Thomas could now see the School Bus-sized regenerating ground bat on his sensors, and he was not happy and very unnerved at what he saw. Sure, he had anticipated the fact that the numerous hazardous chemicals here would do something to the monster, but he honestly had not expected that they would do this.

And what was ‘this’, you ask?

Well, the original form of that boss mob was gone. After triggering trap after trap and suffering ever more debilitating damage and chemical exposure that its regenerative factor just blindly ignored the implications of, the creature that looked like an overly large, overly buff, and utterly wingless vampire bat was long gone.

In its place, though, was something that was arguably worse, at least from a certain point of view. Instead of hobbling along on four limbs, it now crawled along on a mess of over fifteen, all of which were different shapes and sizes, and all of which emerged from different points on its body.

Instead of having a single face, complete with eyes, nose, and a mouth, there was, instead, a face that split into three, with additional blind eyes and random ears and occasionally a jabbering mouth dotting the grotesque mass of meat, bone, and tissue that the creature had become. Even its identification, which hung above its head in red letters and numbers, had changed.

This was no longer merely a Lv.35 Giant Ground Bat; no, that name and level were long gone. In the place of that information, there was but a single line that was both comforting and greatly disturbing.

Lv.1 Man-Made Inferior Shoggoth.

And that; that last part of its new identity, was what unnerved Thomas more than the mass of meat and other organic parts that was trying desperately to crawl its way towards him. Thomas knew what a Shoggoth was, and he knew that, in Lovecraftian literature, Shoggoths were nigh unkillable by human hands.

And what made him somewhat scared about that was the fact that he couldn’t leave this Dungeon without killing everything in it. If he could not kill this monster that he had accidentally made, he would die here, and Axton would be left high and dry and sans his help when it came to defeating those cheating bastards that they both needed to fight.

And so, as he shifted Spider-Can into hover mode once again, Thomas steeled himself for what he knew was to come. He could have, eventually, downed the Boss Mob with a deluge of ranged fire.

Eventually he would have overcome its healing factor and the beast would have gone down. That was a fact that he cursed himself for deciding wasn’t worth it. Now he had to find some way of wiping out a creature that, in its native setting, was unkillable by conventional human weapons, when, if he had just bitten the bullet, he could have used to kill its original form with just fine.

“Well, let’s see if there is a way to deal with you…”

…

There were no thoughts in its head, not that it even had a head at this point. Hell, it was nothing more than a mass of random meat and bone and other such organic stuff, completely lacking a brain at all and driven solely by the instinct that remained even after the previous traps reduced it to this sorry state.

Still, though, it moved ever forward, utterly unaware of anything else beyond its target, which had at last begun to move. It did not even notice when bullets and autocannon shells ripped into its body, nor did it notice when the speedy metal machine kicked containers of random chemicals into its shifting mass of viscera.

Besides, right now it didn’t even need to care to begin with. It was regenerating so quickly that, while those containers full of chemicals did impact it, its body just swallowed the canisters whole, pulling them into its own flesh where they would exist inside and, occasionally, poke out and be exposed to the wider world.

Thankfully for its own sake, the containers were not ruptured, nor were they crushed by the rapidly mutating mass of mobile body parts. However, this state of affairs was most assuredly not tenable in the long run, as the more things its body pulled into itself the slower and more bloated it became.

Despite rapidly mutating in all manner of ways fit for a Body Horror type fiction, the total mass of meat remained the same no matter how bloated it became. In fact, the total amount of meat, bone, and other such things was still the same as it had been before its initial exposure to the hellish concoctions in this room.

Yes, it was bigger, slower, and bulkier, but a growing portion of that was made up of chemical containers, bullets, autocannon shells, and other bits and bobs. To be even more on the nose about what was to come, it had even pulled undetonated landmines and generic explosives into itself without setting them off.

All of that combined was what made its situation a bleak one. Not only were its previously limited mental faculties now utterly gone, it was now a ‘walking’ time bomb, just waiting to go off and coat a decent portion of wherever it was in metal, meat, and other random materials.

All that was needed was one last spark to ignite the bomb that it had become, and a certain Player/ Outworlder was preparing to provide just sch a spark.

…

“Jesus!” Thomas shouted at no one in particular as he made Spider-Can pump another fifty bullets into what looked to be a growing mass of inchoate flesh. “How much do I have to put into this thing before it loses a single goddamn point of health?!”

Thomas had dumped a decent portion of his remaining ammo into the blob made of various body parts, and yet not a single point of the thing’s HP had been removed. This was not merely regenerating from sustained damage; this was this thing being utterly impossible to damage!

“Fuck fuck fuck FUCK!”

Thomas was now very concerned that he was fighting an unwinnable battle, and in his fear, he decided to use the one little toy that had been installed on Spider-Can before the Battle Royale had begun. It was a weapon that he had never used before, and he had honestly hoped it wouldn’t be needed, but now it was, and that only deepened the concern he felt.

“No other choice.” Thomas said with a voice tinged with defeatism and fear. He flipped a switch on the dashboard of his machine and the top of his War Suit shifted. A single piece of it rose up to reveal a dumbfire rocket that was concealed just beneath the ‘head’ of his War Suit.

“Here goes nothing…” Thomas said as he braced himself for what was to come. This was going to hurt. A lot. Thank God he built his Player Avatar the way he did, though he wasn’t sure if even his high survivability build would be enough to stop what was to come.

He aimed the rocket carefully and pulled the trigger, and his Avatar was instantly doused in the backblast of the rocket.