Chapter 49: Zeus Bites

One of the glutton rabbits was chewing on a fallen Zeus, hungrily gulping down whatever parts that it could break off with its sharp little nibbling teeth. And then, in an act of horror Sean would never forgive the system for, it split. In a bloody, tearing sort of multicellular mitosis, the rabbit used the energy it had gotten from the food to rip itself in half, magically filling in the missing pieces to create two complete, if slightly smaller, rabbits.

Rabbit Glutton (Mark III)

Oh, shit, did you give one of these things meat? Stop doing that. They make more of themselves when they do that.

Each new little rapidly multiplying one of these bastards has the base stats of its predecessor, plus 20% of the stats of whatever meat source, PLUS a multiplicative 10% bonus per mark level and some other stuff. The point is, you need to stop giving them meat. You don’t get any more experience for it or anything. What’s wrong with you?

Shit, Sean thought. He fought with speed. Sloths fought with strength. And he finally got the reference the stupid rabbits were making, one that he had missed the first time around by just killing them fast enough that it hadn’t even come up. The rabbits fight with math.

The system had got Sean good. The rabbits plus sufficient meat meant an unstoppable army, and he had just provided them with a battlefield full of squished, stabbed, and otherwise bio-available sources of protein. It didn’t take much time for them to split, so long as they had access to that, and there was only one of Sean to deal with the problem.

Sean could still pretty much kill them at will, but the rabbits all looked like each other and had managed to spread out all over the battlefield. He had no way to call up the system descriptions on any rabbit unless he was close, and no time to do so even if he did. With the rabbits eating, splitting, and then dispersing, he knew the probabilities were high that there were going to be some high-grade rabbits by the time he had thinned their numbers.

He had managed to kill about half of them before the first rabbit gave him any real trouble. He stabbed it with the Mystereamer, which had been more than enough to take down every rabbit up to that point. As a result, he didn’t check very carefully to see if the blow had really taken it down, and the thing landed a vicious bite on his hand before he shook it off and took it out with a second strike.

By the time he had the population reduced by three quarters, each rabbit was an actual fight. He didn’t stop to see what rabbit generation he was up to on each, mostly because he didn’t have time. They were leaner, meaner, and faster to an extent where he had to stop, square up, and make sure they didn’t take out his neck in a storm of fluffy vengeance. They still weren’t serious threats as long as he kept his head on a swivel, but any delay meant some other rabbit getting stronger somewhere else. There just wasn’t time for strategy if he wanted to stay ahead of the furry tide.

It wasn’t until he had reduced them to a tenth of their normal numbers that he started to pick up injuries that mattered. Bites that barely got through his armor before now ended with the rabbit teeth clacking as they completely penetrated muscle to meet in the middle. And the rabbits were now agile enough to get behind him, attack him from weird angles, and otherwise make his life hard.

Finally, after the better part of an hour and absolutely covered in gore, he stood before the last of the rabbits, one who had actually helped him in his push to kill the last ten or so fluff balls by swallowing a couple itself.

Flounces, the Lagomorphic Terror of Worlds, He Who Brings Vengeance for His People

Somewhere, deep in the soul of every rabbit, is the knowledge that they are born to run. Not in a fun rock and roll way, either, but in a terrified, a coyote-will-eat-me-if-I-don’t kind of way. And side by side with that knowledge is a spirit of rebellion. People tend to overlook the outlaw aspects of the bunny spirit because they are distracted by all the cute carrot eating, but it’s there. Watching. Waiting for the moment when its enemies are least prepared for attack.

Flounces isn’t like that though. He’s just a naturally violent guy. He agreed to this whole vengeance thing because he heard there would be a lot of bloodshed and mayhem. For Flounces, that’s just what a good Tuesday sounds like.

I’m not going to give you any hints about his stats because, frankly, it wouldn’t help that much. I mean, just look at him. Does any part of that look like it’s going to be easy?

The description wasn’t wrong. Whatever tier Flounces had ascended to after eating the last few rabbits, it wasn’t just a linear growth from one level of strength to another. It had evolved to a point where its physiology sat somewhere between how Sean expected a very fit rabbit to look and the general build and attitude of a werewolf. It had pink eyes, and sharp, six-inch long fangs on either side of its normal bunny nibbling teeth. Its ears were docked, cut, and scarred for what Sean suspected were purely stylistic reasons.

And, in a stunning turn of events, it was midair. In a fight, it was sometimes helpful to do the unexpected thing. Sean had been the beneficiary of that philosophy more than once. But now the tables were turned. The last thing that Sean ever expected a rabbit to do was a full drop-kick, which is exactly what Flounces did.

By the time he realized what was happening, the rabbit was already halfway to him. By the time he broke out of his shock, he was skidding on his back through the accumulated guts and blood of a hundred slain animals. The worst part wasn’t the broken bones, the pain, or the fact that the rabbit was already bounding after him with all the speed of a greyhound. It was that he was thankful for the guts, since without them, he would have slammed to the ground instead of slid and probably would be unconscious by now.

High SAV scores were a hell of a thing. If, before the apocalypse, Sean had seen a movie where someone sliding on their back across the ground at moped speeds pulled three darts from a pouch, threw them in quick succession, and actually hit what they were aiming at, he would have called bullshit. Him doing the same thing with two out of his three shots should have been amazing. Instead, it barely slowed the thing down.

Riding the last few drops of momentum from the strike, Sean kicked off the ground, flipped, and landed on his feet. He dodged desperately to the side, slipping and sliding on the bloody mud as he did. The rabbit was so committed to the attack that the same bad ground conditions kept it from changing directions in time, allowing Sean to dodge the attack by only a few inches and get in a decent strike of his own with the Spectral Sticker.

He had hit the rabbit three times now, twice with darts and once much harder with the spear. Each wound drew blood, but Sean watched in terror as the wounds closed so fast they actually pushed the weapons out. Before the rabbit had fully reset, he jumped in with the Mystereamer, hoping that the weapon’s regen-nerfing powers would be enough to let him build up damage on the giant rabbit that it couldn’t ignore.

He managed to get two and a half good strikes on the rabbit before it turned around, the sheer bulk and strength of the animal allowing it to body-slam him hard enough to send him flying again. As he sailed through the air, he saw that the wounds on the rabbit were indeed closing slower, this time taking a second or two instead of the near-instantaneous healing it had displayed before. It was a step in the right direction, just not one that reached anywhere far enough to actually help him.

This thing’s VIT and regen were, in a different way, a perfect counter for his build. If he was a big barbarian type, he might be able to cleave it open in a way that disabled it faster than it could heal. If he was a mage, he could set it on fire. He was slightly faster than it, sure. But as a speed-rogue merchant-of-the-random, he just couldn’t do enough damage to it fast enough to matter, unless it literally laid there and let him take unlimited strikes.

Oh, shit. Sean thought. Actually, that might be a possibility here.

—

A few minutes later, Flounces was visibly consumed by rage and frustration. Sean had been running that entire time, using his superior maneuverability to juke the rabbit whenever it got close. He blessed his decision to raise his VIT because as much as his lungs were burning from the effort, he was still holding up.

His plan was batshit and had almost no chance of working, but Sean had decided to go all-out on the execution of it anyway. A while back, he had been worried about the prospect of being paralyzed and eaten alive, having reasoned that if there was any part of the Zeuses that the system would have buffed, it would be their paralytic venom. The rabbits ate bone, but they appeared to know enough to avoid the poison-bearing teeth. The battlefield was absolutely strewn with disembodied jawbones, waiting to be put to use.

Now, with an armful of mandibles and a maniacal gleam in his eye, he was thankful for the little Greek bastards.

You want a long-shot win? I’ll give you one.

He skimmed the battlefield one more time, picking up a few more jawbones as he did. He was starting to feel the fatigue of the fight, but if he was only going to get one shot at this, he was going to make sure he didn’t fail for lack of ammo.

Standing tall and completely laden with Olympian mouths, Sean waited for the final charge of Flounces, honestly wondering if he had finally gone insane.

I probably have, honestly. But you can’t say it doesn’t look good on me, as mental states go.

As Flounces neared, Sean dropped all but a few of the jawbones, dodging a paw strike by sliding underneath the rabbit like a baseball runner and jabbing them into its stomach as he did. There was no immediate effect, but he didn’t expect to get results that easily anyway. He jabbed a few times with Mystereamer to annoy the rabbit into turning around, at which point he ducked a bite aimed at his head. Then, he got behind the rabbit again as it slipped in the remains of its friends, and hit it in the ass with a few more venom-bearing teeth.

After that initial stretch of luck, Sean started to pick up damage. If nothing else, the rabbit could body-check him if it knew where he was, and it was just too big for Sean to consistently dodge. It caught him deep on the leg with a claw once, leaving him bleeding badly in a way that Stitch Up was barely helping with.

And getting one’s pinky finger bitten off, it turned out, was much more painful than you’d think. But Sean was in a zone, and paid the rabbit back for every strike it landed with a half-dozen Zeus-bites. And very gradually, it finally started to slow.