Chapter 39: Well-Timed Distractions

“Shit. Shit.” Sean tried desperately to slow his descent down the sides of the canyon and failed miserably. It would have been one thing if he had just slipped and fallen. Instead, he had tried to jump away from the attack coming from below, one that had been lifting up the ground itself as he jumped. It wasn’t entirely unlike getting double bounced off a trampoline. The only difference was that instead of landing a few feet away in his yard and fracturing a wrist, all that force was making it hard to not roll towards a giant ambulatory rubbish heap bent on gelatinizing him.

The only good news was that he was mostly rolling sideways and thus hadn’t managed to impale himself on the Mystereamer yet. Digging it out of his belt, he tried to jam it into the dirt to stop his fall, only to find he was still falling too fast to even manage that very well. Reluctantly, he burned a charge of Hard Time to line up a stab downwards.

The knife pierced through the soil just fine, but Sean had underestimated just how fast he was moving, how much he weighed, and how ill-equipped his shoulder was to handle the combination of both. He almost screamed as his shoulder wrenched around at an awkward angle.

He stopped, sure. Once the knife made contact, it trimmed off most of his speed. But when he felt something in his shoulder rip and pain blossom, he hadn’t been able to keep a hold on his knife. Before he could come to grips with everything, a sudden shadow overcame over him. Instinctively, Sean set his legs on the ground and heaved hard, sliding on his back just far enough and fast enough to avoid getting mashed by the thing’s foot. The Goliath was apparently far more eager to get this fight over with than Sean had imagined.

As soon as he stopped, Sean sprang to his feet and sprinted back up the incline, hoping the garbage golem couldn’t climb very well. That part, at least, proved to be true. Compared to how it moved on flat land, the golem wasn’t nearly as quickly uphill. The bigger problem was that its attack range was much, much further than Sean would have liked. When they were both on flat land in Sean’s first escape, the Goliath didn’t use its arm much for striking. Now, Sean’s climbing of the crater seemed to put him at the Goliath’s preferred striking angle.

Every time he got anywhere near the edge, the arms of the Goliath would lash out, usually above him, destroying the ground he wanted to climb and showering dirt and rocks down on him. If they caught him dead-on, he’d very likely die. This was, for better or worse, a level 50 monster. The system might not have dedicated a lot of its stats to speed, but it was still plenty fast on top of being endlessly stronger, larger, and more durable than Sean was.

Sean ran helplessly around the inside of the bowl of the crater, staying just ahead of the golem’s ability to actually hit him. Any plans he had of getting further from the monster and escape the crater were pipe dreams. On top of that, the fact that the golem was chasing meant that it didn’t have to move nearly the distance Sean did to keep the status quo stable.

Sean tried to fake it out a few times, running slightly towards his foe before doubling back and leaping towards the top, only to find it wasn’t nearly as dumb as he had hoped. Not only was it smart enough to keep him from making it to the lip, it was learning. The hits were getting closer and closer to Sean, forcing him to be more careful and lowering his chance of getting out.

Eventually, this thing is going to get lucky. I can’t wait. Sean had to change things and fast. A bit of strength wouldn’t help him, and he didn’t need more SAV to hit something as large as the golem was. Even improvements to Hard Time wouldn’t help him much here. More than anything else, he just needed access to more pure, unadulterated speed. Sean gritted his teeth in frustration at what he was about to do, then dumped all eight points he had received from the High Proof achievement into DEX.

Making another attempt at trying to get out of the crater, Sean found that he still wasn’t fast enough to get past the Goliath’s arms. That wasn’t optimal, but it also wasn’t his plan anyway. He could already feel the difference in speed taking effect. He wasn’t stronger than the golem, and he wasn’t nearly as tough as it likely would be. But now he was a little tiny bit faster, if only by a hair.

Turning, Sean charged towards the middle of the crater and directly at the Goliath’s leg. Before he got near it, the monster raised one of its big legs up in the air, bringing it down hard on the approaching human. Sean was expecting that. Rather than leaping to the side, he pushed off the ground hard at the flattest angle he could manage, jumping upwards and trying to minimize the time he would lose from the maneuver.

The leg barely missed him, which was what he was looking for. Starting a second charge, Sean stabbed out with the Spectral Spike, jabbing it deep into the garbage. In relation to the size of the beast, it wasn’t much better than a mosquito sting. But Sean had a hunch about the armor-piercing qualities of the Spectral Sticker.

There was a lot of shit about the future apocalypse Earth that Sean’s brain more or less explained away as magic. How did the DEX make him faster? Some kind of magic. How did having high SAV seem to affect the weapons he made, and improve them? Weird magic. But the teeth he used in the spear and darts were a more explicit kind of magic. The description said that they could project damage past many kinds of armor.

Please let your entire body count as some kind of armor, Sean thought. I know it doesn’t make sense, but you don’t even make sense, you stupid giant trash bastard.

Something as big as the Trash Goliath had to have some kind of core somewhere, some kind of weak spot. It made good game sense, and the system simply couldn’t expect people to create wounds big enough to actually injure something this big and still call it a level fifty enemy. If the system ran on stories, it almost had to have included some sort of vent that Sean could shove metaphorical proton torpedoes down to get this thing taken care of.

And, if he was lucky, the spear would cheat its way around the way the thing was constructed and strike straight at that core. For a moment, it looked like Sean’s gamble failed. The leg was moving away from him almost as soon as he stabbed the sticker and soon, he’d lose his spear. But before he could jerk it out, the weapon hit something thin and metal. Whatever the tin-can like structure was, Sean touching it seemed to trigger something in the paper-rubbish.

Sean felt the spear vibrate a bit in his hand, and the titan’s leg jerked as it roared in rage, dislodged the spear, and kicked out at Sean. As much as his fastest dodge and a charge of Hard Time could move him, the outside edge of his arm was still caught, and he was sent spinning and flopping to the ground.

He now had one arm that was clearly shattered and one arm with some kind of ripped tendon that Stitch Up hadn’t quite managed to mend yet. Usually, that would be enough problems for one guy to handle. But a much bigger problem was looming above him, literally, in the form of the giant’s now descending leg. He tried to kick off the ground, but the loose dirt shifted under his foot and prevented him from getting as much power as he needed. The trash leg was coming down fast, and there was nothing he could do to stop it from crushing the lower half of his body.

Just before the leg made Sean-jam of his legs and pelvis, he saw two bright flashes pass above his head and thud into the trash. The giant roared again as the area roughly equivalent to its knee burst into flames. It paused its stomp, then brought its leg up to bat away at the fire spreading on its leg. Sean decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. He rolled over, sprung to his feet, and sprinted away.

Glancing over his shoulder, he got a better look at what those flashes of light had been. One of them was already broken by the giant’s swatting, but the other was still jutting out, intact enough to be identified. It was an arrow, and if he wasn’t very much mistaken, he was familiar with the maker. Scanning the rim of the crater, he saw Estesia firing arrow after conventional arrow towards the golem.

“Sean! Are you all right?” Estesia yelled.

“I’m fine!” Sean said, his broken arm burning with pain as he ran towards her. Stitch Up was working to heal it, and the extra levels it had gained were making it work faster than it ever had before. Still, there was only so fast it could pull several pieces of bone together. In the meantime, his running balance was shot.

“Don’t lead it back here, you idiot!” Estesia screamed. “Those fire arrows take a lot out of me! I can’t do anything to it now! It will crush me!”

“You can’t outrun it?” Sean shouted back. “You’re faster than me!”

“Have you even seen yourself lately? What the hell have you been doing?” Estesia fired off a few more arrows, then put her hand back to her quiver, found that only a few were left, and thought better of it. “Never mind, I don’t want to know. No, I’m not as fast as you think I am, and I’m running out of arrows. Lead it away, Sean. I’ll try to find help back at the market.”

Sean nodded and veered to the left. The Goliath was just now getting the flames out, and while it was slightly scorched, it didn’t seem to have taken that much actual damage. It started moving towards Sean and Estesia as Sean broke away to the side, desperately trying to get to the rim of the crater before the monster got into striking range again. Pain or no pain, he managed to launch himself faster and further up the side of the crater than he ever had before, his heart soared in triumph as his feet set down on the lip.

It’s funny, it doesn’t even sound that close.

Turning out of curiosity, Sean saw he was right that the Goliath wasn’t chasing him at all. Instead, it had stooped, picked up a dodge-ball sized rock, and was chucking it. That was new. Sean prepared to dodge, but the boulder instead went wide. Very wide, like it wasn’t aimed at him at all. By the time he realized what was happening and cried out a warning, it was well on its way to Estesia.

She turned, saw the rock, and tried to dodge. It was too late. She moved back just far enough to keep it from hitting her in center mass, but the rock impacted with her leg and flipped her fully end-over end. Sean was glad he couldn’t see the details of what had happened to her leg, but he couldn’t ignore the fact that she didn’t get up when the dust started to settle.