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

It had been a long two weeks.

Ron motioned to some of his nearby zombies, dragging corpses toward them. The corpses were two white tigers with clouds around their feet that somehow allowed them to run on the air. In death, the clouds had dispersed.

“What am I supposed to be looking at?” Jeb asked.

“The face!”

It only took a moment for Jeb to spot it: the human brain is good with faces.

Both the tigers had identical scars across their left eye. Matter of fact, the tiger’s faces looked fairly identical, too.

“Twins…with identical scars?” Jeb asked, hoping that was the answer. Ron shook his head and pointed to one of his zombies. It was a giant white tiger with a scar over its left eye.

“Ah, damnit.”

Two was a coincidence, three was a pattern. These weren’t identical twins with matching scars. These were created monsters, stamped off of an assembly line.

The implications were frightening.

The most important of which was that the swarm wasn’t going to end anytime soon…if ever.

“I gotta tell Freeman!”

Ron nodded, kneeling down to touch the two corpses. A highly concentrated spark of purple energy leapt between his fingertip and the corpses, and they opened their eyes, the clouds forming around their feat as they jumped off the ground and began fighting the creatures above them.

Jeb swam through the thick haze of the battlefield, aiming for the front of the line, where Freeman was leading the march toward the tortoise.

Freeman’s fighting style was…effective.

The old Cajun wore some kind of cestus –spiky gloves – on his hands and phased through creature’s attacks to deliver bone-splintering strikes on their noses. It seemed no matter what the man was fighting, he’d punch it right in the snoot. Matter of fact, he didn’t see the old man attack anything anywhere but the face.

More often than not, it worked, too.

So he’s got phasing as a Class skill, and Luck as a Myst ability. I can see how that would be hard to compete with.

As Jeb thought that, one of the charging monster’s tripped over its allies, toppling to the  ground in front of Freeman, the ten-foot tall creature’s snoot in ideal booping distance.

Freeman punched the creature’s nose so hard it crumpled like a fruit-roll up. Or perhaps like the way a car wraps around an oak tree after hitting it at a hundred and twenty.

Another one tried to use the old man’s distraction to claw him from behind, and the claws simply slid through the cajun’s back to no effect.

Jeb approached, clomping past Freeman’s allies as the Cajun took out the offending creature, its eyeball popping out of its skull.

“Freeman!” Jeb shouted, getting the old man’s attention.

“Jeb? Wha’ye doin ‘ere?”

“The monsters are copies!” Jeb said. “They’re coming off an assembly line! They’re not gonna slow down or end!”

Freeman frowned, then glanced back at the people fighting behind him, panting, sweat dripping from their faces as they staved off the onslaught of monsters.

He looked back to the tortoise that was looming ever larger over them.

“Don’t matter,” Freeman said, shaking his head. “Don’t change wha’ we gotta do.”

“You really think everyone’s gonna last that long!?” Jeb demanded.

“Nose tells me, we don’ finish dis today, we don’ finish at’al.” He said, tapping his nose.

Where does he get that? Jeb thought to himself. Looking more closely he spotted Myst rolling off of the man’s body like heat from a furnace.

Is he burning through his reserves to get this done?

Jeb looked at their situation with a critical eye. Attrition was a bitch, but the zombies were doing their part, giving people a chance to rest or heal, keeping the enemies from attacking more than a few at a time.

We just might have enough to get there, but we won’t have enough for the trip back. If they won, Jeb expected to be teleported out of the Tutorial, but otherwise they would be slaughtered. Was it worth a shot? Probably. Jeb was tempted to believe it.

As long as Ron can keep up with demand, we might actually be able to make it. Sucker must be leveling like crazy.

Some god with a twisted sense of humor must have been listening to Jeb’s thoughts, because it was at that exact moment that the horde of zombies surrounding them went feral and started attacking humans indiscriminately.

Jeb felt a pinch on his back as something broke the skin, and he turned to see the zombie bear he’d trusted his back to being flung away by its paw. In its place were dozens more undead of every shape and size, charging mindlessly.

What the hell. WHAT THE HELL!?

“Yer gonna wanna check on tha’!” Freeman shouted, crushing a charging monster’s skull before punching a zombie trying to bite him in its face, exploding the head like a watermelon.

Jeb dropped his knives and picked himself up, deftly weaving through the chaos, with the intention of posing a sternly worded WTF. Possibly including murder.

Jeb gained a little too much altitude trying to navigate the battle and a flying creature swooped down on top of him from behind, claws clamping down on his body, catching both his leg armor and skull armor triggers, sending it flying violently away, but leaving a gouge on his torso.

It wasn’t serious enough to trigger the traps he’d left on the cane, but it burned like fire across his ribs.

Damn, Jeb thought, lowering his altitude as he approached Ron’s Last Known Location, dropping to the ground and catching himself on his cane.

There was nothing there but a splotch of blood on the ground. Then again, there was blood everywhere, so Jeb didn’t have any solid evidence, but something inside him told him something bad had happened to Ron.

The humans were being pushed hard now, forced to close ranks into a