Around three days prior to Axton clearing the final overworld boss, Thomas Rhodes had descended into the final Dungeon that the current Battle Royale arena provided as a distraction. The previous five Dungeons had given him a trial by fire, forcing him to make use of Spider-Can in new and creative ways.

In fact, it was thanks to the cramped confines of those Dungeons that Thomas had learned just how capable his War Suit really was in both ranged and melee. He had even learned the correct usage of the hover systems needed to anchor his War Suit on a suitably durable ceiling, and it was there above the growling, hissing mass of angry enemy mobs that Thomas currently sat.

It was times like these where he was glad that seatbelts were a thing, and he was equally happy that the virtual reality didn’t fully emulate the sensations of real life. Had that not been the case, he likely would have ruined the interior of Spider-Can with vomit and dropped food and drink on more than one occasion.

Right now, he was sitting in his seat, his entire body upside down while Spider-Can clung to the ceiling of the underground ruin like one half of its namesake. Beneath it and its pilot, a bunch of wingless bat creatures circled and occasionally lept up to try and grab ahold of the mech. However, much to their irritation, Spider-Can was just too far above them, and their bodies were not suited to try and leap up very far, let alone crawl up the side of the slick ruin walls.

In all honesty, their matchup was poor enough that Spider-Can could quite possibly have stayed on the ground and their fangs and claws would not have been able to do much more than scratch the paint, but what they lacked in power they made up for in speed and numbers. Thomas had already fired off Spider-Can’s pair of ranged weapons several times now, and the terrain underneath his position bore the marks of the stubbornness of the ground bats.

Where dozens once stood, there was little remaining aside from bone and a few strips of hide. The cave bats were, if nothing else, very good at cleaning up any mess that was made out of meat and the like, even if that mess was their own kind’s flesh and blood.

As Thomas watched the ground bats circle a bit more, finished eating his meal, and opened the cockpit of his War Suit while carefully undoing his seatbelt. As the hatch opened and he clambered out, the mobs beneath him became even more attentive and now jostled with each other trying to get to the man whose feet were easily over fifteen body lengths above their heads.

“And a one, and a two, and a one, two, three.”

As the ground bat screeched and clawed at each other, Thomas used the metal plating on one of Spider-Can’s legs as a pull-up bar and began to engage in a workout. Now, of course, he didn’t need to do this, but it was a welcome distraction from the usual hubbub of combat, and it also brought a smile to his face to listen to and see the critters beneath him trying to fight each other for the right to make a failed leap at his feet.

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After a few tens of pull-ups, he switched positions and began to do leg curls while his lower legs and feet held the metal in a tenuous grip. After that, he cycled through a few more exercises before clambering back into Spider-Can’s cockpit and sealing himself inside, much to the visible annoyance and anger of the mobs only a few tens of meters below him.

It was a difficult procedure to reposition himself so that he could buckle himself in again since he and the seat were both upside down, but time was on his side, as was patience. Eventually, he managed to get himself locked in place and he booted up his War Suit, disturbing its slumber for the first time in over three hours.

The torso of the mech swiveled a bit, then the turrets that made up the War Suit’s ‘arms’ swiveled and then depressed and elevated. A few clicks echoed through the ruin as the guns loaded themselves, and then the torso and turrets both began to spring into action.

The quad 12.7mm machine guns on one side of Spider-Can’s body began to spray modified ammo into the horde of ground bats below, sending not solid rounds but canister shot into the mass of meat and bone underneath. The formerly angry mobs now felt pain and fear, but they could not run fast enough to escape the deadly hail of belt-fed canister shot.

After a few seconds of continuous fire, the four guns of Spider-Can’s ‘anti-infantry/ light vehicle’ weapon went silent, with the only sound left being the hissing of the cool, damp air chilling the steaming barrels. Just like the previous times before, all that remained beneath Spider-Can’s frame was a red stain of gore and shattered bone, with the occasional body part left miraculously intact(ish).

…

However, this time there was not going to be a few minutes of peace and quiet before another group of ground bats of unusual size mad either way over to clean up the mess. No, instead, the mechanisms that tried to make this game more… enjoyable decided that since Thomas was going to be a camper and was refusing to take enough risks, then a solution had to be presented to finally dislodge the tank turret with legs from the ceiling and get it to actually move.

Deeper into the final Dungeon that Thomas had delved into, a test tube big enough to fit a few elephants in began to crack, slowly letting the generic green luminescent fluid within leak out before the glass chattered in a typical generic fictional fashion. As the liquid poured out, a massive creature awoke inside the broken tube, and despite only being ‘born’ a few moments ago, it knew what it needed to do.

Of course, what it didn’t know was that it was not geared properly towards its intended goal. In fact, the thing may have been big, strong, and durable, with a regeneration factor to boot, but it lacked the only real tool it could have reasonably used to deal with the target it had been made to focus on.

Because, in the end, it doesn’t matter how strong you are, and it doesn’t matter how durable you are. If you can’t hit anything, you might as well be useless in a fight, especially when all your allies have already been killed, and you have to deal with a faster, more maneuverable opponent who excels in the one thing you lack in terms of attack strategy: ranged combat.