Hiro bounced down to street level, Smoke Zero energy drink in hand.
He spotted the Art Deco Atlas statue, and chugged the drink. On his next exhale, the courtyard in front of the statue and a portion of Fifth Avenue filled with smoke. Another exhale only made the smoke thicker, yet Hiro could still see his opponent due to Atlas’ health bar, which luckily for Hiro, didn’t have a gold rim around.
Description: As the world’s most subjectively brilliant minds went on strike, Art Deco Atlas, in all his godly glory, decided to side with the Titans.
At dawn, he led an attack against Wall Maria and Wall Rose, leaving them with Wall Sina, the innermost core, where an eager Eren Yeager and a pleonectic Dagny Taggart defended the Golden Apples of the Hesperides.
Art Deco Atlas wanted those goddamn apples, and he’d do anything to get them.
Gathering as much Ultrahard Steel as he could from a rapacious industrialist named Hank Rearden, famous for his overpriced ODM Gear Blades and Thunder Spears, Art Deco Atlas formed an incredibly large blade sphere, so large that he had to carefully hoist it on his shoulders.
Alongside the Titans, Atlas used this bladed sphere to smash through Wall Maria and Wall Rose which had been constructed poorly due to companies siphoning funds from cost-plus government contracts to line executive pockets and pay dividends to shareholders.
At long last, Art Deco Atlas breached Wall Sina.
He was just about to claim the Golden Apples when he shrugged and was subsequently crushed by the weight of his own creation, the bladed sphere pinning him to the ground and severing his arms.
Art Deco Atlas died with one of the Golden Apples in his hand, the fruit rotted to the core.
Just as it had said the batshit description, Atlas slammed his bladed sphere onto the ground, which sent sharp bits of shrapnel flying at Hiro that he managed to dodge.
Kiss or Slap? KISS!
Hiro called upon his demon cats, which all bumrushed the statue, who smashed the ground repeatedly trying to beat them away as the smoke continued to obscure most of the action.
Klank!
{Blade Whirlwind} had little to no effect on the statue’s health bar.
Hiro fired at Atlas with his finger gun to gauge its strength.
Pew! Pew!
“Nothing. Really?” Hiro jumped back to reassess how he would handle the Sentry. He wasn’t trapped here. He could always escape, move to a roof, grab Bianca, and head to Central Park from there to bury her.
There’s no way I’ll be able to get in close enough with the way he’s smashing that sphere. I should have picked up a Corruption cartridge. Edging? What about that?
Edging was related to his MIND stat, which was boosted by his current Roulette layout.
This begged the question: Do I have more MIND than Atlas?
“Fuck it, let’s try.” Hiro cast Edging by just thinking of the power.
A ripple of energy was all he noticed, one that mirrored a corona of light as it cut through the smoke. It hit Art Deco Atlas and the statue, who had a pair of phantom demon cats attached to his leg, began to twitch violently.
Then, the mania.
Art Deco Atlas went to work like he was playing a life-sized game of Whac-A-Mole. He hit the street repeatedly with his bladed sphere, panic in his eyes as if he were being piloted by some unseen force.
Hiro moved even further back, disturbed by the sheer speed at which the statue slammed the sphere into the pavement. Atlash showed no signs of relenting, and even if the Edging power had pushed the statue to madness, it had no effect on his health bar.
Then what? Hiro thought as he bounced back, where he landed on top of an armored truck that lay on its size. Hiro tried {Blade Whirlwind}, but this only drew Art Deco Atlas’s attention to him, the statue quickly reaching the truck.
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Hebounced away as Atlas drove the bladed sphere right into the engine, causing gasoline to spill out onto Fifth Avenue. Inferno? Hiro thought, thinking of another of his current vape pen cartridges. What will fire do against a statue?
As he bound away yet again, at a loss for how to handle Art Deco Atlas.
Hiro remembered his fight against the Pilgrim. The answer was in the description. He focused on the statue again, but the description never appeared.
Rather than stick around, Hiro jumped to a rooftop, where he quickly sheathed his sword and pulled out his phone. “What was the last sentry description?” he asked his companion as Art Deco Atlas slammed his sphere into the streets below.
The text appeared and Hiro focused on the final paragraph.
Hiro hadn’t seen any Golden Apples, but there was Atlas’ sphere…
But how do I make him shrug?
The first thought that came to Hiro almost made him laugh. Tickle? No, that won’t happen. No way. But I could try to cut at his under arms.
An idea formed. A crazy one, but that was par for the course at this point.
Hiro hopped down to the street and shot at Art Deco Atlas with his finger gun.
Pew! Pew! Pew!
The statue charged out of the smoke in his direction.
Hiro triggered {Bounce} to send himself over the statue. He landed behind Atlas just as he slammed the bladed sphere into the pavement.
It was a small opening, but Hiro managed to cut at the back of the statue’s heels just as he propelled himself forward and to the side with {Bounce}. This had a way of staggering his opponent, which caused him to lose his grip on the bladed sphere.
It wasn’t exactly a shrug that dropped the bladed sphere on Atlas’ back, but it was close enough, the statue’s body quickly dissected, obliterating its health bar. It was all so sudden that Hiro just stood there for a moment, poised to strike again.
But then the prompt came.
[A Sentry has fallen.]
Applause rang out in Hiro’s head.
You have new followers!
One of Art Deco Atlas’ hands turned, and a glowing light appeared, which Hiro recognized as a new skill. This was followed by two vape cartridges. There was a Corruption one and a cartridge listed as Anti-Fear, but no description.
He reached out to the node of light.
One Hit Wonder: {Scania the Piss Disc Mimic}
Grade: A
Upgrade: N/A
Description: Have you ever visited Scandinavia and wondered where the name came from? Wonder no more!
Pliny the Elder, famed Roman geographer and author of Naturalis Historia, once mistakenly identified the southernmost tip of Sweden as an island, referring to it as ‘Scania’ after a local tribe that inhabited the region.
Nearly two thousand years later, a legendary Spawn/Thor crossover penned by Todd MacFarlane and Frank Miller revealed that the Scania tribe was actually named after a particular yellow mimic that once frequented the southern coast of Sweden.
Known historically as the ‘Piss Disc Mimic’, or more accurately, ‘Mīgan Diskr Hermir’ (Mīgan from the Proto-Germanic mīgana which meant ‘to urinate’; Diskr from the later Scandinavian word for ‘plate’; Hermir from the word hermiz, meaning to ‘one who mimics’), this One Hit Wonder will allow you to call upon Scania the Piss Disc Mimic to aid you in a single battle.
The mimic will exhibit all of your traits, and fight with the full extent of your current abilities, turning the tide in your favor when you need it most.
“I get a mimic? Nice,” Hiro said under his breath as Soul Essence rushed into him.
He bounced away, and made it up to the place where he had left Bianca.
Hiro almost apologized to her but decided otherwise as he lifted the teenager back into his arms and turned toward the direction of Central Park.
He moved higher, hoping to avoid any more confrontations.
There.
He spotted one of the enormous crows to the east, the monster distracted by something as Hiro moved past Billionaire’s Row and finally landed in front of one of Central Park’s numerous entrances.
Hiro kept his eyes peeled on his surroundings as he moved deeper into the park, to the space where the giant skeletal crocodile monster had opened up the hole in the ground leading to the Central Park Catacombs.
“I’m sorry I can’t find a better place to bury you,” he told Bianca after he jumped down into the hole. Hiro placed her there, thought about covering her body with dirt and stone, but figured she wouldn’t like that.
He was just about to spring back up into the park and see what he could get into next when an idea came to him.
The idea came so strong, so fast, that he felt staggered by its implications.
Hiro took out his phone, his hand suddenly shaky. “Are you there?” he asked his Companion.
The text took shape in a matter of seconds.
“I want to speak to the Doom System. I have a complaint.”