The Discarded, Half-Eaten Apple Core New Life

By the time Jabberwock decided it should resume its slow-paced chase, I already had two hundred laser cannons aimed at it. The bastard stopped, stared, and chuckled.

I fired my laz0rs. They started to cook the monster alive. Then a huge magical circle appeared on top of the World boss and everything around Jabberwock went dark.

It reminded me of that joke Warlock I made once in D&D. He had the Darkness spell and a power that allowed him to see in magical darkness. Bam, eternal advantage in all attacks. The DM said he was okay with that so long I didn't take any levels of rogue. As if I would. Pure warlock to level 20, my build was entirely ready and copied out of a YouTube theory craft video. The next thing, the party never again found a single monster that didn't have blindsight, tremor sense, or any other shit that let them ignore my combo.

I didn't remember a lot of things from my human life but the stupid shit? As crystal clear as the Kaiju flesh littering the countryside.

Anyway, my lasers were doing fuck all to Jabberwock. they struck the darkness magic and vanished. Not even a glare, lens flare, neither a glowing dot. Why hadn't the stupid fuck done that before? I had no idea. Perhaps it was getting serious now that I forced his pet to go thermonuclear (not really nuclear) or it was a Vancian mage and needed to prepare its spells. Go figure.

The blob of darkness kept moving. I was out of ideas. Fuck. What could I do? Without visual confirmation, I had no idea if my attacks were doing anything but waste DM. One stupid idea came to mind. One really, really stupid. But it was the only thing I could think of.

To the drawing board!

*

*

Even with my ridiculous intellect, System-assistance, and the ability to spend tens of thousands of DM points per minute, this stupid shit took two whole days. I had to design it to be sturdy, strong, and the design didn't scale very well.

But I had done it.

Two hundred feet tall. Red. Dinosaur-themed. With a samurai kabuto. Blocky. It was everything a giant Mecha should be. Damn, I should start an action figure business. It had a braid of vines running up and down its body, with redundant branches. A hundred 486 machines collected data and made minor adjustments to the calibration of the servos and actuators. I was getting real-time feed of its systems. All green!

Now all I needed to do was to name my creation. "I name you Ragnarök!" No way the aliens would mess up this one.

> For creating level 170 (Mythic) Giant Robotic Mecha "Ranger Ork", you gained 6,517 Experience points.

Seriously? I had to vent it out on someone. Marshall. There goes the pear grapeshot! The damn Lord opened the palace door and snatched the pear out of the air with his teeth.

"Why did you put a red demon with an angry face... Oh, I got it. A scholar once said people before the Apocalypse liked to use iconographic communication."

, I replied like a gentleman.

The guards and servants stared at the wall. Some maids blushed and looked away.

"Hey, I've never seen a Mythic contraption. Show me."

I opened the hatch on Blackjack Six and floated out. Then I shouted (no mouth) my Perk like any good nerd would.

"GET IN THE FUCKING ROBOT, SHINJI!"

I entered through the access hatch in the lower back of the robot (totally an asshole), then climbed up a shaft with blinking lights and exposed metal beans that were there for no specific reason other than to look cool, then reached the cockpit in the robot's chest. I floated up to a pedestal with a hemisphere cup lined up with the finest velvet. The mirror image of the pedestal extended from above and closed shut around me. A massive sword sank into a dais in front of me and the whole room shone with a thousand colored LED highlighting the room's features.

And this was broadcast to large LED screens on the walls of the training grounds building. The camera cut to an external view of the hangar. Then I gave the command.

"発進 (hasshin - take off)! Go Ranger Ork!"

Two panels opened on the surface. I put a shot from the observation tower. Then explosives went off and the Ranger Ork's docking rig shot up to the surface on rails.

The people cheered. I lived for this moment. From the roof of his palace, Marshall saluted the robot.

> Your knowledge and experience improved your Mecha Pilot Skill to rank IV. — Mechas you pilot enjoy a 5% per rank higher structural health.

Bring it on, motherfucker!

*

*

Ranger Ork ran over the flattened landscape littered with crystal shards. Its reinforced steel feet crushed the ground as it shoved the crystals down into the earth (what, were you expecting the crystals to crumble. Pfft, poor fool. The ground was softer). I ran toward Jabberwock, faster than a robot two hundred feet tall had any right to be.

People on the walls screamed and shouted. I felt on cloud nine. The sheer power of the servos mounted on the hands of this Mecha made my Core tingle. I might have had a nerdgasm. Or a dozen. Ranger Ork sped and put miles between it and the city walls. I remembered I needed to do a test.

ports opened around Ranger Ork back, elbows, and legs. Hundreds of pounds of jet fuel burned and shot tongues of fire down into the air. Ranger Ork soared up and my Perk caught it, granting the twenty-story-tall chunk of metal ten seconds of flight. I had full maneuverability during this time and stayed afloat thirty feet above the ground. When the flight time ended, Ranger Ork plummeted. At the last moment, the jump jets burned the rest of the fuel to arrest its fall. I still landed with the impact of a dozen loaded speeding 18 wheelers but the superstructure held. I got a few yellow and orange warnings as some actuators took damage and I used Replicate to perform the repairs and upgrade the strength and shock absorption of those areas.

Being a Dungeon, I had a great advantage with my gadgets. I could repair or recreate them on the fly. So long nothing shoved their aura into them and stopped me from making changes. I wouldn't be able to repair Ranger Ork during the fight with Jabberwock.

As I made my final approach into the mass of darkness hiding the tentacle monster, I used some resources to create a two-hundred feet long sword. The slab of metal would be considered dull by any normal person testing its edge but it was necessary to stop it from chipping. An actual sharpened blade would shatter with the forces involved.

My Domain beacon penetrated the darkness. I could sense Jabberwock in all its horrific glory with all five senses. No, it was not tasty and the monster stank. But then again, I could taste the sweat of every dirty dweller in Pitsmouth and got used to it. Why do you think I had a clause demanding everyone in the underground to keep themselves cleaner than a Japanese JK?

Using Animated Blade, I swung the sword at the monster. Jabberwock parried the blow with a tentacle, the blade sank four feet into the appendage. Just a flesh wound.

Ranger Ork was two hundred feet tall but Jabberwock had more than three times my height. A taller Mecha would be problematic. The square-cube law had no mercy even with magic. Physics-Chan had her vengeance, at last!

Jabberwock lashed out with four tentacles. I dodged three and grabbed the fourth. A steel cable shot out of Ranger Ork's wrist and a small rocket at the tip made it wrap in a loop around the tentacle. A mechanical arm on the other side of the wrist caught the cable as the spent rocket detached and fell. Dedicated machinery welded the two ends of the cable and started pulling it to spin around the tentacle. This steel cable was covered in shards of Boboyote's crystals, which were not harder than diamond but much less brittle. At the same time, a tensor pulley pulled the cable deeper into Ranger Ork's forearm. The sawing tension started to dig into the writhing flesh and soon the fifteen-foot-thick tentacle was cut. A port at the bottom of the wrist opened and a bigger rocket attached to the cable shot out, unwrapping a coil of another cable, and landing outside the monster's aura.

One of Jabberwock's heads bent down to bite the tentacle. I Replicated a pulley system outside the aura and latched onto the cable. Then I pulled the tentacle away from the biting mouth.

But that allowed me to shoot the other arm into the neck. It was too far away for me to grab it. But that's what rocket punches are for. The detached arm latched onto the neck and threw its own cable. Lock! Go!

The other heads noticed it and the whole monster went berserk. My guess was correct. Jabberwock couldn't regenerate its heads. Two tentacles slammed into Ranger Ork's chest and tossed the Mecha sixty feet away, to land on its back. Except not! I fired the jump jets and jettisoned the spent forearm, the one that cut the tentacle. The stupid Perk gave me ten seconds of flight and I straightened the Mech and shot up. Two new forearms materialized outside the World Boss' aura. Cables shot from the elbow stumps and attached to the new forearms, reeling them in and reestablishing connection. Then I landed hard.

Meanwhile the animated blade was defending the cable and attached forearm that was steadily digging into the monster's neck. Jabberwock screamed. I lost some Attributes but my unique constitution, with the double bonus to my Attribute efficiency halved the impact such a shout would have on a normal person. I lost about a quarter of my points instead of half.

Two hatches opened in my shoulders, revealing a hundred tubes each. I fired these, launching two hundred missiles at the World Boss. These missiles didn't explode. Instead, they had a hooked barbed tip and bladed fins in the shape of spirals, powered by electrical motors inside. They latched into the rubbery flesh of Jabberwock's tentacles and started spinning, drilling into Jabberwock's flesh, and ejecting gallons of blood and gore behind. These drills might not be the drills that shall pierce the heavens but they would surely do a number on the monster.

Smoke poured from the shoulders as the spent launchers were ejected. New ones appeared above, with attached rockets to stabilize their fall. Cables shot and dragged the new launchers into place.

Lingering Wounds did fuck all to Jabberwock's healing abilities. He didn't regenerate the wounds; he regrew the tentacles. A technical difference. But what if I didn't sever the tentacles and instead did enough damage, they were basically non-functional? Tentacles were called muscular hydrostats. Which was a fancy term for a boneless limb that could move by exploiting the fact that water was incompressible. As the tentacles got damaged, the muscles around the wound cramped to stop loss of fluid and degeneration of function (meaning it would go limp otherwise).

With the drills constantly cutting into their flesh, the tentacles would get stiffer and stiffer, leading to a massive loss of mobility and combat ability. Or that was the plan. And now that I explained it, I had jinxed it.

Hey, I had to monologue at least to myself. I shot wrist blades from the forearms and dashed forward to hack and slash at the boss.

> Your knowledge and experience improved your Mecha Pilot Skill to rank V. — When piloting, reduce your reflex delay by 3% per rank.

This new ability made the robot much more responsive. Rake in those ranks, baby!