Grill Smith son of Krewton Crunchmaster descendant of the warrior God Slag just got a notification that his Con just rose to 7.5 and that he leveled to D(76) as a result of his constant running, he was more tired then he had ever been in his life.

Normally he would be thrilled to have pushed his limits, the system recognizes his growth, it was half the fun of being an Orc. They weren't actually much stronger than other races, but their culture pushed young orcs into ever more absurd acts of strength and endurance. So an Orc that capped their str at 10 or even got a racial ability to push it to 11(a number hard to reach for any non C rank being) were surprisingly common to other races. Grills 8 str was actually kinda low for an Orc his age, especially some kind of chief. But his big game chef achievement was better then just raw stat points in a lot of ways, it affected both how much he could lift or carry, but also how well he could endure carrying things over long distances, and being out of shape for an orc, he never would have made it this far without the achievement. He had never felt so close to his god as he did right now, the powers of a blessed chef being used to save his own hide along with 3 of his best eaters.

Some might think an Orc god would not care about some back alley chef and a few orphans, and most Orc Gods would not at that, some might even have rooted for the closing zombie horde instead. Slag was different in a way though, sure he was still a God of war, but he was also a God of Freedom, no Orc tribe patronized by Slag would ever resort to enslaving Goblins and Gremlins the way some of the savage tribes do. His third domain was considered the most un Orc like, he was a god of cooking. Worshipers cooked fallen foes and offered up a portion to their god, before eating themselves, an especially blessed Orc chef may even have their God descend to share the meal with them.

That was Grills dream, to be visited by his god and be told his food was so good, and his foe so mighty that Slag wanted to make him an Orc Chef Paladin.

The zombies would probably make sure he never saw that day though. The runners could have closed in on him by now, but they were circling, making sure he could not leave this Hex alive. Hexes are one kilometer across from one parallel line of the hex to the other. And the whole world was made of them, each had a different biome with different settings and different properties, this was one of many Ruined Wasteland hexes in the area around the Scav Hive; a 20+ hex township that his Orphanage had been on the outskirts of. No one owned this hex, someone would need to conquer both the “secret” Lab and the Colossal Ant Hive to gain control of this hex, and it would take a large part of the whole scavenger guild working together to just clear the nest. Plus the hives surface patrols were much easier to fight and provided a good leveling area for mid level scav teams, as a result.

Any Hex with the Ruined or Ruins descriptors would spawn items in the ruined buildings regularly, repeatedly raiding ruined hexes like this one was at the backbone of the scavenger society and their economy. Selling the pre-end items to bigger cities or the services of expert scavengers were the only reason they were left as an independent “nation”.

All of this Occured to Grill because he was entering a candy shoppe, and he wanted to know what pre-end candy tasted like and how often some might respawn in here. It was an idol thought though, he would not let his curiosity allow him to search the shoppe as he headed to the back room.

Then he saw a sign that his buddy might have been in just as much trouble when he saw that the hatch was sticking out of a wall, the claw marks of things heading into the hole were impossible for Grill to notice now, but the screeching of a runner outside ushered him down the ladder anyway.

On his way down he could see where things had ignored the bars of the ladder in favor of raming claws into the stone walls around him. He heard no sounds coming from below him, so if Hank was dead, maybe the things would kill a lot of zombies after they killed him, a small consolation, but he grinned anyway at the thought that something bad would probably die either way.

He heard things in the shop above as he ran out of ladder, the last 20 feet or so of the ladder burned away in some blast.

“Shit, Fuck”

“Air Cushion” the little halfling teen under his left arm cast a spell below them after assessing the issue.

The little squirt was good at using air magic in the kitchen, so Grill decided to trust the girls spell. The fact that he had no other choice if he did not want zombies raining down on his head in a second, may have also contributed to his “Trust”

Grill jumped, legs bent ready to absorb the impact. Normally he would roll, but he feared squishing the boy billy.

The air cushion stopped most of the fall damage, but Grills right knee cap partially dislocated, sending him down on both knees, popping the knee back into place painfully, but also dislodging the boy billy from his back. Before he could figure out how to get the boy back on his back, a huge black scorpion tail stinger impaled the downed boy, Grill Followed the tail up to a mutated Runner zombie on the wall, clinging to the wall using the claw holes left by whatever had been chasing Hank. The Zombie had 4 human-ish legs, 4 arms, a jaw split open down the middle, like its jaw tried to become mandibles. All together it looked like the remains of two or three people mixed with a monster scorpions tail to make a horrific zombie mockery of an arachnid. Goo drooled from its open maw as the tail began to lift the dying boy.

Grill Ran.

The boy would be another boomer soon, another explosive zombie child howling for blood in less than a minute and there was nothing Grill could do about it.

So he ran down the cavernous room to where the tunnel to the door into the “Secret” lab was.

As he reached the tunnel mouth he finally slowed down to gawk at something, a woman.

She was emerging

“Shit i was too slow, you lost one.”she paused her words looking pensive for a moment before brightening up “I wonder if I can cure the boy? Would be a fun secondary objectives” she nodded to herself before finally looking at the poor confused and tired man holding a child under each arm. “Are you slow? Get behind me before we lose another kid!”

The confused Orc knew how to take orders, he brought the girls behind the tall woman in a lab coat before asking. “Who are you, how did you know i was coming? Are you planning on killing zombies with your bare hands? Because while I might normally approve, with zombies you will just get infected and join them that way.”

She chuckled “ ok, in order I am Omega, Sydney the lab saw you with sensors hidden all over the Hex” then her hands melted into her arm revealing large gun barrels sticking out of each arm, and her sleeves transformed into long belts of ammo entering just above each elbow. “I am also always ‘armed’”

she then chuckled at her own joke while unloading a few dozen rounds into the ceiling of the large chamber. Where each bullet struck light began to glow from that spot in the ceiling, the sudden brightness revealed the scorpion zombie leading a few dozen Crawler zombies across the ceiling to get the drop on someone. A few more rounds into the hallway the ladder is in were just in time to backlight a fat tank zombie slamming into the ground having fallen down the tunnel, then rather then get up, he only partially sat up, angling his stomach to break the fall of other zombies, who began to bounce off his belly then land in a heap 5 or 10 feet in front of the tank zombie.

The strange tactic dashed Grills hope that most of the zombies would not survive the fall. However the Woman just laughed harder while unloading hundreds of bullets into the zombie pile, gore covered the singed walls of the ladder hall.

For every one that stayed down after the barrage 2 more got up and started shambling towards them. Some of the zombies cleared the corpses from the way, piling corpses around the edges of the tunnel down. Creating new “safe” landing spots for zombies falling from above.

Soon it was all the Omega Woman could do to slow the growth and advance of the horde. Grill had no ranged weapons to speak of, all he could do was crouch to block anything from hitting the girls huddled behind him covering their ears from the cacophony of gunfire.

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Omega knew she couldn't slow down firing for anything. In fact she needed to be shooting more guns, maybe some lasers. But she could not stop firing her arm guns for that. So instead the flesh of her arms melted to upgrade her inner arm machine guns into dual gatling guns, each with 6 barrels rotating fire. 2 spider legs grew from her back to compensate for the massively increased recoil.

she heard the man and girls behind her gasp at the transformation. They had not seen anything yet, she calculated that this would still only grant the squishy people a 10% chance of survival.

The only way she could see increasing the odds significantly was to fight less like a shapeshifting person. She had to fight like a nanoswarm, she had a few ideas for that.

The first stages of that were the bullets she had been firing, each a smart matter shell around a bunch of smart matter controller nanites, these could then teleport more nanites into the body using her “inventory” tech from the computer Holly brought. These were then able to harvest any usable biomatter, and even a bit of mostly intact brain matter, or nervous system. The zombies seemed to need their brains intact so harvesting them was dropping some zombies that had been shot places other then the head. The more times a zombie was hit the faster it could be disabled and then dismantled.

The zombies dropping mid crowd were slowing down progress, and so more had to stop to move bodies out of the way, or the dumber shamblers would trip over them and make the situation worse.

She detached metally, using small sensors created by bullets in the walls she could see the whole battlefield from a hundred angles, so she pooled that data with the data from her personal senses to create a top down commander view in her mind. This allowed for better accuracy as she could use many more variables to project trajectories. Many hijacked zombie brains were out to work processing raw data.

The massive brainpower boost allowed her slow her perception of time dramatically, allowing her to test out more outrageous battle simulations. These simulations brought her to the inescapable conclusion that she would have to stop looking even vaguely person shaped to buy time for reinforcements.

Hopefully the Zombie Angel would keep holding back the powerful zombies, even the scorpion horror had scuttled back into the tunnel after she shot off a few of its limbs at the beginning of the battle. And the tank zombie seemed content to help the smaller zombies land safely and move corpses.

She had put a bullet into the boys spinal cord early in the battle as well. The nanites were stopping the zombie boy from moving, or blowing himself up. He was now a silently screaming zombie at the bottom of one of the corpse piles.

Omega saw all of this, as well as other large tank zombies in the candy shoppe above, grabbing zombies and carefully dropping them onto a safe landing place. Worst of all she could see the zombified angel standing outside surrounded by custom horrors that make the scorpion thing look cuddly.

So she had the torso of her body grow 4 more spider legs, 2 out the front to match the 2 stabilizing legs in her back, and 2 growing out under the gun mounts on her sides. She also made a helmet with improved sensors on her head, and armored her shoulders and torso Once the upper half of her body was like a bust shoved into some kind of spider tank. The bottom half of her body dropped into 2 piles of grey goo that flowed to either side of her.

Now she could vastly change the angle of her fire into the horde by tilting her body at odd angles, or scuttling a bit from side to side. The 2 blobs squished over to the sides of the tunnel mouth and then turned into laser turrets based on the only other gun design she had absorbed so far.

Few of the slain zombies she was harvesting had useful designs, that is until she sprayed fire up at a zombie salamander that had camouflaged itself on the ceiling, she had only spotted it because it blocked the light from the glowing bullets imbedded up there, as it moved over them, it fell on the group of zombies and she was able to use her naintes in the bullets to trick it into thinking the other zombies were the enemy, and it unleashed a torrent of flame into the horde.

The surrounding zombies quickly tore the confused salamander apart, but not before she got both the camouflage ability and the fire breathing power, both of which she used in a tech based design, before she began creating a few mini flame drones out of her new nanite factories. she was creating them with the nanites from her brain farms and metals from her inventory. Plus bones and organs harvested from zombies shifted into the glands and organs needed for the “fire breath” power of the salamander.

Congratulations! You have learned the Power: Blue Magic Sorcery; survive monster powers or eat monsters to gain magic that mimics the signature powers of monsters.

She thought that was a bit redundant, until she realised she could make a purely tech based flame drone design, that could still have the fire breath without needing the goopy biological bits. She filed the data away for later as she had lots of goopy biological bits to work with, so she would save the magitech versions for later.

Still her nanites instincts praised her for finding another type of power for her to gain while doing the studies she planned on doing anyway. Plus she could use the blue magic firebreath in anyform, even if just a few hundred nanites worked together they could generate a small flame before draining their magical pool. This was much more utilitarian then having to create the organs that generated the combustibles and other organs that enchanted them with bodily mana, plus the spike in the mouth that generate electrical current to ignite the enchanted combustible fluid, plus fire resistance for the whole system so the creature does not boil its own brain.

She found the creature a fascinating mix of evolution and magical bullshit, being undead had just made it more unstable. But her blue magic opened a lot of new doors tactically, all her bodies were emergency flamethrowers. Lighting up the whole horde would likely suffocate or burn the people she was trying to save, plus it would waste mana she might need more when the real threats started coming down, but a few carefully timed blasts added to her simulations raised the chances of her charges surviving until reinforcements arrived much higher.

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Grill was in love, he would have asked for a gun, but the wonderful angels guns seemed to be able to shoot themselves better than he ever could. A seemingly endless horde basically throwing themselves in the meat grinder that was this battlefield, he had the feeling that she would just make more guns if the ones on her arms and the turrets she spawned were not enough. Sure enough as the horde surged it was cut down by flames from a zombie she had shot off the ceiling, even her foes die in a way that keeps her winning.

He was not the only one in love, he prayed to slag that he might see this awesome battle, at first only a minor presence checked Grills battle, the spider tank woman spray and preying an endless horde of foes spoke to something primal in Grill and it seemed the divine prayer guy agreed because he felt the crushing pressure of his gods attention slam into him a moment later. Slag was an odd god in that he wanted his worshipers to show him cool things or feed him good food.

Grill could feel the presence of his god settle in the back of his mind, giving him the ability to move again.

Just in time too. The ceiling of the large cavern caved in dropping several zombie horrors and tanks into the middle of the chamber, uncaring of the rubble crushing their smaller and weaker allies.

Grill jumped back to avoid a falling rock, and as he did a black streak flashed past his face, he turned to look at where the flash had come from and saw an angel flying in the center of the hole in the roof, one black twisted wing and one white pristine wing keeping the infected angel aloft. The holy horrors face was twisted with glee and triumph, causing grill to look at where the black flash had gone.

He dropped to his knees, ignoring the pain from his earlier injury as he stared at the huge black feather sticking out of the chest of the little Trollish girl Tiffany. She panted, her eyes wild with fear.

He was horrified, he had failed her, if only he had stood his ground the feather would have hit him and the falling rock put his infected ass out of his own misery.

He only had a moment to pity himself before his God took over his body fully. Slag jumped to his feat and roared at the angel, while summoning a spectral great Falchion.

“I'M GONNA MAKE CHICKENS WINGS!!!”