God of Zero Cost

The static hiss of the capsule terminal dissolved. Ethan opened his eyes to a suffocating, damp chill. The rough limestone walls of the mountain fissure scraped against his shoulders as his player model fully rendered back into the world.

Outside the narrow rock crack, the rugged, sun-baked folds of the Wadi Ara pass stretched out in silence, completely isolating him from the bustling sounds of the Megiddo fortress.

He dropped down the gravelly slope into his hidden ravine outpost, his boots crunching softly on the loose stone flags. The floor of his campsite was bare.

Ethan knelt directly in the unpaved dirt, rolling his linen sleeves past his forearms.

"Here we go again," he muttered.

He extended his hands, driving his calloused palms straight into the thick bank of dark red alluvial silt lining the wadi creek-bed. The interface line in the corner of his vision flashed a bright, rhythmic green as his three hundred percent material extraction speed triggered into an immediate, blurring overdrive. His fingers moved with machine-like precision through the mud. He didn't just pile up a solid, clumsy mountain of earth; he focused as he used his perception to something more intricate this time.

He molded the massive, low-slung chassis of a new Scarab Beetle Golem. But as his hands shaped the heavy leg pillars and shoulder blocks, he forcefully cored out multiple pockets in their interiors. His thumbs carved long, hollow, parallel channels straight through the center of the clay limbs.

Leaving the hollow spaces open, Ethan stood up and walked toward the deepest, darkest fault rift at the back of the limestone cliff.

His perception locked onto a slow, heavy bubbling sound echoing within the dark mountain stone. Right inside the narrow fissure, a natural tectonic vein of raw, unrefined tar was slowly weeping out of the bedrock. It was a thick, jet-black, foul-smelling sludge that pooled into a highly viscous, sticky glue under the mountain air.

Ethan drove an empty clay storage jar straight into the black pool, his extraction macro filling the vessel to the brim for absolute zero silver shekels.

Returning to his workbench, he poured the raw, black bitumen sludge directly into the hollow internal chambers he had just carved inside the Scarab's frame. He used a wooden scraping blade to smear the sticky, un-fired tar thick across the inner walls of the hollow void, completely lining the interior traps before molding the outer ceramic skin shut over the chambers.

He layered three separate, thin, high-fired ceramic plates over the top—overlapping protective husks designed to break sequentially under a sub-boss's heavy impact. The outer crust would take the initial kinetic blow, but any weapon that shattered it would plunge straight through the hollow gap into the sticky tar beneath.

Ethan moved on towards the from of the beetle and shaped a cavity for his torch, pulling the stored tar to help his torch burning.

With the Scarab MKII fully sealed and ready , Ethan turned his focus to his ammunition.

He scooped up handfuls of mud activated his linguistic system, blending it into black iron-oxide stones.

His hands worked in a continuous, blurring rhythm, rolling the sludge into hundreds of identical, heavy, teardrop-shaped sling stones.

After a few hours, Ethan finally breathed out in relief. He packed up his rawhide canvas bag, slung his gear tightly across his chest. Behind him, the newly molded Scarab Golem rose heavily to its feet, its un-fired internal tar sumps gurgling softly within its hard ceramic plates. near its rear sat an open cavity that held more iron-oxide stones.

Ethan did a final check to his gear and strode straight out of the wadi, ready to embrace the grind.