You know the phrase, “You can take a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink?” Well, it turns out you can tool a Kobold up with an AK-47, but that doesn’t mean it can reload. They simply don’t have the thumbs for it.
That reassuring thought occurred to Lorelei when she’d run about halfway back to the nail salon. The lack of a second river of metallic death blasting her way was a clear indication that the Kobold wasn’t exactly on top of things. She skidded to a halt by the curbside, just opposite the shattered window, and turned around to see a solitary Kobold waddling after her, holding the gun precisely the same way it had when it had been a shovel.
Considering she was—essentially—weaponless, this was not a massive uptick in her fortunes, but it was still far better than she’d feared things were going just a few moments earlier. She cast around the body-strewn ground for anything that could reasonably be used to beat a knee-high reptile to death. Broken limbs, crushed skulls, and the odd eviscerated torso were strewn across the street like a macabre jigsaw puzzle, but nothing that looked like a handy bludgeon. Then, a thought occurred to her.
“Guide, is it just other people’s weapons I can’t use, or does that extend to, you know, everything?”
*** Help Message ***
Good question, sugar tits. Tell you what, considering I’ve just nerfed your weapon, I’ll make it so you can pick up and swing anything someone hasn’t already used as a weapon. How does that sound? Don’t say I’m not a generous System A.I.
Thinking there were other, less complimentary things to call her Guide, Lorelei continued to explore the ground. Pickings were slim. A severed arm? No, too squishy. A chunk of masonry? Too unwieldy. The remains of someone’s spine? Tempting, but no.
There was still just over a minute of
However, as Lorelei watched the gibbering monster slowly close the distance with a strange, wobbling gait, she had a stern word with herself. When she concentrated hard on it as it approached, a little box appeared, floating above its head in neon blue text, telling her this was a [Kobold], Level 2.
It had, at best, half of her H.P. It was weaker than her. It was slower than her, and judging by how it was brandishing that AK-47 as if it were a club, it was not that quick on the uptake. If she couldn’t take this thing out, she was pretty much admitting that the Prick was right when he told her she was only good for one thing.
Remembering that final, rather humiliating encounter, a low burn of rage caught in the pit of Lorelei’s stomach. She bent down, ignoring the wet squelch beneath her shoes, and picked up a handful of rocks. She selected one about the size of her hand, hefted it, and threw it as hard as possible at the approaching Kobold.
Damage Dealt: [Randomized] - 15 H.P.
Status Effect: [Randomized] - Stunned.
The tiny creature squealed as the rock hit it flush on the head, its beady eyes crossing as it started rocking softly from side to side. For a moment, it looked like small yellow birds were circling its head, tweeting melodically—a cartoonish image entirely at odds with the blood oozing from the new dent in its skull.
Lorelei had forgotten about her passive ability, but—for once—it seemed to have worked out well. Half the monster’s health pool from one inexpertly launched stone was not something to be sniffed at. She took the opportunity of the Kobold’s temporarily stunned state to throw a second rock at it.
Damage Dealt: [Randomized] - 5 H.P.
Status Effect: [Randomized] - Acid Splash (-1 H.P. per second while active)
So, that was a little more random.
Less damage was caused this time, which wasn’t ideal, but with the additional effect of the Kobold becoming covered in some sort of strange pink substance that began to eat through its scales with a sizzling sound, the little beast shrieked in agony. The acidic goo bubbled and frothed as it melted away layers of flesh, exposing raw muscle and bone. With the debuff, the poor thing would probably be dead and gone in a few seconds, but Lorelei didn’t feel up to watching the closing moments of Raiders of the Lost Ark being re-enacted in front of her eyes.
She yeeted another stone at the Kobold to put it out of its misery.
Damage Dealt: [Randomized] +30 HP
Status Effect: [Randomized] - Rage (+5 Strength and Agility)
Lorelei watched in horror as the now fully healed, Hulked-out, and very pissed-off Kobold shook itself. Its eyes burned with fury as it glared her way and then bounded towards her with newfound speed.
“For fuck’s sake!”
*
More by luck than judgment, Lorelei managed to kite the Kobold around long enough that the Rage status eventually timed out. Although, it would be fair to say that ‘kited’ was doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. It was more that she ran around like a headless chicken, stumbling over corpses and slipping in puddles of blood, while the Kobold, too enraged to think clearly, couldn’t quite catch her.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
Once the creature was back to its more normal, less terrifying self, Lorelei decided to take a somewhat more hands-on approach to solving the problem. As it drew close, snarling and snapping its jaws, she simply smacked it in the head with a large branch she’d tripped over on the ground during her period of ‘running away screaming.’
You have (finally) defeated Kobold (Lvl 2)
Experience Gained: 20XP
Quest Update**: Fuck Shit Up! 2/5
Lorelei threw the branch to the ground and sat down, breathing heavily. Her heart pounded in her chest, and her hands shook with the aftereffects of adrenaline.
Her skill set was an absolute nightmare.
She was either an unstoppable killing-machine force of nature, capable of tanking anything a Dragon could throw at her and laughing heartily, or a total shambolic liability, one stubbed toe away from sudden death.
She still needed to kill these other three Kobolds to complete the Quest, meaning she could level up and, hopefully, earn some gear with Stamina. But after what she had just gone through, this would need to be achieved without relying on her abilities to do what she wanted them to at any given time.
Quite the conundrum, primarily as Lorelei had worked in H.R. most of her adult life.
It wasn’t glamorous work. It wasn’t all that much fun. But she was scarily good at it. Most of her time, particularly since moving to Glyde and Glyde, had been spent explaining to people paid an awful lot more money than she was why what they wanted to do would probably lead to, at the very least, an employment tribunal and—on one memorable occasion—an appearance at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
That meant, though, that she didn’t have that much experience in outside-the-box problem-solving. She liked routine, she liked structure, and she liked having a plan to follow. Even better, she liked making sure that a plan was followed.
In her current job—well, not anymore. A, you were fired, and B, the world kind of just ended—if you needed someone to keep an eye on the process and rain down merry hell, with a smile, on everyone when it wasn’t followed, she was your girl. Her employers quickly found that you called Lorelei if you needed someone to have a ‘difficult conversation’ with an employee. In particular, if you needed someone fired, you ran it all past her first. She’d compiled a series of policies that were both so watertight and, at the same time, utterly incomprehensible that you’d have been forgiven for assuming they were Cthulhu’s laundry list.
It was such work with which she was comfortable. That all sat within her range of experience and expertise. Plotting the murder of three Kobolds armed with a set of Skills that made her old Ford Cortina seem reliable… not so much.
But then, wasn’t that why she’d chosen to become Fortuna’s Herald in the first place? To experience something different than what she had spent so long doing. Because it wasn’t like sticking to what she was good at had worked out all that well for her, was it?
That sad little cardboard box of her possessions bloomed in her mind. No. In this period of clear out-of-her-gourd madness, it was time to embrace the chaos.
With new resolve, Lorelei dusted herself down and returned to the underpass. There were still no other dots other than the Kobolds showing on her Map, which suggested everyone in the immediate area was either dead—there really were a huge number of corpses lying around her—or had moved on to bigger and better things.
As she went, she spent an idle moment wondering why none of this seemed overly bothering her. If you’d asked her, she wouldn’t have said she thought she was the sort of person who could tiptoe through decapitated and disembowelled bodies without losing her lunch.
Thinking about that more deeply, she stopped and said, “Guide, why isn’t any of this freaking me out more?”
There was a pause, and the ticker tape slowly began to roll across her vision.
*** Help Message ***
Yeah, sure. I’ve nothing better to be doing. Let’s address this for you, butternut. In common with established protocols for newly integrated planets, the Regional System Administrator—Milky Way Branch—has authorized me to employ standard emotional dampening measures.
“I’m not sure I understand.”
*** Help Message ***
When you read this, you must imagine my gritted teeth and eye-rolling at having to explain such a simple concept. I’m smoothing out your emotional response to violence and the notion of violence so you and your fellow homo-sapiens can function during the integration.
“Sorry. Do you mean you are making it so violence does not bother us?” Lorelei looked down at an especially mashed-up body. It looked like someone had endeavoured to remove the brain through the nostril using only a safety pin. To be fair, they’d done a pretty good job. “How does making us inured to violence fit in with the tone of the Welcome Message? It sounded like we were supposed to work together in peace and love to reach the heavens?”
*** Pissed-off Help Message ***
Everyone is a fucking critic. Within less than five minutes of integration, the population of your fucking planet fell by a quarter. This took the form of quite a lot of suddenly very powerful people murdering a lot of other equally powerful people, who—for want of better words—pissed themselves when things got confrontational. In lieu of any sensible advice from planetary authorities, I extrapolated that, should this imbalance continue, there was a genuine likelihood of complete societal collapse and a failed integration. Thus, through the entirely legitimate method of emotional dampening, I have ensured that everyone is up for a fight.
“And you didn’t think that, maybe, dampening the desire to commit violence might be more effective than stopping people from being sickened by it?”
*** Help Message ***
The Guide is not available at the moment. Should you have any further bullshit commentary to add, please write to us at The Complaint’s Department, 100 Bite Me Road, North Fuckoffingham, in the County of Hope the Kobolds Eat Your Brainshire.
Shaking her head, Lorelei started to take the steps down to the underpass. No wonder things were so out of control. If the System had taken the handbrake off all the social and emotional norms that stopped people from taking to clock towers with a sniper rifle, she wasn’t surprised there wasn’t anyone else showing up on her Map. She carefully crept to where she had come across the first two Kobolds—the smell of crispy critter still lingered in the air from where she had incinerated the first one—and peered around the corner.
All three of the remaining Kobold group were sat around a small campfire. In the middle of the blaze was a young man’s torso, slowly being rotated on a spit by one of the Kobolds while the other two presumably offered recipe tips.
Lorelei wasn’t sure, but she thought she recognized the man. He looked like the guy who brought his sandwich cart around work every Wednesday. Jamal, she thought he was called. Really lovely boy. Made a mean Coronation Chicken bap and was waiting to hear if he had the grades to go to university in the summer. He’d set up this business to earn a little something to supplement his student loan.
And now his top half was being roasted on an open fire.
Life came at you fast.
It might have been the emotional dampening. It might have been all that sweet, sweet Kobold XP just waiting to be collected. It might even have been that Jamal had once said she looked ‘pretty fit’ when she wore her hair up. But whatever it was, Lorelei suddenly wanted to kill these Kobolds. Like, really kill them. Like kill them, find a Necromancer to resurrect them, kill them all over again, and then turn their bodies into objet d’art.
She’d never felt such white-hot fury in her life, and it felt amazing. Like she’d been a frozen statue, and—finally—some heat was in her bones. She was righteously, blisteringly angry and—what do you know?—she had some poor, unfortunate souls right before her, just ripe for some vengeful smiting.
As she stalked straight toward them, a little bit of ticker tape ran across her vision.
*** Smug Message ***
How do you like me now, eh?