An Oni’s first wicked Kanabo

Rare-A vile apparition gear, part of the Oni set.

Ogres are a nasty bunch, big brutes that break your bones and suck the marrow from it. They wander around the wilderness and occasionally stumble into a village they leave destroyed in their wake. The Oni are the ogre’s smarter and meaner cousin, having the same strength but much more wits and cunning to put it to use! They can sneak up on you or fool you into opening the door for them, before they smash you in with their amazing brawn!

The Kanabo is their iconic weapon, the large spiked bat being as much as staple of Oni craftsmanship as it is of their savagery. While most of these clubs are too big to be wielded by any creature smaller than these semi-giants, the Oni occasionally craft something smaller like this bat made for kids. That’s right, you’re swinging a rattler around. Fortunately for you it’s a rich kid’s rattler, probably worth more than you’ll make in your entire life!

+4 Strength, +3 Bashing, +3 Smashing, +3 Thrashing.

As an apparition-type gear, this weapon can deal damage to all incorporeal apparition-type enemies and various other incorporeal enemies as if they’re physical foes.

Hidden effect (Revealed!): Bloodlust. Though this item isn’t cursed, wielding it makes the wearer more prone to violence and less queasy about the results. A pretty damn good ‘curse’ for you whiny little humans to get in here!

Thomas sent the description to everyone, including Elise who apparently hadn’t gotten either of the last two paragraphs herself. She seemed no more reluctant to wield her platinum box item as before, and instead seemed eager to go gain some more experience.

The party managed to keep her inside the Guild for a little longer, asking about what had happened between her and the other men.

Gunther was apparently her leering neighbour that ogled her with repressed feelings, explicitly stated to be unreciprocated feelings mind you, but he never dared to press them. The whole world ending and her being trapped in the dungeon with him debacle apparently made him think he stood a chance now, and with her stuck in her room till now she never had the chance to dash those hopes into the ground.

When she heard what he did, she seemed more amused than aghast. The French tried to rob her, and as she lashed out she froze and they’d taken a lot of stuff from her handbag before she unfroze again. Pepper spray, her phone, tissues, pretty much everything but her tampons and ironically enough her wallet. They’d turned her bag upside down while she still held on to it, otherwise she was pretty sure they would’ve taken that as well.

In their defence, she admitted that she did try to steal Louis’s weapon first. Couldn’t exactly fight rats by kicking them and smacking them with her bag as she had been forced to before finding the Safe Room, and they had multiple weapons so she considered it fair to enforce some communism on them. She seemed at peace with her stuff being stolen in return, given the circumstances.

She didn’t know why they stuck around, but she assumed it was either to rob her of other stuff once she opened her boxes, or Gunther had complicated things for her as usual.

The first and only time she appeared shaken by the events she found herself in, was when she heard what the misunderstanding had wrought. She avoided staring at Ben’s name and the skull next to it after that.

Not that anyone thought differently. This had certainly put a perspective on things, and Darryl now saw his suspicions confirmed. The French hadn’t been hostile at all, they shot first and the French defended themselves. They were the aggressors here, blinded by an unfounded ideal of saving a damsel in distress. A damsel that for all her fair looks came with a temper and the guts to support it.

They’d left it at that, because Volos had been a champ for translating it all for them but he was clearly getting annoyed having to repeat everything they said. So they invited Elise into their party and went grinding some more.

She made some sad German noises when Darryl took out the dead lamb and tried to console him over what she thought was his dead pet, before they could convince her to loot the Neighbourhood boss map. She threw them a real accusing glare once she understood what they meant. Without the gear and it trying to kill them, the little monster did look like a baby lamb.

With the map revealed to her, they set off to one of the other neighbourhoods hidden to them. They’d cleared almost all the mobs here, leaving little but the Big Bad Woolf and the endless supply of rats.

Elise levelled a lot faster than her ‘father’, whom Ben told him had been a cowardly reluctant man. Well, Ben used less diplomatic words, but never mind that. Even with his spear giving him great reach, Gunther had been wary to fight more than two rats at a time and too often fumbled on hitting them with how jumpy he’d been.

Elise didn’t have that problem in the slightest. Her two highest stats were Strength and Charisma, which apparently translated to her swaggering in between beating up foes. She always rested the bat on her shoulder like an 80s hooligan or dragged it behind her like a madwoman, she seemed proficient in cleaning the blood off with a single potent swing, and her posture showed neither hesitation nor any trouble handling the big and heavy-looking bat.

The others were better at their specialisation, thanks to skill levels granting them an unnatural awareness and instinct where experience lacked. Darryl noticed that Ben ran and walked differently than before, more quietly, without the teen noticing the difference himself. Though Ben did mention that he inexplicably knew where to stab for optimal damage and how to properly hold his weapons to begin with. Thinking back, Darryl’s feet instinctively took a stable stance he never learned when he raised his shield, something that he never noticed as he got his first shield at the same time as his cufflinks boosting his Shielding skill.

So given a day or two, Elise would probably also look like a natural prodigy using her weapon.

But not yet today. They weren’t planning to grind for long as everyone but Elise had been up for almost 20 hours at this point, and their status debuff had jumped from Exhausted to Very Exhausted. They just fought the encounters they ran into, leaving most of them to their new team mate. She was soon level three, the first two levels easily gained when your bat liquefied most foes in a single smash. Darryl remembered Volos’s warning not to get too comfortable about this dungeon after the easy start of the first floor, and now he understood why their mentor told them this.

As Elise broke a strange fox-horse creature in half with a devastating blow on its back and decapitated another by turning its skull to goo, Darryl saw a safe room appear on the edge of their minimap. He pointed it out to the rest while they waited for Ben to finish his foe.

Which wasn’t going as well as Elise’s fight. Ben was awkwardly trying to stab one of the Vulperiers with a krutnik leg, which didn’t exactly grant him much of his usual benefits and instead had him chase and poke the panicked creature for a tenth of its health with every good hit. With the unwieldy weapon he didn’t get a lot of those.

The wolf-sized horse with fox ears, eyes and a fox-like lightfooted stance kept dodging back, instinctively trying to put a minimum distance between itself and its target before using its poisonous spit. Why it spat venom was beyond him, but even Darryl could tell they’re clearly a kind of skirmisher meant to fight in a pack or face slower foes. Even though it would have had the advantage if it closed the distance and spat Ben in the face, it simply didn’t.

It eventually went down, granting Ben a silver hunter box. The teen was panting and sweaty after that, and not at all amused with how foolishly inept he appeared. Doubly so considering a girl he was trying to impress was there to see it.

The others didn’t get a chance to show if they could do better though, as they found no more foes between them and the Safe Room. The place seemed to be some kind of American diner, a single cramped room with a long counter and a single row of booths. The place felt rather claustrophobic, with the large windows showing stone walls instead of the outside world.

A Bopca in the salmon pink uniform and hairnet looked at them, a dour face unapologetically sizing them up and clearly already lamenting that they had to do their job now. Though they applied the thick lipstick and eyeshadow that suited the stereotype of one of these diner chefs, Darryl honestly couldn’t tell if it was a woman or if the Bopca race didn’t know human men didn’t wear make-up and that particular kind of uniform.

“Welcome, crawlers.” It said. “Food?”

“Oh, make me one of those tall stacks of pancakes covered in syrup!” Ben said eagerly. “And bacon, lots of bacon sizzling hot and greasy!”

Elise said something that wasn’t bratwurst or schnitzel and therefore Darryl had no idea what she said, but the Bopca nodded all the same. Thomas ordered mac n cheese and Darryl went with some eggs and bacon.

They ate in silence, mostly because of the one amongst them that couldn’t contribute and would feel left out otherwise, and Darryl lamented that his order had indeed been made the American Diner way. Way too greasy and fat, as if he was eating junk food.

Which, granted, he had been eating for two days now thanks to Ben’s choice of ordering food, but Darryl wasn’t too fond of the idea of having to fall asleep after such a heavy meal. He only ate some and made the rest disappear into his inventory when the Bopca wasn’t looking. As he already ate a single crawler biscuit earlier that day, he wasn’t actually hungry anyway.

That wasn’t the case for Ben and Elise, clearly, as they’d both ordered big and greasy and were now racing each other to see who’d finish first. Darryl wondered if Elise was ravenous after being bedridden without food for two days, or if she truly had the crazy genes to keep her figure with those eating habits.

Ben eventually won, triumphantly belching as the last pancake disappeared in the bottomless hole he called a mouth. Elise wailed something that sounded like she didn’t accept her defeat gracefully, and Darryl quickly retreated to the bathroom when she tried to involve him.

When he came back to wish the others goodnight, Ben was once again ordering ludicrous amounts of food to stash in his inventory and the Bopca’s mood had turned from grumpy to positively miffed.

“Don’t worry, I’ll order some healthier food to stock up on.” Thomas said as he waved Darryl away. “You go get some rest now, you’ve had a very rough day.”

Darryl nodded and left. He knew he walked into a room and lay down on the bed, and that’s where his recollection of events ended. Sleep took him almost immediately.