Chapter 28: Capon The Swole

The trees showed no signs of thinning. Sean should have arrived at the edge of the forest after an hour of running, but nothing changed. Something system-ish was happening, for sure, but he had no way of knowing exactly what.

Do I just… keep walking? It doesn’t seem like the trash goliath followed me in, and I should be able to lose it again if it finds me. Eventually, there has to be an end, right?

But after a few hours, Sean still hadn’t found anything resembling an exit. Whether the system had managed to create an infinite space or was simply bending Sean’s path into circles, he didn’t seem to be getting any closer to the exit. And even worse, the light from the sun was starting to dim. If he didn’t get out soon, and it looked like he wouldn’t, he’d be camping in this cursed forest.

An hour or so later, as the darkness closed in, he hadn’t found the exit to the forest. But he had found something perhaps more important.

Glutton Rabbit (Level 9)

The great cycle of nature is maintained only when all its parts work together in beautiful harmony. Nobody believes that fact more than the glutton rabbit. The glorious confluence of flower, sun, paw, and ground are stamped upon its very soul. The cooperative workings of the these various elements bring the rabbit into existence. It’s a miracle.

The glutton rabbit doesn’t care. This sucker will eat ANYTHING, whether it’s hungry or not. It’s sort of a jerk like that.

It was the biggest, fattest rabbit that Sean had ever seen. It didn’t even look like it could walk and despite that, it was munching on a log, which was weird but not quite weird enough to break Sean’s ever-strengthening ability to ignore system stuff that wasn’t directly threatening his life. Without as much as a single thought, Sean crouched and pulled the Mystereamer from his belt. If he was going to spend the night in the woods, he might as well do it eating several thousand calories of rabbit meat.

Holding his breath, Sean placed his steps carefully, trying to aim for only the softest, most sound-absorbing parts of the forest floor. The rabbit didn’t seem to notice or care, not that he expected it to. For a prey animal, it seemed oddly comfortable making a lot of noise, and Sean doubted it could hear anything above the loud wood-snapping sounds it was producing as it went to town on the log.

Sean slowly closed to attacking range, finally getting within several feet of his target. He slowly lowered his weight into a fighting stance, ready to spring.

I’ll jump at it from here. There’s no way it can get out of the way in time.

As Sean crouched, his weight shifted forward for his attack. But before he could actually jump, the increased pressure under his front foot suddenly gave way as a small branch that had been hidden under the leaves and needles that coated the forest floor broke with a loud snap. The rabbit’s ears twitched and its body tensed, but in the next moment, it went back to eating. Whatever sense of self-preservation it had, that apparently paled in comparison to how much it wanted to eat that log.

Sean slacked his muscles, then sprung as hard and as straight as he could toward the rabbit, his weapon held high. Halfway there, something intercepted his attack. His momentum was stopped, he felt a great pressure on his chest, and then, he found himself turning end-over-end in the air. Like magic, his Savvy stat kicked in, and he reflexively tucked into the backward motion, managing to land on his feet with his weapon pointed in front of him. It was a good thing he did, as the enemy in front of him appeared to abort whatever follow-up attack it had planned when it saw he didn’t land flat on his face.

Capon The Swole (Level 13 Named Rare Jacked-Rabbit)

The rabbits in this forest have but one dream and hope, and that is to eat until they are too fat to walk, let alone to defend themselves. Most of them are pretty close to achieving that dream. The reason they can even attempt this without getting immediately converted into excess energy for apex predators is simple. Capon watches over them like a vengeful spirit and kills anything that threatens them.

He’s fast, he’s strong, and the only reason you aren’t dead yet is that he doesn’t weigh that much. Pro-tip: Running isn’t going to do you much good here.

As Sean tried to get back into a fighting stance, Capon suddenly launched itself again, not at him, but at a nearby tree. Twisting in the air, he impacted against the tree with a loud thunk, flew out of Sean’s field of vision completely, then bashed into his back like a battering ram. For the second time in the fight, Sean found himself midair and without the slightest clue which way was up. He barely got his arm up in time to protect his face as he slammed into the log that the other rabbit had been eating.

His armor saved him from scraping his arm and torso skin, but not from the impact. Sean mustered energy to slip over the log and bought a split second of time as he heard repeated thwaps as the rabbit careened wildly from tree to tree.

His knife was only mildly helpful in this situation. The rabbit was fast enough that it could pick angles that he couldn’t see, hit him where it hurt, and be gone before he could react. He needed something like a shield that could protect at least one side of him, so he could guard the other side with his knife. Unfortunately, he didn’t have anything like that.

Then, with a bit of creative thinking, he realized that he could make something that worked like a shield to some extent. Before he could start his plan, the rabbit crashed like a bulldozer into the log Sean was using for cover. Already compromised by the tremendous eating skill of the fat rabbit, the log exploded into splinters as the rabbit cannonball flew a foot or so from Sean’s head. He caught just a glimpse of horrifying, fur-covered muscles before it sprang away again.

Sean only had a second to get his new plan into action. He ripped the Trash Compactor from his belt and started the process of getting its substantial weight into motion. The next time he heard a thwunk from a tree, he used Hard Time on himself to amplify his dodge. It was a false alarm, and whatever effect the skill had fizzed before it could do any good.

After the next thwunk, which came only a split second later, he used Hard Time again as he dodged once more, barely getting out of the way of the murderous little ball of fur. That was enough to get his mass weapon moving, and it rotated over one full side of him, or nearly so. As he swung it, he fought against the gyroscopic stability of the thing to move it up and down slightly, keeping the rabbit guessing.

From that moment, it was a different fight. The rabbit wasn’t dumb enough to charge straight into death, but Sean was spikes and heavy weights from almost any angle it might have wanted to attack from. He could hear it careening from tree to tree, but he was just as powerless to catch up to it as the rabbit was to launch any substantial attacks. It was a stalemate.

For a short time, it looked like it might come down to a battle of endurance, with Sean’s ability to swing a heavy weight pitted against the rabbit’s ability to jump off trees indefinitely. He didn’t like those odds. But that all changed when he noticed a thick, quarter-inch-deep furrow in the ground leading away from the log, and followed the indent with its eyes until it led him to the solution for his problem.

Capon, according to the system’s description, was a hero type, a protector of its own kind’s opulent lifestyle. At the end of Sean’s sight was the glutton rabbit, dragging its huge bulk away from the fight. When he moved towards the heavy rabbit, he heard a rabbit’s scream from the trees as Capon hurtled himself towards danger, caught the trash compactor in the chest, and was hurtled away.

Things were quiet for a moment, but Sean knew better than to trust in the stupidity of something that the system called a named rare. He moved slowly but steadily towards the glutton rabbit. He caught no indication that Capon was still alive until he was within striking distance of Capon’s bulky cousin. With no other options, Capon launched itself again, focusing on the Trash Compactor side. This time, it got caught not by the heavy weight, but the pants leg itself. Sean let go of the weapon and the weight kept its momentum as it wrapped Capon up like a bolo.

Sean had no illusions that the pants would hold the rabbit for very long, and by the time he had rushed over, the rabbit had almost wriggled out. Sean dove with his knife, casting Hard Time on the ball of fur and pants as he did. He barely made it. As Capon struggled free and tensed its legs for a leap, the tip of the Mystereamer hit it in the spine and staked it to the forest floor.

He had been banking on the idea that Capon’s build was almost completely built around DEX and STR, with hopefully little or nothing invested in VIT. That proved true. Even without the stab, he could see that the one good thwack it previously received had more or less caved in one of its sides, despite its crazy musculature. As the rabbit breathed its last breath, a notification popped up in front of Sean.

You’ve killed a named apocalypse beast!

Named apocalypse beasts sport higher levels, bonus stats, and more effective modes of attack than their common brethren. Taking one down is a challenge, and you’ve just accomplished that feat for the very first time. Statistically, you should have died. But you didn’t! Hooray!

Named enemies are guaranteed to drop a unique piece of gear and reward a substantial bonus to experience (multiplicative with other bonuses to experience). In addition, named enemies often occur in conjunction with a thematically appropriate territory which might hold other now-unguarded secrets.

Achievement Unlocked: Uncommon De-nominator

You have killed a rare, named enemy with a level significantly higher than your own. From this point forward, named apocalypse beasts will have slightly richer system descriptions in addition to dropping slightly better loot.

Sean spent a moment feeling like he was reeling from the announcement, before realizing that he was actually in very bad shape. His adrenaline had kept him from feeling a number of injuries that Capon had inflicted on him, with broken ribs being the prime prize.

A piece of loot dropped to the ground, but that could wait a second. Sean had just killed an enemy at a five-level disparity plus another multiplier of some kind. If the more-intense-than-usual gnawing feeling at the back of his brain was any indicator, he had something even better than loot to deal with.

Sean Lawrence
Level 10 Human (Prisoner of Time)
EXP: 122/3000

Assignable stat points:10

STR: 6
DEX: 23
VIT: 7 (8)
SAV: 25 (26)
MAG: 5 (7)

—

Abilities: Shankmaster LV2, Adhesives Mastery LV2, Stitch Up LV2, Hard Time LV2
Achievements: E-Raticator, Uncommon De-nominator

Sean realized that, based on the level and stats alone, he wasn’t supposed to be able to solo that enemy. And really, the only reason he had been able to stop it from slamming into him was that he had a truly unique kit that allowed him to counter the one very, very effective thing the apocalypse beast could do. Without that, he would have taken one or two more hits within seconds, and that would have been all it took to slap the fight out of him.

With that said, he just gained an absolutely massive amount of experience, incredibly far beyond what any enemy had given him before. It might have been unplanned, but it was exactly the kind of risk Sean had been looking to take.