I Didn’t have to wait long to understand why Joe said that as the bathroom exploded in a shower of piss, water, concrete, and tiling. What remained was the biggest shit anyone has ever seen. That wasn’t hyperbole either. It was twice the height of the restroom and filled most of the space. The shape was somewhere between a shit emoji and video game slime except with tentacles of shit covered electrical wires. Why tentacles? It wasn’t my first question, but somehow it boiled to the top as one of those very tentacles wrapped around a wounded militiaman and tossed it into the nastiest foulest smelling mouth in my lifetime.

  Nora fumbled for something in her backpack while dodging another of the crappy tentacles. The tentacle smashed into the ground next to her a squish preceding the crack of the harder material underneath. Shit splashed across her clothes. “This is so not cool!” She whipped the Sticky Webs wand out of her pack and shot it at the giant poop slime. The spell hit just off center of the monster and seemed to just slide into its body. I didn’t say anything as nothing happened except a shit bubble popped on the surface. Nora Shouted, “Nevermind. That was a bad idea.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ve had worse ideas!” I shouted back to her as we fell back. “Everyone fall back from this thing as fast as you can!” There were far too many injured men within range of the tentacles. I counted almost half a dozen men on the ground but trying to crawl away. I couldn’t do anything about the dead bodies as tentacles plopped them into its oversized toothless mouth. Before I got out of range I concentrated on using Assess.

  Demon Infused Refuse Creation, no class, level 12 equivalent

  Yeah, I’m calling it a shit demon. With that I picked up speed to get further away. As I finally got to comfortable distance I turned to see what it was doing. The shit demon had barely moved from the building, and I could see thick ropey spider webs covering it and the building holding it mostly in place. Or not. Slowly the body slid along the webs losing part of its mass to coat the spider webs. The movement caused the most heinous squelching noise I had heard. I tried to stay out of the range of its stench, but that seemed impossible. The men were looking to me for a solution, but I didn’t really have any good ones. “Brett, do you want to toss some lightning at it?” to which the teen responded with little arrows of lightning smashing into it. The smell of burning shit permeated the air. It didn’t really look worse for wear, so it was hard to tell if the shot had any effect.

  I looked around at the 30 or men down here in the park with me and shouted, “Did anyone get a class ability with water or fire maybe? Or even some sort of purification ability?” Heads turned to me. They looked part panicked and part befuddled. No one had asked them what their ability was before I did just now. Meanwhile Brett shot another bit lightning into the beast charring a part close to his first hit. Nora starting shooting Force Bolt at the creature, and when those bolts hit they blew large chunks out of it. However, it would suck to burn a bunch of charges of the wand on this thing.

  The Shit Demon’s tentacles continued whipping around pulling dead bodies into its mouth. I stopped to look a little closer at where we’d hit it with spells, and the charred parts were disappearing and the blasted out parts from the Force Bolts were filling in. Either it regenerates or it is consuming those bodies to heal itself. I looked to the men again and one looked me back in the eyes. He ran over to me while the others were either shooting at it or helping to drag the wounded away.

  “Captain, I have a class ability for destroying sewage. I work in a sewage treatment facility.” He was tall and heavy set. He clearly sported a beer belly from a lot of Sunday football. His speech had a slightly nervous stutter to it.

  “That’s great. You should use that now.” I urged him.

  “There is a problem. It doesn’t have much range.” He stutter increased with a bit of anxiety mixed in.

  “How much range?” My only thoughts were about this being a decent number.

  “One meter.”

  Fuck.

  “Does it destroy a lot of sewage at least?” I asked hoping the radius or cubic space was massive enough to kill this with one or two uses.

  “How big is a three meter radius?”

  “It’s a start.”

  “Everyone, Listen up! Here’s the Plan. Spread out wide and target where the tentacles meet the body. Brett, only use your lightning ability whenever I get close. Nora, blast it with the wand. Let’s Go!”

  I’d like to say there was a flurry of activity, or that we exploded forward uniformly, but not everyone was on the same page. Half the guys didn’t hear me over the gunfire. They still were firing at the thing’s body. Brett did though and he started firing his pistol at the base of the nearest tentacle. Nora nodded to me before firing another salvo of Force Bolts towards a tentacle as well.

  “What’s your name soldier?” I asked the man I was going to push forwards to kill this giant piece of crap.

  “Ben, Sir,” He responded hesitantly.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “Well Ben, Time to go earn our keep.” I flashed a grim smile at him and kept my rifle up, my staff was still back by Mr. Schulack, forgotten in all the insanity.

  “We get paid?”

  I laughed, “Not really, but at least we’re saving lives.”

  “Okay, I can go for that.” He still had the stutter, but it far less agitated that before.

  I sprinted forward and rolled to my right as a tentacle smashed the ground where I was. I looked back to see it had missed Ben as well, due to his slowness more than anything else. I got up and pushed forward only to have to slide under a horizontal swipe of another tentacle. I swear these things are multiplying. I glanced again and saw this time that the tentacle had smacked ben. He was trying to roll with it, but his bulk made that difficult. His clothes that remained were splattered in shit, but his hat had fallen off, and part of his vest was lying on the ground behind him. “Come on Ben, we can do this.”

  “I’ma tryin’, Sir.” He said with utter lack of confidence.

  I ran forward again, only for a tentacle to wrap around my waist. Before the tentacle touched me I was assaulted by the smell. Swallowing my own vomit was the next thing that happened, and then tentacle wrapped around me. Adding insult to injury, in all of the nastiness, I dropped the rifle I was holding. Panicking slightly, I reached for my newest knife; I was regretting not having one of the magical daggers at the moment. “A little help, people!” hunting knife now in hand I began stabbing at the tentacle waving me about like a play toy. It didn’t try to immediately toss me into its mouth, the reason escaped me. And then suddenly I was back on the ground and the tentacle was limp. I looked at the body only to see a giant gaping hole where a huge chunk of shit demon was.

  Ben was next to it with a big stupid grin on his face. “I did it, Captain.”

  This grin was short lived as two of its remaining tentacles grabbed ben, the first around his torso and the second around a leg. Those two tentacles pulled hard stretching his body. Ben was screaming loudly, “NOOOOOO!” The pulling turned into tearing. Ben’s left leg came free in a spray of blood, viscera, and shit. Ben’s final words came as he pointed a finger at the mouth of the beast and used his cleaning ability. “Die, Motherfucker!” With those words the area around the mouth disintegrated before my eyes. It even left a lemony scent behind as the remainder of the creature lost all cohesion. The collapsing pile of shit, trash, and the remains of the restroom spread everywhere. Anyone I could immediately see was covered in filth. This was becoming the crappiest day ever.

  I sat there for a while, unsure what just happened. The monster was certainly gone. I looked around for Ben only to find him several feet over. It was hard to recognize him, covered in the shit that he was. I crawled over to him, not yet feeling sure enough to stand. His body was covered in a lot of crap and refuse of various types, but his left was missing. I placed a few fingers to his neck to try and find a pulse; there was none to be found. Ben died to save us. That was a trade that I didn’t want to have happen, but was forced to accept.

  “Everyone, lets see what survivors we can find!” I shouted. I didn’t cry for Ben’s sacrifice, and I wouldn’t shed a tear for any of the others that died today. This was an early move to escalate things. I knew that much. I roamed until I found a water fountain. I tried washing shit and trash from my face and hands, but it was a losing effort. There was always more crap to go around. After I gave up on getting clean I pulled my phone out and called the Colonel’s assistant.

  “Hi this is Neal Cassland. I’ve got a problem to report.”

  “We have problems all over the place. You’re going to need to be more specific”

  “Here in Fenton. We fought no less than 25 lupin, 20 abyssal orcs, and kid you not, a 20 foot tall trash and shit demon.”

  “I’ll mark it down. Did you suffer casualties?” She said the whole ‘I’ll mark it down’ part awfully casually. Yet she follows it up with casualties. It is hard to get a read on her as a person.

  “Yeah, fourteen from the group.”

  “Fourteen! How many do you still have?”

  “Not counting my original team, one hundred and seventy-six. Adding them in puts me up to one hundred and eighty-three.”

  “That is nearly full company. You shouldn’t activate much more than that.” Yeah, I was totally going to ignore that direction. I knew it, and I hope they knew it too.

  “Not a problem.” That should suffice for my confirmation but future noncompliance. I had to throw bodies at the problem until I could do several things: gain levels, level the troops, get extra abilities for everyone, and equip them with magical gear. I was doing okay on the first one, but the others were going to be difficult. With that in mind I checked my levelling progress.

  Level: 3    39% progress to next level

  Not nearly as much progress as I would have liked, but we were splitting the experience between sixty people.

  I realised we still needed to find the teleportation circle. That was such a stupid mistake. “Nora and Joe, we need to find the teleportation circle if it survived!” I shouted this loudly, having no idea where they were at the moment. I then scanned over the area that was a free standing restroom. I found Nora, Joe, Brittney, and Brett already there, digging through the muck and remains of the building, looking for the thing I just asked them to look for. “Forget I said that. You’re already all over it.” Brittney then raised her arms with the muck-covered animal skin. It was torn in many places and looked thoroughly damaged. She smiled and walked it over to me, before pulling out a large dagger and slicing through the symbol, melting the blade and igniting the animal skin.

  She dropped the burning skin and smiled. “Got it all done. I’m going to go back to healing people now. I’m not sure what magic items you are going to find in the wreckage. Everything is covered in shit.

  I thought about it for just a moment. “I think I have a solution for that.” I went to retrieve the staff. This thing is going to pay dividends now. Once I had it in my hands, I concentrated on the abilities. The usage of the abilities was pretty straight forward; it provided you with an interface, and you simply selected the ability you wanted to use. It felt a bit much like a game, but I was tired of making those comparisons. It was just the new reality.

  Mana filled my vision. It was glorious. I couldn’t make sense of it yet; there were just too many colors. I saw so many different shades of blues and greens, and purples. I kept concentrating, and slowly things came into focus. The purples finally faded to background mana. That must be the ambient mana in the air, ground, and well, everywhere. Other colors were slowly becoming distinct. I was loving this. I just concentrated on different people and objects until I finally could make sense of everything. It was a trippy experience. I stepped forward towards the remains of the restroom and the giant shit demon and found several things. I picked those up and decided that my plans would be just a bit more delayed.