Book 2 - Chapter 7: Jellyfish Buckler

Hours later, Sean was prowling the woods by himself looking for a suitable test subject. On his arm was the single ugliest object he had ever made. Hell, it might have been the least attractive piece of gear he had ever seen. People who made stuff generally liked to make them well. It was legitimately hard to find an ugly racket, for instance, or a truly bad-looking sword.

This shield was different. It was a big, uneven disk of relatively tightly woven plastic netting, several inches thick, the better part of a foot and a half wide, made of all different sorts of plastic with no attention paid to visual consistency. It was a horrifying to look out, and flat out embarrassing to carry.

So why does it have to be so good? Why did the system reward this?

Jellyfish Buckler

Hooooo boy, you did a number on a lot of trash to make this. If individual pieces of garbage had ghosts, they would haunt you after seeing the shredded abomination you’ve made out of their corpses. You’d deserve it, too. It took a lot of work to destroy this garbage so thoroughly, yet in such an orderly fashion.

That said, this thing is like a shank in all the right ways. The irregular consistency and weave mean that anything that actually tries to pierce this thing is going to get deflected somewhat as it goes through. And that’s if it can get through at all. This things like eight inches thick! Not only that, but the little fragments of peanut butter lid and wadded tin foil you have layered through here give it even more stopping power.

More seriously, this shield is a commentary on all the ways equipment shouldn’t really work in the system era. When you are dealing with a guy with ten times the strength of a normal human, steel swords shouldn’t hold up to the abuse he can dish out. Steel armor shouldn’t stop anything he tries to do to someone else.

The reason it works is that crafting skills and system logic overshoot the physics you used to know. If a detail-oriented crafting class holder spends a ton of time getting a sword just right, the Apocalypse System rewards that in a way that your old, boring world wouldn’t have. The same is true here. You’ve leaned into the sheer weirdness of your class, and it has not gone unnoticed.

Effects: low-to-moderate projectile stopping power, but superior projectile deflection. Projectiles piercing the shield, if deflected, will always deflect in a direction beneficial to you. +5 VIT when wielded in your offhand.

The +5 bonus was so good that not only did Sean make sure to have it ready for battle, it also made sense for him to carry it in his hand in any situation where he might be attacked or had to move long distances really fast. As much embarrassment as the shield might bring him, it wasn’t something he was going to hide if he ever ran into other people. The stats were too good.

Sean was finding that while the Tells didn’t exactly move in groups, they did tend to clump together. He walked 20 minutes without finding any monsters at all, then found two that were close enough to each other to offer support. It took him the better part of an hour and another two groups before he found one walking around solo. By that time, he had forgotten his hatred of the aesthetics of his own shield in favor of impatience, and charged.

The Tell saw him almost immediately and started chucking apples. Sean was able to dodge the first several projectiles without too much trouble or slowing down significantly, but as he got closer, the Tell’s throws became proportionately more accurate. Eventually, the Tell got Sean’s speed dialed in and launched a perfect apple, one that tracked his motion perfectly and would have taken an awful lot of effort to dodge.

In comparison to moving his body entirely out of the way, angling the shield to block the apple was child’s play. For all its bulk, the shield was very, very light, and catching the apple on its far-left edge was easy. After that, he could ignore the arrow. It would likely hit the apple on a part of the shield he didn’t care about, too far on the edge to threaten his arm unless it came in at an extreme, unlikely angle. At some angles, it would even miss his shield entirely.

By the time Sean got to the Tell, he had been hit by five arrows, four of which he didn’t care about at all. The last one hit him hard and got all the way through the shield to his chest, where it was so slowed already that his armor shrugged off the hit without any significant problems.

And once he was in range of the Tell, getting it off its feet and beating it to death with a flail was even easier.

The next encounter, with a group of two Tells, ended up being the real proof of concept for the shield. He did his best to line the two Tells up with each other, getting a small amount of cover from his target being in the way of the second threat. It was a decent plan, though he still picked up more apples on the shield than before, and the arrows followed the red spheres hot and heavy with non-stop distressing thump sounds. He even picked up some minor wounds on his arm by the time he got to the first Tell and ripped its head almost off with a strike from the Trash Compactor.

The second Tell was such a non-threat now that Sean had his equipment, that he was even able to do some experimentation. He hadn’t tried using the armor-ignoring effects of his Spectral Sticker spear or his Spectral Darts on the enemies yet, mostly because they didn’t appear to be very armored in the first place. A quick check showed that this was the right move. At the moment, it looked like using the Trash Compactor when he could take big, wide swings and the Mystereamer when he couldn’t.

Picking up his third apple of the day, Sean checked his progress on the quest.

Quest Parameters:

Destroy 100 William Tells (5/100)

Time Limit: None. As a warm-up, All participants will exit at the same moment regardless of time spent in the trial.

Rewards: Variable, quality dependent on performance.

He was five percent through the quest, which wasn’t much, but as short as today’s hunting was, he knew that he would be clearing the Tells out much faster now. He grabbed what hats and arrows he could from the Tells, before turning to go back to the Shanktuary. Brett was very clear he wanted a report back, and he could stand to have the shield repaired in the meantime.

—

“Good news. I’m not dead.”

Brett had been as good as his word and had gotten rid of some of the trash while organizing the rest of it in a much less hazardous way. The common room was still like a chaotic workshop, messy and random, but much better now that the shredded piles of garbage from yesterday were gone.

“Great! It stops arrows, I see.”

Sean hadn’t spent much time removing the various missiles from the shield, reasoning that it would be easier and safer for the shield when Brett did it.

“Yeah. I figured you could take them out while you take a look at the shield. They should be good for garbage generation.”

Brett sat down and started carefully spreading the mesh to withdraw the arrows before setting them off to the side. Sean had to hand it to him. It wasn’t the most exciting thing he had ever seen, but Brett was damn good at what he did, while Sean guessed at most crafting things involving his hands.

“Getting the arrows out is easy. Honestly, I’m more worried about these.” Brett pointed to the apples that were still stuck to the shield. “If those build up over time, the shield is going to get heavier. And that’s if the Tells don’t have tricks to take advantage of them being in place already.”

Brett tugged at the apple ineffectually, then shrugged and generated a small work knife from the work table’s dimensional storage.

“What are you doing?” Sean asked. “Are you cutting those off?”

“It’s the only way. Don’t want to rip the shield. How have you been getting these off, anyway? It’s like they grew into the plastic, somehow.”

“It’s not that hard. Watch.” Sean grabbed the shield, carefully framed the apple with his hand to hold the layers of the shield down, then yanked. The apple took some bits of plastic with it, but not nearly as much as if Brett had cut it out.

Brett’s eyes widened for a moment.

“Sean, what’s your STR score?”

“Right now? 25-ish, I think.”

“That’s what I thought. I’m not that much weaker than you, and you just popped that thing off like it was nothing. And you didn’t tear the shield as much as you should have, either. That’s a skill thing, somehow.”

“Adhesives Mastery?”

“Probably, unless the system recognizes these as an improvised weapon in some weird way, which seems unlikely. It’s probably just that your glue skill works on a pretty generic ‘he’s better with adhesives’ logic, and that extends to removing adhesives just as much as applying them.”

Brett tugged at another one of the apples on the shield, which held on much tighter for him than it did for Sean. Not only would it not come off as easily, given how much the shield was deforming as he pulled, it was likely he’d destroy the whole thing in the process if he kept going.

“The system thinks of these things as a type of glue. Which, I’m sorry, I should have realized before.”

Sean thought about it. So far, he had plenty of experience with tape, and plenty of experience with glues that had normal curing times. He hadn’t really been thinking of the weapon version of the Tell apples as a resource yet, especially given that he was just thinking of them as a legitimate threat to his own life.

“Shit. I’m going to have to do some mashing, aren’t I?”

“Yup. Get to work.”

—

As easy as it would have been to use the actual mortar-and-pestle and bashing tools the workbench provided, Sean was likely to get better results using his mad scientist tools. As soon as Sean had explained his theories on the system giving him jankiness bonuses for his crafts, Brett had permanently banned him from using conventional tools unless it was absolutely necessary.

And so instead of grinding the apples with the right tools for the job, Sean found himself carefully bashing them with the orb-end of a weird, bumpy, mace like object he found in the mad scientist's tool bag. Then, he’d grind them into a fine paste-like consistency in a tiny bowl that looked like it was made from a piece of a chrome car bumper.

“This is a pain in the ass, Brett.”

It really was. It took him the better part of an hour to grind out the five or six apples he had picked up from the last fight. Even if he didn’t intentionally start collecting more apples from the Tells, which Brett had told him to do, this was going to be a big part of his day for the foreseeable future.

“Yup. That’s how it always is at first. You don’t have the right tools for the job. But you’ll get them.”

“How? I already bought out the store, pretty much. Maybe if I stumble into a mad scientist lab, or a post-apocalyptic zombie-killer workshop, I can find something.”

Brett shook his head.

“Nope, you aren’t going to get that lucky. You get to make your own tools, Sean. That’s how most blacksmiths start out, you know. They buy a few basic tools, then spend the next few weeks equipping their workshop with things they make. This is going to be like that, but instead of working with iron…”

“I work with random bullshit I find on the ground?”

Brett grinned.

“See, you’re getting it.”