Kingdom of Loathing

Chapter 31: I'll Face Myself

Haha, the title is a reference to Persona 4. Haha. Haha.

***

Climbing the tower was tedious and tiring, as the staircase seemed to go on forever. Finally, after about five minutes, Cassidy and Frank reaches their first roadblock: a giant wall of... skin. To continue up, they would have to go through this wall of stitched-together human skin.

"Y'know," Frank said quietly. "if ya had asked me a minute ago if I wanted skin, I would've said yes. Now, I'm not so sure."

Gurgling and growling, the wall flapped around and reached towards the two.

"Oh no, not today!" Cassidy declared, holding out her staff and sending a blast of fire to the wall.

Instead of dealing damage as it usually would, the fire brushed against the wall and gained no reaction from their foe.

"What the hell?" Cassidy stumbled back. "Frank, why didn't my magic do anything?"

"Well, ya see," Frank laughed nervously. "I forgot to tell ya that this thing resists against all sorts of damage. It took me four tries to wear this thing down."

"Then I guess I'll just have to keep hitting it!" Cassidy decided, leaping into the air for another strike.

However, this time, the wall counterattacked by flinging one of its flaps towards Cassidy, leaving gross scratches across her arms. Cassidy felt a significant drop in her hit points.

"Jesus damn!" she exclaimed, stumbling back. "Just how strong is this thing?!"

"Yo Boss, your bag!" Frank warned. "That thing knocked it off!"

"Huh?"

Sure enough, Cassidy's bag was sprawled across the floor, items scattered around the room. Then, and ominous buzzing filled the room.

"B-boss... what's that?"

Whipping her head around, Cassidy spotted what Frank was asking about: a beehive.

"Oh. I forgot I had that."

"WHY WOULD YA HAVE A BEEHIVE?!"

"I had to save a friend who climbed up a tree and he gave me this beehive as thanks."

"Well no time for stories, look at what's happening!"

The bees, swarming around the wall of skin, began attacking the enemy. With each sting, the skin swelled until it finally collapsed onto the floor into just a normal pile of skin.

"Wow," Frank muttered. "I guess that worked."

Upon defeating their first roadblock, Cassidy and Frank continued climbing the tower's stairwell. On their way up, they encountered two more obstacles- a wall of meat, and a wall of bones.

For the wall of meat, Cassidy thought it would be nice to take some meat back to cook, and simply carved a hole to pass through and collect. As for the bones, she conveniently had a boning knife as a gift  from one of her younger friends (wink wink) and immediately took down the foe.

After the two previous trials, they stopped at a mirror on the wall before them.

"You see this before?" Cassidy asked Frank. He seemingly "shook his head. "Guess this is new, then."

Stepping up to the mirror, Cassidy imagined some sort of weird reflection- twisted and warped, or something like that. Instead, the mirror showed none other than her own scowling face.

"Gee," Frank remarked. "That's kinda anticlimactic."

"This is boring," Cassidy scoffed. "Let's smash it."