I was doing well. I’d lasted a year, had a full solar-powered workshop, good armor, good weapons, great ranged skills, 8 in melee, 5’s and 6’s in all of the hand-to-hand combat skills. I was only lightly armed, and headed back to my base after foraging eggs and vegetables in the woods, when I passed a house with boarded windows in the neighborhood that I hadn’t remembered seeing. There were thumps coming from inside.
“A survivor zombie house! No big deal,” I thought, drawing a punch dagger and heading inside for some unarmed practice.
The whole place was filled with smoke, but I figured it’d clear once I found the smoker or two in there. I got through the first room without too much trouble, then in the second, a feral predator poked through my armor and I started bleeding. Then, as I went further into thick smoke, I found myself surrounded by a couple more feral predators, grappler Z’s and corrosives, and I realized I should probably take this house more seriously. After putting down the Z’s around me and emptying my RM99, a hulk blindsided me and knocked me across the room. My holdout gun was enough to take care of him, and thinking the worst was over, I headed back into the smoke to finish the house. I was soon set upon by more predators, grapplers, and the like.
Now, I’d been playing with monster upgrades on, but this was above and beyond anything I’d ever seen. Finally, after chopping one more smoker, the air cleared enough that I was able to see the problem: The house that I’d stumbled into was home to at least 2 zombie masters and no less than three zombie necromancers. That’s why everything was upgraded, and I’d been fighting the same Z’s over and over again. At that point, I was surrounded and realized I was in real trouble. The closest exit was a boarded-up window, so I used the last of the ammo in my backup gun to get to my kukri (which I’d dropped) and used it to smash at the window. I knocked out the boards, but before I could jump through, one of the three grapplers behind me pulled me back into the middle of the room, where I was once again surrounded. It didn’t end well.
I savescummed because I have a couple of IRL weeks on this character, but my enthusiasm is a tad muted because I got legitimately pwned. One thing is sure, next time I’m just burning the house down.
