Oh right. BuyMort accepted conquest as a legitimate means of property transfer. The implications were disturbing, especially how it told me the neighboring Block holder’s name.

The system didn’t come right out and tell you to go kill your rivals. And it didn’t tell you it was rewarding you for doing so either. It just pushed you in certain ways. BuyMort. Wow. I realized there was no point in ignoring this shopportunity, and accepted ownership of the MortBlock, tucking it into my grenade bag.

I secured all of my gear as best I could before I jumped down onto the dead Sleem. Its body was firm when it wasn’t trying to swallow me, and I bounced against it before landing on the concrete floor with a rattle.

The shotgun was still functional, but the slime all over it was still burning away at its parts, so I couldn’t tell for how long.

Now that I wasn’t getting hurt, my suit wasn’t spraying everything down with acid neutralizer, and my new grenade bag was starting to rot away too. I should have checked for something with acid resistance.

The hangar was silent, except for the gentle humming of the anti-gravity pods keeping the ship hovering in the air. Then I heard a low rumble in the ground again and shook my head. I started loading shotgun shells. Thankfully, those seemed to resist the caustic slime better than most of my other gear, and they were all still intact. I loaded a handful of the explosive shells and turned to look for my first victim.

I still had two laser shells in the magazine, so the first Sleem cube to show itself got sliced in half. The rest of them seemed to stop and take in what had happened to their cohort, as its top half slid noisily to the floor. Without giving them time to react, I turned and sliced a swath through the gathering horde in the hangar. The next shell I racked into the chamber was a MIRV shell.

There was no shortage of targets, as Sleem poured into the chamber from every direction. I could hear them flopping from the walkway behind me, so I turned and fired a shell.

The rifling in my shotgun barrel had been melted and blasted away, but it still acted as a functional smooth bore, and the shell hurtled through the air before separating directly in front of the growing crowd of Sleem.

Four of them absorbed the explosive fragments, and I could see the lights inside of them clearly as the bombs blew. Their slime erupted violently, spattering across the massive hangar, and injuring several Sleem alongside those exploding.

I didn’t bother giving them time to recover, I just went through the rest of the shells in my magazine. Explosions buffeted the Sleem, tearing through their lines and keeping them back and afraid. Dozens of them died in my barrage, but as soon as I started reloading, they all surged forward as one.

The Mossburg hit the floor and I grabbed one of my crystalline grenades. The clockwork pin ticked as I wound it, and the color of the glass changed faintly when it was armed. I tossed it underhand at the nearest cube, while it charged forward to envelop me.

As I watched the resulting destruction and chaos from the grenade, I reminded myself to leave a five star review on the product.

This thing was a life-saver and more people needed to know about it.

The first cube died almost instantly. As the grenade entered its body, it crushed and the liquid aggressively coursed through the Sleem. It started one of their death screams, the teapot whistle, but stopped almost as soon as it started. The core of the cube turned black first, then it spread through the hapless Sleem’s body as it jerked, twitched, and began to swell.

Other Sleem nearby attempted to move, but they were so crowded that none of them made it in time, and dozens of them were splashed by gummy black liquid as the cube violently erupted.

The process played out again, in a dozen places, as oozes and cubes all died too fast to move away from their friends. The oozes began popping first, splashing more and more of the Sleem nearby with deadly liquid.

I turned to see them splitting at the sides of the current cluster-fuck in their ranks. More and more of the Sleem not in the immediate splash zone began moving rapidly away from their brethren while those at the nearest front of it surged forward.

A clear separation began, and then the Sleem stopped dying, as none of them were near enough to get splashed.

They retreated beyond my range to throw the grenades, and I grabbed my shotgun. No reason not to use the opportunity to reload. I was loading more laser slugs to deal with the rest of them when my plan came to a crashing halt.

A strange formation began to form in front of me, as the vast majority of the Sleem began to retreat. A single orb, and about a dozen cubes all formed up in a loose semi-circle beyond the ship. The orb dropped something to the floor with a clatter. It was metallic and shiny, but I never got to see what it was, as a dimensional pod ripped into place and began warping it away. The surrounding cubes and the orb all shot little flecks of slime at the pod, and they struck it from a dozen different angles at the same time.

As the dimensional cube sizzled and danced, it warped in the biggest BuyMort bug I had seen yet. A towering monster of a mantis-like creature appeared from the pod’s rainbow beam and started immediately slashing at the cubes surrounding it.

The thing was a beast, like the end game boss of a video game.

It was endowed with two massive front limbs that ended in folding scythes, but something about the scythes caught my attention. They foamed. A line of dripping foam oozed from the creatures arms, and anytime it retracted the scythe blades back into its sides after a strike, a fresh coating of the foam was applied to them.

Where it struck the first cube, it punched through the Sleem into the concrete beneath, and then turned to deal with its next target. The orb squalled as it was cut through, and then began vibrating and dying. The foam turned their bodies to liquid, and they poured vital fluid from each gigantic wound.

The mantis creature itself was taller than anything else in the room, including the Sleem’s ship. It sat on what looked like a thousand smaller legs extending from a tail that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a lobster and lashed out with its two scythe arms.

I immediately began to think of it as ‘the Lobtis.”

The chitin across its body was visibly hardened and excessively shiny. It flashed and glinted even in the low light environment of the buried hangar, with only the glow of the sabotaged alien spaceship to provide illumination. Thick overlapping plates protected its limbs and body from any Sleem acid, and I assumed from myself when it decided I was worth attacking too.

Which was going to be any second, based on how empty the hangar around me had become in the seconds since the mantis monster had arrived. I glanced around and shook out of the shock, snatching my shotgun off the ground before running toward the staircase out.

The Lobtis reacted the instant I exited the underside of the spacecraft, lashing out faster than I could sense and lopping both of my legs off just below the knee. I was lifted violently into the air and thrown back under the ship, a juicy arc of red blood arcing and trailing after.

Thrashing from the attack, I struggled and splashed out of the Sleem puddle I had landed in. Then I looked back as the painkiller entered my system, and the Lobtis got significantly shinier. It was focused on the fleeing Sleem again, and as I watched it in my state of injured shock, it vomited a gush of foam down onto the hapless cube. I almost felt bad as the cube began to teapot-whistle-scream while the top of it gushed to the floor with a splash. The whistle bubbled as the rest of the cube melted, and only stopped around the point its body had melted halfway into a puddle.

The starfish cartoon was in my peripheral vision again, and when I looked over, it scolded me for the damage I had caused. It pointed to my legs, where the Lobtis’ foam was still actively dissolving the remainder of my lower limbs.

My legs hadn’t been completely chopped off, as the metal from the suit itself had held up. That was good, since I needed to avoid using the charge as much as possible.

But the feet and lower portion of my legs had been cut through cleanly, and the Lobtis’ digestive acid, mixed with the residual Sleem juice everywhere, was rapidly eating away at what was left of both ends.

A tendril was actively combatting the nasty stuff on each leg, but it foamed and dripped for a long moment before it finally stopped turning my body into liquid. To be fair, my flesh, blood, and bones became liquid from its digestive fluids far slower than the Sleem did, but I assumed that’s just because I wasn’t its intended target.

I had just been dangerous enough to the Sleem for them to suicide bomb me with its summon. As my suit got to work on my replacement legs, I grabbed my shotgun and fired the first of two laser slugs I had managed to load in it. My aim was good, and I swept the beam across the Lobtis’ lower body. The chitin glowed and sparked, blackening as my beam assaulted the armor.

But the monster didn’t fall. It just stopped chasing the Sleem, turned to look back at me, and then charged.

In an instant of panic, I racked the gun and fired the next laser slug at it, feeling the heat in my now glowing barrel through the slide. This time I focused on hitting it in the face, and my beam wavered and shook across its chest, neck, and head. All of the areas scorched wherever the beam danced, and the mantis suddenly roared, covering its face with both claws.

The sound trumpeted in the underground hangar, and while my helmet muted it to protect me, I could see the concrete floor vibrate with its force and power.

My shotgun empty, I hurriedly grabbed at a MIRV shell. My hands fumbled with the receiver port as I watched the monster charge toward me, and the instant it seated, I rammed the slide back into place and fired at the charging monster.

It opened its arms to slice me, and the MIRV shell separated just inside them, peppering the beast with miniature explosives that detonated and cut off both the roar and the charge. My starfish suit completed the repairs to my lower limbs with a cheerful sign off, and I jumped to my feet.

The mantis monster roared again and swiped at me, missing completely of its own accord. I was nowhere near fast enough to dodge this thing. Its limbs moved so fast that the air buffeted me when it missed.

It slashed one of the engine pods on the nearby ship, and the resulting explosion knocked it back, and sent me skittering and splashing across the floor into the staircase. With one of its four pods crippled and partially destroyed, the rear end of the ship groaned and sunk to the ground in that corner. It still hovered, just not on that side.

The thin metal limb of staircase I struck buckled and snapped off, and I slammed into both it, and the wall behind it. Thankfully, my helmet protected me from the worst of the blow, and I ended up sliding in the Sleem muck before I hit the wall, so the impact wasn’t enough to break anything.

It just knocked the wind out of me.

My cartoon starfish appeared at my side again and frowned at my feet. When I croaked a gasp of air into my lungs, it mimicked the sound before pointing at my gut and miming a trigger pull. A mild electrical shock struck me in the gut, and I could suddenly breathe again.

Finding a random cure for having the wind knocked out of me saved my life, because I saw the mantis lobster coming and managed to move in time to avoid the worst of its next attack. The thing slashed at the wall where my head had been a moment earlier and I sprinted on burning legs through the slime.

It had been partially blinded by my MIRV shotgun shell. I could see that one of its large, multifaceted eyes had popped, and was bleeding bright yellow ichor into the Sleem juice all around us.

Most of the original cabal of Sleem who had summoned this thing appeared to have escaped it, but I took grim satisfaction in the fact that the orb had gotten killed. I hated those Sleem in particular.

Keeping myself in the monster’s blind spot was more difficult than I had hoped, as it was able to move its head in almost a complete circle. Its depth perception was messed up by the loss of half its visual organs, and I managed to move in unpredictable enough patterns that it continued to miss me with its scything claws as I scrambled back to the crippled ship for cover.

Once beneath the listing ship, I ducked in the lowest corner and reloaded my poor Mossberg Shockwave, realizing as I cleared caustic slime from it’s loading port that this was possibly the weapon’s last outing.

Ignoring the burn in my feet wasn’t easy, but I had practice and painkillers. If I got out of this dungeon, I was definitely planning on visiting Phyllis’ stash before bed. Hate to imagine the dream purchase from this fiasco.

The Lobtis claw that tried to scrape me out from my hiding spot came closer than I was comfortable with, but also moved far too fast for me to do anything but jump out of my skin from its passage. A sharp tearing sound in the air was all I heard, and sparks from the concrete mixed with flying Sleem residue to tell me what had happened.

I racked the shotgun, shook the remaining slime from it, and prayed to whatever pasta entity might be listening that it would still fire as I started running for the far side of the ship’s underbelly.

My new friend reacted at once, scuttling alongside the vessel on its hundreds of limbs to keep pace with me. I stared at those legs for a second before I raised my weapon and fired a MIRV shell at them.

The bastard had taken me out at the legs, I felt like returning the favor.

The round separated before impact and a dozen pinpoints of light vanished into the lower limbs of the Lobtis before erupting in a cascade of muted explosions. It roared and slumped forward as several of its lower limbs stopped working and more yellow ichor flooded from its underside onto the gummy floor. Foam spattered the walls and pillars around it, hissing where it struck, as the Lobtis suddenly clamped down onto the floor.

It’s entire lower body dropped, and its legs were suddenly covered by its tail’s obvious thick armored plating. I gave it another MIRV shell just to be sure, but the explosions just scorched the chitin plating. The Lobtis responded immediately.

Both scythes slammed down on me from above, punching through my body and nailing me to the concrete floor beneath. One scythe tip was lodged in my belly, just above my hips. The other was rammed through my chest, directly beside the starfish suit. I lost the shotgun again as I slammed to the floor, the weapon splattered into the Sleem juice nearby.

As the Lobtis loomed over the top of me, my cartoon starfish appeared beside me once more with a gasp.

“You’ll need to break something user, I won’t have enough charge to fix this mess!”

It vanished when the Lobtis vomited foam on top of me in a rush.

The volume of digestive fluids it retched forth was impressive. It felt like I got hit from above with an entire swimming pool of the stuff, but fortunately I noticed immediately that my suit protected me from its acid too.

Except where my body wasn’t covered by it, or anyplace it had been violently torn open, that was.

My chest and stomach began to bubble, and the suit in those areas melted away from the claws frighteningly quickly, leaving behind only the top layer. My own red blood, the Lobtis’ grey digestive foam, and the faded blue-green of my suit’s material quickly formed a slurry on my body, and I grit my teeth against the pain.

My starfish suit may not have had the charge to fix me up after all the work it had done that night, but it managed to keep me pumped full of those lovely painkillers. The Lobtis finished vomiting with a gurgle and cocked its head to peer at me. Just in time to see my plasma falchion light up at my side, but not in time to realize what it meant.

I swept the burning blade up and through the claw tip in my chest. It burned through cleanly, and the Lobtis screamed in pain as it retracted both claws and moved to retreat. Its body dragged by me on the ground as it went, and I swiped again, cutting a swath through its tail chitin and several lower legs.

Yellow ichor burned and colored the smoke from my falchion as I hauled myself up off the concrete. I had three feet of Lobtis claw sticking through my chest as I staggered toward the monster, but it was horribly wounded now too, and couldn’t move fast enough to escape me.

My falchion roared in the air again and I took more lower limbs. It screamed and slashed at me with its intact claw but hit the falchion's blade instead of me and took off part of its own limb in the attack. As the burnt scythe tip splashed to the gore beside me, I looked up at the monster and grimaced. It pushed at the slick concrete, now a swampy mix of ichor, melted Sleem, and human blood over uncaring concrete.

I grit my teeth and stalked forward to kill the monster in front of me. Three more slashes with the falchion brought it low enough for me to inflict a mortal wound by slashing through part of its thorax and covering myself in a flood of yellow goo before I collapsed next to the giant, dead bug.

Part of its deadly natural weaponry was still embedded in my chest, as my starfish suit busily did what it could to fix my lower abdomen. There had been enough charge left in it to neutralize the digestive juices of the Lobtis, but not enough to replace the organs it had shredded with its claw.

My falchion guttered and went out, and I had enough wherewithal to replace it in its docking port before I coughed violently and splattered blood all over the inside of my helmet. A small arm swept across the screen and cleaned it off.

That painkiller was good stuff, I barely even felt the wrenching agony of the scythe blade in my chest, as it severed a rib entirely and further deflated my lung.

My starfish suit was dead. No more charge. It wasn’t even dancing at me with hallucinated Dutch cartoons.

I still had the presence of mind to break something, but it took me a minute to figure out what. My first attempt was the concrete. I punched once at the slime covered ground, but my blow was weak and ineffectual. It crossed my mind that the concrete should really be crumbling with this much acidic slime all over it, but I filed it away to figure out after I figured out how to not die. I had always been decent at setting and adhering to priorities.

The next victim was the shotgun, to my shame. I felt like a cowboy trying to put down his horse, but it turned out the metal and composite may have been damaged by the slime, but it was nowhere near weak enough for me to affect with my fist. Thankfully, a Mossburg Shockwave is not sapient. Or they would have gotten BuyMort, apparently.

I shook my head, trying to clear the encroaching darkness and bizarre thoughts of sentient weapons running a society. My hand shot out to steady me as I started to fall, and I crushed part of the Lobtis’ chitin with my palm. It crumbled like dry leaves, crackling in the still air and falling to the floor in dust and small fragments.

My suit immediately sprang to life, and the cartoon appeared in my hazy vision. A small shock hit my heart and I jolted back awake.

“That’s better user! Look at all this damage. And barely any charge. Let’s get you on your feet, so you can break some things!”

I groaned and tried to raise my head as fresh blood pumped into my veins from the starfish suit. A tendril rose in front of me, gripped the broken end of the Lobtis claw in my chest, and heaved it out in a sudden gush of blood. I screamed as I felt more bones snap, and a healthy section of my lung was sliced away like a ham. More painkiller shut me up, and my head spun from it.

Lasers welded my chest, and another jolt shocked me back to awareness. I gripped at the chitin beside me and heaved myself to my feet as the suit shoved a fresh lung in place of my damaged one and vomited the damaged one out onto the inside of my anti-Sleem suit in a thick slurry.

Whatever, this thing was trashed anyway.

As was I, I noticed at that moment. I needed a bath, and my stomach was still hanging open. All the organs stayed in place, but I had a gaping tear in my skin and muscle tissue. The fatty bag that holds all my organs inside had been repaired before the suit ran out of charge. I appreciated its ability to prioritize, but any shifting or movement in my midsection made me almost fall again, so I focused on my task. More charge.

The suit was already winding down, having ensured I wouldn’t drown in synthetic blood and closed the worst of the arterial damage. It was disconcerting to be able to see inside my own chest cavity, but the entry wound was wide, with severed bone apparent. The arm on that side also didn’t work, and I was starting to lose feeling in my legs.

The Lobtis was hard, all over, except where my laser shotgun blast had hit it. The armor had withered and blackened in those areas, and I immediately saw where my hand had fallen through. I reached back and punched the armored chitin plate near the burn mark and my cartoon appeared once more.

“Great job user! Keep going!”

I sought the next area as more mechanical tendrils rose from the suit to work on me. Bone bridges were grafted and lasered in place, flesh-foam filled in the gaps, and then another round of lasering to get me looking the way I did before.

As I found and punched the blacked spots in the Lobtis’ armor, I wondered how much of me was left with original birth parts, and how much was this flesh paste and synthetic organs they kept filling me with.

Of course, I immediately realized that my genitals had come through unscathed so far and felt better.

Then I felt stupid for feeling better and realized how stoned on the suit’s painkiller I was.

To be fair, I’d had rather a lot of it that night, so when the Sleem sneaked back up on me while I was in my stupor, I didn’t beat myself up over it. I just shrieked in abject terror as an orb rolled toward me out of the darkness, then grabbed feebly at my shotgun. The weapon slid further away, and I looked up to see the orb hurtling toward me, when suddenly a dog barked.

The orb splashed violently, disappearing in a fine mist of acid. I flopped into the slime and looked over my shoulder as my starfish suit combatted the acid trying to dissolve my brand new legs.

Doofus was there, right there at the top of the stairs behind me. So were Molls, Rayna and Tollya, and every single one of the BlueCleave hobbs.

One of the new people staying in the camp was there too, nervously clutching a shotgun and wearing a belt filled with taser slugs.

Doofus caught my attention immediately, because the dog was decked out in an anti-Sleem suit just like the one that hung in rags on me. His was equipped with a small but ferocious directed sonic weapon on the front of the snout, and as I watched, he barked at another Sleem and splattered into its component parts. The big malamute started racing down the stairs toward me, and Molls slid up onto the metal platform he had just left.

She was beautiful. Her armor was pure white, trimmed with gold filigree. It covered most of her body, leaving only her face open. It was clearly shielded though, a blue forcefield distorting her image. I saw a similar blue shield move ahead of her lower body, burning Sleem remnants and allowing her a safe path to slither.

In her hands rested a long bow with what looked like a huge counterweight. As she drew the string back, I saw it for what it was as concentrated light formed in the tube. She loosed at an encroaching cube, and it sizzled and squealed as it was burned. The cube turned to run, and she hit it with another laser blast, aggressively ending its life.

Rayna and the hobbs set up a rear defense. I could see them moving back to the central room and realized this was an extraction. My body stung from the acid, and I had a moment of clarity about getting out of here.

It had been my choice to stay and sabotage the Sleem, instead of sneaking or running out when I had the chance, and the thought of anyone else getting hurt for that decision tore at me, even though the cloud of painkiller.

Doofus was at my side, barking at any Sleem who got too close and splattering them into oblivion. He was good at longer range too, but he liked to growl and warn them before he killed them, like the ethically sound boy he was.

They vibrated with what I assumed was fear when he growled, but they kept coming anyway. I had to get my people out of here before they summoned another Lobtis, or something worse.

I ran for the stairs with Doofus at my side. I turned and snarled as I ran.

“BuyMort, I’d like to sell all of this, except the ship.”

Molls covered us with blasts of weaponized light from her bow, and we fled the darkness of the underground base. Rayna and Tollya covered our retreat and fell back, using the plasma rifles from earlier. I made a mental note to replenish the ammunition for them, no matter the expense.

Those rifles were effective beyond belief. They punched giant, burning holes in the Sleem, and kept going, burning through as many Sleem as were between the rifle and the wall.

Rayna was smart and positioned her people to use them to great effect, holding off full charges from both medical, and the residential block. I shuddered as we passed that hallway, boiling with Sleem as it was, and kept going, following Doofus as he led me out.

We all filed out of the underground passage into Mr. Sada’s basement, and Doofus turned back to growl at the portal until Rayna and a still burnt Ordo heaved the hatch back into place. I dropped my slime covered shotgun, collapsed on the ground, and hugged Doofus to my chest. Our suits crinkled against each other as he leaned into the affection.

“Good boy, Doof. Good, handsome, smart boy.”