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

a tunnel winding down deeper into the mountain. They were experts at bypassing the murderholes by now, and Jeb had enough trapped rocks to keep the lava squids at bay.

With Ron’s zombies made from native ingredients, they were able to withstand the heat and act as a buffer between the worst the dungeon had to offer and themselves.

Ron’s Mystic Taxidermist Class was a C rank class that he chose because it gave him the ability to repair and redesign corpses at will, in exchange for Myst. In short, the synergy with his Core was well worth taking the lower ranked class.

He’d floated the idea of stitching the useful parts of the copper-skinned villagers to his giant caterpillar zombies, but Jeb had quietly taken him aside and explained the need to avoid Amanda losing her shit and abandoning them.

If Amanda left, Brett would obviously go too, then they would be down a frontliner and a healer.

Jeb also found time while Brett and Amanda were holding against a line of slow golems up front to single Jess out for a little talk. The Assassin was standoffish, but Jeb pointed out that if she was cold enough to kill people without remorse, she should at least be cold enough to pretend she wasn’t into it, if it gave her an advantage.

In this case, less friction with the group and access to life-saving treatment.

She seemed to be considering it before Jeb ducked back to the others.

They dispatched the fire golems and worked their way down to the bottom of the dungeon, where the boss was waiting for them.

They stepped into a large cavern, not quite as big as the first one in the entrance, but big enough to hold a prom in.

The chamber was round, with flat tiled stones with jagged edges composing the floor, lines of bright red showed at seams where hot magma peered through.

In the center of the chamber was a crystalline heart, with black stone underneath the semi-transparent quartz. Massive crystal tubes rose up into the ceiling and floor.

Wrapped around the heart was…something that didn’t belong.

It looked like one of the lamprey-dragons that came out of the World tortoise by the thousands, except much, much, bigger and scalier looking, as though they were looking at an adult, and the others were babies.

Its jaws were clamped around the base of one of the oversized veins, seemingly content to greedily suck on the quartz. As they approached, a single orange eye as big as a melon slid open, peering at them from twenty feet above.

It watched them stop in place, but didn’t move.

“The fuck is that?” Ron muttered.

“Before we get started…Anybody wanna try to solo that thing for the Accolade?” Jeb asked out of politeness.

Nobody stepped up. Jess looked tempted, but she seemingly measured the length of her sword against the depth of the creature’s scales and thought better of it.

“Normally I’m a thrill seeker,” Bret said, waving a hand. “But that thing could use me to pick its teeth. It’s all yours.”

“Alright,” Jeb said, rolling up his sleeves. “Time to kick this thing’s ass…in a half hour or so.”

Jeb sat down cross-legged on the stone floor and opened his bag of untrapped marbles and started prepping for the fight.

It’s not a ‘fight’, it’s hunting. If the creature didn’t wanna leave its perch and come to them immediately, it only had itself to blame when Jeb used his big monkey brain to tip the odds in his favor.

He took the marbles and gave them packets of telekinetic force that would spear upward if the monster were directly above them –and Jeb wasn’t –, then a moment later, tug it back down and hold it to the ground as tightly as possible.

He mixed them up, making some into grabbers, some into blades, and other into spears. He had no idea which ones would work, if any of them. That creature’s scales looked tough.

In addition to the traps on the marbles, he put extra triggers on his own body:

1.       If he was over 50% surrounded by mouth, then he would explode while forming a protective bubble.

2.       If he was in a stomach of any kind, he would explode.

3.       If he lost consciousness, a bail-out would occur that flung him in the general direction of the entrance.

4.       With the creature’s hard scales in mind, Jeb created and bound several ‘penetrator’ fingergun shots to both index fingers. It worked by battering several dozen shots in the same spot within milliseconds of each other. Simple. They were labeled ‘Pen 1’ through ‘Pen 10’. Sadly no Pen15.

5.       Jeb re-upped all of his previous triggers. His Core had grown since the first list of triggers, and they were nowhere near what he could do now.

Very carefully, Jeb pried his second cleaning wand apart and removed the Annihilation Lens, pocketing the filter.

There’s gotta be a better way of using this than just blowing it up.

The lens was tiny, and only capable of using the smallest amount of Myst before it was overloaded.

In addition, the shape of the lens was heavily concave, scattering all the Myst that came through to the four winds. It made it really hard to use it as a weapon.

Which is the point, I suppose. Wait a minute.

Jeb opened the lid on his fire-fly lantern and inspected the grain-sized three-layer lens sandwiches and compared them to the annihilation lens about as big as the tip of his pinky.

Muahahahahahah! Jeb swallowed the maniacal laughter as another genocidal idea bubbled to the surface.

“I’ve got an idea.” Jeb said, musing. “Can we sit down in the tunnel for an hour or so? We might not even need to fight this thing.”

Over the course of half an hour, Jeb performed surgery on the lantern and annihilation lens, being very careful not to