“Zombie plants,” Sam said as though that was a perfectly normal thing to suggest. “Some kind of tree that picks up goblin corpses and uses them to… throw insults, I guess.”
The creature lashed out once more at Coop, but this time the ferret summoned her shield and deflected the blow. An instant later, Wolfy lunged toward the strange plant, biting into its stalk as the pale goblin heads shouted insults.
“Demon mutt! Devil-breathed ballbag!”
Pete frowned. “What the fuck are these things?!”
>> NON PLAYER CAPITALIST [NPC] CLAN
NAME: Blightfruit Shamblers
TYPE: Zombie Plants
>> DESCRIPTION
Born of rot, graft, and questionable genius, the Blightfruit Shamblers are the shambling legacy of Professor Gribbix Rotstem, a notorious necro-scientist whose experiments with goblin corpses and parasitic flora earned him exile even among his own kind. Gribbix believed that death was “just wasted fertilizer,” and so he perfected a vile grafting technique—planting blight-seeds inside goblin cadavers until roots and vines claimed the body like a walking trellis.
The result is a grotesque hybrid: half-rotting goblin torsos fused with woody trunks, their skulls dangling from branches like rancid fruit. These heads swing, sway, and scream endless streams of goblin abuse, while vines lash out with thorned fury. The Shamblers are not graceful predators but stumbling, dragging horrors that close the gap through sheer persistence.
Though slow and awkward, the Blightfruit Shamblers thrive in contested zones where coins and corpses pile high. Wherever wealth and death intersect, Gribbix’s leafy abominations sprout anew.
>> CORE TRAITS
+| Rooted Persistence: Blightfruit Shamblers are slow-moving but difficult to fully destroy. Severed limbs sprout into writhing vine-knots that continue to attack until burned.
+| Goblin Fruit Abuse: The dangling heads constantly shout insults at opponents, lowering morale and occasionally causing minor distractions or debuffs (e.g., –1 Accuracy while being mocked).
+| Necro-Botany Spread: Killing a Shambler often scatters its blight-seeds. If left unattended, these seeds may sprout into new Shamblers within hours.
>> UNITS
+| Stump Shamblers (Basic Walkers)
Weapons: Vine tendrils tipped with thorns.
Mechanic: Slow melee swipes. On death, drop “Blightfruit Seeds” that can spawn seedlings if not destroyed.
+| Fruit-Head Biters (Mid-Rankers)
Weapons: Detached goblin heads that drop from branches and roll across the battlefield, snapping at ankles.
Mechanic: On death, spawn 1–2 “Headfruit” minions that harass enemies before rotting away.
True to the description, the Blightfruit Shamblers were difficult to put down. Wolfy and Coop both bit and tore at the zombie plant, but it continued to hurl insults at them as bright green sap poured from the wounds they made. The sap filled the air with a noxious scent, stinging Pete’s eyes and bringing bile to the back of his throat as he backed away.
Coop, too, was forced to retreat, her fur covered in the sticky sap. She fled from the plant, chased by more insults from the swollen goblin heads that dangled like sickly fruit. Wolfy continued to maul the zombie plant, but even though he was doing damage, it wasn’t enough to put the Blightfruit Shambler down.
“Damn, these things are tough,” Sam mused, sending a blast of power from her hands.
Ethereal chains wrapped around the plant, fixing it in place and burning where the chains met the surface of the plant. The goblin heads kept throwing insults while the plant whipped out with lashing tendrils.
Not willing to risk getting any closer, Pete swapped the machete for his bow and loaded up a drill arrow. He used his charge shot ability and aimed for the thickest part of the plant’s trunk. When he released the arrow, it shot with predictable speed and severity, completely missing his target but, by chance, hitting a second zombie plant that was slowly walking its way toward them from the rear.
The arrow hit like a shard of lightning, cutting right through the creature and sending it to the floor in a deflated heap of plant matter and gory remains. The goblin heads bobbing from stalks all around the tree muttered curses and insults as they
“Meatheaded prick!”
“You shoot like a girl, pansy boy!”
“I’ve seen better archery from a…”
The voices died down, and the plant continued to wither, its color changing to an ashen hue as all the moisture seemed to drain out of it. A quick glance behind confirmed that Pete’s shot hadn’t simply beaten the odds of his current Luck debuff. There were dozens of the plant creatures shambling along, packed tightly together so that it was basically impossible to miss them, even with his Luck issues.
>> ACHIEVEMENT: Pesticide Potshot!
Congratulations! You just killed your very first plant-based enemy in the Dominion Ultrimax Contest and, in doing so, you’ve pushed the planet a little closer to ecological oblivion! Only joking! Who cares about the environment when your whole world has been turned into a games arena?
ACHIEVEMENT REWARD: + 10% damage to all plant-based enemies for the next 10 minutes
KILL REWARD: 15 Belch bucks
Pete shook his head. “Guess this is what we’re doing for the next little while.”
“There are dozens of them,” Sam said, staring down at her map interface. “They just came out of nowhere, and now there are dozens of them!”
“They don’t hit very hard,” Coop said, circling around beside Pete. “But that damned sap is a nightmare.”
Pete looked down at the little ferret and saw that the fluorescent green sap was still sticking to her fur. She flicked one paw like a cat trying to dislodge water, and a gob of the sticky sap went flying over and landed on Grizzle’s already badly stained robe. The goblin jumped into the air, scowling over at Coop.
“Might be a good chance to pick up some experience,” Pete said, turning to Craig as the zombie plants slowly shuffled their way towards them. “Just need to stay clear of the tendrils, and you should be fine.”
The little goblin nodded, raising his gun and preparing to fire. A moment before he did so, however, he turned to Pete and grinned. Craig reached into his pocket and pulled out a small handful of coins; only the coins were tarnished and looked like they were somehow diseased and covered in sickness. Black dust covered their edges, and sickly vapors seemed to rise from his hand as Craig tossed the coins at the closest zombie plant.
“You got a face even a mother couldn’t love,” one of the twisted heads hanging from the plant said a moment before one of the coins from Craig’s Filthy Lucre ability struck it right in the mouth.
The moment the coins struck the plant, sap started to bubble and hiss, and a dark infection spread out from where the coins had made contact. The disease spread swiftly, eating away at the plant flesh and causing it to recoil as the bobbing heads it held became notably silent.
Craig raised his rifle and fired, waiting for the slot mechanism to complete and shooting a single coin projectile, which struck one of the goblin heads right between the eyes and sent it toppling from the vine. The head fell to the floor, cursing as it hit face first and then rolled towards Pete and the others.
“I’ll bite your mucking ankles off!” the head frothed as it rolled towards them.
Craig pulled out a blade and plunged it down into the goblin’s head, ending its complaint swiftly as the tree it had come from sent a lash of vine out towards Craig’s head. Before the blow struck, Grizzle lunged forward, holding out her holy book in front of her chest like a shield so that the whipping tendril hit the tome rather than Craig’s face.
Grizzle grimaced as the vine whip wrapped around the book and cut into the fabric of her robe. No blood flowed; however, Grizzle blinked in a moment of confusion as the pain she expected wasn’t nearly as pronounced as she’d thought it would be.
Before either she or Craig could attack the plant once again, Torgo came charging past, screaming at the top of his lungs, fire and ash surrounding his outstretched hand. A moment later, the fire shot forward from the little goblin, a gout of flame and ash that struck the offending plant with such ferocity that it engulfed the Blightfruit Shambler in consuming fire.
The tree screeched as its surviving heads blurted insults. The fire acted quickly, however, burning its limbs and vines and reducing the zombie plant to a heap of smoldering ash within seconds. The other plants didn’t seem to notice or mind the fact that their comrade had just been utterly consumed by fire, shuffling towards Pete and the others with the same clumsy energy the first of the plants had demonstrated.
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Firelight dancing in his eyes, Torgo turned to one of the other enemies and shot another burst of fire towards the enemy. Once more, the zombie plant was consumed in the ravenous fire, and Torgo seemed to have come alive at the sight.
Grizzle was horrified by the scene. She backed away from her companion, clutching the religious text to her chest, eyes wide with terror. Craig, by contrast, grinned in delight, moving up next to Torgo and leveling his gun at the nearest enemy.
“This is good, right?” Sam asked, motioning to the pair. “At least they’re fighting.”
Pete nodded. “Hell yeah. Nothing wrong with adding a couple of fireballs to the attack.”
He pulled out his machete and advanced on a pair of the shambling zombie plants, which Coop was busy harassing. The temptation to use his newly acquired Blood Overdraft ability and go into full berserker mode was strong, but Pete resisted, relying on mundane strikes of the machete and hoping that the repeated slashes and thrusts would help him level up his ability with blades.
Melee fighting with the Luck debuff felt a little like trying to swat a fly with a herring. Most of his strikes went wide or clunked into the skull of one of the goblin heads, failing to damage the tree and, more often than not, deflecting the force of the blow. On several occasions, he fell on his ass, slipping on the fallen heads from the zombie trees as they rolled and snapped on the floor, teeth chattering, insults flying.
“Clumsy mucking oaf!”
“What’s the matter, hooman? Looks like someone swapped your legs for mucking wingwangs!”
“Come here and I’ll bite your mucking toes off!”
The insults came thick and fast, but Pete ignored them, continuing to thrust and kick and punch at the enemy. He received more than his fair share of bruises, cuts, and shocks of pain as he swung the machete at the enemy heads.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t hit anything. His heightened agility meant that he was able to move deftly enough, but his luck was so appalling that, in almost every instance, something went wrong. His left foot slipped on goblin spit, and he lost his balance while in the middle of a machete swing. He thrust his blade forward right at the moment when a nearby zombie plant stumbled backward, knocking his arm and sending the strike wide of the mark.
Pete remembered old Looney Tunes cartoons he’d seen as a kid, showing characters slipping and sliding around on banana peels or roller skates. That’s exactly what fighting felt like with the Luck debuff, as though everything that could go wrong would go wrong.
>> KILL REWARD: 15 Belch Bucks
>> HEAVY BLADED WEAPONRY PROFICIENCY +1
It was still possible to take out the zombie plants; of course, they just took a lot of effort to kill. That wasn’t just because of Pete’s luck issue either. It seemed that Sam, Coop, and Craig were having similar difficulties killing the strange plants. They couldn’t attack worth a damn, but it took a lot to put the bastards down, and the incessant insults and teeth chattering of the goblin heads were more than a little annoying.
“Your mother drank white wine with accountants!” a nearby head spat, teeth clicking and one eye drooping down to its lips. “Your father was a bathroom attendant’s apprentice and—”
Pete laid into the goblin head with a kick that sent it flying into the air and sailing out over the concrete wall surrounding the edge of the roof. The dead goblin was still muttering ineffectual insults as it sailed into the night, and Pete found himself wondering whether it would still be frothing with insults when it finally landed.
>> ACHIEVEMENT: He Boots He Scores!
And it’s a beautiful strike! You’ve just sent that undead goblin melon soaring off the roof like it was the championship-winning goal in the Gobball World Cup. Ten out of ten for distance, zero for sportsmanship. Keep this up, and you could have a promising career in an amateur Gobball league.
ACHIEVEMENT REWARD: “Golden Bootleg” bonus. This unlocks no bonuses, but your kicks look 12% cooler.
Pete smirked, turning and swiping his machete through the air, aiming at a nearby zombie plant as it whipped out with one of its lashes. The machete sliced through the tendril, and Pete lunged forward, ignoring the insults of more of the goblin heads and driving the edge of his blade right through the center of the main plant stalk.
As the machete slid through and erupted out the back of the plant, he realized his error and pulled the blade free. For an animal or humanoid enemy, that strike would have been a killing blow, but this was a plant. Or at least it was partly a plant. As a second tendril whipped around and lashed at his face, Pete blocked the blow with his arm, wincing a little at the sting before slicing through the tendril with his blade and starting to hack away at the zombie plant as though he was chopping down a tree.
It took a good few minutes to do enough damage to the Blightfruit Shambler to kill the thing. By the time it was done, the plant had been hewn into two different parts. Its noxious sap was all over Pete’s clothes and had spurted onto his face and arms, but he found that, the moment the plant died, its sap immediately began to lose its bite. Instead of a sticky, acid-like substance that burned his skin and baffled his senses, the sap simply became an annoyance.
>> KILL REWARD: 15 Belch Bucks
>> HEAVY BLADED WEAPONRY PROFICIENCY +1
As the fighting continued and the number of zombie plants started to thin, Pete and Sam both backed away. Torgo was still fighting enthusiastically, largely in silence, but clearly delighted with the prospect of throwing fire at the shambling enemy. Craig had continued to fight with a knife rather than the gun, and he used his abilities to both buff Torgo’s damage and the defenses of the group.
At one stage, a ragged, holographic banner appeared above Craig’s head, made from tattered rags and bones with a skull and crossbones motif at its center. The moment the banner was raised, everyone in the party got a small buff to damage and resistance, and Torgo in particular seemed to respond vigorously to the buffs.
Even Grizzle, despite her earlier horror at the violence, had joined the fight in some small way. She seemed to be using her holy scriptures as a shield, pushing back against attacks and bearing the brunt of the zombie plant lashings with the makeshift bulwark. As the fight went on, she had even used the shield to protect Craig and Torgo when the enemy surrounded them, and despite taking several wounds herself, Grizzle seemed to have taken to her new role as goblin protector.
Pete and Sam left the goblins to finish off the stragglers, reasoning that the experience would be more valuable to the trio than if Pete or Sam killed the remaining plants. They returned to the edge of the roof, looking down at the enemy below, Pete peeling dried portions of sap from his clothes, Sam squinting out into the darkness.
“We take out the smaller enemies first then,” she said, pointing to the left side of the intersection down below. “You can use your stealth and bow to pick them off one by one, and I’ll get Wolfy to attack from the opposite side over there. We’ll divide their forces and keep them guessing as to where we are.”
She pointed to the rear of the area. “If we can get Craig and his friends to stay hidden around there, we wait until there are only a few left, and then they can start taking out the stragglers. We communicate with the chat, keep things as quiet as we can until it’s hard, and then we just give them hell.”
Pete turned to face her, smiling. “You really dig this stuff, huh?”
She shrugged and smiled. “What can I say? I’m a sucker for top-down strategy sims.”
“Yeah, but this won't be top-down. We’re gonna be right in the middle of the shit.”
“And strategy doesn’t mean shit when the fighting starts, I know. I figure we need to at least go into this thing with a plan though, right? I mean, we’re up against it here.”
Pete nodded. “Sure as hell seems like the System has it in for us.”
“The moment this all started, I figured we were basically done as a species anyway. We’re just entertainment. Someone bigger and more powerful has scooped us up and thrown us in a pit to fight it out until we’re all dead.”
He frowned at that. “Jesus, that’s bleak.”
“I’m just being a realist. There’s no point in denying it, and the moment you see that everything is hopeless and we’ve got no way of winning this damned thing, the easier it is to just get on with it.”
“Well, that’s one way to look at it, I guess. I prefer to be a little more positive, but that’s just me.”
She grinned, still staring straight ahead. “Can’t hurt to have at least one optimist in the group, I guess.”
Pete looked out at the lights below, trying to make out the enemy they were going to have to kill to survive the next phase of the contest. While he couldn’t actually see Coin Lord Grindle, a long line of flashing lights at the center of a group of smaller lights suggested where the Fleshcycle was located.
The sound coming from below was much more troubling than the sight of the flashing lights. The roar of tortured engines rose and fell along with the occasional sound of screeching tires. What made the sounds much worse, however, was the fact that human screams accompanied the revving of engines, as though each time a throttle was pulled it caused the imprisoned Noob extreme pain. Even honking horns and screeching tires had a human-like sound to them.
“I was thinking I might try and get some sleep,” he said, still staring down at the enemy. “But there’s no way that’s gonna happen.”
She nodded, pulling out one of the Ultrimax Imperial Experience packs from her inventory and starting to pull it apart and hand different items to Pete. He took a protein bar and started eating as she began picking through a salad.
“None of us are getting any sleep,” she mused. “Not until that creepo down below is dead.”
Pete nodded. “Or we are.”
She turned to him, frowning. “I thought you were supposed to be the optimist?”
Coop appeared, covered in sap and flicking her paws in an attempt to dislodge some of the substance.
“You got food?” she asked, looking up at the pair.
“Yeah,” Sam replied, pulling a second package from her inventory and sliding down against the half wall that surrounded the edge of the roof.
Pete joined her as the goblin trio came sauntering over, and soon the whole group was sitting in a circle, eating contentedly as they each considered the rapidly approaching fight. Pete considered the group as he ate, working through their various strengths and weaknesses.
It was difficult to know how to prepare for a fight with an epic boss they knew next to nothing about. They’d faced the Noob Riders already, so they knew roughly what to expect when it came to fighting the smaller mobs, but this would be the first elite-level boss they’d ever fought, and he and Sam had only been in the game for one day.
He thought about offering some kind of rousing speech to inspire the troops but realized that they still had hours to go until his Luck debuff ended, so a speech now would probably not do much good. Pete was also never really a speech-giving kind of guy. He hated politics and had never liked public speaking. The circumstances were very different here, of course, but trying to rouse the troops on the eve of battle still felt incredibly corny, and he couldn’t even begin to think of what words to say.
[Nero-Private-Pete] From what I have observed, the old adage is true, Pete. Actions do indeed carry more weight than words. If you wish to lead, simply do so with action.
[Pete-Private-Nero] Thanks, but I don’t really want to lead. I just figured someone should say something to…wait, how the hell did you know what I was thinking? Can you read my thoughts?
[Nero-Private-Pete] Not precisely, no. I could sense your hesitation, however, and it was easy enough to see that you wished to inspire the others. I simply put the two pieces of data together and offered a suggestion.
Pete nodded, but the truth was he was less than convinced. Being able to communicate with the AI with just a thought was one thing, but if Nero could read his mind, that was another entirely. Nothing would be private, and Pete had to guess everything would be fed back to the System sooner or later. While Nero hadn’t done anything to make Pete suspect his motives, the fact was the AI worked for the System, and its entire purpose was to assist players so that they could survive a little longer and provide as much entertainment as possible.
[Nero-Private-Pete] I apologize if I overstepped, Pete.
[Pete-Private-Nero] No, it’s fine. I just… It took me by surprise, that’s all.
He looked around at the group, considering each member of the party. They all brought something different, a different strength and perspective, and they were all dealing with the impending fight in their own way. He marveled at the fact that he hadn't met any of these individuals until today, except for Coop, of course. Now they were preparing to head into battle against an overwhelming force with only a slim chance of survival.
You suppose this was what it was like being conscripted into a war and forced to fight. The Dominion Ultrimax contest, however, felt utterly absurd as a theater of war. The goblin enemies, this obsession with money, the constantly changing rules that seemed stacked against them, not to mention the billions of viewers watching every move they made through the game feeds; it was completely ridiculous that this is what humanity had been reduced to.
All of their armies, their tanks and warships, heavily armed troops, and highly skilled operatives amounted to nothing. There was only one path to victory, one hope for humanity's survival, and that hope rested on the shoulders of people like Pete.
“Looks like our friends are back,” Coop said, eyes narrowed as she turned to face a group of skulking zombie plants that were slowly shambling toward them from the shadows.
Pete sighed, pushing himself up to his feet as the others quickly finished their food and did likewise.
“So much for downtime,” he mused, rolling his shoulders and pulling the machete out of his inventory as he walked toward the enemy.