Chapter 48: Hard Counter

Recovering the Trash Compactor and the darts that had been embedded in Zeus skulls, Sean sat down and tried to rest as best he could. Stitch Up was working its hardest to put him fully back together by the time the crack showed activity again, but it was slow-going. At least, he thought, his bones were all in the right place. He was getting pretty used to being in a lot of pain, but broken bones brought a certain reality of lost leverage and poor structural integrity that couldn’t be worked around with mere psychological toughness.

A sudden burst of smoke issued forth from the impossible depths of the crack, accompanied by a notification confirming his limited initial success.

Wave one complete!

Congratulations! You’ve proven yourself the clear superior of the medium-sized Zeus variation. Be proud, but not too much. Zeus is not a smart, tactical god. A full herd of those gym-rats was mostly useful as a test of your build concept. Congratulations - you hard-counter the exact kind of things you were built to hard-counter.

But the Zeuses aren’t the only build with a hard counter. Tests are more fun when it goes both directions, don’t you think?

Sean did his best not to think about what was coming. Regardless of what it was, every second of recovery was vital. A single healed bruise mattered. Catching his breath mattered. Horrifying surprises he couldn’t do much about didn’t matter, at least until when they demanded he deal with them.

The smoke coming from the crack started to show some activity, first blasting outwards from the crack and covering the various rubble left behind from the general mayhem the first combat had caused. Sean jumped to his feet as the smoke curled around him, fully expecting attacks to spring out of the cover.

As he held the Spectral Sticker in one hand and the Mystereamer in the other, Sean tried to figure out exactly what made sense as a hard counter for his build. Two of his three emphasized stats, DEX and MAG, were about speed. If the Apocalypse System was looking to counter that, it would either need something that moved and attacked faster than he did, or that simply didn’t care about speed in the first place.

Speedster or some kind of VIT-juiced tank. Between the two, I’d rather have the tank.

Meanwhile, his visibility was shit. He could vaguely see some sort of motion happening in the vapor, but nothing close enough that he could get details. That was fine. Whatever the system was getting ready was also giving him time to heal. He wasn’t entirely topped off yet, but what little damage remained was somewhat negligible. He’d face the next wave mostly whole.

When the smoke retracted, it left an oddly clean field of play. It had wicked away all the rubble, dropped Zeuses, things that had dropped from the Zeuses, and generally anything in the area besides a relatively smooth, consistent layer of dirt. In the center of it, surrounded by hundreds of blobs of smoke, was a statue.

Sean had seen statues of chimera before, animals that were supposed to be made of a variety of other animals, possessing the strengths of each. This statue was a cruel, terrible misrepresentation of those artistic efforts. It was a man, kind of, but with a rat for its left hand, what appeared to be another man’s head on the other, and a rabbit’s head.

In a stunning choice that somehow worked even less, the artist had attempted to replace each of the pectorals of the man with snarling cats’ heads. The human-head hand had a sword in its mouth, held aloft in a fucked-up warrior’s pose.

Sean looked at the statue in stunned, horrified wonder that was only amplified by the sheer size of the thing. Where any decent person would have carved the atrocity as small as possible to make it easier to destroy, the system had opted to make it a hundred feet tall.

For a horrified moment, Sean was worried he’d have to fight the statue. Glancing down at the system notification he had just received, he realized it was something much, much worse than that. The system, it appeared, not only intended the statue as decoration, but was actually proud. So proud that it had set up four still-big-but smaller gate-post-like statues around the cleared area, and they looked every bit as horrible as their bigger cousin.

Wave 2 System Space Generated!

Despite the fact that everything around you looks mostly the same, the Apocalypse System thought this fight would be a little more interesting if you had a little less room to groove. Where you sit now is in a perfectly circular arena, one that you are blocked from leaving by anything less than an item or skill with absolute “can leave in any circumstances, no matter what happens” type language.

Don’t think too hard about that bit. We checked, and you don’t have anything like that.

What you do have is a history. Since you arrived on the scene, you have been a terror to a certain class of small-to-medium, low-level creatures. You have slaughtered hundreds and hundreds of rats, literally every rabbit you saw, and as many as two slimes. It’s built you a little bit of a reputation, the kind that just as easily could have got you an exterminator-themed class if things had gone a little differently.

No use wasting the narrative you built, though. It’s time to greet some old friends. I hope the statue helps inspire you. The Apocalypse System worked really hard on it. Don’t try to destroy them, either. It built them sturdy.

When the blobs of smoke around the center statue started to clear, Sean realized that they each held a monster. Some of the bigger ones became big fat rabbits or, in one case, a wind-panther. And a good portion of them turned out to be hiding not one but several rats, tiny Zeuses, or slimes. By the time all the blobs of smoke cleared, there were hundreds of enemies.

Yup, that’s a hard counter. You can’t be faster than all of a bunch of something at once.

The actual conversion from smoke to various apocalypse beasts took very little time, and was far too coordinated for Sean to use clever timing and rush in early to fight with a lesser amount of them. As soon as all the smoke had transformed and the battlefield was fully packed with enemies, the entirety of the little jerks snarled in unison and started sprinting towards Sean with death in their eyes.

In any group of enemies running all-out, a sort of sorting occurs based on who can move the fastest. In the case of the army running towards Sean, the fastest was easy to guess. It was the wind-panther, far and away. Sean ran to meet it. If he could take it out, his life would get a lot easier. Not easy, exactly, since here were tons and tons of little guys ready to make his life hard. But the only one he could see that had the individual power to be a danger to him all by itself was the big cat. If he could get it under control before he was swamped, he’d have a much better shot of surviving this.

The arena space wasn’t huge, and Sean and the cat clashed within seconds. Luckily, there was enough time to get a few spins going on Trash Compactor, which with his enhanced strength might have been enough to one-shot the big animal. Unluckily, he absolutely botched the timing on his first swing, whiffing the weapon through the air a full foot in front of the cat.

Sean brought it back and around again as fast as he could, but the cat’s teeth were a breath away from his neck. That left him with two choices. He had managed to regenerate some of his Hard Time reservoir after the first wave, and now had two uses left and ready to go. If he used both of them, it would give him time to smack the cat out of the air. If he only used one, he could probably dodge, but he’d have to then handle the cat with more conventional means, all the while trying to counter the swarm of little enemies that were upon him.

He went for the double-charge option. Slowing the cat down and speeding his own body and equipment up, the Trash Compactor got around just in time, catching the cat on a shallow upwards diagonal that caved the side of its face in and batted it just enough off course that its momentum didn’t take Sean off his feet as it flew past.

Even if the cat wasn’t dead, it would have a hell of a lot harder of a time following him now. Sean hurriedly looped the Trash Compactor back through his belt, pulling out the Mystereamer with his primary hand and one of his darts in the other. Most of these monsters didn’t take very much to kill, and very few of them were good at dodging.

He didn’t even understand why some of them were there in the first place. The glutton rabbits couldn’t do much to him, even though their movement appeared to be buffed quite a bit in this iteration. Even moving twice as fast wouldn’t have helped them that much. Whatever resources were involved in creating the enemies, Sean was glad some of them went to create the rabbits. But it was perplexing.

The battle with the rats and the Tiny Zeuses was a confused, horrible thing. Sean could take out several of them in a second, but where the rats would have had a hard time getting through even his starter armor before, they appeared to now have been buffed. Their bites were sharper, in much the same way that the rabbits were now moving around at slightly less pathetic speeds. At any given time, Sean had two or three rats that were lucky enough to get past his onslaught, sink their teeth in, and hang off him in rat-fueled-courage.

The Zeuses were less capable of breaching his defense, but made things hard in a different way. With their paralytic venom, even a single bite from one could spell disaster for Sean. And given that he couldn’t see where exactly they had been improved, if anywhere, he had to assume that each of the little bastards had juiced venom. Avoiding them meant taking more rat bites, but he didn’t have much of a choice until he could clear the field.

The big breakthrough came when he was forced to disengage and run from one end of the battlefield to the other to give Stitch Up a chance to stem the bleeding. As he ran, he realized that as much extra efficacy as the enemies might have picked up, none of it had been poured into their defense at all. And while Hard Time didn’t appear to multiply the force output of the objects it sped up, Sean’s stats made him move faster and harder in a way the universe did take note of.

After that, the weapons in Sean’s hands were mostly for defense. Moving at top speed, it was hard for any of the rats or Zeuses to latch on to him, and even though not every footfall meant a dead enemy, most of them did. Sean sprinted back and forth across the battlefield, stomping the ever-loving hell out of whatever got in his way. By the time he had thinned out enough rats and Zeuses that they had room to get out of his way as he ran towards them, neither was much of a threat anymore.

And yet, somehow, I feel I should be concerned that there are slightly more rabbits than I remember.

While Sean had been focusing on the bigger threats, the rabbits had been content to mostly stay around the outskirts of the battle. And while he had managed to stomp quite a few of them in passing, there seemed to be even more of them now. With a sudden horror, he saw why.