A surge of bowel-loosening terror gripped me. What was that thing? There’s no animal that looks like that. Would our guns even hurt it? Could we drive away before it got to us, or would it catch us and rip our puny cars apart and devour us alive while we screamed in agony…

A gunshot practically in my ear snapped me out of my paralysis. Right, the thing was still a good hundred yards away, and my little action girl was already putting rounds on the target. I shook myself, and tried to take control of the situation.

“Shoot it!” I yelled at the men behind me. “Kill it before it can get to us.”

I took a potshot of my own at the monster, although I couldn’t tell if I’d hit anything. The men had all been staring in frozen horror, but at my words a couple of them shook themselves and unlimbered their rifles. Bob fumbled clumsily with his seat belt, looking like he’d just wet himself, but there was no time to worry about that.

By the time I turned my attention back to the monster it had closed half the distance, and was coming on like a freight train. Shasa crouched in front of me, ears flat and tail down, but gamely raising her shield to protect me.

I had to shout to be heard over a flurry of gunshots. “Shasa! When it gets here try to distract it, and hit it from the sides. Don’t stand still, or it will get you with those hooks.”

She nodded. “Okay, Tom. You can kill it, right?”

“We’ll kill it dead,” I assured her, and lowered my rifle to spin up a force missile. Lots of penetration, because this thing’s armor was tough. Some of the bullets that struck this thing were punching holes in its chitin, but others just glanced off its flanks in a shower of sparks. I needed lots of explosive power too, because this thing was huge. I had no idea where its vitals were, so I just aimed for the middle of the onrushing bulk.

My force missile shot across the rapidly shrinking gap, glowing bright enough to stand out even in daylight. The demon centipede saw it coming, and tried to bat it aside with one of those long stabbing limbs. The force missile punched deep into the huge blade of hardened chitin, and then detonated.

I ducked as broken fragments flew everywhere. A sliver of black armor speared the car roof inches from my head, and punched through the thin metal like cardboard. The monster shrieked in pain, and launched itself in an impossible leap.

“Holy fuck!”

I rolled away from the car seconds before the immense centipede landed on it, crushing the roof and collapsing the suspension. The thing’s forelimbs came down on Bob’s car, crumbling the hood, and someone screamed. I scrambled back on all fours, desperate for some distance as the thing looked around to choose its first victim.

One of the men from the hotel had dropped his gun and run, but the other three were blazing away as they took cover behind the trucks. The monster raised its harpoon-like limbs menacingly, and I saw that one of them ended in an oozing stump where my force missile had blown off half its length. But the other three were about to make mincemeat of the militiamen.

“Hey! Over here, stupid bug!” Shasa shouted, darting in to smack one if its rear legs with her mace.

It should have been a useless gesture. The monster was so big that she seemed like a child next to it. An ineffectual mortal facing off against an invincible nightmare apparition. I half expected her mace to break, or just bounce off harmlessly.

Instead it shattered the knee joint of one of the centipede’s many legs, crushing chitinous armor with a crunch I could hear even over the gunfire.

The monster whirled to strike her with one of its stabbing limbs, but she was already dancing back. The harpoon glanced off her shield, leaving a gouge in the metal but unable to penetrate. Meanwhile another flurry of bullets punched into the monster’s exposed flank, and at this range they all seemed to be penetrating.

Right, time to do my part. I spun up another overpowered force missile, with the same parameters as the first. I wasn’t going to miss at this range, and the monster’s limbs weren’t long enough to protect its flanks. A couple of seconds to ready my shot, and we’d see if I could blow this thing in half.

Then the horror’s tail came sweeping around at me, and I realized it was tipped with a set of giant pincers that must have been six feet long. I ducked, and the giant bludgeon smashed into the cab of the pickup truck I was trying to use for cover. The whole truck rocked, almost tipping over, and broken glass showered down on me.

I lost control of the building spell, and it nearly cooked off in my hand. At the last moment I managed to throw the surging, unstable ball of mana at the monster’s flank, far enough away from me to be safe. It detonated on contact, blowing a big but shallow wound in the centipede’s armor.

Or was it a millipede? Weren’t they the ones with the pincer tails?

I shook off the inane thought, and backed away again while looking around to see what everyone was doing. The remaining militia guys were still shooting. Shasa was still dodging the monster, and thank god she seemed to be more maneuverable than it was. Bob was crawling out of the wreck of his rental car, clutching that giant gun of his. Where was Jenny?

As I wondered, the crazy girl vaulted onto the monster’s back with the spear I’d made her. Somehow she managed to stand on the heaving surface, and stabbed the thing. Nice! Its limbs couldn’t reach her from there, so as long as she kept her balance she could just keep stabbing it.

A shotgun boomed from somewhere off on the other side of the monster. Jenny clutched her side, and fell.

“Whore! You think you can fight my Judas? I’ll feed you to him, and use your blessings to kill your friends!”

Oh, shit. There was someone helping this thing? Why? Did he have some kind of animal companion power? My gut said that thing was no animal, but who knows what System options a crazy bastard might stumble across. For all I knew it might be a demon he summoned.

I ran off to one side, trying to circle around the monster. It gave up on catching Shasa and moved in on the cluster of people who kept shooting it, but I didn’t have time to worry about that. I had to save Jenny.

Not that she was helpless, even wounded. When I finally got a clear line of sight she was sitting up, clutching at her side with one hand and looking vulnerable. A fat guy in dirty overalls was shambling towards her, with a pump-action shotgun in his hands.

“Well aren’t you a looker,” he said, leering at her. “It’d be a shame to waste those titties. Maybe if you’re real nice to me, I might not feed you to my Judas.”

“Here’s how nice I can be,” Jenny growled, raising a pistol in her free hand. She fired with startling speed, but somehow none of her bullets seemed to hit the lunatic.

He cackled in glee. “Guns ain’t gonna do you no good with me, missy. You think I’m stupid? The first thing I got from Judas was a shield that makes bullets miss.”

“Not so smart if you’re telling me how it works,” Jenny growled, dropping her gun. “I bet it doesn’t work on knives.”

A flicker of concern ran across the madman’s face, and he raised his gun. But I wasn’t having any of that. I hit him with a fast, mid-power force missile.

Sure enough, whatever barrier was protecting him didn’t do anything against magic. My attack struck him in the arm, gouging out a huge chunk of flesh and spraying blood everywhere. He staggered back, losing his grip on his weapon and looking around wildly.

Jenny was on him before I could cast another spell, with one of those big combat knives I’d bought her in her hand. She feinted at his face, and laid a long slash across his stomach.

The fat man screamed, clutching weakly at the wound. “No! You can’t kill me! I put all those blessings into protection. I should be invincible!”

“A strong aura just means I get to stab you more,” Jenny replied, sinking her blade into his thigh. She pulled it out, and a spray of bright arterial red rose from the wound.

“Hey, check it out. I bet you can still bleed to death.”

The madman waved his good arm, desperately trying to cast some sort of spell, but Jenny wasn’t going to give him the chance. Her knife lashed out again and again, breaking his concentration, inflicting more and more wounds as the he wobbled and collapsed.

I left her to it, and turned my attention back to the fight with the centipede monster just in time to see someone’s leg vanish into the creature’s maw. But someone was still alive and shooting over there, and now I finally had a few seconds to get this right. I built another big force missile, packing in high penetration and a big explosive charge. Better add a guidance package too, because I couldn’t afford to miss. I’d be down to a fourth of my mana after this, so I’d better make my shot count. Where to aim?

Who knows what kind of internal anatomy a demonic centipede monster would have? I picked a spot just far enough back that it wouldn’t be able to block my shot with those harpoon arms, and cast my spell.

This time the monster was distracted with trying to get at someone who’d hid under one of the trucks, and didn’t notice my attack until it was too late. The shining ball of blue light flew true, and punched through an armored plate right where I’d aimed it. A moment later it detonated, and blew the damned thing in half.

“Yes!” Shasa cheered, dancing back from the monster. “I knew you could kill it, Tom.”

“Finally,” Jenny added. “I was starting to think that thing was going to eat us all.”

“It’s still alive!” Bob’s voice rose from under the truck, sounding completely panicked. A thunderous gunshot followed, and then another.

Sure enough, the monster’s forequarters were still moving. But it was mostly dead now, staggering drunkenly and gushing noxious fluids from its wound. The rear part of the body was thrashing violently, but obviously in its death throes.

“Keep hiding, Bob,” Shasa called. “We’ve got this!”

She darted in to smash another leg, and backed away before it could react. Bob fired off another shot, and a couple of the men were still putting rounds into it. I’d lost my rifle somewhere along the way, so I left the rest of the group to finish it off while I checked Jenny’s wounds.

“Did that thing have a fucking fear aura?” She asked, looking around nervously as I ran my diagnostic spell over her.

“I’m not sure if it was that, or just the natural effect of something so huge and dangerous-looking,” I replied. “I’m just glad we only had one man cut and run. Here, let me see what I can do about that gunshot wound.”

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

For someone who’d been shot and then moved around a lot, she was in surprisingly good shape. I extracted a few pieces of buckshot from her side, stopped the bleeding and made sure there wouldn’t be any infection. But she probably would have been fine without my help, she’d just have been laid out for a couple of weeks while she healed. Apparently the health and defense buffs she’d invested in were doing some good, even against bullets.

By tomorrow everything we fought would have more points in physical buffs than she did. That was going to be grim enough, even if there weren’t any more super-monsters like that centipede.

“What’s the verdict, doc? Am I going to live?” Jenny asked as the shooting died away down.

“You’ll be fine,” I assured her. “Just take it easy until I recover enough mana to finish healing you. But I’d better make sure no one else is going to bleed out first. Watch my back while I see who needs healing?”

“Sure, just let me… oh, shit. Tom, look.”

She was staring at the crazy guy’s body, and for a moment I was afraid we were about to have some kind of horror movie re-animating psycho problem on our hands. But what I saw was worse, in its own way.

Strands of colored mist were seeping out of the body, and gathering into a glowing ball in the air above it.

“People give points,” I realized.

“Looks like it,” she agreed. “Great. Like we didn’t have enough problems with psychos without the System rewarding them for murder. I guess this means cannibal tribes and unstoppable serial killers are going to be a thing.”

“Maybe. Then again, hunting people is dangerous,” I pointed out. “Even if you’ve got a lot of points, it seems like it would be hard to get away with it for long. But that will have to be a worry for later. Come on, let’s see how bad things are.”

As it turned out, all of the men had taken a beating. Bob was covered in cuts and bruises from nearly getting trapped in his car, and had concussion and a broken ankle. Sam had been knocked over by the centipede’s tail, and had three broken ribs and a dislocated arm. Juan had been quicker to get out of the way, but a chunk of flying debris had cut a gash in his shoulder deep enough to expose bone.

It could have been worse, though. The guy who’d made the big dick joke had gotten eaten by the damned centipede. The guy who ran off had vanished into a woodlot a few blocks down the road, and I had my doubts about whether we’d ever see him again. Without Shasa’s heroic efforts at distracting the centipede monster we’d probably all be dead.

“I don’t have enough juice left to heal everyone completely, but I can at least stop the bleeding and set broken bones,” I told everyone. “Just keep an eye out while I work. Juan, can you call 911? I don’t know how many people died in that diner, but I’m sure the cops will want to know about it.”

“I figure you’re right,” he agreed, setting his rifle down to fumble for his phone. “I hope there aren’t any more of those things.”

“I don’t see anything, and it’s hard for something that big to hide,” Jenny said. She’d found her rifle while I checked on the injured, and was keeping a sharp eye on our surroundings.

“That monster smells really scary and bad,” Shasa put it. “If there was another one close by I’d smell it. Only, I think there’s something bad over there, where we were going. I smell dead people, and something weird and icky.”

“Then we’re not going in there alone,” I decided. “Jenny, can you call the Dragonslayers, and see if they’d be willing to sweep the place?”

“Sure thing.”

“I wish we could just bail, but I guess there’s no place to go,” Bob muttered.

No kidding, Bob. With our latest discovery I’m not sure even a major city would be safer. They’re going to have psychos trying to level up through murder without getting caught at it, on top of whatever birds, bugs and sewer denizens can get at them. Humanity’s only option is to keep fighting until we’re tougher than the monsters, and then hope that the danger level stabilizes instead of just getting worse forever.

I focused on healing, and got Juan’s bleeding stopped and his wound disinfected while he talked to the 911 operator. Then I moved on to Sam, and discovered one of his broken ribs had punctured a lung.

Ouch.

It took me a few minutes to get the internal bleeding stopped, and get those broken bones back where they belonged. I was down to my last dregs of mana by then, and while I managed to stick the bones in place they were a long way from healed. What was the next priority?

“Score!”

Bobs exclamation drew me from my thoughts. He’d managed to limp over to the centipede’s body, and was holding up a massive XP ball. Unlike the ones from lesser monsters, this one was a swirling mass of multiple colors. A bit of green, like the monsters that had only given physical points. A bit of purple, like the bush that had given me mana. But the dominant color was black, which we hadn’t seen before.

“Put that down before you leech all the XP, you idiot,” Jenny complained. “We need to all touch it at the same time or it won’t divide evenly.”

“Oh, uh, sorry. I think it’s stuck to my hand,” Bob said, turning it over to demonstrate.

“Ugh. Then bring it over here where we can all reach it.”

“I don’t think I want any of that in me,” Shasa objected. “It looks scary.”

“That’s up to you, sweetie, but I’m not missing out on any points if I have a choice,” Jenny said. “If black means evil then Tom will just have to fix me later.”

She swept the basketball-sized ball of mist out of Bob’s hands and hurried over to the main group with it, ignoring his squawk of protest.

“Gee, thanks. Check your status, and see if you’re getting anything new from it,” I suggested.

“Oh, good idea. Hmm. Physical points, magic points and… huh. Something called profane power, but there’s an option to convert that to normal points.”

I frowned. “So it might be safe, or it might have side effects later, and as usual we don’t know and there’s no time to think about it. That sounds like the System. Anyone who wants a share, go ahead and touch the ball.”

Did I want to risk it? Well, no, obviously I didn’t want to. But that looked like a crazy amount of points. Could I afford to pass it up?

Reluctantly, I decided the answer was no.

In the end Shasa was the only one who passed on a share of the centipede. I sent her off to claim the dead guy’s points instead, because she deserved some reward for her bravery. Ordinarily there might have been some grumbles about splitting the points more carefully, but I think we were all too busy being shocked at the magnitude of what we were getting from that monster.

One-fifth of the centipede came to almost twenty points of profane power, whatever that was, which converted to half as many universal points. Add in the normal, uncontaminated points from the XP ball, and I was up two magic, three physical and ten universal points. Damn, no wonder that thing was such a nightmare. It must have had, what, two hundred points? More?

I was just starting to think about how to spend the unexpected bonanza when a police car with flashing lights pulled up, and a pair of nervous cops toting shotguns piled out and started asking questions. After that things got busy for a while. They called in a fire truck to put out the burning building, and an ambulance showed up to take Sam to the hospital. A second cop car delivered a detective who wanted to go over the fight with us, and ask us questions about what had happened. We were still going through the details when a couple of big guys in a flatbed truck showed up, and started pulling out body bags.

I spend a few points expanding my mana pool and speeding up my mana recovery before the detective really got going, so I could recharge during the forced downtime. No one else wanted to bring up the subject of spending points while the cops were asking us questions, although when Bob suddenly traded in thirty or forty pounds of fat for the same amount of muscle it was obvious what was going on. Then the Dragonslayers finally arrived, in an old van and a couple of pickup trucks.

You’d think the cops would be skeptical of a bunch of civilians walking around with guns and armor, talking about hunting monsters. But the various city workers had been casting nervous glances at the woods and the centipede’s massive corpse ever since they got here, and they obviously just wanted to get back into town before something else happened. The ambulance had already left, and the rest of the men were clearly trying to hustle through their jobs as fast as humanly possible.

So when Dale climbed out of his truck and ambled over to us, the detective took one look at the crew unloading behind him and flipped his notebook shut.

“Afternoon officer, Tom, Jenny. Looks like this was a bad one,” Dale said easily.

I gestured at the centipede body, which was slowly melting into noxious black goo in the afternoon sun. “That thing soaked up dozens of rounds from our rifles, and all the attack spells I could muster. Is the dead guy over there Don? He wasn’t carrying ID.”

Sheryl took a look and nodded, seeming remarkably composed for a young woman dealing with such a gruesome scene. “That’s creeper Don, alright. Dad showed me his picture back during the kidnapping scare, just so I’d know to stay away from him.”

“That’s all I need to know, then,” the detective said. “I see the coroner’s men are collecting the bodies, and the fire is out. We’ll all be vacating the scene soon, and I’d advise you all to do the same. Best to hunker down somewhere safe until we get a handle on things.”

“Nowhere is safe anymore, unless we make it safe,” Dale replied.

“We’re all deputized,” Sheryl added. “We’re just going to sweep the area, and make sure there isn’t a nest of those things somewhere. Isn’t that right, Dale?”

“That’s right. We’ll give you a call if we find any more bodies, officer.”

The detective had visibly paled at the idea that there might be more centipede monsters lurking somewhere nearby. He glanced around nervously, and over at where the fire truck was pulling out.

“Well, I can’t spare any men to help you. We’re being run ragged today as it is. I need to move on to my next call, and the patrol car can’t stay much longer.”

“That’s fine, officer. We’ll make sure these folks get back to their hotel,” Dale assured him.

Five minutes later the detective was gone. The moment he was out of sight the other two cops started ambling towards their patrol car. The guys on body collection detail noticed, and put a little extra hustle in their work.

Sheryl snorted in disgust. “Useless city cops.”

“They didn’t sign up for the end of the world,” Dale said philosophically. “So, what’s the plan?”

“My guys are wrecked, and I’m still below half mana,” I said. “But we really need a couple of loads of sheet metal from that junkyard to fortify the hotel, or who knows what will happen after dark. We haven’t seen any movement over there, but Shasa here says she smells something hinky.”

“It’s like blood and bugs and scary badness,” Shasa tried to clarify. “The same kind of badness as the giant bug, but not as strong. Maybe there are little ones? Or some kind of scary bad magic thing that made the giant bug?”

“Bug monsters. Why does it have to be bug monsters?” Dale grumbled.

“Because they wouldn’t need help if it was just regular animals,” Sheryl pointed out. “Say, Shasa, did you used to be a dog?”

“Uh huh! I’m still a dog, I just have hands now,” Shasa said.

“And boobs,” one of the big guys in armor muttered.

“Shasa’s the best dog in the whole world,” I declared, coming over to put an arm around her. “Seriously, she was amazing at distracting that bug monster. We’d all be dead without her.”

“Yeah? I did good?” She asked hopefully.

“You did very good,” I assured her, and petted the top of her head.

“Awesome.” She gave me a loopy grin, and leaned into me the way dogs do when they want to be affectionate. Well, at least she wasn’t licking my face.

“Huh. Well, we can sweep the property and see what turns up,” Dale said, struggling to keep his tone businesslike. “But that means we’ll want to keep any points we collect.”

“Sure, that’s fair,” I said. “We’ll park our vehicles across the street, and be ready to cover you just in case. It’s going to be another hour or so before I get us all healed up, but our guns still work.”

“That’s humanity’s cheat power,” Dale said. “Guns don’t cost points, and you can use them to hunt all the XP you want. Come on, everyone. Let’s see what the Junkyard of Despair has in store for us.”

They might talk like a bunch of nerds, but the way the Dragonslayers went about their business was organized and decently well thought out. Two big guys with shields and a patchwork assortment of armor anchored the front of their advance, using axes for close-range combat. Sheryl and Dale took opposite flanks, and slung their rifles in favor of pump-action shotguns. Their mage and healer followed behind the front line, sticking close to each other, and another couple of guys with rifles brought up the rear.

As they made their way across the junkyard’s parking lot and into the office building they adjusted their positioning to take advantage of the terrain, and make sure they covered each other. They were a little rough, but someone in the group clearly had a tactics skill.

“Those are some brave kids,” Juan commented.

“Brave or dumb,” Jenny said. “You know, I’m looking at all these points, trying to figure out what to buy to make sure I don’t die if we run into another monster like this one, and I’m not finding anything.”

Bob grew a couple of inches, and put on even more muscle. “Hulk build, babe. Next time around I’ll just punch out the monsters.”

Jenny rolled her eyes. “This from the guy who spent points for a giant dick.”

“How did… I mean, I didn’t… what, were you checking me out?” He sputtered.

“I could have lived without knowing about that,” I grumbled. “But it occurs to me that Shasa got through that whole mess without a scratch.”

She grinned. “I did, didn’t I? I’m just too fast for stupid bugs.”

“Speed,” Jenny said contemplatively. “I could go for that.”

“I could go for a million points worth of running away really fast,” Juan said. “I was so scared I almost peed myself.”

“Bob did pee on himself,” Shasa said innocently. “I guess he’s not very brave.”

“Hey! It was my first fight. Anyone would react to a giant bug monster crushing their car.” He looked over at the wreckage, and shook his head. “How are we getting back to the hotel, anyway?”

“I guess I’d better call Beth, and see if she can get some more guys over here,” I said.

“Your phone is still in one piece? Mine got smashed,” Bob grumbled.

I tapped the rugged titanium case on my hip with a grin. “I spent a lot of time at factories and work sites for my job. You could run over this thing with a car and it would be fine.”

A few gunshots drifted over from the junkyard, punctuated by the occasional snap of lightning missiles. But there were no screams, or signs of panic. Just the occasional order, or shout of encouragement. Whatever they were finding in there, the kids had it handled.

It was good to have backup. Something to keep in mind, as civilization slowly descended into chaos.