Chapter 99: Rest Period

Whatever burst of incredible speed the knight gained while Sean was on the wall was gone, replaced by a fast-enough-but-easier-to-handle tempo. Which meant the knight either had a super-fast boost it could use when it wanted, or it got buffs when Sean was trying to cheese his way past it.

Sean reached out the Mystereamer, slamming it sideways against the knight’s greaves and using it as a leverage point to roll himself over out of the way of the descending sword. Scrambling to his feet, he sprang back out of the range of a cut that came down diagonally from the knight’s shoulder, then sprung forward and jammed the dagger through a gap in the knight’s armor at the shoulder.

Following the pattern of recent enemies Sean had fought that didn’t flinch away from pain, the knight didn’t pause at its new wound. It swung its sword back at Sean sideways, ripping the flesh of its shoulder more as the motion ripped Sean’s dagger free. Ducking, Sean brought the dagger sideways through the knight’s knee, pushing it entirely through the joint and out the other side before he had to spring sideways to get out of the way of another blow.

Not only did the knee blow not slow down the knight, if anything, it was more enthusiastic. It ran forward with a swift flurry of chained swipes, each with enough reach that Sean couldn’t get past them to land his own hit anywhere vital. Riding out the storm, Sean pulled out one of the Spectral Stickers, catching the knight’s hands and arms where he could to accumulate what damage was possible while on the defense.

After another five minutes, Sean was winded. He had landed dozens of blows both with his armor-piercing spear and his dagger, pumped loads of elemental energy into the knight, and still hadn’t managed to make the knight react in the slightest. It was like his enemy was invulnerable to damage, even beyond the normal build-up-until-it-fails defenses the mossy golem had shown. Suddenly, it occurred to him why.

Dammit. Black knight, one arm, Arthurian legend. These are only flesh wounds.

If Sean’s guess about why the knight wasn’t picking up damage was right, he’d have to cut off the rest of his limbs to seriously slow him down and get past to the next part of the competition. Other people with chopping weapons and strength builds wouldn’t have that same problem. They’d figure it out eventually and his lead on them would be gone. If it wasn’t already.

And if I try to get around him, he’s going to knock me off the bridge. Sean thought. Which gives me sort of an idea, actually.

Sean stowed his weapons away in favor of the Heavy Heart. Even outside of his plan, this turned out to be a much better choice. As much as the knight could ignore damage, it couldn’t ignore the sheer physics of the big flail-head slamming into it again and again. The knight could deflect things with its sword, sure, but doing so would leave it wide open for the next hit.

It was only after ten or twelve revolutions and church-bell-loud hits that Sean managed to reach his first goal, scoring a solid hit on the knight’s leg that badly beat the armor around the joint and functionally shackled his movement speed in a way that sheer damage hadn’t been able to. Taking advantage of the moment, Sean sprang back, giving the Heavy Heart more chain and swinging it over his head for all he was worth.

Every hit so far had bashed into the knight from one direction, moving him closer and closer to the edge. Now, the Sean tilted the orbit of the Heavy Heart, letting it spark and slide over the ground a little bit as he brought it into the knight’s hip at an upward angle. It wouldn’t hurt the knight. But thankfully, Sean wasn’t banking on the damage.

“I’m guessing most knights can’t fly,” he said over the impact. “Bye!”

The sheer force of the hit lifted the knight off the ground, rolling him over the railing and into the abyss to the side of the bridge. For all the lore around the knight’s sheer rejection of wounds and pain, there was none saying it could teleport. Sean waited a few moments to make sure he wasn’t wrong about that, then continued on. The bridge was now clear.

—

There were no rewards in the race. The system didn’t appear to have been lying about that part. Sean kept running until he got to the first of the obstacle courses, which was a sort of timing-based challenge built around large slabs of stone smashing down and lifting back up in a hallway interspersed by flamethrowers, spikes, and other traps meant to keep it interesting.

It was like a video game trapped hallway he’d need to move through cautiously, reading the pattern of the clockwork-driven hazards and moving through at just the right tempo to not get stabbed, crushed, or burned to death. Except he didn’t end up doing that at all. Until it activated, the hallway looked normal, just another featureless section of the stone landscape Sean encountered after a half hour of hard running. Which was just long enough for him to be zoned out when he hit the section.

Sean snapped to as the first slab of stone fell behind him, looking up just in time to see the next coming down. His stat-enhanced reflexes saved him, pushing him forward and stopping him just before he fully committed to the next part of traps that the stone slabs were apparently designed to push him into. He caught the edge of a sharpened spike to his arm, picking up a nasty cut in the process, but pushed on.

Still, he was off-balance and badly out of control. He had spent exactly zero seconds observing the trap and, so far, had managed to stay out of the worst of it through sheer reaction time alone. That wouldn’t last.

Sean dove forward, barely squeaking under two big stone slabs and rolling to his feet just in time to stop his momentum and to keep from getting squashed by a third. Mostly. He screamed as the slab caught a few of the toes on his left foot, mashing them down to putty. He still tried to push through, only to find the next series of traps required the same mobility that the stone slab had just stolen.

With a set of three buzzsaws coming horizontally towards him on rails and another set of spikes coming out of the wall, Sean was absolutely aware he wouldn’t be able to dodge them without losing a limb, or worse. In that moment of awareness, he took a bigger chance. Now that the traps were active, it was clear that the whole apparatus was driven by clockwork of a sort, stone gears set into the wall turning with each other in some insane relationship that drove the timing of the machine.

Rolling the dice, he picked a couple of the smallest gears he could find and hit them with Hard Time, speeding up one while slowing the other as much as he could.

This probably won’t work, Sean thought. Then all hell broke loose. Whatever power plant was driving all the motion in this hallway apparently required watch-maker level precision to keep everything running smoothly, and two gears moving as badly out of sync as possible was apparently enough to break down the whole thing. Some parts, like the buzzsaws, stopped working entirely. Others, like the stone slabs, went into a sort of always-on mode, bashing up and down with no pattern or timing at all.

That was fine with Sean. Between the gaps provided by the non-working segments of the trap and the general predictability of the parts that were still moving, he was able to get through without much trouble, shattered foot or no. Now that he wasn’t dealing with a diabolical design actively designed to kill him, it was predictable. He could deal with predictable.

It only took him a few more scrapes, cuts and the most minor of stabs before he was out the other side and on his way. Biting down a scream as Stitch Up pushed the bones of his foot back into position, he kept moving.

—

It turned out he couldn’t run forever. After a day’s hard fighting, Sean found himself forced into a kind of enforced rest.

Rest Period!

You must stop for four hours. Each competitor has an identical delay on reaching this point. Your safety is guaranteed and your immediate area is sealed by a spherical field that is impenetrable to all the abilities owned by any candidate still in the running, including you.

The end of the rest period will be signalled by an audible alarm.

After checking the borders of the area to make sure they really were indestructible, Sean settled in for a rest. If anything, he was glad. The last several hours had been several fights with animals of various kinds, a kind of field boss called Duck Who Is Also In The Navy, and dozens of trick rooms and traps meant to slow him down.

He had been able to cheese all of them, to some extent or another. Most traps were vulnerable to either his own personal speed or being slowed down, and none of the enemies were anywhere near the power level the golem or the armored snake had been. It all seemed too easy, to the point where Sean had been looking over his shoulder for Apocalypse-System tricks until he had realized what was really going on.

This was a race, not an elimination course. Which meant it was probably balanced for the average competitor left. If the assassin Sean had taken out was any indication, the average competitor wasn’t all that strong. From their time hunting together, he was also pretty sure he could have taken out any individual member of the human team, besides maybe Jason if the man got lucky.

Which left Sean with the inescapable conclusion that he was above average, and probably pretty far above it. It was at least possible that he was the strongest competitor left, although he doubted it. There was still a pretty big question mark over how strong Eike was at this point, but Sean couldn’t imagine a world where the offworlder hadn’t done well in the competition events. Sean imagined the man had a whole team of planners making sure he’d have the every possible advantage, both on the Apocalyptic surface and here in the challenge.

And if he and Eike were moving faster than the others, that meant they’d get to the end first. There was no chance Eike was going to wait up for the weaker members of his team. Sure, if he ran into them during the race, it would be an advantage for him. He’d team up where it meant saving time. But nothing about the guy screamed team player to Sean. If it were to his advantage, he’d ditch them for more forward progress.

Which meant Sean’s best-case scenario in this thing was getting to the end and finding Eike there waiting for him, nipping on his heels, or having already won. And as much as the Apocalypse system wasn’t supposed to be a person, he knew one thing: It did a pretty good impression of someone who loved movies and media.

And like all movies, there was no chance this didn’t end in a fight to the death.