Apocalypse: Generic System Macronomicon (miss read books TXT) 📖

his shoulder –five or six, maybe? – and an empty Snickers wrapper being used as a tunic.

He landed on Jeb’s palm, his expression hollow.

“How’d it go?” Jeb asked.

“I was on top of the world, human. Naturally, I was distraught about the loss of my clan, but I decided to forge ahead. I joined a new clan. The things you taught me made me a god among the Free Folk. I had the world in my hand,” He said, shaking a tired fist.

“There I was, snorting lines of pollen off the back of a Rhapsody beetle. I could have anyone or anything I wanted. I was powerful. My company was expanding rapidly, turning over clan after clan to my control. I had supply lines that stretched from one end of the forest to the other.”

He heaved a heavy sigh. “We even had plans underway to establish contact with faeries from the next country over, corner the market. Consolidate. Umm…Leverage our assets?”

“So what happened?” Jeb asked.

“One minute I was snorting pollen, the next minute, the ungrateful bastards were throwing me in prison for embezzlement. I rotted there in that hollow log with the scum of the forest. I got hard. I got mean, just to survive.”

Smartass gave the mountain a thousand yard stare.

“After what felt like years, they finally let me out, but my company was already in someone else’s hands, and believe me, I wasn’t keen on hanging around watching someone else in my seat snorting my pollen, so I got the hell out of there. I spent the next three days after that looking for you.”

The next three days? We’ve only been here three days.

“You created and subsequently cheated a company that spanned the entire forest, then did hard time…in one day?” Jeb asked.

“You humans lack the focus to get anything done quickly,”  Smartass said, rolling his eyes. “Ooh, what’s that!?”

Chapter 16: Optics

“Check this out,” Jessica said, tugging Jeb off to the side.

“What is it?” he asked, stumbling a bit as his new pegleg slipped.

Jess handed him Razorback. “Take a swing at me,” she said.

Jeb glanced down at the brutal black jagged longblade in his hand and shrugged. “’kay.”

He took a sideways swipe at the stubble-headed assassin. He briefly considered protesting, but that was just a waste of time at this point.

In the blink of an eye, blackened steel gauntlets snapped into place on her hands, allowing her to catch the sword with her palms and wrench it out of his hands, nearly toppling him over.

“Nice,” Jeb said, blowing on his stinging hands.

“I can do it for my head and feet as well, but anything bigger than that is going to take more Myst.”

“Did you try making a weapon or enchanted gear yet?”

Jessica flicked her hand, and a throwing star whizzed into the distance and sank into a rock before it began to gradually fade away.

It’s not permanent. I wonder why creatures are permanent then.

“Does that answer your question?”

“Color me impressed.” Jeb said.

“I can’t do enchanted gear yet,” Jessica said with a shrug, “But I feel like it’s possible, just too expensive to do with my current Myst reserves.”

Jeb nodded.

Brett and Casey Sr. were sitting outside the cave entrance, which had been cleared into a cozy little campsite.

Both the aging fitness model and the teen mom were sitting cross-legged, focusing on starting their Myst core.

The last of Casey’s goth makeup had been washed away, and now she just looked like the girl next door. Her hair was still black as night, though, and her attitude hadn’t improved much, glaring at every man in the camp like they represented the patriarchy.

The only time he saw her crack a smile was when she was cooing to Casey Jr.

One thing they don’t tell you about babies:

Newborns are ugly.

Right now, she was soul-searching in an attempt to unlock her Myst abilities, which should help her kill monsters.

The teen girl was even less prepared to powerlevel than Amanda had been. Amanda had the benefit of experience and a few Body enhancing potions.

Casey’s stats were as such:

Casey Thompson

Body 13

Myst 4

Nerve 8

The girl hadn’t gotten a single level, her inhuman stats were from the bonus fifteen points at the beginning, which probably saved her life.

She’d started putting them in Myst one at a time, then stopped when she started getting horrible headaches and seeing scary things, putting most of the rest into Body and a little into Nerve.

Once Casey figured out her Myst ability, they would be able to guide her toward a class that synergized with it.

In theory.

Jeb spent the morning working on altering Amanda’s armor to fit her better, as well as working on a few of his own devices, watching the Myst boot camp members hard at work.

The armor they got for Amanda was a rare animal: It was a full suit of armor that looked as though it’d been taken straight out of a video game.

This lead to several problems with its functionality,

The shoulderpads were huge, obnoxious things that would never work in reality. They had to remove them just for her to be able to lift her arms above her head. The main reason they’d been sold.

The armor was also heavier than a normal human had any right to be able to move in. That problem was largely solved by Amanda’s superhuman strength, but being heavier than it needed to be served nearly no purpose.

So Jeb was sitting there, using the BSF (Blue Serpent Furnace) to heat up the tons of fancy ornaments dangling from every part of the armor until they were white-hot and shaving them off with telekinetic force. It was almost like whittling down a block of wood, if it weren’t for the extreme heat blasting Jeb