Chapter 90: EZ-Carry Pouch

The fight hadn’t come without its costs. Sean’s armor had never been more damaged, and unlike in some of the books he had read, that came with real damage to his real, human body. He had picked up cuts and scrapes while fighting in the crowd, but jumping down onto the snake had produced substantial wounds on his feet and legs, wounds that had widened and increased in number as he stabbed the snake to death.

With his opponent dead, Stitch Up kicked into gear, pulling cuts and scrapes together but there were just so damn many of them that it was slow-going. What made it even worse was that the system had no intention of helping him out with extra time to heal.

Fifth Round Complete!

You have defeated the Scalemail Snake, a tremendous feat that not many could accomplish at your general strength level. No, you can’t know if anyone actually did accomplish it besides you. But it’s pretty good! I can reliably tell you that you are doing well, here, overall.

With that said, there are more rounds of combat if you want them. You have two minutes to make your decision. Will you continue on to the next round of combat?

Y/N

Two minutes was a long time in some contexts but Sean wasn’t doing planks. Even if his wounds healed up completely during the next two minutes, the psychological effect of considering combat again so soon after the last fight was incredibly heavy. The fourth fight was a lot. The fifth had been a stretch, one that he barely walked away from. The prospect of the sixth fight loomed over him like an impassible wall.

But I bet Eike does it. I bet he at least tries.

That thought ate at him, burning at his mind. Sean had a rare class, sure, but did he really think Eike didn’t? That his parents didn’t stuff him full of the offworlder equivalent of 10,000 year ginseng and have him sleep with magic swords until he got some sort of high-quality combat class? They had to have done something like that.

Sean didn’t have a shit’s worth of a clue on the particulars of Eike’s build, but the offworlder was strong enough to cow others, have them fall in line, and build what amounted to an army in this place. He had support behind him in more ways than one, and if Sean was going to bust through that support, he needed to work for it.

I can’t lag behind. I can’t. I have to do this. I have to. I must.

—

“That’s too fast,” Jeff said.

“I’m doing a bad job?” Sean asked.

“That’s not what I said. You’re working too fast.”

It had been one of the rare days where Sean was actually motivated to work, driven by a vague new-years-resolution motivation to improve, do a better job, and not spend so much time doing absolutely nothing on the job. Jeff was watching him while finishing up one of his dozens of daily smoke breaks, mild disapproval in his eyes.

“I just want to get these hedges done by lunch, so I can get the weeds sprayed by the end of the day.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why? To get ahead. To do more.”

“I get that. Who’s asking you to? I’m not. The bosses aren’t. They don’t even know what we do, Sean. As long as they don’t notice we’ve dropped the ball somewhere, nobody cares.”

“You don’t want to do better, ever? Do more?”

Jeff dropped his cigarette into his mostly drained coke can, which let out a soft hiss as it extinguished the burning.

“I do plenty. I earn my wage. But doing more, rushing things, that’s not gonna make me more money. It’s not gonna make anyone appreciate me more.” He walked over to Sean, grabbing the hedge trimmer and making a couple clean-up passes. “I’ve seen guys do what you are doing, bust ass for no reason. One way or another, it doesn’t last. Either they quit because nobody appreciates it or they hurt themselves pushing too hard.”

Finally satisfied with the hedge, Jeff threw the switch on the trimmer and leaned on the blade a bit as he talked to Sean.

“I’m not saying you shouldn’t work hard. Do a good job. Hell, I do that, and I’m old and worn out.”

“What should I do, then?” Sean said, a bit deflated.

“You figure out what good enough looks like. I’m not saying you cut corners and see what you can get away with. I’m saying, it doesn’t help anyone if you kill yourself doing more than anyone asked for.”

—

Good old Jeff. The memory of Jeff popped into Sean’s head. The man had never gone to college, yet he seemed to have more wisdom than a stack of textbooks.

Sean had about ten seconds left now. He had no idea when Eike had got into his head to such a large extent. He had been considering saying yes to the sixth round, which was likely certain death, given how he only won the fifth through sheer luck. Now, somehow, Jeff had calmed him down.

It wasn’t that he’d settle for good enough, either. He needed to do really well to have a shot at the end-game of this thing. A few seconds ago, he had been so worked up that his finger had been hovering the yes button like accepting a death match with some strange Apocalypse Beast was an absolutely normal thing to do.

Never again. He’d take risks, sometimes big ones. But wherever good enough ended up settling out, it wouldn’t be him taking huge, unnecessary risks with no limits at all. He had already taken huge risks to get where he was. He didn’t have to push himself all the way to death just to feel good about himself.

Or at least he didn’t now, thanks to Jeff. Who, he realized, was probably still roaming the Earth somewhere, alive way too far in the future for it to make any damn sense, and judging by what little Sean had seen of his fighting style, rocking some kind of redneck-terrorist class.

Fits him, too. I promise I’ll get out of here, Jeff, and see you again.

With seconds left on the clock, Sean flexed his mental decision-making muscle, clicked on “no”, and was immediately teleported out of the arena.

—

Sean squinted his eyes against the light from the town as he felt every bit of discomfort the cobblestones of the square could impart on his back in glorious detail. Apparently the system hadn’t seen fit to put his armor back together, or to set him down on his feet post-teleport. He had been on his back in the arena, so it wasn’t like it had knocked him down but setting him right would have been a nice gesture.

“Um… Customer? Sean?” He heard a voice speak out as a shadow moved over him. “Are you… fine? Alive?”

Sean pressed his arms underneath him, wincing, and sat up. Now that the adrenaline was good and worn off, he could feel a surprising amount of invisible damage that still hadn’t quite healed under his skin. Pushing himself into a sitting position, he looked up at the worried face of the Ramen Vendor Guy.

“Yeah, sorry, not trying to block your shop.” Sean started slowly getting up, feeling a small amount of the pain recede from a combination of stretching and Stitch Up doing its thing. “I’ll be out of the way soon enough.”

“Oh, no, it’s not like that. If anything, you and your friend have ended up being my favorite customers, here. It’s just you looked… I was worried you were dead. That’s all.”

“No, not quite. Just had a close call.” Sean said.

Some movement behind Sean alerted him to another presence as he turned to see Jason standing there, looking slightly nervous to be bothering him.

“Oh, hey. Good to see you made it out okay.” Sean wasn’t lying. If he could get too caught up in the game, so could anybody. “Is everyone else all right? I guess you wouldn’t know yet.”

“No, I do. Everyone made it out. Did you really just get warped back?” Jason asked. “It’s been… shit, probably an hour now since I got back. What even happened to you? Your armor’s a mess.”

“The round five boss wasn’t exactly fair. I had to get tricky.”

“Round five? No way.” Jason's eyes widened slightly. “Three was hard enough for me. Spike looked like you when he got out and he only did four.”

“Yeah. In retrospect, it was a mistake. I had to do some weird stuff to get out of it.”

“Shit. I bet the prizes were pretty good, at least.”

Sean actually hadn’t checked, having been slightly distracted by his Jeff-driven epiphany about the worth of his own life. Holding up his finger in a one-second-please gesture, he dove into the notifications.

Trial Exit Complete: Five Enemies Defeated

You have survived the Arena challenge and completed two non-compulsory rounds in the progress. Your performance is considered above average and you will receive extra rewards for each of the two optional opponents you defeated, as well as one weird reward for something else.

Don’t act coy. You know damn well what you did, you psycho.

But first, let’s talk about normal rewards, what anyone who survived got. Statistically, getting as far as you have means that you now have about as good a chance of surviving the overall Apocalypse competition as not.

With that being the case, the Apocalypse System has three relevant prizes for you. The first is making sure you are outfitted for the greater system universe when you eventually get there. This reward contains the credits you need to get a decent, greater-galaxy appropriate weapon, so you don’t embarrass yourself out there. The second is a piece of gear you’ve probably dreamed about, something that will make every aspect of your life easier from here on out.

The third, though, is the kicker. You’ve proved yourself, here. Whether they know it or not, everyone who survived that arena challenge has proved against all doubt that they have gained, and gained substantially from this planet’s Apocalypse. Is there a ton left to gain? Sure. But there’s no rule saying you can’t ever back away from the blackjack table, so to speak, or that you have to risk it all after you’ve already equipped yourself to survive in the greater universe.

You might not think of it as a real reward, but that third prize is probably the most significant gain you could make. Put plainly, it gives you a choice.

Rewards: 5000 shop credits, EZ-Carry Pouch, Apocalypse Competition Exit Rights, Additional Round-based Rewards (See Accompanying notifications)

The 5000 shop credits were pretty self-explanatory and as curious as he was about the exit rights, Sean assumed reading that one right away would lead him to a world of thoughts he wasn’t ready for quite yet. He’d look through his other prizes, first.

EZ-Carry Pouch

You are a magic future time-skip adventurer, and yet you have to take bathroom breaks. You have to find safe spaces to sleep. Sometimes, you have to take 30 minutes out of your day to boil grain. There are just a lot of inconvenient realities to being a real person.

Not least among these is the requirement that you carry your shit around. Do you need food? Get ready to dig through your stinky pack to find it. Do you need a weapon? You better hope you have an on-point weapon mounting system or you’ll either find yourself unable to get armed in time or hopelessly encumbered by the very tools you need to survive.

It sucks, it has always sucked, and nothing could be lamer than working as your own porter as you try to have the low-fantasy adventure you’ve always dreamed of.

Well, no more. The EZ-Carry pouch weighs one pound, and always will, but has a 500 pound carry capacity. Any non-living item that isn’t in some way actively energetic (like a lit campfire, an exploding grenade, or an arrow in flight) can be stored in it, regardless of size, so long as that overall weight limit is not compromised.

Items can be retrieved by placing your hand above the pouch and willing the retrieval of the item. Note that all recalled items will appear in your hand. Whether or not you can keep a grip on it is on you.