Chương 19: Victory Part 2

I let out a long, shaky breath that felt like it carried about five pounds of pure, unadulterated stress out of my lungs. My chest was still heaving, and my ears were ringing with the ghost of the gunshot that had just ended the Great Crab Cow Uprising of Oakhaven. Dimitri stood nearby, looking remarkably fresh for a man who had just spent ten minutes playing punching bag for a herd of armored tanks.

He lowered his rotting barrel lid and beamed at me, his face glowing with a pride so intense it was practically a light source.

"Incredible, my brother Arthur!" he boomed, his Russian accent sounding like a warm hug for my ringing ears.

"You handle that iron with the grace of a dancing swan and the sting of a thousand hornets. You are a natural born champion of the long distance strike!" I leaned against my knees, trying to convince my heart to stop mimicking a drum solo.

"Yeah, sure, I'm a regular prodigy," I wheezed, glancing up at him.

"Says the guy who spent the entire fight acting like a literal brick wall. You're the obvious MVP here, Big Sunshine. I was just the guy in the back poking them with blue light while you took all the hits." I looked over at the first two Bovine Crustaceans that Dimitri had body slammed earlier. They were still there, lying on their backs like very confused, very angry kitchen appliances. Their six chitinous legs were twitching in a pathetic, rhythmic clatter, but they weren't dead.

Because of their ridiculously thick stony carapaces, Dimitri's physical bashes had basically just knocked the wind out of them and sent them into a temporary existential crisis. They weren't actually damaged, just grounded. And from the way their eye stalks were starting to refocus, it was clear they were planning on recovering their dignity and their verticality very, very soon. I didn't really have a grand strategic reason for what I did next.

Maybe it was just a lingering bit of that adrenaline, or maybe I just didn't want to deal with a round two. I walked over to the floundering beasts, adjusted the weighted grip of my Training Prototype 7, and took aim at the soft, fleshy underbellies that were currently exposed to the sky.

"No second chances for the dairy crabs," I muttered. I pulled the trigger, sending a couple of basic mana shots into their unprotected bellies. The sapphire bolts hissed through the air, and the two monsters finally went still, their legs collapsing into a final, silent heap. I stood there in the quiet of the meadow for a few seconds, the smell of ozone and wild clover swirling around us. The adrenaline was slowly receding, leaving behind a weird sense of accomplishment that I definitely wasn't used to feeling.

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"You know what?" I said, wiping a bit of sweat from my forehead and tucking my gun back into its digital holster.

"For a first dance with the reaper, that actually wasn't half bad. I might even say it was moderately cool." I felt a weight drop onto my shoulder that was roughly equivalent to a falling tectonic plate. It was just Dimitri's hand, of course, but the man didn't know his own strength or he just assumed my skeletal structure was made of reinforced titanium. He beamed at me, his smile so blindingly bright and wholesome that I was pretty sure it could be seen from low earth orbit.

"I am knowing this feeling well, my brother Arthur!" Dimitri boomed, his voice vibrating through my ribcage like a sub-woofer at a rave.

"To see the spark of triumph in your eyes is to see the first ray of sun over the Siberian tundra! You have fought with the heart of a lion and the precision of a master clockmaker!"

"Yeah, Big Sunshine," I wheezed, trying to keep my collarbone from snapping under the pressure of his pure, unadulterated friendship.

"Nothing says triumph like nearly being turned into a human panini by a herd of angry surf and turf monsters." As the last of the Bovine Crustaceans' souls or whatever passed for their programming flickered out, something weird started happening. The air above the heaps of stone and steak began to shimmer, looking like a glitch in a high-def video game.

Sixteen tiny, glowing orbs of light drifted upward from the corpses, bobbing in the breeze like radioactive fireflies that had spent too much time near a reactor core. The loot split was perfectly democratic. Eight of those sparkly little buggers zipped toward Dimitri, hovering around his massive frame like a magical belt of disco lights. The other eight swarmed me.

I didn't even have time to duck before they were circling my shoulders, orbiting me with a soft, humming energy that made my teeth ache in a way that screamed rare drops. As I stood there with eight glowing balls of light literally doing laps around my ears, a familiar, eerily calm voice rang out inside my skull. [Loot distribution calculated. Pending user confirmation for acquisition.] I squinted at the orbs.

They were pulsing in sync with the blue text, like they were waiting for me to click a 'Download' button in my brain. [Processing information for display.] A translucent blue window flickered into existence right in front of my nose, hovering just behind the swirling neon bees that were my potential rewards. I was about to find out if this was top-tier drop or just a very shiny pile of garbage.

••••• Name: Chitinous Rib-Plate Tier: 1 Drop From: Bovine Crustacean (Common) Selling Price: 1 Gold Description: A curved, stony shard harvested from the underside of a Bovine Crustacean. It retains the coarse texture of a cow's hide on one side and a rigid, calcified reinforcement on the other. While too brittle for high-grade blacksmithing, local scouts often strap these plates to their shins or forearms as makeshift protection against low-level predators.

Its faint scent of damp earth and musk never quite fades, no matter how much it is scrubbed. ••••• The translucent display finally flickered into high definition, and the glowing orbs around me began to lose their neon fuzziness. They solidified into physical objects that looked like a very strange cross between a geological sample and a butcher's shop accident.

Floating right in front of my face were eight curved shards of stony bone, each one covered in a coarse, hairy texture that screamed "I used to be part of a cow." I stared at the things, wondering if I was supposed to carry them back to town in a giant shopping bag. I tentatively reached out a finger to poke one of the floating rib-plates, but the second my skin made contact, the laws of physics decided to take a coffee break.

The shard exploded into a cloud of sapphire particles that smelled faintly of wet dirt and musk before zipping straight into my chest like I was some kind of human vacuum cleaner. [The items Chitinous Rib-Plates have been successfully added to your inventory. The inventory interface may be summoned at will through thought-based commands.]"Well," I muttered, "that is certainly one way to handle the luggage situation. No heavy lifting, just a light case of being possessed by cow-flavored stardust."