Apocalypse: Generic System by Macronomicon (shoe dog free ebook TXT) 📕

dungeon, it revealed a short hallway followed by a room with a jewelry box inside of it.

Easy peasy.

“Let me go first,” Jessica said. “There could be traps. We were in one like this a while ago that had sawblades. It killed one of our guys.”

As tempted as Jeb was to man up and take the lead, he understood that without his foot, and having significantly lower physical attributes, he was probably dead weight in the heat of the moment.

He waved her ahead, and she ducked into the doorway, followed shortly by Jeb.

I wonder if the ceiling is stable? Jeb wondered to himself as he hopped down the hall, which was why he missed the glowing beam of light that appeared ahead of Jessica until it was too late.

“hold up,” Jeb said, trying to grab her shoulder, but her foot had already gone through the beam.

“What?” Jess whispered, tensing.

Jeb didn’t answer, watching in amazement as a line of bright energy flashed along the hall, deeper into the room, where it rose into the ceiling. A fraction of a second later a thousand beams of Myst touched the floor, and a thousand scarabs were created in the blink of an eye. A fraction of a second later, the light pulsed again, and another thousand scarabs were birthed, nearly directly on top of the others.

And again, and again. Fifteen times, the light pulsed, forming a roiling mound of flesh-eating scarabs.

“Crap, we should –“ Jeb’s voice cut off when he heard the door closing behind them. He glanced over his shoulder and spotted a cleverly disguised wall of stone sliding into their way.

Damnit.

Jessica lunged past him and struck the wall of stone with her fist, creating a thunderclap that echoed through the one-room dungeon. The stone shrugged it off.

“Son of a bitch!” Jessica growled, slamming the wall again. In the distance, the swarm of scarabs was beginning to investigate the noises in the hallway, along with the interesting smells…

“We just need some time,” Jeb said, mind racing. “There’s probably a lever in the main room that opens the door.”

“What, past the death swarm?” She demanded. True to her words, the swarm was nearly three feet tall, ten feet wide, and approaching rapidly, leaving no room in the cramped hallway to skirt around or over them.

“Stay calm. We’re gonna wait them out,” Jeb said, pulling out his new toy.

“No way, you-“

“You’re gonna wanna cover your mouth,” Jeb said, drawing in as much Myst as he possibly could, burning it, then funneling his core’s corona through the stick in pulses, mimicking the trap’s summoning mechanism.

In moments, the hall was flooded with squirming worms.

Delicious, squirming worms.

Jeb formed the last of his free energy into a thin wall of Myst between them and the rest of the hallway, forming a telekinetic barrier.

Moments later, the swarm of hungry scarabs crashed over Jeb’s worms like a wave, consuming everything they could get their mandibles around.

They pressed up against the barrier, forming a flat wall of blue beetle carapaces, heedless of the two humans holding their breath on the other side, praying that it would hold.

Jeb could feel their weight pressing against the telekinetic wall, focusing all his might on keeping it as steady and strong as possible.

After a good ten minutes, the feeding frenzy began to slow down as the scarabs ate their fill of worm. Stuffed and lethargic like thanksgiving day, the beetles gradually unswarmed, forming a thin coat of iridescent carapaces across the floor, walls and ceiling as they went into hibernation to sleep off their glorious meal.

The whole wait, Jeb was pulling in more Myst, getting ready to do it again if he had to.

“Can you make it to the next room?” he whispered, once things had settled down.

Jess glanced at the beetle studded walls and nodded.

“My class ability as an Assassin allows me to lower my mass to nearly zero,” She whispered back. “I can walk over these guys without them even feeling it.”

That explains how she did those anime style attacks.

“The bridge is yours,” Jeb said, disconnecting from the barrier and watching it diffuse into the environment.

True to her word, Jessica was able to walk across the beetles without them even noticing, using tiny finger-holds on either side of the wall to basically float past the beetles on the floor. She got into the main room, looked around a bit, and turned left, out of sight of the primary hall.

A second later, the door began rumbling open.

The beetles did not like that. their antennae twitched, and they seemed to rouse themselves as the walls shook.

Jessica landed feet first on the far wall like an astronaut in zero G and jumped down the hall, speeding down the short hall without touching anything except for Jeb.

Jessica slammed into him, and the two of them tumbled out of the dungeon, into the free air of the outside.

They got to their feet, making sure the swarm wasn’t closing in on them and getting ready to take some more distance if that was the case.

The swarm seemed to have no interest in crossing the threshold into the outside world, clumping up near the entrance. They were still full, after all, and not interested in going outside their territory.

Still need that circlet. Damn, if only I could make fireballs or something. oh wait. Idea!

Jeb haggled with one of the local fairies to bring him the bottle of antiseptic alcohol in the first aid kit back at base camp, and a few minutes later, he was squeezing the clear fluid on the swarm, grinning like a backyard bar-b-que-r.

“And I cast…fireball.” Jeb said, dropping one of the survival matches on the swarm.

It went up in flames, and the two of them spent the next few minutes resting, listening to the pop