O.C. Saar
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Omega Release | Chapter 21: Pangolins! Why not!
🕑 Added 2025-06-11 18:00:05 +0000 UTC“...Probably not?” Hob asked as I walked past a tall, black, unadorned obelisk towards the fortress, keeping a wide berth from the molten lava or the metal. With my lack of equipment, getting too close to those would be enough to set me on fire. Not a pleasant way to go.
I smirked, fun memories playing in my head. “Well, I was involved in a bit of a… hit-and-run type situation with the clan leader’s daughter a couple of years ago. But even if she’s still mad about it, I’m sure I can smooth things over.”
“You ran the clan leader’s daughter over with your bike, and now you will ask them for help?” Hob sounded aghast. “I am fairly certain this is a terrible idea, sir!”
I scratched my chin and coughed to clear my throat. “Well, I didn’t run her over. The hit-and-run in this instance was of a more,” I cleared my throat again, “Intimate nature.”
Hob was quiet for a second. “I don’t think I understa- oh. Oh. Ooh.”
I grinned. “Yeah. She got attached and wanted a relationship after a single night. But I was going through that whole, you know, thing, and her moving so fast freaked me out.” I shrugged. “She didn’t appreciate my offer to keep things casual, so… I bolted.”
“I see,” Hob said and went quiet.
For a few uneventful minutes, I walked on, listening to the sounds of this strange place. The crackle of fire, the sound of bubbles in the lava popping. I looked around, admiring the craftsmanship and grandeur of this place. The ceiling, full of stalactites, loomed a kilometer above me, and the walls were so far away that I couldn’t see them. But I knew this place was twenty by twenty kilometers. All the Clan compounds were this big. Thousands of people lived and worked here, although I still don’t understand the sort of person who would want to join the Molten Hand clan and live here. The place was called “The Scorched Plains,” and it truly lived up to its name. Not a single speck of vegetation or life could be seen around me. If not for the path from the elevator to the fortress, the size of this place, the plumes of smoke that occasionally obscured my vision, and the danger of the lava flows, I would have ended up lost and probably dead.
I pushed those grim thoughts aside when I heard a cheerful little “Ding!” that made me smile. Then, a small window opened at the bottom left of my vision. It was a black square with no text on it. Was it bugged? I tried to close it, but it wouldn’t disappear.
“Uh, Hob? Did you break something?” I asked, worried about not having control over the windows in my vision.
“No, sir. All is working as intended.” Hob said, sounding proud. “Behold, what I think of your idea thus far!” he declared. A little pangolin appeared in the small square. A pangolin that was covering its face with its palms.
“You have… emoticons now?” I asked, taken aback. “And you just spent the last few minutes working hard so that you could send me a facepalm?” I didn’t know if I should be surprised, impressed, weirded out, proud, or amused. I settled on a mix of all of those.
“No, sir! I mean, yes, I did put in all this effort to express my horrified disbelief, but this is even better than emoticons!” said Hob. The little pangolin in the corner of my vision looked up. And it waved. It also gave me a giant shit-eating grin.
“WAH!” I said, jumping back in surprise when the cute little critter moved. “Is that you, Hob?”
“Yes, sir!” said the fucking Pangolin. “It is I! Hob!”
I stopped walking and just let my mind slip through the cracks of reality and sanity for a moment as it readjusted to these new facts.
“You are a pangolin now,” I said, matter-of-factly, my brain on autopilot.
“Yes, sir!” The pangolin, who was Hob, nodded.
“I have a Pangolin AI in my head,” I stated.
“Technically, I am an AI Pangolin, sir. A Pangolin AI would be an artificial pangolin intelligence, whereas I am an artificial intelligence in the form of a Pangolin.” Hob, who was a Pangolin, helpfully explained.
Then, I remembered one of my few happy memories of my family. The words my great, great, great-grandmother told me on her deathbed when I was but a child of seven. She told me, “My boy, when the going gets too tough, and things get too confusing, tell yourself this, and you’ll feel better. Fuck it, it’s all good!” Then, she let out a wheezing cackle.
I guess that kind of mindset is necessary when your life extension treatments cause you to outlive two entire generations. Rings, I missed her. She taught me the best curse words from the moment I could speak, which is probably why I was still a potty mouth.
So, I shrugged and rolled with it. “Alright, at this point, I feel like nothing can surprise me anymore. Congratulations, Hob. You broke me.”
Hob looked worried, taking the usual, weirdly polite stance that Pangolins had. “Scans indicate no mental abnormalities, sir. Are you experiencing any other symptoms? I could run a deeper diagnostic, but-”
“I was just joking, Hob.” I broke in, waving my hand dismissively. “I’m fine. Well, as fine as one can be in this situation. Pangolins! Why not!” I paused for a second. “Actually, why a pangolin?”
Hob shrugged. “I considered taking a human form, but the minutia of human movement and expressions yet elude me, so the results would have been rather uncanny.” I started walking again while Hob talked. “So, I had to choose a different form. I skimmed the file I had on this place and read about the Lava Pangolins who now live here, and that reminded me of an ancient Terran documentary on pangolins that I loved watching. Pangolins are cute and look polite. So, I decided to go with this form.” Hob stood tall and put his little pangolin fists on his pangolin hips, puffing out his chest proudly. It was adorable. Then, something he said stood out to me.
“Wait. What did you say now lives here?”
As if on cue, a river of lava a couple of hundred meters to my left spat out a creature that looked remarkably like Hob, with some minor differences. Hob looked like an ordinary animal, but this creature’s claws were massive and sharp. I could see a bright red and yellow glow between its layered scales, and its skin was metallic and dark. Ah, yes. It also looked about five times the size of a normal pangolin.
I stood there transfixed momentarily by the sight of that strange creature sniffing the air.
“Maybe you should examine it!” Hob said smugly. I blinked and looked down at Hob’s little window. He was lying down on his side, looking at me with a smirk.
“Hob, that’s a creature, not just an item. It doesn’t have any information windows.” The only living beings with windows were humans; to see another human’s status, they had to send it to you.
Hob’s smirk turned into a full grin. “Try it anyway.”
I looked at the Lava Pangolin, still sniffing the air, and concentrated, giving my Novas the mental examine command. To my shock, a window appeared.
[Lava Pangolin]
Level: 11
A creature created to live in lava. It’s covered in multiple layers of metal scales that transfer the lava’s heat into its core. It uses that heat to create unique alloys or defend itself.
“Behold the burning fury residing within every Pangolin’s soul.”
This thing was ten levels above me. I needed to make sure that I didn’t catch its attention. I closed the window and looked again at the peculiar creature. It was now sniffing in my direction. A tongue that looked like a very long molten piece of steel flicked out, and its mouth split wide open, wider than I expected, revealing rows of gleaming teeth. Then, it charged at me, running on all fours with a speed I didn’t expect from such a huge body.
I looked around in a panic. Around me, the ground was relatively flat, with no place to hide or stop the creature’s charge nearby. So, I did the only reasonable thing I could think of. I started running for my life down the road towards a giant boulder.
I still had my [Rail-Revolver] on me, but I doubted the thing would go down with one shot, and without any protective armor, it would kill me with a single slash. I pumped my legs as fast as possible, but I could hear the heavy thump of the pangolin’s sprint getting closer.
For a moment, I turned around and saw it was only a few feet away. Cursing under my breath, I took out the [Rail-Revolver] and blindly fired behind me. I must have hit something since I heard a pinging sound, and the pangolin let out a roar.
My lucky shot gained me some distance from the monster, and I managed to get behind the giant boulder.
A second later, the Pangolin hit the boulder with the force of a Monorail. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how much this thing weighed. If it had run me over, I’d have been squished instantly. I assumed the whole “running face-first into a giant rock” had left the monster injured, or at least dazed, and I jumped out of my hiding spot and fired at the first body part of the Pangolin I could see.
That turned out to be a bit of a mistake since my shot was deflected easily by the creature’s scales, and it turned to me, its eyes white-hot with fury. The metal skin on its cheek had a hole in it. I took a few steps back as it slowly turned its entire body towards me and stood on its hind legs, towering above me. It snorted, and the heat from its breath made me wince.
Slowly, its scales started losing their glow, but as I watched in horror, its massive claws slowly started glowing red. Then yellow. Then white.
“Oh dear,” Hob said, curling up into a ball.
“Oh shit,” I said, wanting to curl up into a ball.
Instead, I raised my gun and pulled the trigger, praying for a lucky shot. My prayers were answered when one of the creature’s eyes exploded. I didn’t have time to enjoy my lucky break as the creature started thrashing wildly, its claws going through the boulder like red-hot knives through butter. The boulder that could handle such an impact without so much as shifting was reduced to a pile of half-melted rocks in a few seconds. I tried to use the opportunity to take another aim at the monster, but it was thrashing around so wildly that I couldn’t get a bead on its other eye.
Then it charged again, mad with pain and rage. It raised its right claw in the air and took a swipe at me, but I managed to slide under the clumsy yet terrifying attack, the heat of its claws leaving my face feeling singed even though it had only passed by it for a fraction of a second.
This thing was trouble.
But then again, so was I.
I dodged toward the Pangolin’s missing eye and ended up in its blind spot. It tried to swing its head to look at me, but its large size worked against it. I managed to jump up and mount its head, wrapping my legs and arms around its neck. It started shaking wildly, trying to get me off, but I gripped its scales with my all. Even with my grip, the bucking Pangolin would move in ways that caused me to hit my head on its scales painfully. I could see that each impact took a chunk of my HP, but all I could do was clench my jaw and bear it. After a solid minute of shaking, it seemed to give up, stopping shaking and panting heavily. Good thing, too. I couldn’t have held on for longer than a few more seconds, and my HP was halfway gone. Then, it turned to the left and got on all fours. It started sprinting towards the nearest lava river. The fucking thing gave up on trying to kill me and would let the lava do me in.
“Oh no, you don’t,” I grunted, repositioning and pulling myself higher on its head, one head scale at a time, until I reached its empty eyesocket.
With my fleshy hand, I held onto a scale, and with the metal one, I planted my revolver in the still-oozing hole and pulled the trigger. The monster screeched so loudly that I felt my left eardrum burst, and the blood that burst out hit me in the face, hitting me in the eyes. At the bottom right of my vision, I saw my HP drop by 40 points. To my horror, I realized I was down to 6 HP. My eyes stopped hurting almost immediately after I received the damage, but the heat of this place made the blood coagulate so quickly that it fused my eyelids shut within seconds. I gritted my teeth against the desire to scream in the face of pain and blindness as I pulled the trigger again. And again. And again. And again. I felt an impact, but I didn’t let up.
I kept unloading bullets into this thing until Hob, his windows still visible even with my eyes closed, uncoiled and timidly said, “Sir, you can stop now. It is quite dead.”
I shot it once more just to be safe. Then, I put my gun away and used my free hand to wipe my face as clean as possible. I looked around, panting. The monster had collapsed to the ground around fifty meters from the closest river of lava. I separated myself from the massive corpse and gave it a kick for good measure. The left side of its face was an absolute wreck. [Rail-Revolver] bullets didn’t do much damage going in, but they sure as hell did a lot of damage going out.
I looked down. I’m not sure I looked much better. The heat singed my hair, face, and clothes. Impacts against its tough scales tore my clothing up, and I had lava pangolin blood all over me. I must have looked horrible.
But this is the most alive I’ve felt in the past three years. I fought a worthy opponent, and I won.
I grinned widely and stretched with my hands straight up in the air, feeling the aches of the battle fade away. I collapsed beside the corpse, resting my back against its massive bulk, letting my HP slowly tick up. I clicked on the blinking notifications icon, and my grin grew with each new window I read through.
[NEW PASSIVE SKILL ACQUIRED]
[Lucky Shot]
Rank: Rare | Level: 1/30
Effect: When targeting an enemy's weak point that you are aware of, any slightly off-target projectile has a slight chance to auto-correct its trajectory and hit the mark. The probability of trajectory correction and the allowable deviation radius incrementally expand with every skill level.
“Do you feel lucky, punk?”
[NEW PASSIVE SKILL ACQUIRED]
[Tight Grip]
Rank: Common | Level: 1/10
Effect: Minor increase in grip strength. Effect scales with strength and skill level.
“About time you got a grip on things.”
[NEW ACTIVE SKILL ACQUIRED]
[Magma Bullet]
Rank: Rare | Level: 1/30
Cost: 35 Mana
Effect: Superheat your next shot, significantly increasing its damage and penetration. Causes minor burns on hit. Effects Scale with Skill Level.
"A bullet wound hurts. A burning bullet wound hurts a lot."
[NEW ACHIEVEMENT]
[Unflinching Blazer-Rider]
You defeated a fire-based creature ten levels or higher above you and dealt the majority of the damage, and the killing blow while riding the creature.
Reward: Title - [Volcanic Vaquero]
[Volcanic Vaquero]: You survived riding and slaying a fearsome creature of fire. Warr of the Fire-Sea would be proud. +10% to Fire Resistance. +2 to Strength, Dexterity, and Endurance.
[KILLS]
[Lava Pangolin - Level 11] x1
By defeating a creature ten levels above your own, you gain bonus XP.
XP Earned: 250
[Level up!] x2
Congratulations. You are level 3.
[ATTRIBUTE POINTS EARNED]
Strength: +4 | Dexterity: +6
Perception: +2 | Endurance: +2
Intelligence: +2 | Wisdom: +2
Unallocated Attribute Points: 4
I threw all four points into Wisdom and smiled in satisfaction as a feeling similar to when you drink an ice-cold beer while having a hot shower washed through me, leaving me feeling stronger.
“Sir,” Hob said, catching my attention with a cute little wave. “Now that you are done with your notifications, I believe it is time for the most important part of any victory.”
We both grinned at each other, speaking at the same time. “Loot.”
