Chương 19: Boss Loot

To hell with this! Cole dropped his other stick and whipped up the muzzle of his rifle, putting it out and jamming it into the ogre's chest as the thing grabbed him and slammed them both against the tree. The stock drove into his front plate, driving the wind from his lungs. Cole felt bone grinding under the pressure of the creature's grip, felt the hot sting of claws piercing into him where they found gaps in his plates. He screamed with pain.

Both of the creature's mouths gaped opened, revealing rows of thorn-like teeth as it tried to bring Cole within biting distance, but the rifle was still a solid hunk of metal wedged between the two. The ogre's two tiny chest hands wound around it, and Cole switched it all the way to full auto and squeezed the trigger. The creature roared as the heavy rounds sliced through it, spraying wood chips and spores behind it and forcing the monster back.

Without enhanced resilience, Cole might have already passed out from the pressure and pain. If Cole had encountered one of these before the garden-variety bark-men elites, he was sure he'd already be dead. The ogre's secondary arms managed to push the barrel up and away, but it had broken the fungal ogre's grip on him enough that Cole was able to slip underneath the reaching arms. Another sixteenth of a second and Cole would have been flattened between them.

Instead, the Ogre slammed into the tree in his place, rending deep claw marks in its bark. Well, let's see how he liked being pinned against a trunk. Not knowing if it would work or leave him prone on the ground at the ogre's mercy, Cole jumped. He burned a charge of his primary ability midair and planted both feet in the back of the fungal ogre. He rocketed away, but Newton's Third Law still seemed to affect whatever he launched off of.

The ogre's ribs stoved in against the tree, which didn't offer any more give to the ogre than it had for Cole's hasty retreat. Orange discharge sprayed through splits in the barky flesh of the creature. Cole hadn't necessarily aimed his jump, so he wasn't surprised when it carried him past a very startled and orange-stained Besson and slammed him into the ground away from any of the zombies, wasting the landing impact on dead foliage and a cloud of moss and loose debris.

Nutmeg bounced around him in a frenzy, barking with excitement, as if they were playing some new game. Cole picked himself up and pushed away the boxer's muzzle.

"So much for staying quiet," said Besson, finishing off the last of the shamblers.

"Grab the loot and let's get gone before anyone comes looking." Cole nodded, gasping for breath. He stashed his empty magazine and swapped in a new one. Only two left. He jogged back to where the fungal ogre had fallen and kicked over the corpse. Half a dozen items were strewn on the ground underneath it. Cole quickly swung his bag down and started stuffing in anything that would fit, not bothering to analyze it. The last thing he picked up was a short-spear with a dark-brown blade.

Having had his club cracked in half, that would have to do as a substitute. Besson had already packed up anything that had dropped from the group of fungal zombies, including anything that might have come from the ones Cole killed. Not about to start a fight over it, Cole contented himself with jogging alongside the recalcitrant man until they'd put a few miles between themselves and the small valley where they'd fought the large group. They stopped for a break near a small stream.

Cole topped off his hydration pack and dropped two of the water purification tablets into it. Just for good measure, he took another of the anti-fungals, as well. Besson came and sat nearby, munching on a protein bar. He squirted some water in a shallow bowl for Nutmeg, then opened his pack and started dumping out the loot from the zombies. Cole did the same, adding his short spear to the pile.

"All that from that one woody?" Cole shrugged and pulled out his LF analyzer.

"He was a lot tougher than any of the other ones I fought. Some sorta' elite, I think. Almost had me when I backed into that tree."

"Until you drop-kicked him like this was Hell in a Cell," said Besson.

"What was that, anyway?"

"My primary ability is a super-jump. Apparently, that means it's also a super- kick. I don't think that's how it was supposed to work, but I figured even if it didn't, it would at least create some space to finish it off." Besson rubbed his hands over Nutmeg's head and muzzle as he looked at the loot pile. Frowning, he reached down and pulled out a piece of metal.

"What's this?" Cole took it, already unlatching his pouch to get his LF analyzer.

"I think it's a slide for my service pistol."

"That's impossible. LF monsters don't drop gun parts. They drop guns, like this," said Besson, hefting his machine gun.

"They can drop armor, melee weapons, and sometimes ammunition. But the guns aren't assembled from parts, not really. You can't even take them apart to clean them." If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

"This is a strange place to tell someone things are impossible," said Cole, raising an eyebrow at the almost twice-size Nutmeg. He tapped his analyzer against the slide.

"My secondary class is all about otherworld gun-smithing." < LF Item detected. Analyzing. Lesser pistol slide of vines — installing this slide on a compatible pistol will give each round fired a 2%-3% chance of wrapping the target with slowing vines. > Cole tapped his own hand and passed over his analyzer for Besson to look at.

"I'll be damned. Arquebus Engineer. I've never heard of that," said Besson. He handed the analyzer back. Cole took out his pistol and unloaded it before pulling the original slide off the receiver. The new drop wasn't a perfect fit, but with the active ability from his second class, he concentrated, and the form-factor shifted subtly in his hand. He aligned the slide and reassembled the pistol, working the action several times while Besson watched.

"What else can you do?" asked Besson.

"This feels like a one-way street," said Cole. Besson sighed.

"Yeah, yeah. I get it. My primary class is Vanguard Houndmaster. It shifts one quarter of my stat enhancements to Nutmeg, here. The active lets me harden both our skins for a few seconds, and it lasts longer if I'm attacking something."

"Wow," said Cole. He looked at Nutmeg.

"A quarter of your enhancements? How long til she can understand English?" Besson shrugged and dug through the loot pile.

"She already gets more than she did when we got here. I've been experimenting with some more complex commands—and she was always clever, but now she's taking initiative from context even better." He held up what looked like a fungal bolt-action carbine and tapped his own analyzer, then wrinkled his nose.

"More mushroom affix loot. Can you do anything with this?" Cole held out his hand.

"Maybe. I'm slowly turning Jefferson's AR-10 into a mushroom machine, piece by piece." Besson eyed the rifle.

"I thought that looked familiar. He's going to love that." With the otherworld carbine in his hand, Cole concentrated on his Arquebus Engineer ability, Field Strip. The weapon vibrated in his hand, then began to melt down, leaving only a barrel and a bolt behind. He tapped his analyzer on the barrel. < Carbine barrel of lesser fungal growth — 3%-5% chance of causing rapid fungal growth, slowing enemies hit. Increase damage by 2%. Reduce accuracy by 2%>"Definitely a loot theme here," said Cole.

"That's on purpose. A lot of Curahee loot helps slow enemies down, which leads to fewer new Kickers being killed on their first real assignment." Besson seemed to know a lot more about the otherworld incursions than the other Kickers. Especially Curahee, of which none of the hopefuls were supposed to have advanced knowledge. Granted, you took intel wherever you could get it. But it certainly made Cole a little suspicious.

"We already lost Bart to those otherworld fuckers," said Cole.

"This feels pretty real to me. Can I see your gun? I want to see how my active ability works with an otherworld armament." Besson cleared and unstrapped his weapon, hesitantly handing it over. He watched Cole like a hawk as he held both part and gun. While the carbine barrel wasn't suitable for a precision weapon like his AR-10, a little less accuracy didn't especially matter for an open-bolt machine gun. Just like with Meteoric Leap, using the active ability was like muscle memory already present in his body.

Maybe it was, and it just needed a Lewis Field to wake it up. Either way, he concentrated, and the barrel melted through the metal and wood furniture. It got slightly heavier and shortened by about two inches. Cole handed it back for Besson to check. He must have liked what he saw when he tapped the Analyzer against it, because he didn't complain. Cole continued to dig through the loot, finding another twenty rounds for his AR-10, as well as a belt of a caliber he didn't recognize, which he passed over to Besson.

He picked up the spear from the fungal ogre, next.

"This doesn't have the fungal affix colors," he mentioned, tapping his analyzer on it. < Bark-bladed spear of minor petrification — wounds made by this spear of petrified wood have a low chance to cause the damaged area to petrify into a bark-like state. Note: Valkyrie affix classes have affinity with hafted weapons. > Cole noticed this weapon said minor, whereas all the other loot he'd seen said lesser. He tapped on the term, which brought him to a documentation page of item classifications.

Apparently, the analyzer applied affixes in a formulaic way based on the percentage chances for the items to activate and the severity of the effect. It ran the gamut from lesser at the bottom end, through minor, average, above average, and on and on. Weird way to standardize, but whatever. It stood to reason, to Cole, that harsher worlds would have greater rewards. I wonder what affix those bullets from the heart-eater had.

The spear was definitely better than his busted Kali sticks, though Cole wasn't sure how he was going to secure it to his pack without it catching on every tree and bush. As he thought about it, the haft of the spear shrank down to a third its original length with a high-pitched ringing sound that caused Nutmeg to bark and eye the weapon suspiciously. Was that his class' affinity with hafted weapons at work?

Nutmeg sniffed at the spear for a minute, but she was distracted by the sound of Velcro as Besson took out the ceramic insert from his plate carrier and swapped in a new one from one of the zombies. He looked at the old one and then tossed the expensive military-issue plate into the mud by the stream bed. He looked over and caught Cole's expression and shrugged.

"This isn't the Army. DOR expects us to discard issued gear when we find better. What are you going to do if you find a full breastplate? Lug your plates around for another two days? We're covered." He looked at the Frankensteined AR-10 on Cole's sling.

"I probably wouldn't ditch that, though."