The Discarded, Half-Eaten Apple Core New Life

Jabberwock's main weakness, aside from its butt-crawling speed, was biomass. The monster depended on keeping its biomass to survive. Wounds didn't matter much so long it could consume the wounded part to regrow it. By the time the Bricks Windows army reached the monsters, they were doing exactly that. Eating themselves, sucking on their tentacles, drinking their blood. The second Saturn V rocket burned all the loose biomass from the dead corpses, except for some whales but the Jabberwocks stayed away from the cetacean demon carcasses.

Small swarms of Bellezevoid flies were pouring out of each dead whale. We had to deal with that first. Up above, the Hugging Momma dirigibles started to rain bullets on the swarms, striking hits just due to the sheer size of the Infernali fly clouds.

I ran a mental simulation and decided to use one of my new Perks. Domain Dimensional Stability should double the cost of opening rifts in my Domain. I shot a Domain Beacon cone at the cloud in front of us and opened fire with the Vulcan autocannons. The rifts opened but their diameter was halved, which meant they shielded a quarter of the number of flies from before. It was an eighth of the volume but all fire lines were 2D.

Then I tried another feature. Divine Mandate. Inside my Domain, no rifts or portals, except for my own, can be opened. The cost was staggering. 100,000 DM to set the rule, then 3,000 DM per minute to maintain, plus a surcharge for every such occurrence that was avoided.

I bit the bullet and opened fire on the flies inside the beacon. When they didn't pop, I swept the area with the arm laser cannons. Each void vortex that didn't pop cost me 50 DM to enforce. The costs soon skyrocketed as the laser vaporized the flies unchallenged by the thousands. I cut the restriction. The vortices opened but at half efficiency as before.

"Use your autocannons, Rangers!" I shouted over the comms. "Spread out and don't focus your fire."

"Okay!" The color-coded teens spread out on their Mechas.

Autocannons sang their roar of defiance and resistance. We had to make a strategic retreat and concede the swarms some ground but soon we had cleared ours. The other nineteen swarm clouds were taking hits from the coral reef of autocannons on the wall and from the dirigibles above from miles away. The autocannons were shooting on ballistic trajectories, scattering lead all over the wasteland (when they missed, otherwise the bullet disintegrated).

It didn't seem to be much of a trouble to cull the swarms before they reached the wall. And I had a little surprise for those who did.

*

*

But the Beelzevoid Fly swarms did their job of stalling for time. My presence and the Domain beacons dragged some stragglers from the nearby swarms toward us too and we had to split our fire to kill that too. It was already night when we reached them and the Jabberwock monsters had already fully healed. Some of them were smaller than others when before the assault, they were the same size.

We circled one such monster and opened fire. It cast a shield and a darkness spell as expected, placing the shield outside the darkness for some unknown reason. I shone a beacon on it and attempted another Divine Mandate. No darkness spells in my Domains. That one was more than ten times as cheap as the no-dimensional-shenanigans rule. Jabberwock's darkness vanished and we went ballistic with the lasers. Well, not ballistic-ballistic, though.

We cut tentacles with our lasers and seared the monster medium rare. When it, against all caution, tried to move one of its heads to eat a severed tentacle, we piled up Railgun shells on the head so hard it became something straight out of Clive Barker's imagination. Jabberwocky roared.

> You heard the pained cry of Jabberwock. Partial resistance! You lose 10% Attribute Efficiency for 5 minutes. You are immune to future cries from this particular Jabberwock for 24 hours.

You are fucking kidding me. Nineteen THOUSAND points of Willpower and I get only partial resistance?

"Fire at will!" I used Bless on the teens and issued my command, giving them bonuses from two of my Classes. Bereft of its defensive spell and under the barrage of a mechanized army of giant robots, the Jabberwock became a mass of deep-fried Lovecraftian horror.

> For killing level 1000 World Boss "Jabberwocky", you gained 50 Attribute points as the MVP. Experience awards are deferred until you finish your species evolution.

Fucking hell. Give me my levels! I cleansed the Mana stone and cut it free of the corpse, then sent it on a mining mega-truck back to the city. We didn't get any intact heads.

"Onward. To the next Jabberwock! We move clockwise!"

The swarms approached the wall. The autocannons fired nonstop. The flies paid with bodies for every inch of terrain they pushed forward. It was time to engage my diversion.

On top of the walls, a special type of trap started up. A motor would spin a disc through a connecting wheel, and a launcher would send the disc flying. A frisbee launcher, to be precise. But the disc was no ordinary disc, it was infused to be a moving piece of Dungeon walls. Dozens of beacons made sure they remained inside the Dungeon as they spun and flew at a lazy speed over the swarms.

The flies spit, giving chase to the frisbees flying above and away from the walls instead of moving forward. Thousands died for a single point of DM. When the flies finally reached the disc or those going after it had died entirely, another disc was launched from the walls. This went on for hours, and the advance halted because the attackers were dumber than rats.

Our team of spider Mechas killed another four Jabberwocks. Another eight levels for the Rangers. The remainder monsters changed tactics. They opened rifts on top of them, the same way the original Jabberwock had when it summoned the first Boboyote. Speaking of them, where did those monsters go? I've never seen an Infernale flee for its life. Or was it another step in their plan? I scanned the skies, the ground, and the underground. Nothing.

Anyway. The Jabberwock opened rifts and then enlarged them to become massive gashes in the air reaching two thousand feet from end to end. The tentacle monsters' role was clear. It was a logistics unit meant to establish footholds near enemy territory. It didn't need to move fast. It wasn't even meant for real combat but against ordinary humans, it was no different than a kid stomping on ants. While I mused and raced with my fellow Mecha pilots to reach the next Jabberwock, ancillary fissures from the rifts lashed out like whips and cracked down on us. Three Bricks Windows lost a couple of legs and we moved away. Though the cracks were slowed down by my Perk, we couldn't risk the Rangers' lives.

We opened fire on the nearest Jabberwock and I canceled its darkness spell. Before we could finish the monster by killing all its heads, the monster exploded its Mana stone. The magic didn't disperse chaotically, though. Instead, the energy flew up in spirals and fused with the rift, widening it by half a mile more.

Shining tubes of goop moved out of the chaotic darkness. One, a dozen, then a hundred. The Rift was widened by them and a gigantic jellyfish half a mile in diameter and with stingers, two miles long fell over the land like translucid oil pipes from hell. And I meant from hell literally. Some dark substance pulsed underneath the transparent flesh. My intuition and Mana senses told me my weapons would have the same effect as trying to kill a medieval knight by throwing toothpicks at his armor with a rubber band from a dozen yards away.

And this was not the single one. All around the city, the Jabberwocks sacrificed themselves to open the rifts and warp in the real bosses. At least the rifts closed behind the moon-sized jellyfish. Not Moon moon (Luna) but yeah. Saturn had dozens of moons smaller than that guy (that we knew of).

"Contractor, I don't like these guys," Larry shivered.

"Me neither."

"Can we go home?" The platypus drawled and whined.

Yeah. It was better to regroup, rest, and assess the threat. "Retreat. We wait for the dawn!"

The spider Mecha army went back to the city. The last of the Beelzevoid flies died.

*

*

Back home, we debriefed the Rangers on the minutiae of the operation while their memories were fresh. They had their leveling build and picks laid out by Marshall and his analysts so we weren't afraid of them screwing up their evolution. After that, they were allowed to rest.

The city was all awake. The Guardians were celebrating their windfall of levels while some of those who weren't added to the raid because Marshall could only add so many people looked at the others with envy. I let Marshall know so he could put his social grease magic to work. Both to keep the sudden world elites from bullying the weak and to keep the weak from trying to do anything stupid.

I secured the five giant Cores we harvested in the land train and prepared to gather intel. First, I set up a massive LED searchlight on top of the wall facing one of the new monsters. I shot videos while entering as much data about them as possible into my databases.

The monsters were as big as I initially thought. Their magic was so strong I could sense the pressure miles away from my Domain. We had 14 of them floating around, getting used to Earth. If I had to guess, they used to live in a place with much denser Mana than our planet.

Larry watched the video feed with great interest and dread. "Can you defeat them, contractor? I'm scared."

"No idea, buddy. And I'm scared too."

The Jellifish had something inside them. At first, it looked like a gigantic inhuman skull but with optic enhancements, I could see it was a mass of bones in the rough shape of a gigantic skull. It was like one of those fractal art installations where smaller samples of an object were used to create a large image of the same object. In this case, it was... humanoid skeletons forming a giant inhuman skull inside the Jellyfish's body.

Two balls of glowing green goop rested in the eye sockets, casting eerie shades at the skeletons around it. Dark ichor, flowing like dark clouds of damned souls around its body. The sheer scale was mind-boggling. We had fifteen new bosses to tackle with. My arachnid Mecha looked like bugs before those things.

The night passed. The monsters didn't react to my searchlights and didn't move except for some tentacle twitches floating around in the wind like dandelion seeds. Wait, wrong metaphor. They weren't drifting but just bobbing up and down.

Morning came with a notification.

> Your trial is ready.

> To evolve your species, you need to rescue 4,000,000 humans and keep them safe from harm for 1 year. No time limit. Current tally: 164,985 / 4,000,000

I could barely breathe as I stared at the ridiculous mission. How would I rescue four million people from here? How long would it take for our population to grow that much organically? No. This mission was in direct conflict with the main quest. I wouldn't be surprised if four million was the entire Earth's population now. I still had...

No idea. I stared at the notification.

> Your trial is ready.

> To evolve your species, you need to rescue 4,000,000 humans and keep them safe from harm for 1 year. No time limit. Current tally: 164,985 / 4,000,000

"Whoa. The System really looks up to you! Such a responsibility!" Larry exclaimed with all the wrong words.

> [...] rescue 4,000,000 humans and keep them safe from harm for 1 year [...]

"I think safe from harm means not engaging in direct combat." Larry guessed.

>̵͙̯͔͌ ̵̦̭̩̈́[̷̟̚.̴̮͓̒́͋.̸͈̆̒.̴̫̤͊͗]̴͕̠̓ ̸̲̟̅̉̇4̴̜̿,̸̤̥̠̆̂̑0̵̹̇ͅ0̵̧̢͕̑͑́0̸͍̔͌͘,̸̤̣͛̈́̕0̶̣̲̭͛̋̽0̶̤̠̱̓͝0̷̖͗̆͒ ̷̮͕̋h̵̡͔̋̐ṵ̷̖͝m̸̭̕͝ą̵̻̤͆̏n̶̢̙͂̇s̷͕̃ ̸̘̋̒ͅ[̷̙͙̜͂͋.̸̧̊̂̚.̵͕̕.̷̜͍̗̌]̶̛̫̗̮ ̴̭̹̙͒͝1̵͉̠̎̓͗ ̵̗̍͜y̴̰͑̃ȅ̵͖̟͉̍a̸̼̝͆r̴̼̼̠̍ ̶̨̧͕̽͊[̶̖͔̱͋͆̾.̷̭͈͓̍.̷̫̈́.̴̟͗͌̋]̴͍͛͊͠

I couldn't refrain from leveling up for years. And I don't think I had anything that could take out those jellyfish without also nuking the city. It was time to adapt our strategy.

"Golly, Larry. It seems we are busting this joint."

"What?" The platypus shook its head. "I don't understand it, contractor!" It said with all the ahoge cutesy it could muster.

"We are going to use our last resort. Our secret weapon, the Joestar family's ultimate technique."

The platypus gasped. "Contractor!"

"I know. It is cowardly of me."

"No, not that!" Larry waved a paw.

"What, then?"

"IS THAT A JOJO REFERENCE?" My mascot shouted, going into a frenzy.

The only adequate response was to conjure a floating whipped cream pie and slam it at his face. Larry licked the cream uttering a gormandizing groan.

"Yes." I grumbled.