Creeping Apocalypse

## AI Description

**New Quest. The Creeping Apocalypse**

This is a world quest! All crawlers *and* all hunters currently active on the sixth floor will receive this quest!

You may not opt out of this quest.

Miriam Dom the vampire has fallen. With the rising of today's sun, she found herself caught out in the open. Helpless and crying, she burned away into dust. The callous crawlers Carl and Princess Donut watched and did nothing as she died in agonizing pain. Nothing!

(Actually, not nothing. Someone should probably ask Carl why he suddenly has three new points to his intelligence stat. Suspicious!)

Anyway, Miriam did not go quietly into the good night. Oh no. Her death has cured thousands of crawlers monsters, and hunters who have been touched by the vampirism curse.

There is, however, a problem.

Some of the forest monsters infected with vampirism have spent the past few nights on a killing spree. And another vampire, a now-cured Allosaurus by the name of Big Tina, unfortunately has expended a lot of effort on building an army of undead monstrosities using the... leftovers... from the forest-wide slaughter.

These newly created monsters are not vampires, and they were not cured when Miriam died. These mindless freaks were left all alone, not under control from any entity. Some are nothing more than mini-Grinder, also known as Shrillings, also known as Shambling Berserkers. We've all seen these before, most notably in some of the train stations at the end of the fourth floor. Yes, they can get pretty big and annoying, but it's not anything you really need to worry about. Hardly worth a regular quest, let alone a world one. You'd have to be a total idiot to let one of those things kill you, especially during the day. I'm looking at you, Nihit Kumar who's about two seconds from getting... Oh that's a shame, Gross.

Anyway, some of the other, more powerful monsters have become something else, and short of a god, they are the most powerful monsters who have ever set foot on a sixth floor in *Dungeon Crawler World* history.

I like to call them Odious Creepers.

The good news? Like Shambling Berserkers, Odious Creepers tend to be pretty slow during the day. The bad news? When it's dark outside, they gain the ability top combine with both Shamblers and other Creepers and get even stronger. And they can get fast, very fast. They can replicate themselves, too, if they have the parts!

There are currently fifty of these things... growing around... the forest, plus another few thousand Shambling Berserkers of various sizes. For fun, we have randomized their location. And for extra fun, we have marked the location of each creeper on the map for you all.

So here's the quest part. Kill all the Odious Creepers before the sun sets tonight.

For every Creeper you kill, you will receive +5 to a random stat. For every five you kill, you will receive an additional +5 levels. The crawler or hunter who kills the most will get an additional prize.

Only the person who does the most damage gets credit for the kill.

If you don't kill all of them before the sun sets tonight, bad stuff will happen. And I mean every single one of the fifty Creepers. And by bad stuff, I mean something completely batshit. And not just to the crawlers, but the hunters, too. So all of you cowards sitting on your ass in Zockau need to get to work.

**Quest Failed. The Creeping Apocalypse**

Holy shit. You idiots.

I warned you. I promised batshit consequences for failing one of the easiest world quests ever.

Here we go, bitches!

I can't help but notice the two remaining Odious Creepers happen to be where only the hunters could conceivably reach them. That's where this is going to start. You hunter guys holed up in Zockau are so fucked.

All of you may notice there's a new status bar in your interface. There's an official name for this thing, but I like to call it the blood bar. Effective immediately and for the remainder of this floor, all saferoom access - and this includes personal space access - is operated under tenth floor and below rules.

For those of you that don't know what that means, here's a quick lesson. You gotta earn your keep. This is an action-themed program, after all. Not some sappy drama where everyone just cries and masturbates all day long. I'm looking at you, Hunter Veeka.

All saferoom access is now timed for all hunters and crawlers. The moment you enter a safe area, your blood bar starts to count down. When it's full, you are given ten earth hours to be layabouts. If it reaches zero while you're still tucked away, you get randomly teleported to a location outside of the saferoom. If it's at zero, you cannot enter a saferoom at all, including guildhalls or locations that double as pubs.

You fill that blood bar by killing shit. It's simple, really. If you've been doing everything you're supposed to be doing, this particular change shouldn't bother you.

That's the change to the rules, but that's not the punishment y'all are receiving for failing the quest.

Gird your loins. This is a good one.

Starting with the location of the two remaining Odious Creepers, the spell *Gehenna Bramble* has been cast. This will spread outward at the average speed of four and a half kilometers per hour. Faster at night, slower in the sun.

If you're not familiar with the spell, here's a quick rundown. Every plant touched with the spell is transformed into a thick, impenetrable, ten-meter-high wall of thorn-covered vines that will undulate and thrust and attack. If you are pricked by the thorns, your blood immediately boils away, and you explode.

This spell cannot be countered. The plant cannot be poisoned and killed. The brambles can be beaten back, but they are relentless. They will not come within five square meters of a stairwell, but everything else will be encompassed, including towns and buildings and everything that's not a saferoom.

And it starts right now.

Oh, one last thing I forgot to mention regarding the saferoom rule. The filling of the blood bar is retroactive. That means if you haven't killed anything at all on this floor, your bar is empty. Heads up!

Good luck. And just remember, you brought this onto yourselves.