Chapter 47: Things that Shoot Lightning

The good news about crack challenges is that you don’t have to worry about them. Every now and again, someone reaches some magic threshold and starts a challenge and all hell breaks loose, but it’s their hell. It’s designed for them, it’s focused on them, and when they win or die, it dissipates like it never happened.

They usually die, if you were wondering.

Even if you attack the enemies that come out of the crack, they will flat-out ignore you. As near as we can tell from what we’ve seen, the only thing that can make one of the monsters deviate from their primary mission is if you actually block their way.

This simply isn’t anything you have to care about. I’m only mentioning it to save you some unnecessary stress in the unlikely event you ever see one.

The Guide, Navigating the New World, Pg. 12

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“Ah.” Sean thought. “I was wondering when you’d show up.”

Medium Zeuses

These man-sized gods are conventional-sized terrors, each capable of causing you medium-sized trouble. They don’t have paralytic venom, and although much bigger than their tiny cousins, they still aren’t quite big enough to handle hurling lightning bolts at you.

Not actual lightning bolts, anyway. They have props, of a sort. Sharp ones. And all those muscles aren’t for show.

The first rule of fighting a herd of full-sized, toga-wearing Greek dudes is you don’t stop to get an accurate count of how many of them there are. Sean did not know this rule and watched as they popped out of the cracks of the Earth like champagne corks. Before long, he intuited the rule by the sudden barrage of stainless-steel lightning bolts they started throwing.

At the beginning, Sean assumed that if he just dodged enough of the bolts, he could get to work with darts, spear, and dagger at melee range. But the Olympian bastards didn’t run out of the bolts. It was like a spell. They generated them from somewhere, and seemed to have a basically infinite amount of them to throw. Within ten or fifteen seconds of dodging, the alley and surrounding ruins looked like an art display with high-voltage wires strewn about as its subject.

The dodging wasn’t completely without benefit, though. For one, Sean got used to the rhythm of the battle more and more each second. Second, and hilariously, the Zeuses had what appeared to be a silly-low amount of DEX and SAV for ranged specialists. This not only meant he got to keep from getting skewered. It also meant that while Sean could maneuver and move in the lightning-bolt strewn environment without too much trouble, the Zeuses couldn’t.

Sean noticed that every so often, one of the Zeus would slip. It wasn’t every single step, but it was enough that he decided to bide his time, risk the bolts, and wait until it happened near him. He didn’t have to wait long. As one of the Zeuses charged him with an uplifted bolt, its foot snagged against something, forcing the slightest of stumbles. Sean burned a charge of Hard Time immediately, rushed him, and planted the Mystereamer directly over its heart.

Or, at least, where the heart should have been. The Zeus looked blandly down at the Mystereamer, which had opted to deliver 100% conventional damage for the first time since its retrofit. It then looked up at Sean, laughed divinely, swung its fist, and sent Sean catapulting through a nearby wall.

It should have killed Sean. Hell, a few weeks ago it absolutely would have killed him. People don’t take out brick walls without some level of personal destruction as a gruesome trophy. But this was an old wall, one that was mostly standing just because nothing sufficiently big had bumped into it yet. And although Sean’s VIT wasn’t as incredibly high as his other stats, it was much, much higher than a conventional human’s.

Did it hurt? Yeah. Could he take a bunch more shots like that? Not a chance. But he wasn’t dead, and nothing was broken enough that he was out of play. Stitch Up engaged almost immediately, negating the damage he had taken even further. He was fine. Or at least he was as fine as a person trapped in the decades-old ruins of a vintage clothing store with an increasing amount of yoked imitation gods could be.

Darts. Darts are the solution here.

Sean didn’t care how fast Eike was. 100 miles was a long, long way, and there probably wasn’t any shortage of time. That meant taking several seconds extra to dodge before throwing the three darts into the first Zeus was worth it. And figuring out a way to safely close the distance to finish the god off with a hit from the Trash Compactor was also a luxury he could afford.

After killing the first, Sean leapt through the mostly broken remnants of a window to get the Zeuses back on bolt-strewn ground and took down another two in even less time than it had taken him to kill the first.

And then things went wrong. It turned out Sean's SAV score was, while very good and mostly sufficient for the weird terrain, not quite enough to keep him from tripping completely. And the moment he stumbled, one of his enemies took advantage of it to hit him with a diving tackle that would have made defensive linemen proud.

The Zeuses were not, it turned out, above sacrificing one of their own for the cause. As Sean rolled and tumbled with the bigger, stronger god, the bolts plinked off the asphalt all around him. They didn’t look that sharp, but with each one weighing several times more than a cast iron frying pan, they didn’t need to be much more than slightly pointy to be scary.

As the rolling came to a stop, the sacrificial Zeus drew back for a smashing attack with his fist. In the process, it took a shot square in the back from a friendly lightning bolt. For a second, it was stunned, but it was damage that it could shrug off. Before it could bring its fist down, Sean burned a charge of Hard Time to slow the Zeus down, speed himself up, and stab him a half dozen times in the bargain.

As the Zeus collapsed. Sean pushed away from it while keeping as low as he could and using the falling body for cover. He scrambled to his feet and kept ahead of a steady stream of the bolts just long enough to get around a corner. Turning around, he went for a double-handed, whole body swing of the Trash Compactor, hoping that one of the Zeuses would be dumb enough to follow him blindly. It did, and he managed to atomize its head in a single blow.

Taking out five of them made him now able to get that accurate count without too much trouble. There were seven of them left. Sean had some broken ribs, or at least some badly bruised ones, but he could still move pretty well. Interestingly, only three of the Zeuses who were following him had lightning bolts in their hands. Unless they were playing some sort of deceptive game, they were finally running out of whatever kind of steam they needed to keep generating them.

Sean got the Trash Compactor spinning as fast as he could. He was pretty sure he could take the number of Zeuses left, provided they didn’t get him on the ground. But more waves of the monsters were coming, and he had to conserve his own durability as much as he could. Darting out from behind a building, he nailed another one with the flail, not quite killing it, then lost his grip on the weapon as the Zeus jerked away. Putting the foe down for good with another stab from Mystereamer, he dodged a few bolts from the other Zeuses and watched with satisfaction as new bolts failed to materialize in their place. With no new missiles incoming, he had more options. He put his spear in his offhand for emergencies, but the next part of the plan didn’t rely on anything but the chaotic damage from the Mystereamer.

Dancing in and out of Zeus blows, Sean focused not on hitting his opponents hard, but on hitting them a lot. He didn’t want his weapons stuck in them, and he didn’t want to commit to the kind of attacks that would risk his own safety. Instead, he wove in and out of the Zeuses, taking only glancing blows and scratching them again and again in minor ways with the edge of the blade as he did.

Those scratches would have taken forever to build up to a serious amount of damage with a normal weapon, but Mystereamer wasn’t that. Sean couldn’t even identify most of the damage being done as the weapon’s chaotic feature kicked into gear, but he was pretty sure the damage that made the wounds sing angelic hymns was probably the system’s best interpretation of “holy.”

Even the damage from the chaotic sources that turned out to be especially powerful weren’t enough to put the hurt on the Zeuses to take them down. But a few of the damage sources weren’t focused on being powerful in absolute terms. Some of them sizzled, some of them left reactions of different kinds in the Zeuses’ skin, and some of them stank. Sean had been banking that at least a few of the types of damage the weapon could do were meant to apply damage over time, and it was looking like he was right.

When the first Zeus fell, it was ugly. That one had been particularly unlucky with the random number generator earlier, and hobbled far behind the others with its speed compromised by a dozen different ailments. Sean focused his attentions on it after that, nicking it again and again as he circled towards and away from the greater group.

When it went down, it didn’t just die. Without its natural resistance to poisons, bacterial infection, and whatever else was pulsing through its veins, it melted into a puddle of some vile liquid that Sean got as far away from as he could manage. If the Zeuses were going to try playing defense linemen fighting again, he was going to make damn sure he wasn’t tackled into that.

None of this was easy. All-melee Zeuses were a different kind of threat to Sean, and the sheer danger he’d be in if he got tackled meant he had to give up defenses in exchange for speed. He needed to avoid their attempts at pinning him down, which meant picking up blows. But the excellence of his armor and his efforts to keep any of the punches and kicks from landing square were paying off.

After another minute, he had melted three more of them. The three that were left were, if not close to death, at least poisoned enough that they were manageable. He lost his hold on the Mystereamer when one of them got lucky and cracked his clavicle, but by then he was able to go to work with his spear without being in too much danger.

The last Zeus fell, and as it did, Sean felt Stitch Up’s get-far-away-from-threats bonus kick to maximum strength. He could see the crack from where he was, and at the moment, it didn’t seem to be issuing any more foes. Whatever healing he could get would be absolutely vital. He sat down lightly on a nearby wall that had crumbled all the way down to his waist level and tried to catch his breath.

Whatever else was true of the Zeuses, they weren’t hard enough. They could have killed him, yeah. But this was far from a long-shot, crazy test level of difficulty. Whatever was coming next would be worse.