The lucky winner of the new power armor was Rogers. Now that he was suited up with an RPG launcher sized particle cannon on his shoulder, we stepped onto the teleporter in the middle of the room and pushed the button for Floor 2.
We appeared in a cave outside a large forest covered in perpetual fog. The walls on both sides curved inward slightly, revealing that the floor was a twenty kilometer wide circle. We lined the men up with the riflemen flanking the two heavies that took point, moving at a right angle to the wall. The room seemed to be a massive open area, but as they explored they found that every one hundred meters or so there were stone pillars which were designed to look like large trees which reached above the others. There was a perpetual sunset happening to the left side of the cave exit, which kept the place dimly lit.
The first enemy we ran into was a zombie. Most of the recruits had seen one before so it didn’t bother them. After we got past the first fake tree, however, they started noticing that some of the zombies were Alfs. I knew that all of the humanoid zombies in the dungeon were brainless clones of the races, but the recruits were confused by the fact that even a head shot didn’t seem to stop these zombies. As we got deeper the zombies started getting faster and stronger, with more accurate attacks when we let them get close enough to swing at us. Once the Runner Zombies started appearing, so did Solin zombies. The recruits were able to take them out fast enough that only a few got into melee range. Then the Solin runners joined in, along with undead versions of many of the animals that attacked us. Some of these were actually recycled corpses from the battle a month ago, but most of those were already recycled for raw materials. They had nothing on them worth taking, but for every one that was killed they earned one to five zerka, depending on how strong, and therefore how serious of a threat the creature was.
After about two hours one of the riflemen, Park, saw an unusual tree. It was over a meter in diameter, and its bark was squishy and leaking in various places. “Hey Johnson, you used to work in an orchard, right? What kind of tree is this?”
Johnson, another rifleman, walked over. “Just because I used to grow fruit trees doesn’t mean I know everything about trees.” He looked over the tree. “Well, I can tell you one thing, it’s dead. These soft spots are rotting.” They then realized that this was true of everything they had been fighting until now. They looked at each other, then started to turn around and run. Before he could do so, however, Johnson was pulled off of his feet by several half rotten roots which had wrapped around his ankles. He started being dragged towards the trunk of the tree as the men opened fire on it. Chunks of wood and bark were blown off, but it barely effected the tree monster that had opened a pit underneath it where the bones of several creature already were. I hadn’t even had to put them there. It had been capturing and eating its fellow zombies since waking up about two weeks ago.
Seeing that Johnson was almost at the pit, Park ran over and drew his sword to try and cut the roots that held his friend. As he drew back, however, a branch slapped him in the back of the head, knocking him over and disorienting him. While it was just a slap, it was like getting slapped by a bodybuilder.
That’s when two particle beams hit it. One blew a hole most of the way through a branch, causing it to break off, and the other hit the trunk, leaving a ten centimeter diameter, thirty centimeter deep hole in the trunk. The branches and root spasmed in pain, loosening the hold on Johnson enough for him to pull free and back away, helping Park run as well.
Once everyone was out of range of its branches the roots started lifting rocks from underground and throwing them at the gunmen. They didn’t hit particularly hard, as the men were wearing armor, but they did annoy the men. It took another thirty seconds and six more particle beam attacks before the tree stopped moving. The men caught their breath, and the two power armored people carefully checked around it, seeing if it was still alive or was hiding any treasure. Originally, I had buried wooden chests at the roots of every plant zombie, but this one had eaten the chest, so they found bits of scrap steel, gold, and technology in the pile of bones underneath it. They weren’t sure what the technology was supposed to be originally, but they kept it anyway. I wasn’t sure either, but that was mostly because the technology in the chest was randomized from a list of one hundred zerka or less homeware products. It could be anything from the System version of a hotplate to a food storage bracelet, a portable mini-fridge.
Now that they knew what to look for, they killed seven more zombie trees over the next three hours, gathering loot from chests that weren’t destroyed. Now that the men had two atmospheric water condensers in the shape of a thermos and one Food Storage Bracelet, they didn’t have to worry about carrying water or food with them the next time they took a day trip to the dungeon.
Eventually we made it to a cave in the center of the undead forest. There was a single entrance, but the cave was over ten meters tall, so the men took a supper break before we entered. Once we were finished, we went inside where the men saw a six meter tall undead Jotun. It sat in the middle of the cave and held the body of a zombie tree, using it as a club.
Seeing the enemy the men pointed their weapons at the Jotun. I pulled out my flying disk and flew up to avoid the battle. The Jotun saw me and stood up, thinking I was going to attack it, but the men used the opportunity to open fire. It held the tree in front of it, blocking one particle beam but not the other. Its chest gained a five centimeter deep third degree burn, and the tree had a hole drilled mostly through it. The other weapons opened fire, but the pistol couldn’t do more than annoy it, and the rifles only bruised it.
Seeing it begin its charge at the men, those with pistols drew their swords instead. When it got to them it swung its club, Samantha barely dropping the cannon and jumping in the way in time. While it still hit several of the men, it only had enough force to knock them over and break a few bones instead of killing them or putting them in critical condition. Sam wrapped her arms around its arm and dug her feet in, trying to hold it. It simply lifted her off the ground and slammed its arm down, damaging the suit but thankfully doing little to her.
The swordsmen ran over and started slicing at its legs. The swords were able to penetrate with various degrees of effectiveness, and when someone managed a good chop on its Achilles tendon it fell to the ground. They were quick to attack its other joints. It tried to fight them off by swinging an armored person at them, but, while several people were hit and badly injured, their sheer numbers gave Rogers a chance to land a blow on the back of its neck, using the full power of the armor to sever its spinal cord and causing it to stop moving.
Rogers finished removing its head just to make sure it stayed down, and the men were treated for their injuries. After all of the treatment was finished, they went down the set of stairs behind some vines at the back of the cave, finding the treasure room. They got another set of power armor, this time with one of those shield generators built in, and several hundred kilos of various metals, about two thousand zerka in value. They were a bit disappointed by what this room contained, but I had done that on purpose, as there were two secrets hidden here, one a hidden door which contained a six-meter tall set of power armor and a four meter long plasma sword, meant to look like the Jotun’s gear, worth seven to eight thousand in scrap as it was too big for them to wear, and one which had a robotic assistant worth ten thousand.
After that, they had to make a decision. Should they continue to the third floor, with several members of their group badly injured, or should they continue to try and defeat floor three? Eventually Stark won the others over to his plan; they could go down there to see what it was like and if they couldn’t handle the enemy, they would come back to the teleporter and leave the dungeon. If they could take the enemy, they would keep fighting until they were two weak to continue or someone died. Maybe they could even clear the third floor and empty another treasure room.
The third floor looked quite different that the other two. The teleporter sat in the middle of a steel room, with steel grating for floors in many areas. There was a sliding door on one wall which had a sign stating “Welcome to the Space Station”. This was actually a prototype of a Station I wanted to one day build around Earth, but Vera estimated a cost of one hundred million zerka unless I found an appropriate asteroid and gave it a settlement core and the other things needed to build such a station. Here underground, however, it only had a value of about two million, as steel was cheap and it didn’t need to be transported far.
Stark, in the new set of armor but with only a rifle, opened the door to see a long corridor with doors on both sides. Lights flickered overhead, and there was some damage on the walls and floor. “Why does this seem familiar?” he asked.
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“Probably because you are a fan of a certain 80’s sci fi horror movie franchise.” I answered. “I am too, so I went looking for the closest thing the system knew about, and got pretty close.”
Several of the men looked at me, realizing what I meant, then a scratching noise sounded at the end of the hallway. They turned to look at it as the other two heavies stepped into the corridor with Stark and shouldered their weapons. A few seconds later a silver quadruped with a tough exoskeleton and metallic teeth ran at them at around fifty kph. They opened fire and it collapsed about twenty meters ahead of them. “Seriously? You decided to see if the System had THOSE?” asked Paul. I nodded and an acrid smell of chemicals came from a bit of smoke near the dead creature. “Of course you made sure they had acid for blood.” I shrugged. “Ok, everyone, let’s see if we can get Mr. Burke to the end of the level.” He sighed, and we set out.
The side rooms were everything from storage of building materials to MRE storage, to a machine shop and a medical room. I had tried to avoid using proper System devices, as their value would mean that anyone that made it this far would be looting them, but I had put in fake versions with extremely limited functionality, worth several hundred to a thousand in salvage.
In the disheveled and slightly damaged medical bay was the first object that was definitely worth taking; a medical android. I had given it a bit of damage, the left side of its face being melted off and its left arm being ripped off at the elbow. It was actually built with the damage, because I had moral issues with building a human-like machine and then essentially torturing it, and had insisted that it only have a basic AI, not a good one like Vera, Gary, or Bob.
“Hello hu-hu-human settlers.” it stuttered as it twitched slightly. “Several of you appear injured. Do you require medical assis-is-is-is-istance?”
The healthy men looked at the injured men and one of the men with a broken rib shrugged then winced. “Why not. Do what you can.” He went over and laid down on a medical exam table. “You got a name, doc?” the man asked.
“I am medical android four-two-seven.” The android said, folding a scanning device over the man to look at his injuries.
“Well that’s boring.” he said, laying there. A minute or so later, the doctor injected him with a dose of medical nanites that were programmed to specifically repair the damage it had found. “It should take approximately nine minutes to set the bone and properly brace it, but will take over three hours to fully heal the fracture.” The android said, the put a hand under him to help him sit up.
“Thanks, doc.” the man said, getting out of the bed so that someone else could use it. An hour later all of the serious injuries were treated and the doctor had moved onto the minor injuries. Remembering that Sam had gotten bitten on the first floor the men insisted that she get the bite treated. She had gotten out of the power armor in order to stretch, as it limited your mobility slightly. She told them it was fine, and that she didn’t need treatment, but the men insisted and pushed her towards the doctor.
The doctor stared at her for a few second, then smiled. “I cannot treat you, as I lack the necessary skills and equipment. Perhaps you will find another way to repair yourself later. Next patient please.”
“Hey, what do you mean refusing her?” said Rogers. “Are you programmed to not fix women or something?” Samantha was the only woman among the recruits after all.
“I’m sorry, all patient medical data is strictly confidential.” the doctor replied.
Rogers stepped forward and raised his fist to punch the android, but Sam pushed him away. “It’s fine. It was only a minor injury anyway. Besides, didn’t the croc get you? You should get that treated too.”
Rogers sighed and calmed down a bit. “Fine. I’ll let the sexist android treat me.”
Soon, every injured person except Sam was treated and the heavies had put their armor back on. “You think we could take some of those medical nanites with us?” one of the men asked.
“Better yet, let’s take the doc with us.” said Stark, “since none of us know how to program them.” Rogers didn’t seem to thrilled by the idea, but the others liked it.
“My diagnostic ability will be severely limited outside of this room, as I will be without my diagnostic equipment, but I can follow you if you wish.” The others agreed, so the doctor grabbed a briefcase which doubled as a nanite programming station, and the last 240ml of nanites from the medicine cabinet, a gray goo which filled a glass cylinder. One liter of nanites cost about ten thousand zerka to make, due to the extremely rare minerals nanites contained, but I had made several tons of them to fill the air of Sanctuary and the dungeon, so the half liter I stocked this room with wasn’t that significant.
With that we headed out. The initial corridor connected to another, which connected to another in a complicated pattern. The men occasionally looted goods from some of the storage devices between killing alien monsters, but other than ten sets of under-armor they didn’t find much worth taking for the first hour. Around an hour and a half in, however, they found the armory. It mostly contained crates of ammo, rail pistols, basic armor, and swords, but there was also a case of four rifles and an auto-turret. The men refilled their ammo but ignored the armor, pistols and swords, as Paul didn’t have that much inventory space to store them. They did, however, give Paul the auto-turret to store, and give the four rifles to four of the men.
Now that they were better armed, we spent the next four hours walking through corridors and climbing up and down ladders, clearing out alien nests of various sizes, and occasionally finding human skeletons which were covered it bite marks, usually in what was presumably their quarters.
We eventually made our way to a cargo bay. The first thing the men noticed was that there were four exoskeletons in this room. They had been painted yellow, had a big rotating warning light on top, and were slightly bigger than a person with a steel cage covering the wearer. Those that had seen the movies instantly knew that meant this was a boss room and warned the others.
Four of the pistol men hopped into the cargo loaders and drew their swords. Just as they were booting the machines up, a set of cargo doors opened in the center of the room’s floor and a giant version of the creatures from before started climbing out. While the others were roughly the size of a large dog or horse, this one was large enough to serve as a horse for the Jotun from the last floor. The men immediately opened fire, making the monster bleed but not slow down. A stray shot hit a panel on the opposite wall and a warning sounded as air and loose objects started moving towards the monster that was just making it out of the pit.
Sam and Rogers split up, with Rogers running to the left and Sam to the right. While they and Stark were the only ones that would survive depressurization, as the suits had their own air supply, the two of them also had the only two weapons that could do significant damage to this creature. They both opened fire, but the five second recharge cycle of the weapon meant that the creature only had to occasionally block their attack or take fairly serious injury.
As the creature’s blood started melting the metal of the floor, leaving holes large enough to step through, the men and I started grabbing on to the wall to avoid the increasing wind that was pulling us towards the cargo door. Stark ran to the back wall where a sign saying ‘Dock Chief’s office’ was. If there was an emergency override for the door it would probably be near the boss’s office. The door was locked, but beside it he found the panel that had been shot. “Shit.” he said, as he pulled the panel open. He was an electrician in one of the city’s factories before the plague, but this wasn’t exactly what he was expecting. Upon opening it, however, he found that the wiring wasn’t all that different than what he had once worked on. The only damage to the electronics was a fuse that had been shot. With the thick fingers of the power armor, though, he couldn’t remove the pieces of the fuse to replace them with one of the extras the panel had inside it.
He thought quickly, then remembered that he had kept one of the gold coins from the rat room in his inventory. If anyone asked it was for good luck, and only until they got out of the dungeon. He had the coin appear in his hand and used it to short out the fuse holder. When he did the panel lit back up and he hit the emergency close button for the outer door.
The door started closing, but it would still take fifteen seconds or so to finish doing so. In the mean time, Sam and Rogers were firing on the monster one handed every five seconds as it and them tried to hold onto the floor. Its injuries weakened it too much, however, and Sam and Rogers targeted its arms or legs any time it managed to grab on, so it was halfway through the outer door as the door caught it. As the door was on emergency close mode, it simply applied more force to try and seal the breech, crushing the monster. Stark pushed the button to emergency close the inner door too, but with no obstruction, that door managed to close before the outer one.
The air pressure stabilized after thirty seconds or so, and the men gasped for breath. It had taken all most of them, minus those with power loaders, had to hold on while the wind sucked the breath from their lungs, pulled them towards certain doom, and the rapid pressure change burst blood vessels. “We could probably use a doctor.” said Paul. “Does anyone know where it is?”
The men that could do so looked around, but no one knew. After a few seconds I raised my hand. “I shoved him and the nanite case into my inventory.” I said, then ordered Vera to dump him and the kit on the ground.
“That isn’t g-g-g-good.” he said, as he programmed a needle full of nanites to fix depressurization issues. He then went around injecting everyone with one milliliter of them.
Ten minutes later we had recovered enough to get up. Stark, Rogers, and Sam came over and helped us up. “We found the treasury.” said Stark. “Through the window of the office I can see several crates. There’s also a ‘Cargo teleporter’ over in that corner that will let us go to the forth floor.” That last statement made the men groan. “Yeah, we should probably use it to go back to Sanctuary.”
He found an ID badge for a fictitious Cargo boss in the attached break room, and opened the office. The crates contained twenty four cheap pressure suits along with a note to make the workers wear them ‘in case that door opens again.’ Each of these suits was basically the life support part of the power armor and would conform to the body of the wearer. You could even pass nanites through them, so your spells still worked while wearing them, unlike the power armor. There was also a kit for repairing synthetic flesh and a left arm of an android, just in case anyone brought the doctor with them. Upon further searching they found a false bottom in one of the Boss’s desk drawers which contained a data disk with a random number of Zerka between five and ten thousand, in this case 6237. There was a diary in there which contained the boss’s plans to run off to Mars with his friend’s wife, and the data disk was the funds he embezzled so far for that purpose, but all of them ignored the lore I made up for this floor and just took the money.
Once they were certain that they had searched the area, and had decided not to take the random power tools and tool kits I scattered around the area for flavor, the four guys with cargo loaders stepped onto the teleporter, followed by all the people trying not to get stepped on, and we returned to Sanctuary.
It was nine seventeen PM by the time we got back, and everyone was exhausted, so Paul treated them all to a drink at the bar before they headed back to the mine. There they left the cargo loaders near the warehouse and assigned the Doctor to their clinic before debriefing and splitting the loot. As I was just an observer, I refused a share of the loot, but as there were exactly the right number of pressure suits, they insisted that I take one. I set it up as a separate outfit Vera could equip on me in emergencies, with the under armor underneath it. About eleven o’clock, I told everyone goodbye and headed home. I had forgot to tell Di that I might be out late, and wanted to get home before she fell asleep.