Chapter 87: Preservation Instincts

While the Apocalypse System wants nothing more than for you to enjoy yourself while experiencing the places and things it creates, it’s obligated to note that your enjoyment is not the actual purpose of these things. As you’ve gathered by now, the purpose of a metered, organized end-of-world management system is to produce outlier-strong survivors who carry the strength of the world with them.

Survivors who make sure that world isn’t forgotten, at the risk of their own lives.

That risk is very real. Yes, you might end up getting a visit from a weaponized version of a character from a cartoon you loved, and sure, that might be fun for you. But in the interest of avoiding deception, the Apocalypse System is always very clear that at the most fundamental level, these characters are not about fun. That’s a bonus. They are about danger. That’s the crux. That’s the core.

The danger is so basic to what’s happening here that the actual trigger for the next segment of the competition is not enough time passing, or enough growth taking place. We move on when a sufficient number of villagers die.

Villager’s Manual, Explicit Warnings and Disambiguation, Page 1

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They couldn’t all be slow monsters. Some of them had to be fast. When Sean thought of quick mythological monsters that would be appropriate in an arena, a centaur wasn’t the first thing that popped to mind. That said, the thing was blazing fast, as was expected by what was essentially a stat-enhanced horse whose hooves weren’t slowed by the sand.

The only upside was that it wasn’t the bow-and-arrow kind of centaur. Sean wasn’t sure he would be able to win if it was. No, this was the good old-fashioned spear kind of centaur, burning across the sand trying to make a kebab of Sean on every pass. It had surprisingly good control of the spear, too, adjusting on the fly to in effect become a six-foot wall of moving death.

Sean’s saving grace against the horse so far had been its sheer momentum. If it hit him, that momentum would mean he’d be lifted up on a spear like a grape on a horse-driven toothpick. So long as it didn’t hit him, though, it meant that he could evade the horse in close quarters. In straight lines, the centaur was fast as hell. Turning at a gallop, it was as ungainly as a one-winged goose.

“Come on, you asshole,” Sean said. After ten minutes or so of running away from the damn thing without once getting in a good striking position, he finally found the opening to even the playing field. He had held back using the fighter’s heart, so far, since it limited his mobility while it was swinging. Plus, even if he managed to brain the centaur with it in one hit, he’d still have to deal with a half-ton of horse and spear falling towards him in a straight line.

Now, he had it moving faster and faster on a fairly short leash as he spun it vertically by his side. The man-half of the centaur cocked its head to the side, as if trying to figure out what Sean was doing before it actually honest-to-god shrugged, gave up on thinking about things, and charged again.

Sean was worried about the exact timing of what he was trying. Too early, and the attack would miss entirely. Too late, and he wouldn’t have time to dodge out of the way once he launched it.

“Uh-oh! Looks like Shawn is up to something tricky down there. Will it be enough to stop the centaur?”

Ignore the announcer. He’s not important right now.

“He might just have a chance, friends. The centaur looks a little sick, like it doesn’t quite have a sore throat. Do you get it, friends? Because he’s half hoarse.”

Never mind. The announcer is going down. The audience is on the list too, just for laughing at that abomination of a joke.

Seething with rage over the commentary, Sean finally let the Heavy Heart go, giving it more chain as it rotated up and behind him and letting it catch in the sand as it came back forward. It turned out all his worries about finding the correct range were pointless, as the damn thing was so heavy and moving so fast it exploded gallons of sand up off the arena floor like it had been shot out of a cannon.

Sean watched as a cloud of sand almost managed to obscure the centaur, ditched his flail, and bailed out to the side. He didn’t quite make it. The tip of the spear caught his arm as he jumped, ripping the shoulder of his right side wide open. If his gambit didn’t work soon, he’d be in deep trouble here.

Luckily, the horse-man wasn’t immune to getting a shit-load of high-velocity sand in its eyes. As Sean rolled the momentum of his dive over and regained his feet, he turned around to see the horse bash hard off the stone wall, losing its balance slightly as the man-half rubbed at its eyes and wailed. Sean was off like a shot, pulling the Mystereamer into his offhand before sprinting towards the horse, leaping into the air, and landing straddled across its back.

For lack of a better place to stab at on a centaur, Sean settled on the joint between the horse and man. As much as the system might be good at creature design, he was hopeful that it hadn’t gotten the whole equine-to-human transition worked out perfectly. Worst case scenario, he’d probably disable one half or another and that would be good enough even if it didn’t turn out to be a weak spot in and of itself.

It turned out that his chosen target wasn’t especially vulnerable, but it also didn’t end up mattering that much because once he was on this thing’s back, it couldn’t buck hard enough to get him off. The man-half of the monster flailed around trying to reach him to throw him off, but proved to have a surprisingly limited range of motion in terms of how far it could turn around.

That didn’t mean it didn’t have options. It was a horse, mostly. It bucked. It tried to scrape Sean off its back by running close enough to walls to catch his legs, making him pull them up, then bucking some more. It even rolled on the ground at one point, which did get Sean off for a bit, but by then the horse’s back was blistered, poisoned, rotted and frozen from the Mystereamer’s chaotic damage types. It could barely run, which meant Sean just had to deal with its close quarters maneuverability, which wasn’t all that hard.

Finally, it went down, it’s hooves kicking at the sand looking for traction a few more times before it laid still.

Fourth Round Complete!

Each round of battle is significantly harder than the last. Will you continue? You have two minutes to decide.

Y/N

Sean had been wounded in that battle. For all that Stitch Up was kicking in hard now to heal him and even though he hadn’t had to trigger the long-cooldown turbo healing he had picked up from the boxers, he still wasn’t a tank. Even leveled, Stitch Up didn’t make him tougher and it didn’t heal fast enough to completely negate big wounds. It was a cuts-and-scrapes mitigator, or maybe a bit more. But not more than that.

Barring especially good matchups, he was reaching his limit. The next fight might very well be more than he could handle. The caution in every fiber of his being was pushing for him to stop here, after a fight he knew he could handle, before a fight he wasn’t sure about.

But somewhere, out in his own personal arena space, Eike was working to get stronger. His army was working to get stronger. Sean had a suspicion that with the arena, a straight-up combat contest that rewarded absolute strength, Eike would win. That he’d get further than Sean could. But Sean would be damned if he made that easy on him and his little army of assholes.

He waited just long enough for his wounds to truly heal and mentally clicked yes.

This time, there was no clomping, no real noise from the tunnel at all. Sean’s first indicator of what he was dealing with came when a long whip-like object of some kind darted out of the shadows for a moment. Any hope he had of reusing the tactics he had honed on the orc were lost when the whip returned, this time far enough into the light that he could see that it was red, forked, and slightly wet looking.

It was a snake. An absolutely gigantic snake. So big that it nearly filled the gate as it emerged, and Sean spent an odd moment trying to figure out how it had been able to negotiate the inside of the arena building before remembering it was all fake. There probably wasn’t an inside of the arena in this reality.

As more and more of the snake made its way out of the tunnels, Sean started to worry about his chances. The scales on the thing weren’t normal. On a normal snake, the scales laid pretty flat, letting the snake glide. The scales on the giant snake weren’t like that, instead sticking out from it at a 45-degree angle, looking more like red-dyed steel plates than anything organic. As they tapered off to the ends, they became so narrow they looked sharp.

It’s not just the head on this thing I have to look out for. The whole body is a weapon.

Sean holstered the Mystereamer. He wasn’t at all confident he could pierce those scales with it. As the snake eventually got its entire horrible 40 foot length free of the tunnel, he got the Heavy Heart up to speed, cranking nearly the entire length of it as he built up as much momentum as he possibly could. He doubted he could bludgeon it with the flail the whole fight, but if he could get one good hit with it, it might give him the lead he needed to survive.

Out of the tunnel now, the snake shot at him like a bolt from a crossbow, surprisingly fast for how huge it was. Sean held his ground. Even with SAV helping him out, he needed to burn a charge of Hard Time on the end of the flail to get the timing right and set it on a collision course for the snake’s face.

Sean smiled, in spite of himself. He had set everything up perfectly to get one gigantic hit in. Given how big the snake was, there was no way it was going to dodge the haymaker flail.

Or so he thought. At the last moment, the snake’s body jerked as it dug its snout into the sand. For a moment, Sean thought it was digging down, but when it failed to penetrate into the ground, he realized something else was happening. The snake’s head caught in the sand, putting the brakes on its momentum as its body continued forward, whipping out above as its tail came forward.

The flail didn’t miss entirely. But rather than hit the thinner, more vulnerable-looking scales on the head, it caught what amounted to its shoulder, all the force from the flail transferring into one of the large, plank-like scales on its side.

Shit. It’s smart.

The flail caught it on the side and bounced. It didn’t crack the scale. It didn’t even deform the shape of the snake. The snake’s scale took the entire massive force of the Heavy Heart and shrugged it off, ignoring it like an adult would ignore a punch from a toddler.

And yet, somehow, that wasn’t the biggest problem. Sean realized a moment too late that he was in a whip battle after all as the snake pivoted on its snout and its full 40’ length came whipping towards him.