Museum Core Chapter 20: Loot and Terrible Ideas

As it turned out, making hot coffee was damn hard. So hard, in fact, that Thomas would up setting a jaguar on fire.

The idea had been simple, heat up coffee in an appropriate container, then somehow scoop it out with a cup, and then absorb that cup.

Putting that into practice had been a hell of a lot harder.

The cold coke had been simple, with every component needed already present.

A bucket that had been part of a janitor’s cart, water from a pipe in the wall, a single chunk of ice from the ice cream freezer in the gift shop that hadn’t melted yet. All he’d had to do was summon those in the correct order and be done with it.

But heating stuff up was hard. Transporting a burning twig down from the roof was a daunting task, so Thomas wound up summoning a pot and filling it with coffee up there.

And then the jaguar had caught fire, so he tried to switch to a wyvern, but the big beast was too big and rough for every aspect of the task. Not only did it wind up drooling in the coffee, which was gross, but also crushed it like a tin can while shifting its grip. That had been the point where he’d given up.

The people with arms could make sure to get hot coffee if they wanted it.

Of course, the whole affair was, fundamentally speaking, a gigantic waste of time, but he desperately needed a distraction while he waited for the results of the expedition.

So he wound up reevaluating his initial defenses. Again. He liked his defenses further in, from wolverines hidden in nooks and crannies and walking on the walls and ceiling, to jaguars on the whale skeletons and Alpha Steelfur Rippers with overlapping fields of fire.

And anyone who made it past all that would be in serious trouble going up against Cheshire.

But the lobby he’d incorporated was too … basic. Bog standard. Regular tigers and wolverines, which were powerful but simple.

So he removed most of those and added in an elephant and two hippos instead. The hippos wound up on the large mezzanine that granted access to most of the second floor, where they’d not be visible from the entrance to avoid instantly scaring people off.

He also finally got around to absorbing the giant sloth skeleton in the corner that he’d somehow missed so far and slapped that in the corridor connecting the entrance hall to the mammal gallery, along with the Wolly Rhino he’d had from the beginning.

… Aaannd then he checked over every inch of his domain to make sure he hadn’t missed anything else.

He hadn’t, but the fact that he’d missed a fucking giant wasn’t exactly a great sign.

That being said, he was all but drooling over the dinosaurs that were right outside his domain but which he’d ignored in favor of securing the entrance hall. There were reasons for why he hadn’t grabbed them yet, good reasons, but that didn’t mean he didn’t regret not getting them.

The main issues were ones of size and the fact that a lot of the dinosaur bones displayed in museums were replicas, but if he could get even one as a summonable monster, he could die happy.

And then he was back to waiting.

He felt like a dog, right at that moment. A dog whose owner had gone to work, leaving him with the two choices of ripping up furniture out of sheer boredom or just waiting outside the door like an idiot, staring at it, waiting for someone to come back.

Waiting, waiting, more waiting.

***

“Hey, look what we found!” Elias called out as he came back into telepathic range.

“I can’t see you jet,” Thomas grumbled, being left all alone having put him into a decently foul mood.

“Ok, so I’ll tell you. Teddy found this thing called a Capuchin monkey that you should be able to use as an avatar, and we’ve also gotten a lancehead viper, which is apparently really dangerous,” Elias proclaimed. “And we also found where they’re keeping the sharks, but didn’t get to them yet”

Lancehead Viper, that sounded familiar. But he wasn’t quite sure why.

Lancehead. Lance. Something somethings la- … fer de lance. Oh yeah, those things.

They weren’t quite as famous, or rather infamous, as the taipan, black mamba, or various cobras, but they were nasty.

Off the top of his head, Thomas couldn’t remember quite what its venom did, beyond the fact that it caused horrific damage around the bite, often requiring amputation even with the timely administration of an antivenom.

These things were perfect. Or rather they would have been, two hours ago, when he’d still had the Jaguars ready to upgrade. Now, he just had to level them up again.

He wanted them to have this particular power. The sabertooth tigers he also had might have been able to get the venom much deeper with their long fangs, but he had a different diabolical scheme in mind for them.

“OK, so can you get the sharks later, then? I …” Thomas trailed off when one of the roof sentries alerted him to an incoming threat.

“Get Lea and Bethany, and hide in the cellar, something’s coming!” he snapped, and Elias didn’t argue, just sent back a curt “understood” and went silent. Hopefully, he’d have enough time.

***

The incoming monster was the biggest Thomas had seen to date. It was only slightly larger than a wyvern, but far more massive, a bulky snakelike body propelled forward by six massive legs that ripped through up the asphalt with every step.

He wound up naming it “Lindwyrm” in his head, though he was pretty sure that the actual monster of that name was a hell of a lot stronger. And he did know that they were real, Elias had mentioned it, Thomas just couldn’t quite remember any of the specifics.

So he asked once Elias had reported he’d gotten the humans into a safe position, giving a brief description of the monster. It didn’t wind up being enough for Elias to explain more than “somehow possibly remotely related to dragons, but the fairy flitted to the entrance from the cafe to get a good look at the target.

“Landwyrm, it can evolve into a whole bunch of things, Lindwyrm included. Definitely E-Rank, those things grow a lot every time they get stronger. F-Rank power is some variant of acid breath, E-Rank is almost always something defensive, but there are too many options to choose from,” Elias rattled off.

So, another E-Rank beast, and most likely, this one was properly suited to fighting its way through the narrow confines of the Dungeon. This would be bad.

Thomas didn’t really have the time to adjust his entire arsenal to his adversary, but he did have enough mana and time left to summon several more creatures into both the entrance hall and the room with the Alpha Steelfur Rippers.

What powers did he need to counter?

Acid breath, which could mean anything from high-pressure beams to corrosive clouds to everything in between, was going to be a pain in the ass. Unless Thomas was reading too much into the phrase. He should ask.

… Nope, Elias said that it was exactly as bad as he’d thought it might be. But the fairy should have clarified that from the start!

Overall, that was both simple and incredibly difficult to counter.

On one hand, “dodge” and “don’t clump up” commands were simple enough ways to reduce the impact of the acid attacks.

On the other, he didn’t really have any proper way to counter it either. There were no HAZMAT suits for his creatures … though on second thought, that could be incredibly cute, he made a mental note to see if he could eventually make that happen.

But back to the topic at hand. He had no buffer solutions or something meant to properly neutralize acid, not that outright pouring lye onto acid to cancel it out was a good idea, since that reaction tended to be a little … energetic.

He had no acid-resistant creatures, no anti-corrosion powers he could bestow, and even if he’d had them, he had no creatures ready to rank up he could bestow them on.

And then, there was the creature’s defensive power to consider. Elias was utterly certain it had one, but there were so many different possibilities that working to counter any given one was practically guaranteed to fail since the monster was likely going to not have the specific one he was working against.

So he went with the only snakes he had, several sabertooth tigers and two giant sloths, with the latter going in the entrance hall.

His thinking was simple. The boomslang’s purely hemotoxic bite would take a long while to work on its own, sure, but in conjunction with other creatures causing severe wounds, it should be able to cause inordinate amounts of bleeding. That might even be enough.

The sabertooth, meanwhile, was big and had long teeth that should be able to reach and damage the deeper tissues in ways that their claws wouldn’t be able to.

As the wyrm closed in, he ordered his wyverns to attack. He had two of them, and as E-Rank monsters, they were expensive and ate up quite a bit of his command limit, but also almost useless indoors. It was use ‘em or lose ‘em time, and he might even get some ideas about the creature’s defenses.

The first of the monsters simply launched itself off the roof, claws outstretched.

Thomas would have expected it to do less damage than its comrade, who was rapidly climbing into the air despite its not insignificant weight in preparation for a devastating divebomb, but he’d never find out, as the Landwyrm’s snakelike head snapped around, its maw opened, and forth spewed a stream of acid like a firehose, dousing first the wyvern’s head and then switching to its right wing.

Between the sheer power of the blast and the fact that it blinded the descending Dragonoid, it was game over in an instant.

The wyvern crashed heavily into the ground, rolled a few times, and started to thrash wildly but was growing rapidly weaker.

But that was just one of the two creatures Thomas had hurled against his new foe.

The second wyvern plunged out of the air like an attacking falcon, hitting the wyrm like a meteor … after it had already started dodging.

Claws raked down the side of the wyrm, shredding scales and ripping flesh, opening up a massive wound and revealing the true nature of the monster’s defenses.

It was damn flexible, its body bending and being pushed to the side, somewhat “squishing” out from under the impact, evading part of the attack that otherwise would have hit.

But leading the attack with claws was a good counter to that defense. When the wyvern tried to chomp into the wyrm’s neck, it merely succeeded in creating a dent in the monster’s flesh, which deformed under its head.

Thomas winced. That was a fiendishly effective defense against a lot of attacks, especially blunt impacts and bites from anything that couldn’t completely fit its mouth around an appendage.

The durable scales would resist attacks and transform any sharp attacks that failed to penetrate them into blunt impacts, which would then be absorbed by the spongy flesh underneath.

Using the last bits of his mana and command limit, Thomas summoned another giant sloth on the entrance hall mezzanine, right above the door.

Before the wyvern could recover from its mistake, the wyrm twisted, blinded it with a blast of acid and finished it off with a chomp to the neck.

Yeah, that thing was nasty. Too nasty for any of his creatures to beat one one-on-one save maybe Cheshire, but even she was a mid-F-Rank champion facing what could very easily be an enemy around the peak of E-Rank.

This thing would die in his Dungeon, and it would not go easily. He’d pick it apart bit by bit, piece by bloody piece, until it eventually died. It might be distasteful, but it was the only way he could beat, and he certainly hadn’t been the one to pick this fight.

“Your move, beasty,” Thomas mumbled as he began to make last-minute adjustments to his orders and the wyrm dragged itself into the dungeon proper.