Chapter 88: Slowing Down

Eventually, we got access to a bookshelf for the base, something the System offered that stocked a rotating selection of Earth literature based on the tastes of the reader. I think Sean felt bad for me being stuck in the Shanktuary so many hours a day, or something, and he popped for it instead of something actually useful. I told him not to, but it really was nice. I got a lot of reading done, in between other things.

One of the books taught me a term called survivorship bias. It’s this idea that, if you look at things that outlast the test of time and only those things, you get a skewed idea of the past. You end up thinking all old buildings were pretty when it was just that the pretty buildings were the ones they never tore down. When you only see the survivors, you miss all the data about the ones that died.

After the coliseum battle, there were about four tenths less competitors than before. The survivors bragged and by that time I was so buddy-buddy with all the crafter offworlders that I was able to learn a lot.

If you took a survey of every competitor, and I basically did, you’d find that the vast majority of them quit at the end of the third or fourth stage. Some people weren’t here to win, and figured the third stage was plenty. Some were, and pushed the limits to the fourth, and decided to quit there. The fourth was hard and it made sense to quit there. Every story from basically every competitor backed that up.

But remember, that was just the survivors. The real story, the one that the majority of the competitors took with them to the grave, was that they pushed too far, went to the fifth round and died. That the fifth round wasn’t meant to be beatable, really. It was meant to punish greed with death.

The Big Book of Brett, Page 80

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There was no getting out of the way. Hard Time wouldn’t help with that. There was no “out of the way” to get to in the first place. The snake body was eight feet tall and coming at him like a bendy, armor-plated freight train.

The most Sean could do is jump back from it, putting all his strength into a retreat that was in some ways close to the snake’s speed. He launched himself in the air so his feet wouldn’t introduce drag into the equation.

That was the reason you were supposed to bicycle with traffic, and not against it, Sean thought. So your speed was subtracted from the force of the collision, not added to it.

It probably helped. Probably. The snake still smacked him hard, he flew off into the distance like a foul ball. He felt a sudden bang at his back and realized it was the wall of the arena, which he had travelled to in a distressingly short amount of time. Even before the pain kicked in, he knew he was hurt, mainly because his body wouldn’t respond to his commands to cushion his fall towards the sand.

Without a moment’s question, he activated his second wind healing skill. Between the sudden surge of regen it provided and the shock from hitting the ground, he managed to get one Apple-Up potion from his belt, biting through the side of it with his weird, STR-enhanced jaw strength and turbocharging the second wind even further.

He writhed on the ground as his ultra-fast regen yanked various broken, shattered, and torn parts of him back together, watching as the snake recovered from its acrobatic whipping motion and turned to slither towards him. If a snake could look smug, this one looked it. At the very least, it looked like it didn’t have a single worry at all.

Sean did. Even healing as fast as he was, there was just too much damage to heal for him to get back up immediately. The snake wasn’t in any hurry, probably assuming he wouldn’t get up from the hit at all, but Sean still had a very limited amount of time to find his feet before he found out what kind of fangs the snake was still hiding from him.

With a sick click, his arm suddenly regained most of its functionality. Sean forced it into motion, burying one of his darts in the brick of the wall and using it to pull himself to a kneeling position. He felt several more minor pops as different bones and tendons utilized the freedom granted by the hanging position to click back into place.

Digging another dart into the wall, he pulled himself up to his feet. He could stand, if just barely. But the snake was almost on him, and he was still seconds away from getting his mobility back. Desperate to buy himself any time at all, he pulled a dart from the wall and chucked it at the thing, as one might throw a toothpick at an approaching Sherman tank.

The dart hit the snake square in the nose, clanking uselessly off its scales and doing absolutely nothing to arrest its momentum. In a moment, Sean would be jelly.

And then the snake slowed, all by itself, looking confused for a moment before rearing up into the air, opening its mouth to reveal two scimitar-long metal fangs, and hissed.

“What in the hell?” Sean said. The snake continued hissing, thrashing its tail around in obvious reptilian displeasure. “Oh, shit, the armor piercing. You aren’t used to that, are you?”

Sean’s darts and spear weren’t incredible weapons for dealing sheer, raw damage. These days, he didn’t use the spear much at all. It had a significant reach advantage over the Mystereamer, but in terms of penetration, the dagger won. In terms of sheer capability to screw stuff up, the Trash Compactor had been better, and the cruise missile of unhappiness Sean had built with the Heavy Heart seemed like it would be even better still.

But all of those attacked in direct ways. Only the spear and darts he had made out of weird ghost-bear teeth could ignore armor completely. And apparently, that was a step too far for ‘ol snakey, who was probably experiencing pain for the first time in its long, weird, simulated life.

As the snake started to calm down from its hissy fit, Sean chucked the other dart. Though he didn’t get another full-on tantrum out of it, the snake obviously reared back from the pain, driving it to caution and delaying it from moving forward that much longer.

In the meantime, the super-charged combination of the healing skill he had stolen from the boxers and his apple potion had almost brought him back from the brink. He wasn’t in tip-top condition, by any means, but he felt like he could move reasonably well now. Springing forward, he chucked his third dart almost as a distraction as he rushed in wielding his short spear.

The snake had learned by now that the darts caused pain and did its best to get out of the way of the dart as it flew. It didn’t work. The snake was huge, and while it could rear up, it didn’t appear to be able to jump or to flatten itself out to any significant degree. Not only did the dart hit, but Sean was able to use the gap in the snake’s attention to get close and jab it two more times with the spear.

The snake was past its surprise at the pain and now had moved on emotionally towards what appeared to be a dedication to getting it to stop by any means necessary. It suddenly thrashed out, bending one of its massive sides towards Sean. As the side of the snake undulated past Sean, he did his best to move away, mostly succeeding but having most of the skin on his off-arm scraped off in the bargain.

After that, the fight became much more one-sided for a time. Sean would dart in, sometimes using his literal darts for cover if he was positioned to pick them up from the sand between attacks. He’d sting the snake a few times, then escape before the thrashing kicked back in.

It was infuriating that he couldn’t see the damage the spear was doing, but it had to be building up somewhere. Otherwise, it was hard to imagine how anyone could beat the massive thing and Sean just couldn’t believe that was the system’s intention here. Good matchups and bad matchups were a thing, but if his specialized piercing damage was getting nullified somehow, say by the snake’s natural regen just being high enough, he couldn’t see anyone killing this thing.

The way things were going, Sean was reluctant to change up his tactics at all. If it was going to be death by a thousand cuts, he was willing to do all of them, so long as he was able to keep the snake off its game enough to prevent it from making Sean-shaped craters in the wall again.

After several cycles of springing in, hitting, and springing out, Sean was pretty happy with the way things were going. Almost as soon as it set in, Sean’s good mood was broken as the snake gathered its wits enough to get smart.

As Sean dodged around the snake’s head to go for another strike, he found it was easy to close the distance. Suspiciously so. He aborted his attack, turning just in time to see the snake’s spade-shaped nose buried down into the sand as it ripped with a wave of motion originating at its tail and terminating by cranking the huge head back, catapulting an absolutely excessive amount of the arena’s sand floor at Sean.

Sean sprang back and closed his eyes against the grains of sand, badly misjudging just how much sand this thing had got in the air. Instead of avoiding damage to his eyes, Sean caught hundreds of pounds of flung sand at once, enough material thrown with enough force that it took him entirely off his feet.

Shit. Gotta get moving.

As fast as Sean was able to get his wits back about him after the surprise attack, it wasn’t fast enough. By the time Sean’s mind caught up with his flying body, the snake had taken full advantage of its self-made opportunity and caught up with him. The snake was on top of him, its mouth open wide and its steely fangs descending.

Sean flopped out of the way as best he could. He rolled hard to his left, avoiding the first plunge of the snake’s fangs entirely and even catching it with a hastily swiped spear strike to its cheek. He didn’t get as lucky on the second plunge. The snake had learned its lesson, pulling back only half the distance and going for more of a jab than a full plunge.

Sean burned two charges of Hard Time trying to get out of the way and just didn’t make it. The snake’s fang caught him on the outside of his right calf, ripping a deep gash as its near-miss scraped down the side of his leg.

Sean lashed out, catching the snake with a glancing blow to the eye that forced it to withdraw its fang from his leg, then stood and danced away as the muscles in his leg began spasming, burning, and generally not working as well as they had just moments ago. He was poisoned, maybe not as bad as if the fang had hit him somewhere more vital or had been in him longer but poisoned all the same.

And he was starting to slow down.