[System Decay] Chapter 6: 1v1, Goblin Cave, Lots of Items (Patreon)

Will was unbelievably glad that he’d decided to save his use of the Chaos Transfer skill. The corruption condition was incredibly powerful—it caused immense pain, lowered every stat with time, worsened injuries, and could lead to death if unresisted. If he’d wasted it on the goblins only to realize there was a massive spider here, the boss wouldn’t have had to beat him—he would’ve done it to himself.

He hated spiders. When he’d been thirteen or so, he’d gone on a camping trip and inadvertently set his tent up right next to a spider nest. Sometime during the weeklong excursion, a number of the creepy crawlies had hatched, leaving a very unpleasant surprise for him inside his tent.

His hatred for the little buggers had grown alongside him. Spiders were necessary for a healthy ecosystem, he knew, but holy hell did they send shivers up his spine.

This giant one was no exception.

“You know, they didn’t let me torch the nest when I was a kid. Nobody’s stopping me now.”

He doubted the spider could actually understand him, but he kept talking anyway. Will had been talking out loud to nobody for long enough now that doing it was becoming habbit.

Besides, trash talk helped the mind.

The spider, unfortunately, did not seem to appreciate the finer points of the English language. It rubbed two of its massive front legs together, producing a sound that Will definitely did not expect from a spider.

Was it… purring? Will had always figured that if spiders got big enough to make audible sounds, they would hiss. That was the sound they made in most games, after all—but no, this spider sounded like the world’s worst kitten.

“Allie would’ve loved you,” he said, then thought on it more. “Maybe. A pet tarantula and a giant spider aren’t really the same.”

His hackles raised as he finished the sentence, and Will dove away from the web that the spider had already established on the ground next to him. He wasn’t sure how effective a web fresh from the thing’s abdomen was going to be, but he had no intentions of finding out.

Will’s instincts saved him. Another fat wisp of string whistled by his body, splatting right on the ground where it’d been.

Even though he’d predicted the attack, he wasn’t able to roll all the way away. His Speed attribute had started off at a pretty decent value—a fair bit higher than what was supposed to be average for a human, even. He hadn’t leveled it since, though, and it was far behind his Affinity.

More importantly, every single one of his stats was lower than the boss’, and the string shot was fast and wide-ranged. As Will tried to rise to his feet, he realized that his foot was stuck.

After a brief stint in high school robotics, he’d learned to fear the power of even a few drops of superglue. This was like taking a paint can full of the stuff and putting his sneakers straight into it.

The spider sauntered over, apparently happy to take its time now that its prey was caught.

“Oh no you don’t!”

Will realized quickly enough that he wasn’t going to be able to free his shoe with sheer force, so he just yanked his leg out of his sneakers.

“First you ruin my shoes, then you make me leave them behind,” he complained. “Those weren’t free, you know?”

The spider did not react to his words, which he assumed was because it had no knowledge of the English language nor cared for his complaints.

Will needed to take this fight carefully. His Chaos Transfer skill let him guarantee a level of corruption on the spider, but he needed to land an attack first. He hadn’t had the opportunity to test it much, which wasn’t helped by the fact that a) it had a high mana cost, b) it had a relatively long cooldown, and c) he had not properly fought a boss yet.

The goblin chieftain technically counted, but he had won that battle with judicious use of explosives. Doing so here, while he was in the same room? Less desirable.

The last thing Will wanted to do was to land a hit on the snake’s leg and find out that the level of corruption only applied to a leg because the creature was so big. There were ways to test that, though.

Will needed to inflict a status and wear the boss down. He couldn’t think of this as a fight where he could get in a single, decisive blow and win. This was a battle of attrition where the spider could probably one-shot him at any time.

It swiped a leg down at him as he drew the chieftain’s axe of despair, narrowly missing his side. Will was getting pretty good at dodge-rolling, but he was no Dark Souls character. He knew he wasn’t going to be able to keep this up forever.

The spider’s legs were powerful. Will managed to get hismelf clear of the descending limb, but the ground underneath it cracked. This close up, he could see that its leg wasn’t smooth—in fact, it was covered with hundreds of jagged porcupine-like quills.

Careful not to impale his hands on one of the myriad biological weapons the spider had, Will swung the axe.

It hit what he swore was metal. The impact rang solidly through the axe, sending vibrations reverberating through his body. His arms went numb and he fumbled the wooden grip of the axe, though he managed to recover it before it could entirely roll out of his hands.

Adrenaline shot through his veins, and he grinned despite himself.

“Not going to go down that easily, huh?”

That must have been the Resistance stat in action. He’d checked what the stats did during his time in the safe room. Resistance was responsible for a number of things—health and stamina recovery, primarily, but also durability. This boss was Bronze 8. That almost certainly meant its durability was way higher than his.

He needed a skill or an item that could tell him that. It was also entirely possible that it was using a skill of some sort to protect itself.

The spider very rudely interrupted Will’s thoughts by rubbing two of its legs together again. This time, Will was prepared for what was coming. His heart pounded in his chest as he watched its abdomen for signs of movement.

At the last movement, he broke out into a dead sprint, easily clearing the web.

“You mind if we pause? Take a breather?” No intelligible response, of course, but Will imagined that its strange purring sound was a no. “Speaking of which, why doesn’t Omnilingual work on you? Is spider not a recognized language? That feels vaguely… racist? Specist?”

If he couldn’t even land a hit on this thing with brute force, he was going to have to break its armor first.

His power alone wouldn’t be enough for that, but the seven-shot six-shooter could put a lot more force behind a blow than he could with his arms.

“Spider, meet the great equalizer. Ol’ Amendment Two herself.” Will hadn’t been the biggest fan of guns pre-apocalypse, to put it lightly, but the rules had changed. The world had changed. He would adapt.

Will stowed his teleport dagger in his inventory and materialized the revolver. He cocked the hammer back, dearly hoping he didn’t get a result that would screw him over, and fired at the closest leg.

At this range, he wouldn’t miss.

Steaming purple blood spurted from the armored leg. Will’s instincts worked faster than his mind, and he took a rapid leap backwards. The viscous liquid sizzled as it hit the ground.

A small tooltip appeared over the smoking gun, displaying the words [Piercing Shot selected.]

Will hadn’t seen anything like that show up earlier, but in his defense, he had just blinded himself with several hundred gallons of gasoline explosion.

In the dim light of the glowing vents, Will could just barely make out the hole he’d punched in the creature’s leg. It looked large enough to put a couple fingers through.

The spider stomped its leg, making that weird purring noise again at a higher octave, and he lost sight of the wound.

Okay. There was confirmation that he could hurt it, at least. If he could make a bullet hole and dig his axe of despair into it, he could try to inflict it with a few conditions.

Logic told him that this was a stupid, awful idea. He’d be aiming for a tiny target against a boss with way more attack options than him and much higher stats across the board.

But logic was for the old world. Logic was for the safe lifepath, for grinding it out in computer science until his soul had been worn down to a nub.

The world had changed, and there was no undoing that. The logic Will had grown so used to applying had been turned on its head.

Survival in the new world came with an entirely different set of rules, and Will had no intention of failing to understand them.

He needed to survive the tutorial so he could return to Earth. In order to do that, he needed to be strong, and in order to accomplish that, he needed more elements and more skills.

The spider was an obstacle. If he chose to turn here, he would lose an opportunity that he might never get again.

Will sprinted straight at the spider as it prepared itself for another round of webbing. The goblin encampment hadn’t been fully destroyed, but he didn’t bother watching his footing as he stomped out dying fires, finished collapsing half-fallen tents, and threw caution to the winds.

The amount of open space in this clearing was rapidly decreasing. The webs expanded fast, and they stuck to everything worse than Will’s clingiest ex. The longer he waited, the worse it was going to get.

Unlike the legs, which were covered with obvious armor and spikes, the abdomen didn’t seem as protected. Will remembered the system description of the scorpiders. Their undersides had been more vulnerable. Maybe this would be the same?

From the way that it started stomping around with increased intensity, intent on spearing him before he could make it under its body, it didn’t want him going there. That as good as confirmed his suspicions.

The boss reshaped the room as Will ran and dodged its legs, smashing the ground in with every step. Cracks spiderwebbed out alongside the actual spiderwebs, which did not help Will’s attempts to move at all.

“You’re making me think you actually don’t want me to kill you,” Will said. “You know, we could totally call a truce. Work it out like… adults? I assume you’re an adult.”

The spider stabbed a leg forward in response and Will hit the ground.

“Or we can keep doing this. Sure.”

Even if it understood him, Will figured that it wasn’t particularly interested in peace. It was winning, after all. His stamina was running out faster than the spider’s, and it only gained more battlefield control as time went on.

With one shoe lost to the webs, running away was also rather annoying. He kept on gashing his foot against sharp rocks on the ground, which the spider not only was unaffected by but also worsened.

He’d gotten one or two shots in, but every wound he created closed up by the next time he was able to land a blow. Will had stopped firing for fear of running out of bullets before he could do any real damage.

It was looking increasingly hopeless, but that didn’t mean he was going to give up or run. Will assessed the cave as well as he could in between dodging webs and avoiding death by a hair.

[Perception] advanced to Unformed 8!

The notification startled him enough that he nearly tripped face-first into a web, which would have been the end of him.

“Good to know I can level up my stats, I guess,” he muttered in between heavy breaths. “Would love a Resistance boost.”

He needed to find a way to end this fight or at least tilt it in his favor. As the spider’s onslaught continued, an idea faintly resembling a plan formed in his head.

“Oh, this is going to go so poorly.”

What was that saying, again? Fortes fortuna iuvat—“fortune favors the brave.”

Pliny the Elder had died in a volcanic eruption shortly after saying that, but that was besides the point.

Will put the axe of despair back into his inventory and drew the teleport dagger instead. This knife had a pretty low chance of inflicting any status, but he had a tool for that.

“Suffer as I have,” Will quoted, activating his Chaos Transfer skill. The strange sensation of twisted energy leaving his body lasted only a moment, and then his dagger was distorted with corruption.

The spider purred again. By now, the boss’ attack patterns were familiar enough for him to know what was coming next.

Will’s legs were rapidly tiring, though, so instead of dodging, he enacted his plan.

There were vents everywhere in this clearing, and the constant barrage of earth-shattering blasts had only opened up more.

His first thought had been to use the teleport dagger to get under the spider, but he wasn’t sure he’d be able to land an attack on its underside from the ground.

So instead, he teleported to a vent above the spider. High above.

The world flashed green, and Will’s stomach lurched. It didn’t stop when he reappeared; he started falling immediately.

Fifty feet below him, the spider shot its webs at thin air.

This was going to hurt.

Will had chosen a vent directly above the spider. A moment of confusion was all he needed.

He fired the revolver twice as he fell, hoping one would get the effect he needed.

[Gaseous Shot selected.]

A burst of white fog exploded out from the spider’s back, obscuring his target in mist.

[Explosive Shot selected.]

Will couldn’t see the results of the second shot thanks to the mist, but he heard a deafening crack followed by a wet squelch, so he assumed it worked. Hoped, maybe.

He entered the fog cloud and hit hard, sticky surface a moment later. Will grunted in pain as a second, much smaller crack told him he’d broken several bones—according to the parts of his status diagram now flashing orange, his left arm and both legs—and he slammed a bronze healing potion down.

The moment his arm felt functional enough to use again, he started blindly stabbing downwards.

Will was met with much less resistance than he’d thought he would. His first stab dug deep into a squishy wet substance that must have been exposed by the explosive shot. His second did the same.

[Iron Dagger of the Sunken World] inflicted a level of [Corruption]!

Condition: [Corruption]

Brought on by extended exposure to chaos. May also be inflicted by those wielding the Chaos or Corruption elements.

- All incoming damage is drastically increased.

- Continually applies chaos damage, which increases proportionally to the time the target has been corrupted.

- All attributes are reduced.

- Target cannot be magically healed.

The spider bucked, trying to shake him off, but he held onto whatever organ he’d pierced with the knife.

Will inventoried his gun and brought out the axe as the giant cave spider did its best imitation of a carnival bull. It had a much firmer grip on it than the knife did, and burying it in the flesh gave him a much better anchor.

This boss is immune to the [Bleed] condition.

[Chieftain’s Axe of Despair] inflicted a level of [Altrien’s Despair]!

Condition: [Altrien’s Despair]

- Reduces the Soul attribute by 1 rank.

- Wounds drain health at a greatly increased rate.

Immune to bleeding? Isn’t it literally bleeding? Like, right now?

It was, in fact, currently bleeding, as Will found when his arms started to burn. The hot, acidic blood stung his skin, but it didn’t look immediately lethal, so he held on.

The spider started stumbling around, but Will had firmly established his grip on it. Once it slowed down its shaking, he knew he’d won.

Once he was sure he wasn’t about to be flung off, he inventoried the teleport dagger and took the revolver out again.

[Machine Gun selected.]

Seven bullets to whatever internal organs a magical alien cave spider possessed sent it twitching, and it collapsed with Will still on it.

You have defeated a solo boss. Examine its body for a Vault Key.

Achievement earned: Underdog

You defeated a solo boss more than a full rank above you in single combat. You may have cheated, but here, cheaters prosper.

Reward: You have earned an elemental gem of any basic element.

Helper: You’re still alive? Er, I mean, congratulations.

The fog cloud dissipated, leaving Will alone atop the corpse of a massive spider, covered in its burning blood.

He was exhausted. His bones were still in the process of knitting themselves together, and his skin was actively melting thanks to the weak acid of the spider’s blood.

But he didn’t care. Will had won. He’d gone for a batshit crazy plan and it had worked out.

“That,” he declared, a wild grin on his face, “was fucking awesome.”

You have leveled up 3 times!