“Jesus fuck these things are tanky!” yelled an unaffiliated Player over open comms as his War Suit slammed its fist into the face of what looked to be a scaled-up cross between a hippo and a pug. “How much damage can these things take?!”

Franken’s sword was run through the side of that creature, but did not even show its tip out the monster’s opposite side. Franken switched its grip to a reversed one and yanked the blade free, causing even more damage, but that seemingly did next to nothing to gain the animal’s attention. Axton directed his War Suit to push the sword in once again, yanking out in a similar way as before.

“Hold on and wish me luck!” Axton shouted before shoving Franken’s left forearm into the beast’s open wound. That was something the monster felt, apparently, as it tried to kick Franken and, by proxy, Axton away. It would soon wish that had done so a few seconds earlier, though, as Franken had already discharged a few timed grenades from its weaponized left forearm into the creature’s insides.

“Charge is lit; clear away!”

At Axton’s call, the four War Suits and pilots that had been trying to wear this oversized critter down pulled back, and they did so just in time, too. The grenades went off, the first triggering the second and so on until the explosion caused a gout of blood and gore to erupt from the hostile creature’s wound. But it wasn’t just that wound that saw a bit of blood and guts come flying out, as a few other places bore deep-ish cuts and gouges, and if that wasn’t enough the explosion caused the creature to unintentionally vomit up a horrific amount of its insides.

With that damage done, the monster finally fell over with a wet splatting sound as more internal juices and materials began to spill out. The thing was dead after more than three solid minutes of fighting, but that was just one of the enemy mobs that the unlikely gang of Dungeon-crawlers had been forced to deal with as of late.

“Weren’t we supposed to be fighting in a Battle Royale?” Asked Thomas as he hosed down a few smaller, less well-armored critters with a rain of bullets and autocannon shots. “I could have sworn that we were here for a Battle Royale.”

“Blame the fuckers that gave us such a shit-tier drop pod and an equally crap drop site.” Grumbled one of the members of the ‘Kurds and Wei’ Company. While they initially had kept up their acting, this had gradually faded away as the stress and tension that this bullshit Dungeon had hefted upon them overrode their desire to have fun with roleplaying. “Anyone need repairs?”

“That’s my line.” Axton said snarkily. “But, yeah, anyone need a patch or two? Better to deal with it now than wait until it’s too late.”

“Could use a wash, that’s for sure.”

“Yeah, we all do. Thank God for the game auto-cleaning the mess up. Who got the drop?”

“That would be me.” Axton replied. “And, just like last time, I’ll trade it to anyone who needs it for an IOU for some nice salvage.”

The Player who went by the name of Xiahou Dun laughed. “Man, I can never get over the fact that you’d just trade that shit for an IOU! I mean, do you really expect to be paid back?”

“Don’t know, don’t care.” Axton replied curtly. “Besides, the shit that I got isn’t something that I can use right now, or possibly ever. I mean, what use would I have for a bunch of bones and some hide?”

“Fair enough.” said the Player by the name of Saladin. “Pretty sure you could sell it for something.”

“Too much of a hassle.” Axton responded.

“Well, I’d slap you on the back like a bro if I could. But given how my Suit is and how weak your Avatar is, I think you’d be more appreciative if I didn’t.”

“Then we are of one mind.” Axton said with a sigh.

The current monsters dealt with, and the banter all finished, Axton and the rest turned their attention to the massive door that prevented them from moving on.

“Boss Room?” asked someone, to which everyone else replied all at the same time with the correct response of, “Boss Room.”

“Well, I guess I’ll do the honors…”

And with Axton’s words, the door slid open.

…

The massive circular room was utterly empty, with not even a single enemy mob to be seen. Likewise, the HUDs of every Player there showed that there were no enemies there to be seen, though that was little comfort to anyone who now was in that massive arena-like room.

“Anyone up for betting on what kind of Boss we’ll face?”

“I’m betting it's an animal type.”

“Another War Suit.”

“Fuck, I don’t know… a rogue machine?”

“I’m putting my money on an extradimensional abomination.”

“A bit early for that kind of shit, don’t you think?”

“Never too early for Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror, my dude.”

Axton, though, was utterly silent. The arena was far too large for anything that fit most of the constant ideas that the other Players were throwing around, and despite being ‘empty’ it still had a massive number of barriers, barricades, structures, and whatnot dotting its floor, along with bumps and divots here and there of various shapes and sizes.

He had a very bad feeling about this place, but whether or not his suspicions of what would be the ‘Boss’ were true or not was something that he would need to wait for and see for himself. The gang moved deeper into the arena, and just as they reached the center an alarm rang out inside each individual War Suit.

“Enemy?! Where?!”

“Nothing on the HUD or cameras, so where the fuck is it?!”

Yeah, the ‘Boss’ was exactly what Axton had feared.

“Calm down!” Axton yelled.

“But the alarm!”

“Check which alarm it is before panicking.” Axton said with all the authority he could muster.

Sure enough, they did check, and it was once they did that they realized how their choices regarding Axton and his modifications earlier had no doubt saved their asses in more ways than one. There was, in fact, an alarm going off, but it wasn’t one that told of a hostile nearby or one that was approaching.

Instead, it was the one that had only been added a relatively short while ago. It was the one that told them that someone was trying to use the backdoor that those hacked IFF tags provided to make everyone turn on each other. Someone in the group was the first to go from shock to horror to relief and then to joy and laughter as they realized that the people who wanted to fuck with them all just got played.

Soon after that person began to laugh, others followed suit, the tension and stress falling off of them all like a cascading wave of freedom and satisfaction.

“Fuck you, assholes!”

“Yeah, fuck that noise!”

“Gonna have to try a little harder than that, you dumb fucking shitheads!”

As the gang of unlikely allies continued cussing out the cheating bastards who tried to turn them against each other, the exit to the arena opened. With no other ‘hostiles’ left in the arena and no one having been taken out, the crappy AI that ran the arena trap decided that the battle that should have been going on right now was already over before it even had begun.