Chapter Two-Hundred-and-Forty-Nine
The hobgoblin lord dummy exploded with a loud snap from Adam’s bear trap. The entire room shook as the goblin turned into mist.
“Holy shit,” Adam muttered. “Is it doing more damage than my normal punches?”
[The effect appears more powerful, because the entirety of the damage is dealt by the first of the trap’s teeth that connects, concentrating the power on a very small spot. It is the same amount of damage even if it appears more violent. However, the Crush upgrades totalling 270% more impact are likewise concentrated into a single point with the trap, which does seem to increase the impact.]
Adam stooped to pick up the trap. Try as he might, he couldn’t pull it back open to a ready position, due to its cooldown. He returned it to his belt with the other one, where it minimised itself to be easier to carry around.
Though he’d been trying to shape his slime body once again today, he’d yet to get much closer to figuring out how to control anything that wasn’t his hands and feet. One small trick had come out of his experimentation, however, and that was that he’d found a way to use his feet almost like springs, allowing him to jump half a metre higher than normal. With more practice, he was hoping to be able to use it to reliably leap much further than any human could do unassisted.
[30 minutes remain.]
Adam stepped away from the target dummy, shaking out his body, even though he had no muscles or joints that could ache.
He took a deep breath and descended the stairs to the basement restaurant.
“How many players survived stage two?”