As he drove his War Suit in reverse, Thomas kept his eyes on the various sensors inside the cockpit while also simultaneously cross-referencing that information with what his HUD showed him. He had picked up this skill one Dungeon prior after an incident where the cameras got covered in gunk, and he had picked it up at a decently quick rate.

As long as he used the various other sensors in the War Suit and added the minimap to that, he could reasonably run Spider-Can without using the cameras, though it was actually (in his mind, at least) easier to add in the visual data that the cameras provided, despite it being yet more information for his brain to process. Plus, to make things even harder, he had the minimap set to show terrain differences, which meant that the normal minimap, which only showed outlines of where things were relative to the ground, now showed colored patches detailing the height of said obstacles.

How he was able to process all of this info and still function as well as he could came down to the fact that he had played a metric fuckton of VR games before playing the current MMO, and that he had managed to get a few esports champions to teach him the intricacies of micro.

As it turns out, if you have a shit load of money, professionals who are the peak in their field tend to be willing to train you to at least be somewhat decent as long as you offer them something of value in return. While people didn’t need money nearly as much anymore, especially with all needs being provided automatically, having some of it did give you access to getting your ‘wants’ provided for, and every second that wasn’t spent working a job was a second that professionals in any sport could spend improving their game.

But all the training in the world meant nothing if the trainee wasn’t suited for it. Thomas was never going to be a pro at esports, but he could shift his attention between all of the sensors and combine that data in his head. As such, he could easily put his War Suit in reverse and backpedal through the areas he had cleared a few in-game hours ago.

It also helped that he could set his guns to auto-target and auto-fire, and then just focus on maneuvering and, if needed, engaging in melee, but he had been trying to acclimatize himself to manually controlling the turrets while on the move. That was going slowly, but he was getting the hang of it regardless.

Once fully into the large room he had decided to fight the giant ground bat in, Thomas took stock of everything around him. His memory of this place and his hope that he could use the environmental factors here proved to be well-founded, or at least he hoped that they would be so.

“Radioactive symbols, check. Acid symbols, check. Symbols for toxins, poisons, incendiaries and more, check.” Thomas grinned as he surveyed the countless dangerous materials around him and his War Suit before the realization of his dangerous situation hit him like a Mack truck. “Jesus fuck, man. Everyone and their mother knows you don’t put this much hazardous material together like this… I mean, it's just an OSHA citation at a bare minimum just waiting to happen.”

Thomas’ gaze strayed down a bit, and he saw a skeleton wearing a worn and torn lab coat sprawled out across the ground, its skull and right arm crushed by some tipped over machinery.

“See? This is what happens when you throw safety out the window and hope for the best.” He sighed. “That man may have had a bright future and could have cured cancer, but now he’s just a bunch of dusty old bones lying in a heap.” He looked around a bit more before shaking his head. “Obviously this place needed a few inspections and never got them. Besides, who the fuck builds a secret gene-modding/ cyborging lab with this level of design idiocy, anyway? I swear this place has to be algorithm-generated, because I cannot for the life of me comprehend of someone stupid enough to design a Dungeon with this level of moronic object placement.”

He paused, scratched his chin, and then added, “Actually, people can be dumb, and I’ve met a few people who think they are certified geniuses despite being dumber than a bag of bricks.” Thomas shook his head and mumbled, “Or maybe I’m just overthinking things…”

Thomas opened up Spider-Can’s cockpit and hopped outside. No, he wasn’t about to try and face the creature that was roughly equivalent in size to Spider-Can with his personal handheld weapons, instead, he was going to use some of the stuff he had lying around in his Item Box to make this upcoming battle a bit more… fun.

He set to work quickly, as every moment outside of his War Suit resulted in a bit of his HP dropping due to the sheer volume of hazardous materials around him. It was times like these where he was glad that, despite ruling the whole of humanity, the Oligarchs had the common sense to not try and over pollute as well as the common sense needed to know that you needed proper storage for all types of waste, as well as the fact that they needed to be either stored or disposed of properly.

Not that such a way of thinking hadn’t come at a cost. More than a few families had everything stripped from them when they didn’t follow the guidelines and caused massive disasters. As it turns out, most people would very much prefer not to have to deal with yet another near-total collapse of civilization due to improper use, storage, and disposal of chemicals.

You only needed to accidentally wipe out around one percent of the remaining humans on the planet before the whole system gets a hit from the hammer, and now, more than ever, those at the top wanted to avoid that fate. So, with his Geiger counter screaming at him about how fucked he was if he stayed out like this, Thomas rushed his job.

With the last bit of ‘fun’ put in place, he ran like the devil himself was on his heels and literally dove into Spider-Can’s cockpit before slamming his nearest limb onto the button that closed up the War Suit’s cockpit. As the hatch closed, Thomas breathed a sigh of relief as the Geiger counter went from a near-constant noise to merely a few ticks every few seconds.

“Not gonna kill me today, fucko.” He yelled to no one in particular as he twisted himself in his War Suit’s seat. He sighed and checked his HP bar and nearly spat out the drink he was having as he saw that his HP pool had dropped by nearly 87% in just a few minutes. “THIS!” he yelled as he put his drink away. “This is why you don’t leave this shit just lying around!