Chapter 50: Overenthusiastic Jungle Juice Alchemy

That slight reduction in speed turned out to be more than enough to flip the script. Where Sean had been vulnerable to tackles and shoulder-hits before, he could now get out of the way before they landed. This meant he had more time to attack with the Zeus-teeth and the poison’s qualitative effect on the fight was becoming more and more apparent.

By the time Sean was almost out of jaws to fight with, the rabbit was barely moving. But barely still meant moving some, and Sean was thoroughly, deeply gassed. He was much, much faster than the rabbit still, but almost all the finesse had left his movements. Taking his last two portable Zeus-bites in hand, he dodged wide around the rabbit, circled entirely to the rear of the thing, and jabbed them into its thigh.

Okay. Hopefully, that was enough.

Not giving the rabbit a chance to recover, he jumped onto the rabbit’s back, using the fur as a handhold as he stabbed it again and again with Mystereamer. And, luckily, he was able to hit a massive number of times when he didn’t have anything else to worry about. Every strike was as hard as he could throw it, and he threw them repeatedly, robotically, and as fast as he could, while the rabbit tried and failed to overcome its stupor and buck him off its back.

The wounds kept closing up, sure, but not as fast as he could make them. It was a race against the rabbit’s ability to purge the venom, and his speed in hurting the monstrosity. But he was building a lead. As Sean created a larger and larger collection of jagged stab wounds between its shoulder blades, it began to start moving more.

Faster. The way past regen is just to find ways to stab even faster.

He had one charge of Hard Time that recoveedr while collecting the jawbones. In-between ragged breaths, he burned it on himself, adding a few more strikes than he would otherwise have. If this didn’t work, nothing would.

He would never really know if it was the accumulated damage, the special damage types he had been building up as Mystereamer’s chaotic nature showed itself here and there, or just the rabbit flat out having some kind of cardiac event related to the massive amount of neurotoxin he had pumped into it. But finally, it went down. It shuddered slightly, stiffened, and fell over sideways, finally dumping Sean off.

Sean laid on his back, heaving in giant breath after giant breath, too tired to even care about the various swarm-of-things-based liquid seeping into his hair. High VIT meant that each breath was doing a lot for him, but it also meant he had a pretty big tank to fill. He could have laid there for minutes if the system just gave him enough time.

It wasn’t meant to be. Suddenly, the ground started shaking again, tearing the crack open even wider as smoke started to spill out, denser and more intense than ever before. Rather than spreading out like before, Sean watched as it chose a seemingly random point in the city outside of the area, settling on a point even further away from the market, his house, and the forest than he was.

It coiled into a relatively tight rope or conduit of black vapor, stretched, and began to build up. Sean sat and breathed, watching the smoke get continuously taller and wider until it towered over even the tallest remnants of the city. Then it began to form. The smoke roiled as it carved itself into distinct arms, legs, hands, feet, and a head, leaving a huge ball for a wide, exaggerated torso.

Sean thought for a moment that a “giant smoke monster” might be the goal, but the Apocalypse System kept working, doing finer and finer adjustments to the color, shape, and details of the mass. Finally, the hands had fingers, and fingernails. The skin was a toned bronze, the eyes a piercing shade of blue. The toga flowed with enough fabric to clothe all of Greece.

It was the very biggest Zeus that Sean had ever seen. And as the thing took its first rumbling, catastrophic step towards him, he pulled up the system description.

KaiJupiter

No, no, he’s not Greek. He’s Roamin’.

You’re facing the Kaijupiter for three reasons. The first is to allow for that pun. The second is that the Apocalypse System really, really wanted to wrap up this whole Zeus motif for you before you moved on, and in one way or another, you’re probably moving on to a different plane of existence in the next hour or so.

The third reason is practical. This is a big, bad dude, and right now, he has one goal - to get to a place humans live and screw it up. Using a supernatural knowledge of adjacent towns, settlements, and cities, it will make a beeline for the nearest mass of humans, break all their shit, kill most of them, and only THEN will it turn around to follow you.

This thing doesn’t have levels in the conventional sense, but if it did, they’d be much, much higher than you can handle. Remember all those cryptic warnings about you being a long-shot and your success being an incredibly improbable potential event? He’s why. The amount of incredible bullshit that would have to happen for you to even carve a dodgeball-sized hole in him is astounding.

And, I mean, just look at him. He’s a lot of dodgeballs.

As off track as that measurement system is, the point remains that this is an unfair, unbalanced fight. As such, you get to know some things that you normally wouldn’t. And he doesn’t have any weak spots, so to speak, so don’t try any Junkyard Goliath bullshit on him. While he’s not particularly paying attention to you until he completes the “destroy an entire town” part of his plan, he can be convinced to spare you a little attention from time to time if you put enough work into it.

Good luck!

“Oh, yeah, of course,” Sean said, struggling to his feet and walking around the battlefield to recover his weapons. “I can kill this giant god thing. Definitely. No problem. Good ol’ Sean, definitely capable of all this.”

The god was not moving all that fast. Despite the fact that it was huge, it apparently didn’t have absolutely unlimited amounts of strength or flexibility. Instead of dozing directly through buildings, it had to stop to kick and pound on each of them to reduce them to rubble before it could keep moving forward. The steps themselves weren’t that fast, either. This was definitely a monster in the old-school Kaiju style, one that lumbered towards things you didn’t want it to break, and broke them, relying on being basically invincible to make it happen.

Sean didn’t have any illusions about actually killing it with the weapons he had. He’d need to do something crazy, like build a bomb. Except he didn’t have any bombs. He didn’t have a Thor’s hammer that he could launch out of a catapult, or anything like that. And the biggest sword he had was about as small as a mosquito’s stinger to him after taking the sheer size of the thing into account.

Actually, that’s not literally the biggest sword I have access to right now. The idea he had after that wasn’t good, and almost certainly wouldn’t work. But it was the best he had, and it was at least something he could do to pass the time before the thing slaughtered everyone he knew and crushed him. He got to work.

—

A few minutes later, he was pounding away at the top of the Kaiju’s foot with the Mystereamer. Most of the blows bounced right off. The thing either had exceptional resistance to conventional damage or just had a high enough VIT that most wounds left little better than a scratch. Sean was fast in his strikes, but whatever threshold the Kaiju had for actually noticing a flea biting at its ankle hadn’t been reached yet.

Every now and again, the proc damage from Mystereamer would hit on something that actually did do some minor damage, and Sean was still capable of dishing out an enormous amount of shots-per-second if he focused on it. Slowly but surely, he was carving out a cavity in the top of the thing’s foot, and it was, bless it, ignoring him.

As near as he could calculate, he had at least a few minutes before it got close enough to the arena to ruin his plan. He kept carving away, eventually managing to dig a hole deep enough that, in one very narrow portion of the thing’s foot, it broke through the skin and hit some actual muscle. And the Kaiju finally took notice, looking down at Sean in a bored, almost disinterested way. Raising its mammoth hand, the KaiJupiter confirmed what Sean had already guessed.

This bad boy was big enough to throw real lightning.

The monster was at least smart enough not to peg itself in the foot with its own bolt, but that was a small comfort as the concussion from the blast blew Sean off from the sandaled foot, past another, and knocked him into a decaying tree so hard the whole thing toppled. With broken eardrums killing his balance, Sean got back up and staggered back to the foot he had been working on. He wasn’t done.

Managing to get back up on the foot and once again being ignored by the Zeus, he reached into his tool bag and pulled out every single vial of poison he had stolen from Breca’s belt. A handful of vials was something like 20 of them, each sized in a way that made sense if Breca was using them to individually dose bolts to make them nastier. Dumping them into the hole he had made, he crushed each with the edge of the Mystereamer, letting their contents flow freely.

He also threw as many jawbones as he could gather into the mix, before dousing everything with all the leftover slime from his Goose Tape creation, and sealing the whole thing shut with the last dregs of the once-oversized roll.

Sean did not expect this to work very well. He didn’t know what was in Breca’s poisons, and he knew from, both personal and recent experience, that the neurotoxins from the smaller Zeuses weren’t all that powerful once the mass of an enemy got big past a certain point. This was, in the end, him trying to get any edge he possibly could. If it didn’t work, that sucked, but even making the big guy’s foot slightly numb would be a big deal.

Finishing his nasty concoction just in time, Sean jumped off the foot, running for dear life, before the KaiJupiter hit a trap that he had laid out earlier. The system had described the little statues around the border of the second-wave battlefield as sturdy, but he didn’t feel like sticking around to see if that description extended to their foundations if it tried to batter him into the ground with one.

Sean had wasted almost the entire roll of Goose Tape on this trap. The statues were about 30 feet apart, which meant he got about seven or eight circles with the tape before the gigantic roll ran out. Between the fact that the tape was magic and his Adhesives Mastery was juicing it a bit, he hoped that would be enough to make the Zeus stumble. And if it did stumble, then there was one final statue that the system was quite proud of waiting for the monster on the ground.

The thing’s foot had always been aimed right to go between the statues, and the giant’s single-minded focus meant that it had always moved in a straight line. Miraculously, its foot set down with basically optimal placement, where one of its low-to-the-ground steps would catch the tape at basically the end of one of its long strides, maximizing the amount of weight the trap would take from it.

And then, just before it hit, something wondrous happened.

Achievement: Overenthusiastic Jungle Juice Alchemy

You have basically no idea how alchemy works. You’ve done exactly one alchemy project, you’ve read zero books on the subject, and you are, frankly, not even that good of a cook.

Did that stop you from throwing a bunch of random poisons together, mixing them with random biological matter and god-parts, then sealing them in a fermentation chamber made out of a living deity? Nope. You are a go-getter, the kind of person who mixes Everclear with Vodka, Triple Sec, and fruit punch. Or the person who tries to put together furniture without actually learning the differences between bolt A and peg B. You moved forward bravely, and it worked out for you. Kind of.

The poison you created will do a bunch of random shit in short order, essentially pumping dozens of stat conditions into the first target it comes into contact with. It’s only around for five or ten seconds before it burns itself out in some sort of chaotic toxicity turbo-mode.

As a special bonus, we‘re giving you the kind of excessive amount of experience you’d get from this before the poison starts firing, so it works a little better.