By way of greeting, Roland shot the Boss in the face with a Death-imbued round, going for its eyes.

  He missed both face and eyes; the giant Chimera moved its head sideways with incredible speed, revealing a hidden hairless neck like a possum’s tail that elongated and moved its hat-holder out of the line of fire like something out of that old movie classic, The Thing.

  Frustrated, Roland blasted the eyes on its body, scoring one critical hit out of three shots, but the slug inflicted a mere sixty points, almost all of it death-attuned damage. The other two missed the eyes and ended up stuck somewhere in the monster’s elephant-like hide, doing minimal damage.

  He wasn’t scoring critical hits automatically, probably because he didn’t know that the bastard was guilty of anything besides being one ugly mother. If Pestis killed somebody, it’d be vulnerable, but that would defeat the purpose.

  Before he could line up another shot, Pestis struck back. Six clawed or spiked limbs launched themselves at him like so many harpoons, attached to the main body by hairless tendrils like the one serving as the Boss’ neck. Roland dodged several of them, but when he tried to activate Reaper’s Dance, the Skill failed to toggle on.

  He had thought he was far enough away to avoid the movement-canceling aura. Roland discovered the hard way that the extensible limbs projected the Boss’ Nimbus abilities around themselves.

  A claw at the end of a possum’s tail tore through the Pale Rider’s Jacket and crunched into his left shoulder. The impact threw him down the road, a good thirty feet away. Thirty-six points of damage got through his armor. A mental flex directed some of the Vital Energy that he had accumulated to fix it.

  To add insult to injury, the sneaky limb began to retract, dragging Roland by the claw hooked inside his shoulder. A swift cut with a Spirit Weapon severed the limb before he could go too far, thankfully.

  Yanking the barbed claw out of his shoulder was no fun at all.

  Going into close quarters with that monstrosity didn’t seem like a winning move. He switched things up a little.

  Judgment Gaze.

  The Boss had literally dozens of eyes, windows to the soul that he could flood with Death. The power should have been devastating.

  When he met (some of) the Boss’ eyes, he encountered an entity suffused with pain and hatred. It didn’t have an aura, not in the way a human or even a normal living being did. It was more like a magnetic field filled with static, some kind of dense energy that disrupted and pushed against his killing intent.

  The Skill fizzled, inflicting less than ten percent of the monster’s Health before sputtering out. That must be what ‘high resistance to mental and spiritual damage’ meant.

  Pestis didn’t even slow down. Its long limbs reared back; when they snapped forward, they also extended like his lamented Ghost Octopus, except made of assorted roadkill. And this time, they split into multiple spiked limbs.

  It was a lot like being machinegunned by whips instead of bullets. Roland ducked and wove and still took multiple hits. The jacket and helmet held up: spikes, claws and teeth shattered on impact without even imparting any momentum. The pants fared far worse, and Roland grunted as one hit his upper leg, barely missing one of the big blood vessels there.

  He cut the biological harpoon off him before it could drag it back, and ran into the woods. Ran until he noticed that the icons of his movement powers weren’t greyed out anymore.

  Reaper’s Dance! Reaper’s Dash! Uncanny Charge!

  Roland used his toggle-movement combo to put some distance between him and the monster. He needed to reassess the situation.

  Pestis the Diseased didn’t chase him into the woods. Instead, it skittered down the road on its cockroach legs, moving with terrifying speed. It wasn’t as fast as Roland using his movement Skills or even running full tilt, but it would still make it to the landfill in fifteen seconds, at which point it would be all over for his group.

  And on top of that, Roland felt feverish, cold sweat running down his face and under his armor. His joints screamed in pain as he moved, and his stomach bubbled with the kind of unwellness normally visited onto those dumb enough to eat convenience store sushi. All that plus a throbbing headache, and a case of sore throat mixed with tightness around his neck that made it hard to swallow.

  You have been afflicted with Norovirus (3 stacks), Yellow Fever (2 stacks), and Diphtheria (1 stack)!

  All actions suffer a -20% penalty. You take 1 point of damage per Disease stack every second for 15 seconds (6 points/second). Additional stacks will restart the duration in addition to inflicting more damage.

  “Son of a...”

  Roland fought through the chills and other symptoms and fired from behind a tree. The enhanced round hit true; a disturbingly humanlike eye exploded in a burst of gore and the Boss’ hit points dropped by almost two hundred points. But that was the only shot Roland got. The injury had gotten the monster’s attention.

  The mass of plague-ridden flesh and mismatched body parts leaped into the air – a ridiculous sight, like watching a beached whale dancing the macarena – and traveled in an arc that would land right on Roland’s tree.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  He couldn’t use his Skills to dodge, but his inhuman speed saved the day. Roland waited until the leaping monster was on its final trajectory and broke the standing long jump record by a good ten yards. Pestis smashed the tree into kindling, the impact barely dropping its Health by a dozen points or so.

  Roland ran away through the trees. Pestis declined to chase him any further and returned to the road.

  By then, the giant monster was visible from the party’s position. Josh and Bob took it under fire, but the rifle rounds bounced off its furry hide like so many spitballs. That critter’s hide wasn’t as sturdy as the frontal armor of a main battle tank, but it was impervious to small-arms fire.

  “Eyes!” he shouted. “Aim for the eyes, any eyes!”

  Roland moved through the woods, grimacing as the toxic mud squelched under his boots, and took a couple of shots, one of which was an eye hit that put out another eye and shaved off another sixty hit points. Which was great except for the fact that the Boss had already healed half of the damage from Roland’s first critical hit.

  The eyes he had shot off hadn’t grown back, replaced with milky scar tissue, but Roland doubted that would reduce the monster’s capabilities.

  The Boss stuck to the road but used its harpoon-like limbs to hunt for him, ‘shooting’ the barbed claws with depressing accuracy and speed. Roland was forced deeper into the forest after a couple glancing hits nearly crippled him. He fired again, missing one of the many eyes but hitting a critical on the monster’s flank. The damage was an underwhelming fifteen points.

  Nothing about this encounter was fair. Roland couldn’t take the Boss one-on-one, and if it reached the party’s position, none of them would survive for more than a few seconds. If he still had access to his cultivation, he could probably solo the monstrosity. But he didn’t.

  Well, I guess it’s time for Plan B.

  Roland moved further into the woods and produced one of the wrapped blocks Bob had given him. His cousin had given him a short set of instructions on how to use them and, more importantly, the timer-detonator he proceeded to attach to it.

  I always thought that working at EOD was a clinically insane choice. Look at me now!

  Explosive Ordnance Disposal was not a specialty for the faint of heart. The blocks of C-4 Bob had handed him were military surplus, sold – under extremely tight controls – to licensed civilian contractors. Even being in proximity to one of those things guaranteed a lengthy stay at a federal resort, courtesy of the U.S. government.

  When Bob mentioned the blocks as an addition to their gear, Roland realized he hadn’t even begun to suspect how shady the Acosta side of his family truly was.

  What did they plan to do with it? Actual terrorism? Blowing up bridges to secure defensive positions when/if civilization collapsed? Fishing?

  He would have to have a serious sit down with Uncles Fred and Gorman, but right now he had a big monster to blow up.

  Detonator. Timer. Set for six seconds. When timer starts, Mr. C-4 block is no longer your friend.

  In the time it took him to set it up, the slobbering crime against nature was on its final approach to the gate. Everyone with a gun was busting caps on it, with the combined effect of a gentle rain on a block of concrete, except for the occasional eye shot.

  Pestis the Friendly Monster was still at over six hundred hit points and healing fifty points per second.

  “Get to the other side of the hill!” Roland shouted at the top of his lungs while he ran after the critter, maneuvering between the woods holding the block of C-4 in his hand. “Danger close! Danger fucking close!”

  “MOVE!” Bob shouted. “Move your asses, big boom incoming!”

  Bob and Josh dragged everyone down the slope of Trash Hill, putting it between them and what was about to happen.

  Roland lobbed the block right in the path of the Boss, timing it so it – hopefully – rolled over the explosive before it went off, and then ducked behind a tree.

  Everything went white, then black.

  He came to under a pile of metal wreckage, half buried in toxic sludge. The shockwave had thrown him through a the ruined crane, which had then fallen on him. His Health was down to under a hundred points, and he had zip Vital Energy.

  Is it over?

  All he could hear was the ringing of terminal tinnitus. He had put on hearing protection, but apparently being too close to ground zero of a few pounds of C-4 was a tad louder than gunfire. He guessed that the only reason his insides were still inside was his inhuman Constitution, the grace of the System, or both.

  Grunting, he pushed a chunk of metal off him with one hand and stood up, noticing that his pants were drenched in sludge and enough of it had soaked through to give him a bad case of butthurt.

  Cleanse!

  Two uses of the Skill removed the toxic goo, which had started to seep into range of his family jewels. That sort of thing definitely didn’t happen in World of Warcraft.

  Did I kill it?

  There was some smoke and bits of mud, garbage and metal shrapnel were returning to the ground from whence they’d come, so he hadn’t been out for very long. He looked at the road and saw something big moving around. A massive rat head rose above it, held up by its long thick neck.

  Didn’t kill it.

  Pestis the Diseased (Chimera)

  F-Grade Level Boss

  Health 231/880 Mana 81/1,200 Endurance 243/880

  Conditions: Bleeding, Dazed.

  Pestis was alive but the explosion had made more than a dent. A sizable fraction of its body mass was gone, replaced by a ragged hole where a bunch of limbs and eyes used to be. Viscous, motor oil-like fluids leaked out of the huge wound. The flow spurted when whatever the thing had for a heart ticked.

  But said heart was still ticking, and as Roland got himself together, he saw Pestis’ Health tick up to two-eighty-one.

  Roland summoned the Executioner’s Gun and began to fire at will, dumping Mana and Endurance into the shots to guarantee Death-imbued critical hits. In response, clouds of biting insects and deadly diseases swept towards Roland. The visible bugs didn’t do much damage. The microbes added new stacks of assorted plagues on him. Luckily, the gun’s Death energy gave him some Vital Energy to heal and recharge himself.

  If the monster’s upper limbs hadn’t been sheared off by the explosion, the close-range exchange might not have gone Roland’s way. Pestis could only defend itself by infecting Roland and sending bugs at him. The disease stacks kept stacking, but so did the necrotic effect of Roland’s Death-infused ammo. Normally, his targets died too quickly for that to be a thing, but against a big monster, those DOTs added up.

  As it was, Pestis’ Health gave way just as Roland’s was in the low double-digits.

  Victory didn’t feel great. The insect cloud dropped as soon as the Boss died, but the diseases ran their course. He was running a fever roughly equal to the boiling point of water, his skin was covered with some kind of pimples or boils or maybe low-grade leprosy, and he was on the edge of evacuating his stomach contents from every opening, including his earholes.

  “Don’t come any closer!” he yelled at Bob, who was moving down Trash Hill, headed in his direction. “I think I’m contagious as eff! And... UGH! Stay back!”

  There were lots of notifications clamoring for his attention, but Roland ignored them. Instead, he sent all his clothing and equipment to his inventory, found a discrete spot behind the remains of the crane, and let nature take its course.

  Suffice it to say that Cleanse gained another level before it was over.