Archimedes
“So can you tell me again why we’re out here fully clothed at five-fucking-a.m. and not doing naughty things in the very nice, comfortable bed?” Lucy griped as she walked down the street from the aquarium. She zipped the gift shop jacket over her system armor, a sexy silk negligee. “I feel like a fucking college kid waking up extra early, trying to get extra credit, but you won’t even give me the D I’d need to pass.”
“Seventeen cards, Lucy,” Archimedes said as he walked beside her. He was wearing blue jeans, an aquarium t-shirt, and his system fireman’s jacket, and he held his lizardman spear firmly in his left hand. “I’m seventeen cards from upgrading Undead Delight to gold rank finally, and getting an upgrade for the one skill I’m stuck with permanently at this point.”
“Is that why it’s just us three?” Lucy asked. “You don’t want to share the loot with the others?”
“It would have just been me . . .” Archimedes hesitated to finish the statement when saw the pain in Lucy’s eyes. Despite her jokes and kidding, he had seen that look since he returned from the lizardmen world—a deep-seated fear, attached to the memory of him being swallowed by the portal at the stadium. She had stayed close ever since as if she feared losing him again. “Well, I guess I don’t mind the extra tagalong, but it still would have been nice if it were just us.”
“I have ears and a name you know,” Emma grumbled from a couple of feet behind Archimedes and Lucy. “And feelings too . . . if that mattered.”
“Awwww . . . she’s right. We can’t let our little ladybug Marinette be excluded from conversations,” Lucy teased.
“I got to know, do you really just not know her name,” Archimedes asked, “or is this some sort of like . . . Lucy-esque way of bonding? I mean, are you trying to bully her for interrupting us in the shower last night?”
“What? How dare you! I would never bully our little precious friendly fire machine—”
“IT WAS ONE TIME! I make one single mistake, and now you never let me live it down!” Emma protested quickly.
“Twice! IT WAS TWICE, YOU PAIN IN THE ASS BRAT!” Lucy shot back. “And that was two out of two times we let you have a gun in a fight!”
“I mean, you can’t blame her. I find it hard not to focus on your butt too,” Archimedes remarked, trying his best to steer the conversation away from a constant point of contention between the two. He’d lost count of the number of times he heard the story of Emma shooting Lucy in the last two days alone.
“Well, either way, when Miss Benedict Arnold learns how to tell teammates and giant zombie creatures apart, then we can talk,” Lucy harrumphed.
“Hold up. I smell shit,” Archimedes said, extending his hand out to stop Lucy from walking any farther forward.
“What? I’m not bullshitting. If she goes—”
“No, I didn’t say ‘bullshit.’ I said I smell ‘shit,’ Lucy. You smell that too, right?”
A startlingly loud fart echoed through the alleyway to their left. The trio looked down the alley warily.
“I don’t see anything, just piles of garbage bags on that dumpster,” Lucy observed. The wind shifted, and with it came a putrid stench like three-week-old diapers swimming in puke. The smell intensified as the heaps of trash stirred, like something was living among the forgotten refuse.
“Shit, something is in there!” Emma shouted, her bone spear appearing in her hand.
Emma's statement was followed by a scream as they saw a thin man, his eyes wide with terror, sprinting out of the towering mountain of trash, a grease-stained bag of food held to his chest. He had barely taken two steps when a long, fat, purple tendril made of ooze shot out from the pile and ensnared him, suspending him from the ground. A gasp escaped from the group as a massive gunk monster emerged from the trash. It was shaped like a marshmallow, dripping with a purple goop and standing at least five feet tall though its weight had to have been hundreds of pounds due to its mass. The creature's upper half split open and revealed a gaping maw with no teeth. As the scavenger screamed in terror, the ooze tendril morphed into a huge hand and dropped him into the creature's mouth.
Archimedes felt a powerful sting as his life force surged into his spear and it glowed with energy. He lunged forward and stabbed the sludge monster dead center, causing it to explode in all directions. Unfortunately, the man had already been melted down by whatever the monster was made of, leaving only his bones behind.
“Well, that was easy,” Archimedes remarked as he swung his spear to fling the remains of the creature from its haft.
Seconds later, the scattered bits of goo moved and started to creep across the ground like tiny purple slugs as they slid back toward the skeletal remains of the devoured man.
“Holy Schwarzenegger on a stick! We have a T-1000 situation here!” Lucy yelled as a metallic pistol appeared in her hand. She fired a red laser beam at the congealing streams of ooze. The beam burnt a small hole in the sludge, but the creature didn’t seem fazed as the hole closed up a moment later.
“Ugh! Don’t you old farts ever play video games?” Emma blurted out. “That’s a fucking slime!”
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“Language, you little shit!” Lucy snapped back.
“What?! You cuss all the time!”
“Well, this— Crap! Get back!”Lucy shouted as the creature's large hand rapidly re-formed and reached out to grab her around the chest. She scrambled backward, firing round after round from her laser pistol, but the creature seemed unfazed, the bullet holes healing up almost immediately.
The thing oozed closer to her, its gaping maw opening wide, and the pieces of the creature that she had blasted off earlier were now reattaching to its body. Desperately trying to back away from the monster, Lucy stumbled, and Archimedes quickly spun around and reached down to help her, but the monster snatched Lucy before Archimedes could grab her hand. It hoisted her into the air, using one hand to keep her suspended there as it reached out with its gaping jaws, ready to devour her.
Emma ran forward, holding up her hand as she yelled out, “No Brainer,” sending out a dark cone of energy from her palm that froze the monster in place before she turned to Archimedes and shouted, “Get her!”
“Thanks,” Archimedes said as he launched his spear with all of his might, watching it spin in a blur as it cut through the air. Its razor-sharp edge sliced through the tentacle that held Lucy and wedged deep into the brick wall behind the beast. He activated Leap Rush, launching himself forward with superhuman speed and catching Lucy just before she could hit the ground.
He crash-landed into the wall with a thud, setting Lucy down softly before vaulting to retrieve his spear. As he turned around, he saw that the slime monster had switched targets and was bearing down on Emma.
Crap, how the freaking hell do we kill this thing? Archimedes thought.
Lucy kept her distance and fired her laser pistol at the giant purple blob while Emma scrambled away from the creature's twitching tentacles.
Archimedes stabbed with his spear, the holes he made in the body of the monster recovering as soon as he withdrew his weapon. He was considering just fleeing when Archimedes noticed a small, shiny metallic object at the center of the oozing mass. His gaming instincts told him it might be a weak spot.
Just as Emma was grabbed off the ground by one of the tentacles and lifted high above toward the monster's open maw, Archimedes took a few steps back and charged up his spear. With a mighty yell, he leapt into the air and landed directly on top of the slime monster. He could feel a sharp stinging as the creature's acidic coating started to burn him, but he ignored it and stabbed his spear through the ooze, setting off the charge built up in the tip as the spear’s point dug into the metallic object at its center.
There was a loud crack, and the monster disintegrated into a million tiny pieces, sending clumps of a slimy off-white substance splashing everywhere. It spread like an oil slick, drenching the three adventurers in the fetid ooze and coating their bodies with a foul-smelling slime.
“Mother. Fuck,” Lucy cursed as the thick, putrid substance seeped through her clothes and coated her skin.
Meanwhile, Emma, who had fallen to the ground after the monster died, was on her hands and knees vomiting, retching all over the ground as she added her own contributions to the pools of gross liquids.
Archimedes, covered in just as much rank sewer stew as Emma, just stood there, already having gotten used to terrible situations like this on the other planet. One time, he had quite literally been forced to kill and eat a poop snake for survival.
“You know,” Archimedes wondered aloud for a moment as he stared at his garbage-soaked garb, “despite the entire city being destroyed, there wasn’t really trash in the other world . . .”
“Arc! This is not the fucking time to be bragging about your year-long trip through europe,” Lucy shouted as she looked at the goo on her, looked at her laser pistol, and then looked back at her lower half like she was debating if it’d be worth it to just try to shoot herself or the clothes or anything to remove the smell. “This is just so fucking gross.”
“Why are you the one complaining?” Arc asked. “Can’t you use that pristine charm thing from having 12 charisma to clean yourself instantly?”
“What? I . . . Huh. Right. I can,” Lucy replied, blinking for a moment as she moved her hands to clearly access her stat screen. “I forgot I’ve been sober long enough that the charisma debuff from the Boozie Broad perk has worn off.”
“Lucky . . . ‘CAUSE I JUST TOOK A SHOWER!” Emma screamed as she regained herself enough to wipe her mouth and stand back up, the tips of her long hair now covered in vomit.
“See? This is what you get for not being nicer to your teammates. If you just learned to stop talking back and stop shooting us, maybe your charisma would go up with your next level,” Lucy lectured before she practically darted out of the alleyway filled with the shit-smelling sludge and then activated the suggested ability, cleaning herself instantly from head to toe.
“Aww, there you go. See? Everything’s fine now, so come give me a hug,” Archimedes said jokingly as he raised his arms up slowly and began walking toward her.
Lucy, lifting her gun and pointing it at Archimedes, quickly backed up into the street. “Take another step closer, Arc, and I’m gonna Emma you in the face.”
“‘Emma’ me in the face? Have you seriously not gotten tired of bringing that up?” Archimedes sighed, his arms dropping to his sides.
“IT ONLY HAPPENED TWICE!” the young woman screamed in protest yet again.
“Pthhhhhhh.”
The fart sound and rank smell cut their conversation short, and the three turned to see four more oozing purple monsters creeping toward them from the piles of trash in the alleyway. More fart sounds came from farther down the street from another row of rotting garbage dumpsters.
“Oh, not more of them,” Lucy moaned. “I just got clean, and I can only use that stupid Perfectly Pristine ability once a day.”
Archimedes smiled as he watched the oozes approach. “Hey, more monsters means more cards, and that puts me that much closer to upgrading Undead Delight to gold.” He charged his spear and noted that his yellow fireman’s jacket had several new holes in it from where the smelly ooze creatures had burned it. “Plus, we now know how to kill these things. I’ll blow them up, and you and deadeye destroy its core. Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy.”
“What does that mean, old man?” Emma asked.
“It means, shut the hell up and stab the slimes, kid.” Lucy’s eyes widened as an idea came to her, “Ooor, we can use you as bait. You know, throw you in the dumpsters to see if there are more melted Barneys.”
“So, I’ll stab-stab after you make them explode, right, Mr. Archimedes?” Emma confirmed with great alacrity, clearly trying to solidify his plan over Lucy’s.
“Hey, ‘Mr. Archimedes’ makes it sound like I invented a screw. But yeah,” Archimedes replied, and then, before either of the women could say anything more, he leapt forward to take on the closest garbage monsters, yelling, “For the shower!”