The apple cannon thundered—thump, thump, thump—firing an artillery barrage of ice cream at the HOA kaiju.

  The pints splattered harmlessly against the titanic monstrosity just as they had against the Sunnysiders, but that didn’t matter because the Kannibal Kids smelled blood in the water. Turned out, Croc was one helluva good wheel man and though we’d had a couple of close calls, most of the Moon Cursed children of Sunnyside had grown frustrated in the chase. The truck was very hard to get, and why bother when there was another readily available source of delicious, rotten meat-flavored ice cream?

  A relatively slow-moving source that was so much easier to catch.

  As I painted the kaiju in shades of Neapolitan, the Kannibal Kids swarmed, completely unafraid of the enormous monster. They crawled over the titan’s feet and scrambled up its legs, ripping off chunks of meat with their claws and teeth. Currently there were only ten or so of the horned monsters clawing their way across the kaiju, but more were coming. A great rush of them, summoned by the sound of the truck, then pulled in by the aroma wafting off the titan.

  The HOA had stopped its frantic shaking and mindless rampage and had instead turned its attention to the feral creatures, who were slowly whittling down its life. It swatted at them with enormous fists and attempted to rip them free, but the transformed youth of Sunnyside were fast and nimble. The kaiju just couldn’t keep up with their scampering, and though its health pool was nearly as large as the monster itself, the Kannibal Kids weren’t gnats to be so easily shrugged off.

  At level 40 their attacks dealt some serious damage.

  My monster army was bleeding the kaiju dry one bite at a time.

  Death by ten thousand paper cuts.

  Unfortunately, the HOA kaiju had an easy way of negating the truly impressive damage and regenerating its dwindling life force. It could eat. Every few seconds, the behemoth would reach down and snatch up an entire fistful of hapless Sunnysiders, then cram all of them into its oversized maw and crunch down with brutal indifference. The monster was eating the residents the same way Ed ate Doritos and each resident the kaiju consumed restored a meaty chunk of HP.

  It was like the Health Eater Relic on steroids.

  And the worst part was, the Sunnysiders didn’t even try to get away from the grasping hands of their gargantuan overlord. With the signal down, the Sunnysiders were little more than mindless zombies—shuffling drones who couldn’t even be bothered to try and save themselves from a very grisly end. Essentially, the kaiju had an endless supply of health regen potions scattered across the ground and the Kannibal Kids just couldn’t deal more damage than the HOA could heal.

  The kaiju had also begun to release its personal minions to deal with the preternaturally fast youth, swarming its body. Scores of amorphous, semi-translucent creatures were emerging from the kaiju’s mouth, and unlike the kaiju, these things were agile. And fast.

  The new defenders were vaguely circular in shape and covered in hundreds of flailing white tendrils, tipped with wicked barbs that shimmered like shards of broken glass. I’d never seen anything quite like them before, and even though they were too far away to earn a pop-up notification, my gut told me they were Zoning Leukocytes. It was clear that the Kannibal Kids were physically stronger, but the Leukocytes had numbers on their side.

  It was a war of attrition, and I wasn’t sure who would win.

  “I am not certain what you are doing out there, Bekannter,” Jakob sent over the radio, “but it seems to be working. The Leukocytes are coming much less frequently. Temperance and the Horrors have secured the stairwell for the time being. I am back at the disruptor—what needs to happen next?” he asked.

  Ed didn’t hesitate, “You need to find the frequency harmonics display on the central console,” he said. “It’s a digital screen that should show a modified wave pattern. You need to tune it to a resonance frequency of 13.7 kilohertz using the dial located beneath the wave display. It’s tricky, though. When you adjust it, the signal will spike, and if it hits red for more than ten seconds, the disruptor will overheat. So make sure to bring the frequency up slow and steady.”

  I once again tuned out the conversation as Woodstock arrived with more ammo. The cannon had a large metal box jutting out from side—an ammo cache to hold all the rotten apples that originally powered the machine. Woodstock unceremoniously dumped the payload into the loading bin, then disappeared back down into the truck after a brief squawk of encouragement.

  “Good boy, Dan. Good Boy. Kill it with fire.”

  The words were strangely touching.

  I loaded more pints into the cannon and proceeded with another barrage, this time aiming for the kaiju’s chest and head. Right now, the Kannibal Kids were swarming across the creature’s lower legs, but I figured that any attacks done to the head and torso would deal extra damage. My shot went higher than I expected, and I openly crowed in triumph as the pint of milky meat magic nailed the creature right in its giant, cyclopean eyeball.

  “Hope you’re not lactose intolerant, dickhead!” I yelled, pumping a fist in the air.

  The smile on my face died as that eye narrowed and turned toward me, blazing with unbridled anger and hate.

  The creature threw back its head and roared, the sound so loud I had to reach up and cover my ears. When the bellow of sheer rage finally abated, the titan lowered its gaze and focused the entirety of its attention on us. Or more specifically, on me.

  “YOU!” The creature rumbled. It was the sound of an earthquake given voice. “This is all your fault. You couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you, you Chowder Head!? YOU RUINED EVERYTHING! This floor was a paradise. A perfect eco-system of order and harmony. Look at these creatures. Mindless, pathetic beasts, driven by carnal appetites, and living chaotic meaningless lives. They were savages before I turned them into something… beautiful.

  “But you couldn’t see that,” the creature howled. “Couldn’t see the beauty of my creation, you DEVIANT! You MISCREANT! You couldn’t appreciate the paradise I built! I could’ve given you and your pitiful band of freaks a home. I would’ve accepted you. Protected you even against the Monarch. Made you a part of something bigger than yourselves. Made you a part of a real community. And all you had to do was SUBMIT. OBEY. To realize that your petty individuality is the disease and that I am the cure. But instead, you RUINED EVERYTHING!”

  The kaiju broke into a lumbering but purposeful run. It was coming straight for us and picking up speed like the Juggernaut.

  I yanked the Walkie from its spot in my tool belt, “Croc, change of plans. Fuck-face the Giant is coming in hot. We need to roll.”

  “Copy that, Ice Cream Man,” Croc replied. “That’s your new call sign, by the way. Ice Cream Man Dan. Sorta rhymes. I figured we should really have cool call signs. I’m Blue Wardog, Woodstock is Fire Phoenix, and Temperance is Hex Weaver. Haven’t come up with anything for Ed or Jakob yet—”

  “Damnit, Croc,” I hollered over the radio, “we don’t have time for call signs.” I paused and frowned. “Also, Ice Cream Man Dan? Are you kidding me? You Got Blue Wardog and I got Ice Cream Man Dan?” I grimaced and shook my head. “You know what, it doesn’t matter. The HOA is pissed and about to flatten our asses.”

  “Copy that, Ice Cream Man,” Croc sent, “but, uh, what exactly do you want me to do about that?”

  The question hung in the air even as the truck tore down a straight away.

  I wasn’t sure. What did we need to do?

  I paused and quickly considered our options. Our plan was working, and the HOA was no longer focused on Jakob and Temperance, which was a good thing. If we could just survive for long enough, the disruptor should give this giant chucklefuck a fatal brain aneurysm. Anything we could do to weaken the creature would help, though. The Kannibal Kids were deadly effective and more would be coming, but they weren’t strong enough to stop the titan on their own…

  I froze as a new thought occurred to me.

  They weren’t strong enough to stop the monster… Unless we could remove the kaiju’s most important strategic advantage: It’s ability to regenerate health.

  “The cornfields, Croc,” I radioed in. “We need to get to the cornfields. Just anywhere away from the town.”

  The cornfields were the one place the Sunnysiders wouldn’t be as thick as flies on shit and without them, the HOA would be vulnerable. Especially since the cornfields would likely be swarming with even more of the feral Kannibal Kids. Admittedly, the HOA was one tough bastard, but it wasn’t tougher than fifty or sixty ravenous youth all working together. As the African proverb said, “fuck around with the beehive and you’re gonna get the sting”—or something along those lines, though that might not’ve been verbatim.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “On it,” Croc sent. “Blue Wardog, out.”

  I ground my teeth in frustration. Blue Wardog. What a load of bullshit.

  The van’s tires squealed sharply as Croc hung a hard right at the next intersection, then rocketed toward the line of swaying green cornstalks splashed against the horizon.

  The HOA rumbled right along after us, crashing through a two-story house to make the turn onto the connecting boulevard. The kaiju wasn’t the only one following along either. More Kannibal Kids were pouring out from every direction and if we didn’t want to end up on the menu, we needed to make the HOA look like the more appetizing snack.

  I continued firing pints of sludgy goodness at the titan, the cannon issuing a cacophony of roars in fast succession, but the creature was drawing gradually closer by the second. More Kannibal Kids hitched rides as the HOA trundled past, jumping from nearby roofs or the top of parked golf carts. The Kaiju didn’t seem to notice or care. It only had eyes for me, and it seemed to flatly ignore everything else, including the swarm of monsters that were literally eating it alive.

  But that was good news, so far as I was concerned.

  Without a constant stream of Sunnysiders to snack on, the HOA’s health pool was plunging and had finally dropped below sixty percent for the first time. True, it still had a vast reservoir of life remaining, but we were making progress—even if slowly.

  “Dan!” Croc radioed as we blazed around another corner and onto a straight away. “Umm, don’t want to alarm you, but we might have a little problem up ahead. Could maybe use a little guidance, if you’re not too busy.”

  “What now,” I grumbled, glancing over one shoulder to see what the issue was.

  Oh fuck. Well, that wasn’t good.

  We were a mile out from the relative safety of the cornfields, maybe even less, but directly between us and the fields was a wall of Kannibal Kids, four bodies deep, which stretched clear across the roadway then curved left and right, forming a concaved horseshoe. The feral Dwellers had effectively created a flesh barricade and at the speed we were going there was no way to avoid it.

  Not without stopping the damned truck and flipping a hard U-turn, which was as good as a death sentence. If we slowed down, the pursuing kaiju would crush us underfoot like bugs and if we kept going, we would smash headlong into the wall of hungry monsters who would be only too happy to murder us all.

  Once again, the only options on the table were bad ones.

  That was becoming something of a theme, and I didn’t like it even a little bit.

  Wishing for better circumstances wasn’t going to change anything, though, and I needed to make a choice, and I needed to make it now.

  Any decision is better than no decision, I reminded myself.

  “Croc,” I radioed. “Keep driving straight. Head for the cornfields and don’t stop for anything. Ed,” I called, trying to mask the panic in my voice, “can you create a giant cow catcher using your Hard Light Illusion, then attach it to the front of the truck?”

  “I can try,” he replied with a crackle of static.

  “That’s all any of us can do,” I responded. “I’m also going to need you to form a hard light shield across the roof access hatch,” I sent while simultaneously cranking on the apple cannon, swiveling the barrel a full one-hundred and eighty degrees, so the muzzle now pointed toward the assembled mass of horned monstrosities attempting to blockade the road. “Just until after we get past the wall of Kannibal Kids.”

  “Why?” Ed sent over the radio.

  “No time. Just trust me,” I replied, praying he would just listen for once.

  The radio died and an opaque sheet of light appeared, blocking out the interior of the van, followed a handful of seconds later by a triangular wedge of light that protruded outward from the front of the truck. I let out a quiet sigh of relief. That was one less thing to worry about.

  Working as fast as my hands would allow, I pulled out several pints of ice cream and began to hurriedly shove fistfuls of Balloon Menagerie and Voodoo Doppelbanger Spell Cards and into each one. Probably thirty or forty cards in total—though I didn’t take the time to get an exact count. If we were going to punch through that wall of meat, I was going to need a lot of fire power. Problem was, I couldn’t control so many cards at once using Psychic Sovereignty, and launching the cards themselves out of the cannon wouldn’t do anything.

  They’d just flutter around like leaves in a strong fall breeze. Packed inside the disgusting, fetid ice cream, though? Well, then they’d effectively be improvised claymore mines.

  I loaded seven pints of ice cream into the chamber all at once, then lowered the barrel and lined up my shot. I only had one chance at this, and if I screwed the pooch, we were all cooked. I took a deep breath to steady my nerves, then slammed my hand against the trigger before I could overthink things or talk myself out of doing what I was about to do.

  The improvised artillery weapon roared again, launching my munitions. The pints of frozen moo juice slammed into the front line Kannibals and as they did, I activated the Voodoo Doppelbanger Spell Cards.

  In the space of seconds, twenty copycat Dans—all liberally slathered in ice cream—erupted among the ranks of the Dwellers.

  The chaos was immediate.

  The feral nightmare children turned on the clones, attacking like enraged wolverines. That’s when I activated the Balloon Menagerie Spell Cards all at once, using the Mass Activation Phrase I had specifically built into them for emergencies just like this.

  “Kill the Monkey, Scare the Circus!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.

  The ensuing fireball billowed upward in a cloud of red and gold light, momentarily transforming night into day. The explosion hit with the force of a Bunker Buster, blowing the nearest Kannibal Kids apart and scattering a dozen more like bowling pins.

  [Level Up! x 2]

  [Research Achievement Unlocked]…

  [Research Achievement Unlocked]…

  I didn’t have time to read over the notifications. A wave of fire washed over me as Croc drove straight into the smoke plume.

  White light consumed the world as tongues of flame tenderly caressed every inch of my body, charbroiling me in real time. I had to imagine this is what skinny dipping in an active volcano must be like. The heat was melting me on a molecular level and the force of the wind alone damn near knocked me from my feet. Probably would have, if not for the Stick and Cling Relic, pinning my boots to the roof.

  The pain was indescribable.

  Not even my battle with the Shart Stain Golem had come close to this.

  Despite that, however, my Health Bar didn’t even budge.

  With twenty Doppelgangers on the field, I was the next best thing to indestructible.

  My clone army was soaking up all the damage from the blast, though I still felt every ounce of the torturous agony.

  Unfortunately, the ice cream truck didn’t have any such protections and took a hefty chunk of damage as well. Though it looked like a truck and functioned more or less like a truck, it was still technically a Horror, which meant it also had its own HP bar. That bar plunged by half, and one of the wheels exploded from the heat. The truck lurched, followed by a flash of sparks and a terrible screech as the bare rim slammed into the pavement.

  That probably wasn’t good.

  We were losing speed, though the truck was still limping along.

  As long as it survived long enough to get us into the cornfields, nothing else mattered.

  The truck rumbled, bumped, and groaned and then we were through and onto the other side of the flesh barricade. There was a giant hole in the defensive formation, which marked our passing. And though my attack had only killed three or four of the Kannibal Kids, it had also blown off countless more arms and legs. Many of the wounded creatures were also slathered in ice cream, which put them right at the bottom of the proverbial food chain.

  I watched in grim horror as the rest of Kannibal Kids turned on each—not a single ounce of mercy for their wounded kin. This was a dog-eat-dog world and either you were getting eaten or doing the eating. There was no middle ground.

  With smoke still curling from my bathrobe, I stomped my boot on the roof and radioed for Croc to bring the truck to a stop. The mimic seemed genuinely confused by the request—we were damn near in spitting distance to the cornfields—but Croc did as instructed. The engine, now sputtering and smoking, cycled down and the tires slowly crunched to a halt. This was a ballsy gamble, I knew, and one that might get me killed, but we hadn’t gotten this far by playing it safe.

  “Ed,” I sent over the comms, watching the fast-approaching HOA kaiju, “there are a bunch of fucked up Decoy Dans back on the street. Any chance you can use your illusions to make ’em look a little more like the real-life version of me?”

  There was a long moment of silence. “It’ll push me to the edge of what I’m capable of,” he finally replied, hesitation clear in his voice. “But yeah, I can make them look real—real enough to fool the HOA, no question. Just know, it’s gonna drain me completely. So if we’re doing this, you need to be absolutely sure.”

  I’d never been less sure.

  “Do it,” I barked anyway.

  There was a shimmer of prismatic light as the twenty or so Doppelganger Dans were all transformed by Ed’s magic. From a distance, they were almost perfect replicas.

  Even I couldn’t tell the difference.

  Neither could the HOA, it seemed.

  The enormous monster began to slow its lumbering charge, its huge eye scanning the crowd of Discount Dan lookalikes.

  “Come on,” I muttered. “Take the bait, you stupid son of a bitch.”

  Thanks to Ed’s illusions, the army of Dans began waving their arms and jumping up and down, really selling the performance and making sure they had the titan’s full attention. If we survived this apocalyptic shitshow, I owed Ed a beer or five.

  Or maybe an entire pallet of Doritos.

  A slow smile spread across my lips as the hulking behemoth bent low and began snatching the Doppelgangers from the ground. Scooping them up one right after another, then popping them into its oversized maw like Dan-flavored Tic Tacs.

  “Sucks to be you,” I chuckled under my breath as the last clone disappeared down the creature’s gullet. I’d once eaten gas station sushi so rancid that I’d ended up in a hospital for two days with IV drips running around the clock. It had been one of the most miserable experiences of my life and had taught me a valuable lesson about not eating questionable food you found on the side of the road.

  The HOA was about to learn that same lesson.

  Although, I could no longer see the replicas, I sure as shit heard the guttural whoomp as they detonated inside the titan, one right after the other, then several all at once. It really was a beautiful thing when a plan came together. The creature staggered drunkenly, and its health bar dipped below forty percent then kept right on dropping, all the way down to thirty. Holy shit, but that was a lot of damage. I wasn’t sure how kaiju anatomy worked, and I sincerely hoped that I hadn’t just accidentally blown up my friends.

  The radio squealed at my hip a second later.

  “Himmel, Arsch und Zwirn, was war das?” Jakob’s hollered. “What did you just do?” he thundered. “There is literal blood raining from the ceiling and gushing from the walls.”

  “Sorry about that,” I sent back feeling a knot of fear loosen in my chest. “You guys are okay, though?”

  “For the time being,” Jakob replied, sounding extremely disgruntled. “The Leukocytes have slowed to a trickle and the disruptor is still working. There’s a countdown timer now. Approximately nine minutes until it finishes its run sequence.”

  “Good,” I sent, “just hang tight for a little longer. We’ll keep this giant dick noddle busy in the meantime.”

  I pounded on the roof again. “Croc, let’s roll.”

  “Another little hiccup, Dan,” the mimic replied over the comms, “I think there might be something wrong with the truck. There are flashing lights all over the dashboard, and Ed seems to think that’s a bad sign.”

  “How bad?” I asked with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  “Real bad,” Ed radioed in. “This heap isn’t long for this world, kemo sabe. It might make it out to the cornfields. Maybe. If we’re lucky. But it isn’t going to take us much farther than that.”

  As Croc would say, “Oh, Fiddlesticks.” That little wrinkle certainly complicated things…