Chapter 26: Trash Compactor (How to Survive at the End of the World)

Tyr: This be a new series, as stated in the previous announcement. Don't confuse it with Deadworld!
Chapters 1-25 are available on RoyalRoad.

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Some enemies can be cheesed. That Wicked Witch the system generated might very well not like you dousing it with a pail of water. And, yes, it might melt. But as much as it might make sense to hunt those weak spots, you should exercise at least a little bit of caution.

Think of it this way: by the time you get pretty good at using your weapon, you will have all sorts of different tricks and techniques that you’ve either developed or have been granted that make you pretty good at it. You don’t want to find out the hard way that none of those fancy battleaxe skills help when you’re trying to throw a pail of water, and you find yourself impaled on a magical broomstick or flying-monkey paw.

The Guide, Stats and Strats, page 11

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Garbage Man (Level 9)

Condition: This garbage man is on fire. He doesn’t like it.

After taking his life into his own hands several more times while fighting the garbage men, Sean found religion. Not in the literal sense of the word, but rather the cackling madly sense.

The creepy sons of the trash heap didn’t all carry sharp stuff, which meant he was constantly having to deal with different speeds of attack, different ranges, and even slightly different tactics. The only upshot had been system experience, of which they gave plenty, and a deeper understanding of how enemies worked.

The deal with the garbage men, as far as Sean could tell, is that they essentially ignored the effects of damage inflicted on them. You could chop them a thousand times, and so long as they had time to regen the damage, they wouldn’t care. The flip side of that was if you did enough damage all at once, they’d fall apart, no matter how soft the last blow was.

His thoughts eventually led him to the conclusion that they’d be a lot easier to kill with damage-over-time effects. That would not only counteract whatever regen the enemy had, but would also theoretically stack with the regen-busting effects of his weapon. He didn’t have any of those, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t build any.

Flaming Trash-Kebob Mystereamer (Temporary Weapon State)

You have skewered a bunch of trash on your knife then set it on fire, as all emotionally healthy people do at some point or another. The good news is that your knife now deals a small, almost insignificant amount of fire damage.

The kinda bad news, besides the part where you smell like burning garbage, is that the flames are about as likely to burn you as they are to burn your enemy. And the pretty bad news is that trash burns pretty quickly.

I don’t want to say you made a bad weapon, but I think you might already know, anyway.

Once the trash burned off, the Mystereamer returned to its stock description, and Sean got back to work. Wrapping the garbage tighter helped a tiny bit, but not much. It wasn’t until he decided to sacrifice a tiny bit of glue to the project that he learned something very important.

Plug Mud, for all its virtues, had a quality Sean didn’t expect. It burned hotter and brighter than a road flare. Not for very long given the intensity, but for the several seconds he needed to inject fire deep into the bowels of a truly creepy trash-dude, it was fine. Better yet, the insides of the garbage men were textured enough to scrape the Plug Mud from the knife itself. The mud would stick to their insides and burn them out like mail-order napalm.

As the garbage man burned, Sean went to work cutting him up. The fire kept the initial wound open for more oxygen, and even kept the overall regen of the enemy occupied. He could take his time with a series of stabs from both his spikes and his primary weapon without it sealing itself back up like a tubeless tire monstrosity.

Setting the garbage men on fire internally didn’t remove all the danger from the fights, but it sped up his hunt time quite a bit. And the effects of that were showing.

Sean Lawrence
Level 7 Human (Prisoner of Time)
EXP 45/640

STR 6
DEX 23
VIT 7 (8)
SAV 20 (21)
MAG 5 (7)

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Abilities: Shankmaster LV1, Adhesives Mastery LV1, Stitch Up LV2, Hard Time LV1
Achievements: E-Raticator

Stitch Up had leveled, which Sean was glad about, even though it was evidence of him taking several unnecessary hits. Shankmaster hadn’t, which probably either came down to taking more time to level, or taking something else he didn’t quite understand yet to level. But his future fights would likely take a bit more time, for one simple, annoying reasons.

Hard Counter Discovered!

You’ve discovered a hard counter for a particular foe (Garbage Man). When considered in conjunction with your skills, stats, and overall equipment, this particular tactic is powerful enough that the Apocalypse System has deemed that you won’t learn much more from this enemy type while using it.

With that said, the system does not like to punish creativity. You have a choice. Killing a single enemy (Garbage Man) while utilizing the hard counter will result in the institution of an immediate experience debuff on future combat. Or you could switch to almost any other tactic and keep those sweet, sweet experience points rolling. Your call.

Between that and the waning sunlight, Sean decided he had gotten enough out of this day. With no reason to stop at the market, he hightailed it directly towards home.

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Sitting in the bunker, Sean thought over his choices. He’d really, really like to get another level or two out of the garbage men. As creepy as they were, they had only managed to nearly kill him, which was a whole lot better than actually dying, all things considered. But it still wasn’t great. If he was going to keep grinding them while at a level disadvantage, he needed to find something that gave him a bit of an edge.

The problem was that he really didn’t have a lot of options. The steel table was welded together, and even if he could break it apart, he wasn’t sure if any of the individual components would help him that much. The store room had a lot of things in it, but none of them could help him much more than a sturdy stick would.

Absentmindedly, he opened his pack and got out his bedroll and tent, unwrapping the latter to lay out as a fabric base for the former. As he did, he managed to scatter a handful of the garbage-man pellets on the floor. He had felt stupid carting them around all day, but for some reason he had a hard time just leaving them around. For one, he didn’t really want to leave the garbage men with some sort of building block of life and make their repopulation efforts that much easier.

But really, it was just that they were his. He had earned them, even if they were heavy as hell to the point where the combined weight of several pellets had made a noticeable difference in his comfort level. He picked one up in his gloved hand, tossed it up, and winced as it landed narrow-side-down on the bone that made up the underside of his palm. Every single one of these suckers was heavy.

Which gave him an idea.

Sean still had his cast-off clothes from before he got his armor. He had tried to wash them, with no great luck, and had just left them on the floor of the storage room after that. Running and getting them now, he took the pair of pants and carefully cut off both legs with the strawberry dagger. Now he took one of the long tubes of fabric and worked it inside the other, leaving him with one big, double-thick pant leg.

It took him a couple tries to get it right, but he managed to get the leg knotted about a third of the way to one end, leaving a long, cup-like cavity near the top. From the inside, he carefully pushed three of his lizard spikes part way through the fabric, then repeated the process on the other side of the leg.

He then opened up his tub of Plug Mud. It really was neat stuff, and what he had in mind would use up most of the rest of what he had. He hoped it was worth it. Scooping out a generous amount, he placed it in the pant leg and dropped in the heavy-ass garbage pellets, letting them sink into the glue before putting the remainder of his Plug Mud in on top of them. He then knotted the leg again, trying to get the second knot fairly tight on top of the glue.

He was left with a pant leg balloon, with six spikes popping out of the sides. He pushed the spikes in a little bit, making sure they were well sunk into the glue, then waited. Among Plug Mud’s many good points was that it didn’t take a long time to set.

After a half hour or so, it was done. He picked the jerry-rigged weapon up by its long denim handle, shocked by how heavy it now was. By virtually any standard, the thing was an abomination towards the heavens. It was ugly, slapped together with the very redneckiest of tools, without the slightest hint of grace, sophistication, or refinement.

It was a hillbilly stegosaurus tail, and he loved every inch of it. He triggered the system’s information screen on the horror he had created, absolutely sure that it was a success.

Trash Compactor

“Heavy weapons can’t be shanks,” scream the uninitiated. “They don’t even stab! It’s a verb, you uneducated rubes!”. Well, listen, guys. If a shank user were educated, he wouldn’t need shanks in the first place. That’s sort of the whole point.

Being a shank user is all about doubling down on bad ideas, and the Trash Compactor pushes even that philosophy to the limits. You want spikes? We have spikes. You want glue? Honey, there’s so much glue. You want literal garbage? Good. It’s the only thing that guys who use these types of weapons own.

Any stat buffs this weapon would otherwise have were cannibalized by the system just to hold together the sheer stupid insanity of it. It’s not easy to break. Yeah, it doesn’t give you plus 1 to whatever stat, but I think you will find it doesn’t need to.

Sean gave the weapon a few experimental swings. The weight balance was awkward as hell, and he was about as likely to hit himself with it as he was anything he was aiming at. He loved it. He fell asleep with his arm around its handle like a kid with a new teddy bear.

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“Did you know September is refuse worker appreciation month? Remember your boys in coverall with a gift, a card, or even a friendly hello. They work hard to keep our world clean!”

Sean smiled as the level ten garbage man moved in on him. It could spout all the uncanny valley bullshit it wanted to. Sean’s fears of the garbage men were gone, replaced by an ungodly heavy weight he spun above his head like a demented sling.

The garbage man sprung at him with a table leg held high like a club. Sean smiled, swished the Trash Compactor one more time, and then dropped its fully illiterate vengeance out of the sky and into the side of the monster’s face.

Its head ripped clean off. Sean smiled. It was going to be a fun sort of day.