Axillon99

by Matthew S. Cox

  Nighthawk whined. “I don’t have bullet pistols. Ammo’s annoying.”

  “Annoying beats dead,” yelled Angel813.

  Kavan put his rifle away and pulled a broadsword off his back. The edges glowed with blue light once the vibro-blade kicked on. He glanced at the boot-shaped foot taller than him, and wagged the sword at the party. “This is ridiculous. What am I going to do to that thing with this? It’s like trying to kill someone with a penknife.”

  “Keep stabbing it in the toe,” said Rallek, grinning. “It’s just damage.”

  “It’s silly!” Kavan slashed at the huge metal boot, leaving a gouge in the armor and causing a noticeable chip in its health bar. “Wow this is so stupid. There’s nothing vital in its foot, but it’ll still die if I hit it enough.”

  “Incoming,” shouted Angel813.

  Another barrage of goo missiles went off, plastering the floor with nine more circular zones of glowing green death. Fawkes started running before her missile struck, suffering only one tick of damage from the edge of the disc. She flailed her arms to keep her balance when she stopped short at the start of another patch. Areas of clean floor between the glowing splats wouldn’t be there for long if it kept launching those things.

  “This whole room’s going to be toxic!” shouted Fawkes. “How long do the patches last?”

  “Probably until combat ends,” said Angel813.

  “Go up!” yelled Kavan, pointing his blade at the open floors around the walls. “Second story!”

  Nighthawk and Rallek sprinted for a stairwell.

  Fawkes put her CL32 away and pulled out a pair of vibro daggers. She whined at them being level twenty items. Still, despite their shitty damage (20-40), they’d probably hit harder on this thing than her laser due to its resistances. Unfortunately, they also required getting close. Generally speaking, melee attacks did more damage than ranged. It didn’t exactly make sense, but close-in attacks took more effort than ranged combat, not to mention almost every boss in the game had special short-range attacks to screw over melee people.

  Still, she could be useless at range or take a risk and maybe do something close in.

  Fawkes sprinted forward, earning a ‘what the hell are you doing’ look from Kavan. She stopped on the other side of the robot’s leg and raked her daggers at it as fast as she could swing them.

  “Welcome to melee,” said Kavan. “I didn’t know you specced for it.”

  “I don’t.” She kept slashing, involuntarily grunting with the effort. “But it’s laughing off my laser pistol.”

  Vents on the sides of its legs opened, spewing a green, noxious cloud that expanded to fill an area about ten feet in all directions from the robot, where it mysteriously stopped.

  Jolts just shy of painful whacked her from all angles. Yelping, Fawkes jumped backward to get out of the cloud and wandered into a green slime circle. Her health dipped below twenty percent for a second before three medi-bots appeared around her. She jumped clear of the floor patch and glared hatefully at the haze of green hanging low around the robot’s legs.

  “How am I supposed to melee it with that poison cloud?”

  “In and out,” said Angel813. “Bosses do that all the time. AOO’s got a melee coordinator that calls movement. When the cloud fades, go back in. Time how long it takes to do it again, and jump out the next time before the gas comes.”

  Fawkes groaned.

  “Dammit.” Kavan pounded it in the foot over and over again with his vibro-sword while ducking and weaving around a car-sized fist trying to flatten him.

  Rallek, now on one of the second floor tiers, hit the robot with a direct damage ‘tech bolt.’ The instant the bot took damage, another panel on its chest opened, spraying a barrage of dozens of tiny missiles. In seconds, the entire second-story area glowed with green poison goo.

  Screaming in alarm, Rallek and Nighthawk rushed for the stairs while Angel813 frantically hurled medi-bots at them.

  “It’s boot is taller than I am. Why do they have to make bosses so damned big?” yelled Kavan.

  Fawkes and Angel813 simultaneously deadpanned, “Compensating.”

  Venom Shroud

  15

  The instant the poison cloud faded, Fawkes ran back in and resumed chipping away at it with her knives. Kavan’s sword seemed to be pissing it off the most though, which gave her a small cushion of safety. She Flickered into stealth and double-stabbed it, pulling off an 888 point critical. A three-millimeter section of its life bar fell off.

  Rallek wailed in the distance as Nighthawk’s, “Crap, crap, crap” took on a strange echoing quality.

  “Shit!” screamed Angel813. “You guys got too far away!”

  Fawkes glanced at the party list. Both Nighthawk and Rallek had died. Spinning green coin icons with skulls in them hovered over where they went down, Rallek near the top of the stairs and Nighthawk a few steps behind him, still on the second floor walkway.

  “This isn’t going well,” said Kavan.

  For about six minutes, Fawkes pulled a woodchipper on the robot leg, ducking in and out of range to avoid the poison cloud whenever it sprayed. She’d at least gotten that timing down. Out of every sixty seconds, the cloud existed for fifteen. If only the tank stood in melee range, the robot didn’t even use that, which meant her attempt to be useful caused more damage to hit Kavan. Almost the entire floor had been coated in lime green death at that point, leaving nowhere to stand without taking constant poison damage.

  Once Angel813 pulled a laser pistol and started firing, Fawkes figured the wipe imminent.

  Sure enough, Kavan went down four seconds later. Before Kavan’s body even finished collapsing, a massive robotic fist pounded Fawkes’ body away from her ghost, swatting it fifty or sixty yards across the room. She hit the wall with a loud smack, stuck for a second, and peeled away before falling face down on the ground. Unable to heal herself, and with nowhere to stand, Angel813 dropped to the poison on the floor.

  “Really?” shouted Fawkes’ ghost. “Can’t just kill me, you have to make me look stupid, too?”

  The robot stood straight, no longer in a combat pose, and calmly walked back to the spot where it had emerged. All the boxes and crates that had concealed it rushed back into place, making it appear to be an innocent stack of resources. Patch by patch, the green ooze circles faded away.

  Ghosts of the crew wandered together, assembling by the spot of floor with the trap pressure plate.

  “Well, that sucked,” said Kavan, his spectral voice echoing.

  Angel813 stared down, her expression a confusing mixture of anger and guilt.

  “Hey.” Rallek patted her on the shoulder. “That wasn’t your fault.”

  The medic shrugged.

  “Seriously. We were not ready for this. No one here is blaming the healer.”

  “Thanks.” Angel813 begrudgingly peeled her gaze off the floor. “Still feels like I screwed up.”

  The room blurred.

  Everyone appeared standing outside the facility, no longer ghosts.

  “Damn, the doors are still closed.” Nighthawk put his hand on them by the seam. “Oh, dammit. We’re shut out of here for a week.”

  “Is that supposed to be a raid, or do we just suck that much?” asked Fawkes.

  “Well.” Kavan paced back and forth. “For one thing, we’re energy heavy. None of us have current-level weapons that inflict physical damage. And none of us really have our elemental resistances up.”

  “No one needs ER until level sixty,” said Rallek.

  Fawkes pointed at the huge door. “That’s a raid and it’s not level sixty.”

  He flailed his arms. “They don’t even stat gear with resistances until level fifty-eight or so.”

  “Wait.” Nighthawk raised a finger. “There’s a poison shield mod reward from this quest on Epsilon2. It’s hard for a level thirty-five quest, and the reward is only that mod, so most people skip it.”

  “What’s this mod do?” asked Faw
kes.

  “It’s for a PFF, uhh, personal force field.” Nighthawk tapped his belt at the left hip. “We’d kinda have to get those, too. Basically, extra wearable hit points.”

  “They’re like twenty grand,” said Rallek. “And only add 250 points. No one bothers with them since they go down so fast.”

  “Right.” Nighthawk nodded. “But this mod is ninety-five percent poison resistance.”

  “Oh, that makes sense.” Kavan rubbed his chin. “The PFFs aren’t intended to be used for absorbing general damage. It’s got to be a mechanism to let players selectively tweak elemental resistance for certain boss fights.”

  Fawkes looked at Angel813. “Does Army of One do that?”

  She shrugged. “Yeah I think so. I, umm, didn’t bother. You know that whole ‘too much like work’ thing? I kinda figured being a healer would let me coast a little.”

  “Guess not,” said Nighthawk.

  She laughed. “No, I got rotated out for a damn Niath auramancer. I’m a better AOE healer, but that other girl did all the farming and read the strats and stuff. No big deal. Whatever. I’m here to have fun, not bust my ass. Getting through content eventually is good for me; I don’t have to be first.”

  “Well.” Kavan folded his arms. “Since it’s going to be a couple days before we can get back in there, we might as well go farm up that shield mod… and buy some PFFs to put it in.” He poked Rallek. “Maybe you could go on a weekend-long farming bender and scare up something useful.”

  “Hmm.” Rallek crossed his arms, rubbing his chin. “Medics can craft a performance enhancing serum that increases physical damage dealt. It’s meant for melee characters, but the coding is stupid so it buffs bullet damage, too.”

  Fawkes laughed.

  “Best I can do is some arcane elixirs that increase the bonuses provided by tech armor,” said Rallek. “But I know where to farm the materials for that… and the serum.”

  Angel813 blinked. “Wait, you’re serious? You spent a whole weekend farming herbs?”

  Rallek nodded. “Not a whole weekend. Like a fourteen-hour bender. I pulled in seventeen full stacks of Lotari leaf.”

  She whistled in awe.

  “Damn, dude.” Nighthawk blinked. “You could’ve sold that for mad bank.”

  Rallek grinned. “I did sell a couple stacks.”

  “Okay, so… new plan.” Kavan walked off toward the Stormbringer. “Get that mod. Get shields. Get potions. And we try this again.”

  Fawkes raised a hand. “We all need to get physical weapons, too. The poison patches are a time wipe mechanic. If we don’t kill that robot fast enough, there will be nowhere left to stand.”

  “And going up won’t work either,” said Rallek. “It auto-floods the entire second story with nasty poison. Basically the developers saying ‘No, no, no, don’t do that.’”

  Everyone filed up the ramp into the ship.

  “We have a plan.” Kavan nodded. “Next time, that robot’s going down.”

  “It goes without saying,” added Rallek. “None of us should talk, post, or comment about this fight anywhere.”

  “Next stop: Epsilon2.” Kavan tromped off to the bridge.

  A Little Help

  16

  The shield mod quest had more reason than difficult opponents and an apparently lackluster reward to make it distasteful. Slogging through a mile and a half of sewer tunnel while waist deep in alien fecal matter would haunt Dakota’s nightmares for months. Especially the part about the Simarin poop being insanely slippery.

  She’d slipped and gone under about ten times.

  Some worthless slob of a programmer had to either research or invent what it felt like to have warm, slippery, oily, slime covering a person. After logging off for the night, she took a long shower in the real world, trying to scrub away the feeling. Its stench bothered her the most. The summer she’d been eleven, she’d gotten caught trying to hack the school computer. As punishment, her parents made her clean out a deep freeze cabinet in the garage that had conked out. Five pounds of once-frozen salmon left to steep in its own juices for two months created a yellow-pink sludge that stank with such aggressive awfulness that she’d thrown up twice before her brain could even ascribe a sense of smell to it. Somehow, that alien poop had the same molten-plastic/fishy rot smell, as if the game knew what the worst smell she’d ever experienced was.

  Hours later at the Amazon Café, Dakota still randomly shuddered whenever her brain tortured her with that memory. To make matters worse, the sewer-slog didn’t even result in the shield mod reward; only a data pad drop that started another quest intended for a starship crew, and that mission appeared to give out the shield mod. At Rallek’s insistence, the group didn’t all run the sewers at the same time, in case the competition might be following them. She got her quest link last night, as well as purchased a PFF to put the mod in when they eventually got it. Kavan completed the quest an hour after she ran it. Rallek and Angel813 would suffer the smelly mess tonight, and Nighthawk would do it sometime earlier in the afternoon.

  A black-haired woman in her mid-thirties walked into the café with two tween girls. Both kids remained nose-deep in their smartphones, giggling back and forth with each other while hovering behind their mother.

  “Hi. Welcome to the Amazon Café. What can I get started for you?” asked Dakota.

  “Ooh, her hair is so cool,” said the slightly smaller girl. “Mom, can I get that color?”

  “No,” muttered the woman. “Blue is not an appropriate color for hair.”

  Dakota’s smile turned fake until the taller girl stuck her tongue out at her mother.

  The woman stopped short of frowning at Dakota’s near snicker and stared up at the menus. “Let me get a large caramel latte. A small coconut latte, and a small mocha latte.”

  “Umm…” Dakota’s eyebrows inched up.

  “Yes, I’m fully aware those are coffee drinks. I’m not about to have some teenage flake with blue hair challenge my abilities as a parent. Clearly, you haven’t had a good example of parenting in your life. Please refrain from commenting and just pour coffee like you’re paid to.”

  Dakota blinked. Just think about all the time I’d have for Axillon99 if I quit right now. Her jaw tightened.

  The smaller girl mouthed ‘sorry’ without making a sound.

  I’m such an addict. I’m addicted to having a roof over my head. Her smile more plastic than ever, Dakota set to the task of assembling the drinks. A few minutes later, she set the three cups on the pick-up counter.

  The older daughter grabbed the mocha and made eye contact with Dakota. “Don’t mind her. She’s been pissed off at the world ever since Dad left for a woman half her age.”

  “Ashley Nicole!” roared the woman. “How dare you!”

  “See what I mean?” asked Ashley. “All bitch all the time. It’s not your fault.”

  The other sister clamped both hands over her mouth, her eyes bulging.

  Mom stormed over and glowered at Ashley. “I’ll not be made a fool of by my own daughter.”

  “Too late.” Ashley looked up at her. “You made a fool of yourself by biting off this lady’s head for no reason. Stop letting Dad win. Why are you always so angry?” Calm as can be, Ashley took the other small coffee, walked around her mother, and joined her sister at a table.

  The dumbstruck woman stood there for a second or two staring at Dakota.

  “Can I get you anything else, ma’am?” asked Dakota, electing not to release any of the five or six wiseass comments circling her brain.

  “Some ice for that burn,” said Ashley.

  “Stop it,” whispered the other girl.

  The mother shook her head and sighed before collecting her coffee and joining the girls at the table. Whatever murmured conversation went on between them failed to reach Dakota’s ears. She fantasized about a quest to take the two girls away from their horrible mom and ferry them across the galaxy to a loving-but-absent father. Blake glided by and
shook his head with a ‘geez, some people’ eye-roll.

  A short while later when the little family left, Ashley waved goodbye.

  Dakota spent the next few hours slipping thoughts of Axillon99 in between dealing with people. At every lull, she hopped on her smartphone and hunted for missions that offered a ballistic firearm as a reward. As a general rule, projectile weapons did more damage than lasers, but came with the downside of relatively expensive ammunition that weighed a ton. By way of comparison, her CL32 got 250 shots on a single e-pack, which she could recharge for free. A ballistic handgun of the same level and quality would get only 20 shots or so per magazine, at a cost of like thirty credits per reload. Granted, a blue slug thrower of the same level hit harder, averaging 175-250 damage instead of the 142-213 of her CL32. But… basically unlimited ammo made a strong case for going laser―unless one ran into a boss like the giant robot that took inflated damage from physical attacks and almost nothing from energy.

  The more she read up on it, the more she realized that few creatures had resistance to physical attacks while energy resistances were common. A handful of creatures that did possess physical resistance had tons of it, which probably started players thinking ‘bullets are useless’ after one bad encounter.

  It might not be a bad idea to keep a backup weapon up to date.

  Of course, anything good would have to be a drop. The weapons and armor available from stores represented the lowest baseline of gear for a given level range. Only someone who’d just re-specced their character and needed completely different stat allocations would ever bother with store-bought gear.

  She looked up as the door emitted a ping. A somewhat pudgy pale guy with an old winter coat, long stringy hair, and a creepy, vacant stare wandered in. He approached the counter and stared at her.

  “Hi. Welcome to Amazon Café. What can I get started for you?” asked Dakota.

  The guy remained silent for a long few minutes, his mouth slightly open. She debated asking him if he had special needs while wondering if he’d suffered brain damage in the past, but aside from the not-all-there look in his eyes, he didn’t have any physical abnormalities.