Kristoffer Pauly
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MADMAN APOCALYPSE - Chapter -148
🕑 Added 2024-11-30 23:11:25 +0000 UTC-Previous chapter-
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Chapter -148
William Twine nodded towards Steve and said, “Uh yeah, happy birthday.”
The Birthday Boy groaned. “We should get going, right? They’ll probably realize we’ve infiltrated their base pretty quickly, considering their ability to track Gambit wherever he goes.”
“They can’t actually do that anymore,” Panda told him. “I think what happened in the Safe Zone wasn’t because of him being tracked, but rather some automatic trigger reacting to his amoral nature and the whole being on the registry thing.”
The Twine brothers shared a suspicious glance with each other, before looking at me with disgust in their eyes.
Before I could defend myself, an achievement appeared in front of my face. The way everyone else seemed to pause made it clear that I wasn’t the only one to receive it.
“What the hell does that mean!?” William exclaimed.
“We need to go,” Tina told me and pulled me towards the blast door.
William and Matthew started to argue about how stupid it was for them to have followed us up here, somehow both able to ignore Steve’s last command to get along.
Then came a message I had honestly been expecting for a long time.
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WARNING!
Glitch-Hunter Task Force deploying to your area!
We know where you are.
You cannot hide.
Extermination imminent.
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The two brothers stopped arguing.
“Run!” Panda yelled. Steve immediately took him up on the advice.
A sound like tearing fabric came from the far end of the chamber, furthest from the big blast door we were heading for. Then it was like the air itself was pulled open, creating a rift that a bulky beetle Agent stepped through. It was the same one that’d hunted Bee and I during the first Game Event.
With a roar, Matthew took off from the ground and flew towards the Glitch Hunter, while William drew his bow and started doing weird bounding movements as he fired off arrows.
“Let’s get the F out of here!” Steve insisted. He was holding a Looking Glass in his hand and shared the appraisal with me.
“I kind of want to try and kill him,” I said.
The Glitch Hunter’s thick carapace shimmered and all the arrows fired at him reflected right back at the Satyr, several of them burrowing deep into his torso and legs. As William tumbled to the ground, Steve repeatedly slammed on a button next to the large blast door to open it.
“Recursive.action(Beetle_Bolt),” the Hunter said, lifting his girthy right arm to shoot a ton of bolts at Matthew.
The Meatshield-turned-Red-Pawn absorbed several of the flechettes, before body-slamming the beetle into the ground with enough force to produce a loud crunch and releasing a violent crackle of red electricity. The beetle spasmed and fell still.
Matthew got up and tore the projectiles out of his sturdy body, before turning around and running back to his brother. William was no longer moving and dark-red blood pooled where he’d collapsed.
I watched in horror as the Glitch Hunter slowly got back to his feet.
“Oh no you fucking don’t,” I said.
I crouched and triggered SPRING_HEEL, then aimed my new gravity directly towards the Hunter’s torso.
Like a human-shaped rocket, I flew across the chamber, while pulling my fist back.
“Kapow!!” Brock squealed as I smashed him right into the Agent’s beetle head, utterly obliterating it in a mist of white blood.
Despite this guy being high-leveled and fucking scary, he still shared the same weakness as other beetles: impact damage. They wore their skeletons on the outsides of their bodies, so any force that could penetrate through that would devastate them.
“Holy shit!” Steve yelled from the door that he’d managed to get open.
However, the Glitch Hunters didn’t play fair. Already, his neck stump was beginning to rebuild itself into a head.
But I didn’t play fair either. The purple curse from Brock’s impact was spreading out along the beetle’s carapace and preventing the regenerative effects, but not fully.
I did the only thing I could think of and kept punching the headless body until there was nothing left but purple-stained mush.
The body glowed golden and seemed to be doing something similar to my original ‘Personal Rule’ passive that’d allowed me to cheat death once. The result was that the mush tried to take on a coherent shape, before Brock’s Anti-Heal effect kicked in and prevented it. This happened nine times in total, before finally the Glitch Hunter was truly dead.
A squishy ridged black tube landed in my hands and I immediately inspected it.
Then the air around me tore open and three new Glitch Hunters crawled out of their own personal rifts. Before they could fully materialize, I shot myself towards the open blast door using my Fuck Gravity and SPRING_HEEL. I made sure to grab Tina and Steve on the way out.
Outside the pod chamber was a large hallway connected to several other rooms with their own tube holes. Many of them also had open pods inside. It seemed they only closed up once ants or aphids were to be sent somewhere to the surface down below.
The hallway’s floor, walls, and ceiling were all made of the same strange papery material. All the doors were identical to the first, i.e. glossy-black space-ship-looking blast doors. Just like the chamber we’d entered through, it was absolutely sweltering here.
Even though the papery walls absorbed much of the sound, I could still hear Matthew fighting with the Glitch Hunters. However, it wasn’t my problem anymore. I’d already saved his life once, despite the fact that he’d robbed my dead body, so I didn’t owe him shit.
“They’ll follow you!” Steve complained, even though I was providing him the means to escape.
“They can’t track me,” I said confidently.
“You’re right,” Panda agreed, “But they can track Steve…”
“Ah, well shit.”
“Nina says we should take a left and head into the first Children’s Zone we see,” Tina announced.
I didn’t need to be told twice, as the tearing sounds from nearby made it clear that the Glitch Hunters had dealt with the Twine brothers and were now coming for us.
Then suddenly a loud warning klaxon filled the hallway and no doubt all of the Hive Ship, although it was less like a normal alarm and more like unhinged banshee wailing. I wondered if it was the voice of the Hive’s Queen. Within seconds, ants flooded the large hallway, lending credence to my theory.
Instead of attempting to stop us where we flew by above, they instead honed in on the three bulky beetles. A fight immediately broke out and though the three Glitch Hunters fucked up the ants, they were so outnumbered that they were unlikely to survive for long.
“Good thing the Agencies hate each other,” Panda muttered in relief.
A fork in the hallway appeared and I took us left, continuing to ‘fall’ sideways through the air in the most peculiar approximation of flight imaginable. But hey, it worked.
“I’m proud of you Steve,” I said down to where the Birthday Boy dangled in my grip. “You didn’t scream once.”
Panda, who was standing on my horizontal torso looked down at the guy, before saying, “Gambit, he’s out cold.”
“Oh.”
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Comments
the ice man
Cockroach constitution+ gambit would be a horrifying
