Thomas whistled a tune with no origin beyond his own head as he watched the large red dot get closer. While Franken’s sensors were certainly decent, Spider-Can was larger and, due to being more geared towards ranged combat, had a sensor suite that put Franken’s to shame.

Of course, Spider-Can was trash at melee, and it was both big and bulky, but despite its size and weight, it had both speed and aerial maneuverability, as well as firepower out the wazoo. Its legs and the point where those legs connected were reinforced like nobody’s business, so it could take the impact of rough landings, bumping into things and the like, but the same could not be said for its pilot.

That was why Thomas had built his Avatar’s stats the way that he did. The machine that he piloted was like an oversized, weaponized bumper car that could use jump jets and could stick itself onto walls and ceilings, so of course, the ride would be bumpy as all hell and needed a pilot who was resilient enough to (mostly) ignore the jostling and occasional impact between themselves and the interior of the cockpit.

But that was all besides the point. Right now, Thomas was leveling his machine’s guns towards the distance and letting his finger rest on the triggers of the joysticks. He figured that what was coming was a boss, but he wasn’t sure if he could mow it down before it could attack him.

Hell, based on the size of the dot, he wasn’t sure if he would be safe up here on the ceiling like he had been up till now. With his eyes focused on the video feed coming from Spider-Can’s cameras, he watched and waited until the thing coming towards him began to be illuminated by a red outline.

That was his cue to fire wildly into the darkness, sending a wall of 12.7mm machine gun fire and a deluge of 20mm autocannon fire into whatever was coming his way. He had no idea if it would work, mind you, but it was better to try and drown an enemy in ranged fire than to do nothing, except that your guns were useless, and run.

Besides, it had worked so well up till now, and hopefully would continue to work wonders in the immediate future. Why try and fix what wasn’t broken?

With the cacophony of gunfire echoing like endless rolling thunder throughout the ruined underground laboratory that this Dungeon looked like, Thomas let Spider-Can detach itself from the ceiling and flip over to its usual upright position. He could see (based on the more advanced sensors in Spider-Can itself) that while his guns were grinding away at whatever was coming closer, they were having their damage offset by a regenerative factor.

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He could see the red numbers rising from over the top of whatever was coming his way, but with those red numbers were also green numbers, which let Thomas know that the creature was healing about as fast as he could deal damage to it. In a long, drawn-out fight, he could almost certainly kill whatever he was firing at with the sheer weight and volume of fire he could send downrange, but that would take time and severely deplete his ammo supply.

And so, another way to fight needed to be tried, and once Spider-Can landed on the ground and switched into hover mode, the guns went silent, and Thomas sped his machine off and down a side passage. He had explored this place a great deal, though he had done so rather quickly as he wished to beat his deadline by as much as possible while taking as little damage as possible.

Despite being a Speedy Gonzales, he had indeed noticed a few environmental assets that he could quite possibly use in the event that his guns proved insufficient, and he was heading towards a place with a few of such tools. If the thing that he was facing (that he had only seen the outline of, mind you) was able to regenerate about as fast as he could damage it with guns, then Thomas wondered if it could do the same when exposed to, say, super high strength acid.

…

The test tube monster crawled across the ground on its distorted limbs, letting out a series of ultrasonic ‘pings’ to help it locate the target that it was set to attack. As it grew closer, it was assailed by a near wall of gunfire that ate into it from the front, ripping off chunks of flesh and even ripping away some of its face and skull.

This did slow it down, but only because it could no longer figure out where its target was, as the only way it could use echolocation was if it actually had the internal parts needed to permit such a method of sensing the world around itself. However, it just kept healing from this damage, and while it was just barely healing at a slower rate than it was getting hurt, it was still persistent enough to charge forward.

It had rightly reasoned that if this never-ending hail of devastation was coming from a single direction, then that was likely where its target was. How far ahead of itself that its target was, though, was something it could not know due to its head getting shot up to the point that it could not use its sense of smell nor its sense of hearing.

Eventually, though, and utterly without warning, the deluge of bullets and autocannon shells ended, which gave it time to heal from its wounds. Once it finally had the ability to sense things beyond mere touch once again, it let out a series of sonic ‘pings’ and sniffed the air.

The sonic pulses echoed through the ruined facility until they eventually came back and alerted the even larger ground bat of unusual size that its foe had gone off down a side path towards a dead end. What would have worried the creature if it had the mental faculties to do so would have been the fact that the room that the multi-legged metal creature had run off into was massive, open, and yet filled with random bits and bobs.

Of course, you could not fault it for being naïve and slowly crawling after Spider-Can, though. It, quite literally, had only been ‘born’ a few minutes ago, after all.