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

summer. They used to hand me the stuff they wanted to buy and tell me to make a lowball offer, because I was cute. It usually worked. Before I knew it I got pretty good at haggling.”

“Yeah, well, I think George’s body should belong to me, given that I had to put up with him.”

“I don’t know, he tried to kill me.”

Jessica scowled at him silently.

“You really wanted that necklace of adaptation, didn’t you?”

“Did you see the size of those opals!?” Jessica demanded.

She’d done pretty well for herself at Ron’s Post-Life Goods Emporium, trading George’s magical boss-axe and a few minor items for some rings, enchanted armor and a pair of boots with stylized wings that essentially gave her a double jump, improving her midair performance even more.

I need better protection myself, Jeb thought, tapping his beaten brigandine. They were finally equal in terms of treasure, but Jessica could take a hit, and he could not, so he felt a little exposed.

The goal was for him to solo the boss while Jessica ran crowd control again, and hopefully the Accolade would give him a fighting chance of surviving once the Safe zones went down.

He glanced over at Jessica, bedecked in silent blackened mail armor, wearing shielding bracers, along with the Razorback sword, the wing boots and the rings…

Yeah, she’ll probably survive it.

“Hold on,” Jessica said, squinting. “I hear singing. Put in your earplugs.”

Rather than listen to see if he could hear it too like an idiot, Jeb rolled up the stiff pine wax and shoved it in his ears, praying it would come back out.

That was a problem for after they survived this, though.

“~?” She asked.

Jeb gave her a thumbs up, and they crept forward. After what felt like half an hour of creeping, but was more likely five minutes, they came within sight of the lake.

Sirens were, for all intents and purposes, tiny little mermaid looking girls about four feet long, singing and playing with each other in groups of three, their torsos just above the water. On the miniature island in the center, were three more human-sized women, seemingly lounging around and tanning, their bare breasts pooling up on their chests.

I’m not sure I wanna kill these women, Jeb thought, a lifetime of ‘don’t hit girls’ drilled into him since pre-school suddenly flaring up. It might have had something to do with the boobs, or the muffled harmonizing he could faintly hear, as well.

Jessica must have read the reticence on his face, because she unslung her bow from her shoulder, took out an arrow and fired a shot through the chest of one of the smaller girls.

Jeb opened his mouth to protest, when the ground shuddered underneath him. A huge creature, twice the size of a horse, reared out of the water, with stumpy finned legs and a gaping maw. He could hear its pained roar even through the earplugs.

The three little midget mermaids were attached to the thing via a long and partially clear tube with a single thick blood vein this size of his wrist traversing it.

Okay, never mind. My concern about their humanity was not necessary. I think I’ve seen art like that before.

Jessica wagged her hand, catching his attention before pointing at the monsters and performing a sweeping motion, as if to say, ‘after you’

Jeb aimed his stiletto at the infuriated creature, and sent it shooting out into the lake.

The stiletto sank half an inch into the creature’s soft skin, then, when it met bone, the blade collapsed back into the handle, spinning inside an internal groove as it did so, boring a hole like a hand-drill.

The result was the knife went in one side of the monster and effortlessly out the other, spilling the creature’s lifeblood into the lake as it collapsed.

And then the fight was on.

The sirens seemed to display rudimentary intelligence as they sank under the water, hiding behind flotsam or fallen logs to make themselves hard to hit.

In addition to that, their mermaid tops made squeezing motions with their arms, creating little spheres of water floating in front of their chests before they started shooting water at the two of them.

And not friendly squirt-gun battle levels of water, either.

There was a hiss, and a spray of water as a fine line of H2O tore a chunk of wood out of the tree six inches away from his face.

Jeb dropped to the ground on reflex, treating it like small arms fire and getting behind something big and thick. In this case, one of the oversize trees surrounding the lake.

Ranged attacks, huh? Two can play at that game.

He pulled out his little mirror from the crate and held it around the edge of the tree.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to attack things using a mirror while facing backwards? He thought to himself, directing his floating knife to attack a smaller siren and missing horribly, plunging the blade into the water.

Damnit. He pulled it back out and mentally adjusted before attacking again. The extra three points of Nerve must have helped, because he only missed one more time before he adjusted to using the mirror.

He began racking in the kills, perched safely behind his tree, while Jessica leapt from trunk to trunk, drawing fire away from him and forcing the creature’s to turn to pay attention to her ranged attacks.

They didn’t seem like they knew where his attacks were coming from, so he kept zooming the stiletto around, boring holes through anglerfish-looking bastard after bastard.

You have gained a level!

You have gained a level!

You are now level 16!

The good times didn’t last forever, though, as a thick beam of water knocked his Darting Dagger of Death out of his mental grasp, sending it whizzing through the air into the