Minor deity or not, Sabrina and her team were determined to strangle Missy the Magnificent. After leaving Tessa’s room, they spent several hours walking back and forth in the hall. As they walked in the direction that the invitation bent towards, it would change at random due to the shifting of the halls.

  The most infuriating part was the realization that dawn had certainly come by now, and they were stuck until nightfall. If they spent that whole time on the second floor, it would be another two days before they could leave. On the bright side, this gave them time to raise hell.

  >Now pying: Kiss Off — Violent Femmes

  All four of them reacted immediately when they turned the corner and saw an opening into a rge chamber. Everyone but Sloan began sprinting. Sloan, meanwhile, transformed her boots into skates and rocketed forward in a blur.

  The casino was an obnoxious assault on the senses. The bring bells and fshing lights were like the convergence of every ambunce on earth all arriving to the same emergency at once. There were the expected machines and tables, consistent with any casino. Sprinkled throughout, there were also carnival games—ring toss, tests of strength, etcetera.

  It was far more populous than the dungeon typically was. It was about as busy as a real casino. More than half of the slot machines had humanoid creatures sitting at them, repetitively flushing coins into them like zombies. These patrons were a strangely diverse popution. Many were monsters typical of the dungeon, such as demons, orcs, or goblins. Many more, though, were fantasy races more in-line with Tessa. There were elves, dwarves, gnomes, and even what looked like catgirls and catboys.

  That was the other thing—there were men. The fantasy-folk clearly weren’t native to this dungeon, because there was roughly an even split between men and women between them. Sure, the elves and catfolk seemed to be made up entirely of women and femboys, but the dwarves were all quite butch. The gnomes were more dimorphic, with masculine men and feminine women; although they were all adorable, regardless of gender.

  Then, there was the staff. The strange gray women walked throughout the floor, wearing sequined leotards, fishnet stocking, and high heels. They seemed to be working as waitresses, carrying trays with cocktails to the patrons. Operating the games, were a group of mimes, or maybe clowns. These human women, of varying normal skin tones from the neck down. Their faces were painted white, with the harlequin makeup of clowns or mimes. To avoid confusion, Sabrina decided to simply think of them as clowns.

  The clowns all wore mini bikinis, and had their hair up in various buns, tails, and braids. They also wore white gloves, oversized shoes, and frilly ruffs around their necks. The clowns all silently gred at the party of divers with madness in their eyes. The patrons refused to look up at all, and the waitresses only gnced and smirked at the party before resuming their work.

  Sabrina and her team slowed to a stop when nothing attacked them on site. Sabrina was oddly disappointed by this, as she’d looked forward to the fight. She rexed, before tensing back up when a familiar voice came over loudspeakers into the casino.

  “Well lookie-here! Been quite some time since any do-gooder humans waltzed into my casino! What’s this? You were even kind enough to bring chips with you! Looks like somebody in my byrinth has got loose lips! Tisk-tisk-tisk.”

  The voice was the very same one that taunted the party while Sloan fought monsters, and the rest were trapped in a spinning fuck-machine. Sabrina had a feeling that Missy would turn out to be the source of that voice. Still, hearing it again, and with the suggestion of such omniscience, gave Sabrina chills. Even worse— the music stopped automatically when the announcement came.

  “Don’t you worry those pretty little heads, dolls. I’m nothing if not a gracious host. Have a ball! As you can see, my games of chance and skill are as captivating as can be. Do be careful around my girls, though. They like to py rough.”

  The divers shared uneasy looks and shrugs. Part of their quest was to bide their time in the casino, learning what they could. It was just harder to do when everything screamed, “This is a trap!”

  Sabrina wandered over to a prize booth. There was a chip conversion chart, assigning point-values. Sabrina didn’t need this, because her inventory counted the chips as being worth six-thousand points. Some of the prizes avaible were better than expected. Two thousand points could buy a twenty-four-pack of assorted jellies, a forty-eight-pack of almost any type of elemental stone, a six-pack of something called mana stones, or a handful of inscrutable magic items. In price-range of hundreds, there were sex toys and casino merch, and for tens-of-thousands there was armor and weapons. To Sabrina, the best bet seemed to win more chips and cash them out for as many elemental stones as possible.

  Against her better judgement, Sabrina gestured to a handwritten sign and asked the clown, “It says I can trade services for chips. What does that mean?”

  The clown grinned maliciously. She mimed her answer. Through charades, she listed answers like Sabrina eating-out the clown, the clown fisting Sabrina, and the clown whipping Sabrina. Then she pointed at the chip worth one-hundred points.

  That didn’t seem worth it, so Sabrina left. She could sense the clown leering at her ass as she walked away. That was par-for-the-course at this point.

  After a quick huddle, the party divied-up the chips. They each took a thousand, keeping two thousand in reserve. They stayed in a close cluster of machines and tables. Sabrina picked a game of Texas Hold-Em. She’d always been pretty decent at it ever since she was a kid, when she would join her dad and his friends in pying. They pyed for quarters, and her dad would always front her buy-in. She took that table of grown men to the cleaners on more than one occasion.

  Her opponents consisted of and orc, two elven women, and a catboy. The catboy was strange, appearing to be a lithe feminine human man with purple hair, cat-ears, and a tail. Sabrina gave him a nod, asking, “Where are you from?”

  The catboy distantly grunted in response. He never looked up, only staring, gssy-eyed at his cards.

  One of the elves spoke up, sounding dreary and drowsy. “He’s too far gone for speech. You will be, too. It just… sneaks up on you.”

  Sabrina became serious, arguing in a hushed tone, “I thought the casino only had that effect on dungeon-life.”

  The elf snapped her head sharply, incredulously studying Sabrina. “You’re… a diver? But you… no way. You’re a demigod!” Her eyes then scanned, spotting Jade at a slot machine. “You’re here with a party!” Her droning demeanor became more frenzied. “You have to free us! Please put a stop to this!”

  Trying to calm the elf down, Sabrina put a hand on her shoulder. “I will,” she promised in a half-whisper. “That’s why I’m here—why we’re here.”

  The elf opened her mouth to speak again, but then a new hand was dealt to the table. Her attention was then hyper-focused on her cards. Sabrina narrowed her eyes at the distracted elf before checking her own cards. She was holding a ten of hearts and a jack of hearts. This excited her. There were a lot of opportunities for this to go well for her. She could get a straight, a flush, a straight flush, or even a royal flush. She tossed in her hundred-point buy-in. The flop came: six of hearts, ace of spades, nine of spades. The orc bet. The catboy folded. Sabrina called. Both elves called as well.

  Then came the turn— king of hearts. Sabrina had no chance for a straight, but she had at most a twenty-percent chance of a flush. She watched the orc closely. The orc bet, but it was less than she’d bet on the flop. Sabrina had her. She called. The elf who’d talked with her folded, and the other called.

  It all came down to the river. The corner of Sabrina’s mouth flicked up when the eight of hearts came. Her eyes went back to the orc. She hesitated, before tapping the table to signal, “Check.”

  Sabrina bet big. The second elf folded. The orc’s hand trembled a moment, before pushing in half of her chips to call. Sabrina watched as the orc flipped her hand, showing pocket aces. With one ace on the table, she had three of a kind.

  “I just hate pocket pairs,” Sabrina teased, before flipping her cards. “They make you so cocky.”

  A phantom force gathered the chips up into neat stacks and slid them over to Sabrina’s spot. Sabrina sat for a few more hands. She pyed it close to the chest while she got a read on her opponents, losing a little each hand but folding early. She thought the catboy might be doing the same, but he turned out to just be meek and cowardly.

  Once the opportunity came, Sabrina pushed back. She got the orc to go all-in and took all of her money. Quietly celebrating, she jumped when arms wrapped around her from behind. She turned, finding that it was Jade.

  “I’m bust,” Jade reported boredly.

  Sabrina did a double take. “What? You’re out already? It’s been like ten minutes!”

  Jade furrowed her eyebrows, concerned. “It’s been like two hours.”

  Sabrina went cold. Could that be true? She looked around the table, and was struck with terror. She hadn’t even noticed that the catboy was long gone. Outside of a prize-booth, he was locked in a pillory with his shorts around his ankle. Five clowns were sexually humiliating him. One was fisting his ass up to the elbow while another pulled an endress chain of handkerchiefs out of urethra. Two behind him flocked his ass, each taking one cheek. The st clown simply spped him in the face over and over again.

  “Hot,” Jade commented, earning a dirty look from Sabrina.

  Sabrina saw the orc shuffling her feet behind a clown who led her to another prize booth. She turned to look at the elf beside her, but she was missing. To Sabrina’s horror, she saw as the elf was also being led to the same fate.

  Without thinking, Sabrina chased after the elf. “Wait! Don’t do this,” she pleaded with the clown, who only sneered back at her. “I’ll give her chips!”

  “What’s that, toots?” Missy’s voice asked over the speakers. “You want to give your chips away to your opponent? You don’t pn on cheating, do you?!”

  The announcer’s tone was mocking, and it was punctuated by ever clown in sight turning and staring at Sabrina, smiling eagerly. The elf looked back and Sabrina and shook her head as a warning. She wanted Sabrina to leave her to her fate.

  Sabrina stopped in her tracks, pausing for a moment. A fiery anger built up inside of her chest. She conjured her sword, blew bck smoke out of her nose, and shouted, “What if I do?! What if I’m cheating?! What are you gonna do about it, Missy?!”

  There was silence, before Missy calmly demanded, “Get her.”

  The room split like the red sea around Sabrina, with all of the machines and tables sliding away from her to make a ft arena. Every clown and gray-girl in the casino bolted for Sabrina. There were hundreds of them.

  Sabrina busted out the best tool she had for such an occasion. Dropping to one knee, she bellowed hellfire from her mouth. Slowly rotating, she burned them down to cinders as they came. It was a massacre, dealing death with far more potency than Sabrina was comfortable with possessing. Then, of course, her mana was depleted.

  Even having exhausted the nuclear option, she barely scratched the surface of the incoming horde. At once, they were upon her, all wielding melee weapons that seemed to come from nowhere. Without mana, Sabrina’s only option was her sword.

  >Now pying: Teeth — Cage the Elephant

  She decapitated one clown while four stabs pierced her back. Several more struck, but were low enough that the reflected back to her attackers. To her rescue, what appeared to be a ballistic missile struck and exploded.

  When the dust cleared, she saw that it was Sloan. Carrying Jade in her arms, Alice flew overhead on a makeshift zipline. Jade crop-dusted the arena with poison-mist, while Alice dropped four-limbed slime creatures. They were like at twelve inches in diameter, the creatures looked like strange spiders. One-at-a-time, ten spiders tched onto Sabrina’s enemies and exploded like grenades.

  The gray goons were easy enough to kill. They were fast and vicious, but so was Sabrina. The clowns, however, were tricky. It was impossible to anticipate their moves. One wound-up to hit Sabrina with a big mallet, then slipped on a banana peel, rolled into a summersault, and headbutted her in the balls. Their feints, fake-outs, and mime-gags defied physics.

  These goofs were entirely threatening on their own, but they were incredibly distracting. It threw Sabrina off her rhythm, forcing her to leave a lot more openings than she should have. Ongoing attacks from her party helped a lot, keeping her from instantly dying. The fact was, though, that she was taking on way too much damage, way too fast. She had to flee this fight before—

  Sabrina fell, rolled, and even bounced. She couldn’t feel her body. Staring dimly at what she recognized as her own tits, she realized why— she wasn’t on her body anymore. How was she expected to fight as just a head?

  Sabrina’s ghostly form stepped out of her disembodied head. It was frightening to be inside of a dying brain, but at least that was over now. She looked at the dim, slow-motion battlefield around her. This was quite the pickle she’d gotten into. Calmy, she stepped into her human form.

  A shockwave knocked back the enemies around Sabrina as she reincorporated. She quickly psyched herself up to change-up her move set. Her human form had significantly less health than her succubus form and was skill-based. She would be rewarded for a zen approach and fast reactions.

  Prepping a damage-reflect, she took a duelist’s stance. A clown moved for her, but Sabrina anticipated a fake-out. The clown leaped through the air, arcing down with a longsword. Just before hitting, the clown paused midair for a half-second and then completed the move. Sabrina parried perfectly, then followed up with a critical strike.

  Listening for the hum off movement in the air, Sabrina bobbed forward to doge attacks from behind. She was careful to only dodge attacks that would hit the upper half of her back, as below that, they would be reflected. She easily parried and killed a goon. She tried to do the same to another clown, but the clown had a triple-feint up her sleeve. She finished it by plunging a dagger in Sabrina’s diaphragm.

  That was extremely painful, but a healing mist from Jade helped her shrug it off. The song reached a sickly, sluggish point. This was met with Sabrina taking three small hits in a row. Sabrina couldn’t be sure the song was responsible, but she needed every advantage.

  “Change the fucking song,” she requested telepathically.

  >Jade is pying: Loose Lips — Kimya Dawson

  Immediately, Sabrina got hit in the face with a club.

  “Skip it!”

  >Jade is pying: … now THIS is podracing — Mom Jeans

  “Oh my fucking god just let Alice do it!”

  Sabrina was so distracted, that several clowns got the drop on her, pouncing at once. All at once, the remaining health plummeted to zero. Distantly, she heard Jade screaming her name while she dropped.

  She was back to her dim ghost form, all too soon. Had she really just died twice in a span of two minutes? In this ghostly state, Sabrina tended to be calm and emotionless. This time, the fear got to her anyway.

  She looked over her two forms, both expended and completely useless. She was fucked. She was dead— all the way dead, this time. So much for being a demigod.

  She colpsed to her knees, defeated. She scanned her surroundings, getting a good look at her final resting pce. Her eyes flicked over a shimmer; it was so subtle that she almost missed it. She stood and approached the spot where it had been.

  It was invisible until it was an inch from her face. Once she was there, it became a flicker. The infrequent flickering was contained in the shape of a T-posing humanoid form.

  >ERROR: NULL.

  >Components required to correct ERROR: NULL.

  Components? Sabrina followed her instinct. She reached into her phantom chest and brought an item out of it. Huh. She wasn’t aware that she could do that.

  > Satisfactory demon soul (intact)

  She pced the soul into the flickering shape, and the shape dimly glowed with the periwinkle color of the demon she’d looted the soul from.

  >Chaotic form (incomplete).

  She added the chaotic demon’s horns and penis, which slotted in right where they should be. It still wasn’t enough. Bit by bit, she added every soul fragment or cinder or ash that she’d looted. Little by little, the form became real. Some of the details were still blurry, coming into shape, but Sabrina was out of time. Her ghostly body grew fainter by the moment, and the world was now trembling with rage at her lingering presence in it. She stepped in.