Chapter 101: Final Stage

Sean held his breath as he dropped into an icy cold river. If that didn’t keep the webs off of him, nothing would.

If there was one thing Sean now knew about the Apocalypse System, it was that it loved forests. Any time it wanted animals in the mix, it would generate some trees. If it wanted a fairy tale setting, a surprising amount of them took place in deep, dark woods.

If, as in this case, it wanted a frankly overdone scenario, it created living trees that carried around silk-shooting caterpillars in a frenzy of bashing, stomping, and two entirely different kinds of sticking.

He had resisted going into the river. The last zone, the one he had encountered after letting Eike’s fencer go free, was a puzzle-based water level. He was sick and tired of swimming, let alone in water as icy-cold as this. But it didn’t matter if it meant he could have a break from being constantly covered in webs.

Soon after swimming downstream, he found the exit to the forest in the form of a cave guarded by an immense and incredibly fast tree that the Apocalypse System called an EmminEnt. He promptly turned it over to the fire gods with some spare Plug Mud napalm, sprinted past its panicked, flaming branch-swipes with Hard Time, and exited the course without so much as considering actually killing the tree. With no experience in play, there was no point.

Sean was beyond caution now. The risks in here were balanced for other people. Could he get unlucky and get taken down by them? Sure he could. Anyone could. But the chance was low enough that he didn’t care. Any enemy he could circumvent, he would. Any time he could save by being more aggressive in fights, he saved at the cost of wounds and injuries he knew would heal soon enough.

He struggled through an arctic trek next, followed by a ten-wave monster-endurance round. He killed The Only Polar Bear In This Thing in the first, and met the Surprise! It’s Another Polar Bear boss in the second. It turned out neither liked getting hit by giant flails very much, and he moved on.

Spelunking while fighting cave trolls was then followed by mountain climbing while being attacked by eagles. Every level was more bizarre than the last, pushing him in weirder and weirder ways. It was only after he was able to cheese a biker bar brawl by knowing the exact dance to do on the bartop to avoid it completely that he was suddenly surprised to find the system was done. It was over.

He had reached the final stage.

—

Sean tried to blink away the sunlight, only to find he couldn’t blink. He was stuck in place, looking forward at the ground in front of him, such as it was. It was featureless and uniform in a way that made his eyes hurt when he looked down. But if he couldn’t move, he could at least feel, at least, and the ground under his feet felt firm and grippy, like it was made to run on.

Final Stage

You’ve made it. This is it. The entire Apocalypse has been building up to this. Not just in a thematic way, either. This is the point of the entire thing.

You’ve earned some explanation here, something that goes above and beyond the bits and pieces you’ve been able to pick up here and there. And to do that, you need to know a few things about the system.

The first thing that you need to know is that the system, the actual greater-universe System, is a management system of sorts. In a very fundamental way, it’s about making sure the energy the universe has to offer goes to good use.

The entirety of everything would have long since been reduced to useless ash if it wasn’t for the system’s eternal fight against entropy. Whenever you think there must be a better way to manage things, you should remember that there wouldn’t be anything left to manage at this point if it wasn’t for the system. It would all be gone.

If the fact that your planet is wrapped up in all that is distressing, it’s understandable. If you are angry that the system allows outsiders in to reap the benefits of your planet’s demise, we get it. But it’s long since been a quantified, known fact that without outside pressure, planets do worse. More of their energy is wasted. More die, having never become strong enough to escape.

Time is moving differently for you in this challenge than it for those outside of it. You’ve spent weeks in here. Those outside of it have had years to gather the energy this process is releasing, to use it to grow, and to escape. There are still hundreds of thousands of them out there, striving to make it. You are, in some small way, helping them. And the system is, in turn, helping you do it.

As strong as the Apocalypse System is, the second thing you need to know is that it’s limited. It can circulate energy. It can delay the collapse of your planet. But it can’t do either infinitely. In the time it takes you to run the last stage of this race, the system will have little to no time left with which to delay the inevitable.

What the winner takes today is energy that otherwise would dissipate uselessly across the cosmos, spread so thinly it would be useless to anyone. But that doesn’t mean the prize is small. You are so young and new to this world that you can’t know how hard each new level is to gain, out there. How slow growth can be. The edge it could provide you is immense, truly something that would allow you the best chance to join the truly strong at the top. To accomplish great things. To change things.

To succeed.

But before that potential success comes one last challenge. Make good on it, Sean. If nothing else, the System is fair. To the extent it can, it’s rooting for you.

And then Sean was unfrozen. He was able to turn his head, finding that to his side, almost invisible in the absolute uniformity of this place, was a chasm. A deep, wide one, one that he could neither jump or survive a fall down. It was, Sean guessed, a lane divider. But there was nobody on the other side to race him, either beside him or for the dozens of miles he could see in front of him.

Holy shit. I’m in the lead.

Sean took off running, burning up the weird, system-generated uber-pavement as he dashed forward as fast as he could sustain. Off in the distance, he could see some sort of obelisk rising up. It was a slightly different color than the surroundings, which meant he could see it even from this great distance, despite it not being all that tall.

He was miles along the path within a minute or so, flying with all the speed his enhanced stats could give him. He had begun to hope that his lead would hold out and that he’d make it to the obelisk without any other trouble. And then he heard the boom of a portal opening behind him, one that pushed out the last person on or in the planet that he wanted to see.

It was Eike. Good old murderous, superior Eike. He immediately gave chase. When Sean could spare looks behind him, it seemed like everything would be okay. Eike was moving fast, but not as quickly as Sean was, especially once the occasional bursts of speed from Hard Time were factored in.

But then there was a noise, and Sean looked back to see Eike holding some kind of talisman that crackled with energy before disintegrating and launching Eike forward several hundred yards, so fast he almost looked like he had teleported. And then he ate what looked like a small piece of wrapped hard candy that seemed to buff his running speed. Sean still had a huge gap, but it was getting eaten away, chunk by chunk.

The damn bastard is pay-to-winning it.

There was no way that Eike had earned all those items himself. There just weren’t enough rewards in the competition to make it happen. He had to have been stealing all the single-use rewards from his underlings to have a stock as deep as he appeared to have. And it was deep, deeper than Sean could have believed if he wasn’t watching. Most of them didn’t do much, but even a few strides made a difference, and the sheer, absolutely bonkers amount of them Eike had, let those differences add up.

And then, all of a sudden, they were side by side, separated by a wide, impassible gulf but shoulder to shoulder. Eike grinned a sick, satisfied smile and reached for another talisman, only to frown suddenly as nothing populated from his bag of holding into his hand. He was out.

Sean looked forward and saw the goal looming before them, hardly a mile off. He used a charge of Hard Time on both him and Eike, making a small gap between their progress that he ran like hell to maintain. And, slowly, he began to pull away.

After another minute, he didn’t have a huge lead, but he didn’t need one. He was several strides ahead of Eike, which might have been a mile for that it mattered, as Eike appeared to no longer have the ability to close the lead. The channel between them was slowly narrowing as their paths converged, until finally Sean found himself directly in front of Eike, a nagging feeling in his stomach as he lost the ability to keep an eye on him directly.

All at once, his Savvy stat started screaming at him that something was up. He looked back just in time to see an entire hatchet whirling through the air, straight at his head. He ducked and kept running, weaving as various spears, knives and other types of weapons whooshed through the empty space between him and the offworlder. He doubted any of them would be enough to seriously hurt, but even a small injury would slow him down. He couldn’t afford that.

But two could play at the same game. In his pack, he had just one more jar of glue, the sticky-apple stuff he had used before. Since then, his stats had gotten higher, and his adhesives-based skills had as well. If Eike wanted to play the throw-stuff-to-slow-the-other-person-down game, that was his own fault. He had no way of knowing that was Sean’s forte.

Sean wheeled and threw the jar as hard as he could, knowing in advance that Eike would be more than up to the challenge of dodging it. As Eike leaned well out of the impact zone of the jar, Sean grinned and tossed one of his darts. If he lost the dart, he lost it. Hopefully, the system would give it back once this was all over, but even if it didn’t, the effect of exploding the bottle and its contents in a way Eike had no chance of dodging was well worth it.

As the glue misted over Eike, Sean turned back to running at the same time he willed it to harden. He didn’t really have to look now. Even a small slowing of Eike would be enough for him to pull away. He had this won.

Oh, shit. Sean felt himself slow as if he were running into gelatin at the exact moment an unmissable, unskippable notification filled his field of vision.

Lasso’d!

You have been compelled to participate in man-to-man combat by means of a relic, skill, or other means of forcing a fight.

You may not leave your direct area until you have defeated your foe in combat, your foe cancels the effect to flee, or you overpower the relic with a higher tier item or skill.

“Dammit,” Sean said. “You couldn’t let this be easy, could you?”

“For anyone else, perhaps,” Eike lied. “But I think we both knew long ago that this would end in a fight.”