“Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeowch that’s hot!” Thomas yelled as the heat began to die down. He had Axton and Sally install this last surprise on Spider-Can specifically because his build favored durability above all else, and as he had managed to recover all of his HP before firing the damn thing, he had managed to scrape by with only around 10 HP left despite tanking a rocket’s backblast and propulsion to the… well, the everywhere!

Hell, while he was badly scorched and the inside of the cockpit was still reeling from the fire that filled it, the fact remained that both Spider-Can and he, himself were still in fighting shape. Sure, the controls needed a bit of repair, but they had been made the way they had been specifically because the chance of Thomas needing to use that last, desperate gamble was there.

Thankfully, most of what needed repair were creature comforts, along with some of the more complex systems. Spider-Can may have been a glass cannon when it came to torso strength, but it was designed, or rather, redesigned specifically so that its internals could, for the most part, survive the short-lived interior incineration of that rocket.

Though, to be fair, the viewscreens were now utterly shot to ell, and the more delicate sensors needed replacing, but that was nothing he could not fix, or have Axton fix, later on after another supply drop. Still, he couldn’t see jack shit of what was outside the cockpit, and therefore he had no choice but to pop it open and see what was out there.

He did just that and had to give a bit of personal elbow grease to make the damn thing allow him to see outside. He immediately regretted that choice, though, as the hazards around him and his War Suit sent him scrambling to close the cockpit up again, which he managed to pull off just before reaching 0 HP.

“No other way around it, is there?” Thomas grumbled as he forced himself to rely on his own HUD and minimap for directions now that he lacked any camera feeds. He had a rough idea as to where the Shoggoth was, be it alive or dead, and he also had a rough idea of how to escape from this place.

Thomas turned on automatic movement while keeping the hover system offline and began to direct Spider-Can in a roundabout path towards where he remembered the entrance to the room was. Thankfully, the devs added in a feature that was obviously needed to attract more Players, and all Thomas had to do while that feature was active was roughly guide his War Suit in the direction he wanted to go.

The auto-move system would take care of the rest, except when it couldn’t. Thankfully, with its eight, long, fully articulated legs that had claws on the ends, Spider-Can could rather easily clamber over pretty much any obstacle that wasn’t too high or oddly shaped, and Thomas was able to use this to avoid the ‘terrain traps’ that many other War Suits would have been stuck in.

Eventually, though the travel speed was reduced, Thomas made his way to the entrance of the room he had previously been in, walking Spider-Can just a few more meters outside of it before swiveling his War Suit’s torso around and popping open the cockpit to see if his foe was dead.

He had not gotten a notification of the creature, if one could even call it such a thing at this point, dying and/ or providing him with Exp, and so he had a creeping feeling that he had missed his mark and now was utterly screwed. However, while the dust had already settled and the crater where the rocket had impacted was indeed the spot where his target had been, there was no trace of it ever being there in the first place.

On its crawling path towards him, the abomination had spread a trail of blood and other viscera across the ground and the obstacles it had clambered over. Those traces were not there any longer, as if they had just been erased and the target he had been trying desperately to put down never was more than a figment of his mind.

He looked around for a bit longer before throwing his hands up and deciding to hope that the thing was dead and that he could just go and clear the rest of this Dungeon. But first, he would rest a little and do some repairs. Hopefully, while in the process of restoring a few subsystems to a halfway decent status, he could recover enough HP to make this all just another happy accident.

…

“What in the goddamn…”

A developer looked down at what one of the AI GMs had picked up from a random planet, or more specifically, one of the Dungeons on that planet. Just looking at the thing gave her the willies, and as she reviewed the information that was provided to her about this creature, she quickly realized how close to a game-ending catastrophe that both everyone and everything had been.

This virtual abomination was a glitch and half, and while it couldn’t be killed by in-game sources, let alone injured, it could certainly do damage if it came into contact with anything. Thankfully, it had not made contact with any virtual biomass, otherwise, it would have grown even larger and more dangerous than it was now.

If it had used its nature as a glitched entity to escape that Dungeon and get into the sheer volume of biomass outside of it… well, simply shutting the game down for a few days to get rid of it would have been a best-case scenario. She would send a ticket further up the grapevine to see if anyone could do anything to prevent this issue from popping up again.

For now, though, they had essentially caught the ‘cancer’ before it became even remotely uncontrollable, and that was all that could be said about that. In its current state, it could easily be deleted, but that would leave that Dungeon sans one Boss Mob for a time.

Oh, well. They would just alter a single parameter and lower the total number of things in that Dungeon that needed to be killed by one, and that would sort things out without forcing someone to be stuck inside that place forever.