The Weaponized: The Complete LitRPG Series

by Victor Deckard

  The creature was not alone, though. The first scorpion crawled off the dead body, and then several more began to pull themselves out of it. All of them then scurried toward us, curling their tails and opening their claws.

  “Back up, guys,” Nate said as he took a step backward.

  “The hell with this shit,” Vlad snarled as he brought up his submachine gun.

  Half a second later, the Russian opened up on the creatures scurrying toward us. The rest of us followed suit. The sound of gunfire filled the cave. The roar was almost deafening. The four of us fired a volley of controlled bursts. Our bullets drilled through the scorpions’ bodies, spraying pieces of black shell and yellow innards over the ground.

  We killed all of the scorpions before they would have reached us. We stood next to each other, tightly holding our weapons in our hands. Severed tails, legs, and pincers twitched on the cave floor. Blood poured from the small bodies.

  No more creatures showed up.

  “Fuck,” Vlad finally said. “Fucking scorpions. I hate all creatures that have more than four limbs. At least these things were not as big as those spiders.”

  “They might’ve been babies,” Nate observed, looking at what was left of the scorpions.

  Vlad jerked his head to look at the British guy. “Don’t tell me there may be bigger fuckers in this cave.”

  “I don’t know for certain, of course,” Nate said as he shrugged his shoulders. “Anyways, let’s go on. Our mission isn’t over yet. There must be more of these things and the sound of gunfire will surely attract them, so let’s hurry up.”

  Without waiting for the blond-haired Russian to reply, Nate began walking down the tunnel. I stepped over the mess of severed scorpions’ legs and pincers and followed him. Alyson hurried after us. As to Vlad, he had no choice but to do the same.

  It was not long before a wet, slurping sound reached our ears. Slowly, we were moving toward where the disgusting sounds were coming from, and soon we found what was making them. We aimed our flashlights at the third The Weaponized warrior corpse twitching on the cave floor.

  The body ripped open and the ribcage was extended as several scorpions inside clawed their way through the flesh. They pulled themselves out of the body, splashing blood over the cave floor, and turned to face us. Their pincers and tails lifted high into the air in a combat posture, and then all the creatures scurried toward us.

  We opened up on them, firing three-round bursts into each of the targets. Notifications of received experience points popped up in my HUD every time I killed or wounded one of the creatures. We continued to fire at the scorpions, our bullets drilling through them, exploding their bodies into gooey shards until all of the scorpions were dead.

  “Damn,” Vlad said. “I wonder how many more there are those nasty arachnids in this cave.”

  I winked at the Russian and said in an encouraging voice, “The whole cave must be crawling with them.”

  Vlad shot me an angry look, but before he could say anything, Nate said, “That is the third member of that team, guys. We need to find the fourth, the last one, before we can get out of here.”

  “He or she is as dead as the previous three ones,” Vlad said.

  “If he or she is dead, we need to find their body,” Nate said. “So let’s don’t waste time talking. Let’s go.”

  We continued on, making our way deeper into the cave. We hoped we would find the body of the fourth member soon so we could get the heck out of that freaky place. None of us believed that the last member would be alive, so we were looking for another dead body. However, we could not find it. Everywhere we directed our flashlights, we saw only rocky formations and huge boulders.

  At some point, a hissing sound reached our ears.

  “What the heck was that?” Vlad whispered.

  We stopped and pointed our flashlights ahead. The hissing sound repeated, and then we heard the sound of scurrying footsteps. Something was moving down the tunnel toward us, and very fast at that.

  “What the heck is that?” Vlad asked as he took a step backward.

  “Whatever it is, it must be large,” I said.

  A second later, another scorpion showed up in the light of our flashlights. Only this one was way larger than the other ones we had killed. The creature in front of us was as big as a cow. It ran down the tunnel toward us, its claws opened, its tail high in the air, ready to attack.

  Vlad deployed his battle drone and then brought up his submachine gun to aim at the creature. As he squeezed the trigger, the large arachnid slammed into him. The rigid exoskeleton connected with his body, knocking the Russian to the ground and sending his bullets into the cave ceiling.

  One of its pincers snapped shut on his right arm, preventing Vlad from getting an angle on the creature. The claw tightened its grip, and Vlad emitted a high-pitched scream of pain. I thought I heard the sound of his forearm snapping. The scorpion lashed its tail, stabbing its stinger into the Russian’s chest.

  His battle drone opened up on the large arachnid with the machine gun it was equipped with. The rest of us started firing our weapons on the monster as well. Gunshots and Vlad’s screams echoed around the cave.

  The bullets slammed into the scorpion’s rigid exoskeleton like hail on a rooftop but with nearly no effect. The nasty creature continued to maul the Russian, totally ignoring us firing at it. Above the monster could be seen its health bar. When a bullet struck, it hardly shrank. We dealt little to no damage to the creature. Something was clearly off. The scorpion’s exoskeleton seemed to be bulletproof.

  Suddenly, Nate yelled, “Aim for the head, guys! The shell is weakest near the eyes and the mouth!”

  I shifted my aim and fired off a short burst of rounds on the scorpion’s head. The bullets cracked the shell, weakening it. Nate was right. We continued to fire at the monster’s head. It was not long before our rounds breached the shell completely, allowing our next bullets to drill into the monster’s brain.

  Now we were dealing real damage to the scorpion. Its health bar shrank by about five percent every time one of our bullets drilled into the monster’s head.

  Now that it was hurt, the scorpion let go of barely alive Vlad and turned its attention to us. It hissed aggressively before launching itself at us. Nate was quick enough to use his Active Ability, employing an energy shield in front of him.

  The creature slammed against the bluish, translucent wall of the energy shield. The force of the impact stunned the creature for a brief moment. We continued to fire our submachine guns at the monster, our bullets having no trouble going through the bluish wall. Chunks of black shell ripped from the arachnid’s head. Yellowish blood and pieces of flesh and brain matter sprayed, pouring over the ground.

  The scorpion could not get through the shield, so it tried to run around the energy wall. Yet Nate turned as well, keeping the shield between us and the creature at all times, preventing the monster from getting within striking distance.

  After the scorpion realized it could not get to us without destroying the shield, it began striking the bluish wall with its tail, stabbing its stinger into it.

  However, we managed to finish off the creature before it would have destroyed the shield. The black eyes of the monster exploded into a cloud of yellow mist, and the creature finally collapsed to the cave floor, dead.

  We then ran toward the Russian, whose body motionlessly lay splayed out on the ground. He was alive but barely.

  “Is here alive?” Alyson asked with genuine sincerity in her voice.

  “Doesn’t look like it,” I said with a smirk. “Can’t say I’m sorry. He was a real pain in the ass, y’know.”

  Vlad turned his head ever so slightly to glare up at me. He tried to say something but no sound was produced. But I managed to read his lips, “Screw you, Dave.”

  “The scorpion’s paralyzed him with its venom, I guess,” Nate said before turning his head to look at our healer. “Think you can h
eal him, Alyson?”

  “I’ll try,” the girl replied before stepping closer to Vlad’s body and extending her left arm toward him.

  A beat later, bluish energy flowed from her palm toward the Russian. In just a few seconds, the girl’s Active Ability completely patched Vlad up. It neutralized the venom in his body and healed the wounds in his chest the scorpion had inflicted upon him with its stinger. Even Vlad’s once almost severed arm was whole again.

  Alyson’s Active Ability was incredible. It was a shame that her magic-like healing abilities worked only on the four of us. As we had found out on our first mission, she could not heal other people with her abilities.

  The Russian got to his feet.

  “How are you feeling?” Alyson asked with concern in her voice.

  “Fine,” Vlad replied. He did not bother to thank Alyson for healing him. Vlad was just being Vlad.

  “Dang it,” he said. “I’m fed up with this place.”

  “Thought you like action,” Nate said with a small smile on his face.

  “Yes, I like action,” Vlad shot back, “but in video games where you can’t get actually hurt. Actually experiencing pain sucks.”

  “Let’s finally finish the mission and get the heck outta here,” I said.

  “Agreed,” Nate replied.

  Without saying anything else to one another, we continued deeper into the cave. We soon reached a large opening and went through it to find ourselves on a ledge. It was long and wide enough for all of us to stand on it at the same time.

  About three meters below and in front of us, there was an enormous cavern. Before getting into it, we decided to check it out from our vantage point. We played our flashlights around the cavern, passing them over the walls, floor, and ceiling. Nothing looked out of place.

  The cavern was so large and deep, the beams of our flashlights could not even reach the far wall. It looked like we were going to have to climb down from the ledge.

  Before we would have gotten in the cavern, though, something caught my eye. I shifted the beam of my flashlight to the center of the room. There was something lying on the cavern floor. In the light of my flashlight, I saw the body of another person. It was a female, and since she was missing half her head and her body was half-eaten, she was clearly dead. The poor woman was dressed in the black-and-red uniform of our organization, confirming that she was the fourth, and the last member of the missing four-person team.

  A text message popped up in front of me, saying that our mission was complete and we could return to the dropship. So we did not have to climb down in the cavern after all.

  “Okay, guys,” Nate said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Gladly,” Vlad put in.

  As I started to turn around, my ears caught the sound of scraping on the walls. For a second, I thought it came from behind me, but when I looked over my shoulder, I saw nothing behind me.

  “Did you guys hear it?” Vlad it.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Where did it come from?”

  “I think from there,” Nate replied pointing at the cavern in front of him.

  We played our flashlights around the enormous empty space once again but did not detect anything suspicious at first. Then I saw something but did not immediately realize what was happening. It seemed as though the walls of the cavern came to life and began moving. A moment later, a realization struck us.

  “Oh my Gosh,” Alyson whispered.

  There were giant scorpions in the cave, each of them the size of the arachnid we had killed a couple of minutes earlier. All of them clung to the walls, the floor, and the ceiling. Until that moment all of them had been completely motionless, which was why they had blended with the surrounding area so well we had not even been able to notice them.

  But now that all of them were moving their bodies, legs, and tails, we realized that the entire cavern was rife with black shapes moving around. More of them crawled out of various cracks in the walls, filling the cavern. There were dozens and dozens of them in there. And since we did not know how deep the cavern was, there might actually have been hundreds of the giant scorpions in that place.

  Looked like we had stumbled onto their nest.

  And all of them were seeing us.

  “Oh shit,” Vlad yelled. “That’s a lot of scorpions!”

  It was obvious that there was no way we could kill all of them. We did not need to. We found the dead bodies of all the four members of the team we had been looking for. Our mission was complete, so all we needed to do was get the heck out of that scorpion-infested cave in one piece.

  As the giant scorpions began to peel off the cavern walls, we spun around and raced down the tunnel, moving in the direction we had come from. We did not have to look back to know that the giant scorpions gave chase.

  We ran down the tunnel as far as we could. Hissing sounds and footsteps of hundreds of chitin legs reached our ears from behind.

  When I glanced around, I saw lots of giant scorpions emerging from the cavern, contesting among one another to be the first out of the cavern. We sprinted as fast as our legs would carry us, but there was no way we could outrun the overgrown scorpions. So Vlad yelled, “Kolobok, stay here and cover us!”

  Kolobok was the name he had given to his battle drone. As Vlad had told us before this mission, he had named his battle drone after a round-shaped character from a famous Russian fairy tale. He had said that his drone looked exactly like Kolobok because they both were sphere-shaped. It was not true, though. His drone looked like an egg, not a sphere. But sure enough, Vlad had been too stubborn to accept our point, so he had nevertheless decided to call his drone Kolobok.

  Vlad’s flying battle drone stopped following his owner and spun in the air to face the giant creatures. It was not long before we heard the crack of gunfire as the battle drone opened up on the swarm of arachnids scurrying down the tunnel after us.

  We continued to run without looking back to see how many scorpions Vlad’s drone managed to stop, if any.

  Somewhere up ahead was one of the two portals I had set up earlier on. The other one was at the mouth of the cave. As soon as we got into the first one, we would emerge from the second and would be out of the cave. Our vehicle, Humvee, was parked next to the entrance to the cave. So all we needed to do to get out of this place in one piece was reach the first portal. The rest would be easy. Once we hit the Humvee, the scorpions would be no threat to us. Or so I hoped.

  The crack of gunfire behind us suddenly ceased.

  “The motherfuckers musta destroyed Kolobok,” Vlad stated the obvious, panting.

  Nobody replied to him, not willing to waste our breath on talking. The footsteps of hundreds of the giant scorpions were getting closer and closer. We began firing blindly at them as we continued to run forward. I did not know if we damaged some of the scorpions. Not that I cared. We just needed to keep them at bay for a little longer.

  Yet it did not seem like us firing at them discouraged the scorpions. They did not slow down at all.

  At some point, Vlad cried out in panic, “Guys, they are almost on top of us!”

  I glanced back over my shoulders and saw that the scorpions in the lead were about ten meters behind us and closing the gap real fast.

  “Don’t panic,” Nate yelled. “I’m gonna use my ult.”

  He then employed his Ultimate Ability. A dome-shaped energy shield formed around us. The fastest of the scorpions reached the wall of the shield but could not get inside it. While the British guy’s shield was active, we were safe.

  We continued to run as fast as we could. A couple of minutes later, Nate’s shield disappeared. We were completely vulnerable again. The swarm of the scorpions was just a few meters behind us. We did not bother to fire at the creatures. It was no use. All we wanted to do was to get to the portal before the giant arachnids reached us.

  The human-sized portal could be seen up ahead. We sprinted for it as fast as our legs wo
uld carry us. Somehow Vlad reached it first and plunged into it. Nate was the second to reach the portal but instead of diving into it, he stopped and wheeled around.

  “Come on, guys,” he yelled at Alyson and me, waving his hand at us. “Hurry up.”

  The British guy whipped up his submachine gun and opened up on the swarm of scorpions chasing us. Alyson and I reached the portal.

  “Get in, guys,” Nate shouted to us. “I’ll cover you!”

  He then employed his Active Ability to deploy the energy shield as he continued to fire his weapon at the giant scorpions.

  After the girl dived into the portal, I stepped in and a beat later, found myself standing at the mouth of the cave. It was high noon and the sun beat down relentlessly. The climate was hot and humid on this planet.

  Alyson was running toward the Humvee parked nearby. Vlad was already inside the car, looking out the back window. I was a little bit surprised that he was waiting for us instead of just ditching us.

  Alyson looked over her shoulder and glanced at me.

  “Come on,” she cried out to me.

  I burst into a run for the large military-style vehicle. I jerked open the driver’s door and got in the cab. I stabbed the ignition button to start the engine, and the large vehicle roared to life.

  “What did take you so long?” Vlad grumbled from the back seat.

  I did not bother to reply.

  Alyson did not get in the vehicle. The girl stood next to it, staring back at the portal with a look of intense worry on her face. I twisted in the driver’s seat and peered out the back window. Nate was nowhere in sight.

  “I think they got him,” Vlad said. “Let’s get the hell outta here.”

  I jumped out of the vehicle.

  “Where are you going, dammit?” Vlad yelled at me from the vehicle.

  I turned toward the portal in time to see Nate burst out of it. He stopped for a second to get his bearings and then began walking toward the Humvee.

  Alyson squeaked with delight when she saw that Nate was alive and ran toward him.