Chapter 84: The Gladiator Arena One

“Holy shit! He materialized hard!” Brady yelled.

Justin looked over at her, slightly exasperated.

“What does that even mean?”

“It means the rest of you came out sort of soft and smooth and he splatted out of space-time like spilled pudding.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Justin said. Brendan nodded in agreement.

“No, she’s right,” Sean said, laying on his back, trying to get his stomach to settle back down. “Dropped pudding is an unusually exact description of how I feel right now.”

Spike reached down, giving him a hand up before he was entirely ready for it. Sean rose unsteadily to his feet, doing a rough headcount. Everyone seemed to be present except for the small sledgehammer-user woman from before.

“No Hayden yet?” Sean asked.

“Not yet.”

“How long did you all have to wait for me?”

“Brady was the first out and she said she had to wait five minutes for anyone else. It’s been about five minutes since then. So probably not too long, now.”

“Did you all have the crazy plains thing? With the gauntlet of animals?” Justin asked. “Or did it vary?”

“I had that,” Brady said. “It felt like I was murdering the cast of a Disney movie. Without any of my normal tools.”

“How far did you get?” Spike asked.

“I got the wolf. And I think about half the bear before I ran away and the system pulled me out. The system said the wolf was the bare minimum to pass, something about a single fight without stats proving how much I had changed.”

“The wolf and the bear. I couldn’t kill the elk.” Justin said.

Spike beamed. “The wolf, the bear, and the elk. I couldn’t deal with the badger. I’m too used to using range as an advantage, I guess.”

Brendan nodded.

“Same,” he said, before turning to Brady. “What’s half a bear?”

“I stabbed it a few times and then it knocked me over and I ran away.”

“That’s not half a bear. You have to stab it sort of a lot.”

That kicked off a whole argument about ursine shot-placement, one that Sean was thankful for. If he could avoid it, he didn’t want to have a whole conversation about his weeks-long zombie battle trance right away. It turned out nearly everyone but him had picked up weapons befitting their class, ranging from a bow for Brendan, a spear for Spike, and a reflecting mirror and dagger for Brady.

Only he and Scott, the old-man battle bard, had gotten the generic weapon set. But where Sean had gone above and beyond, Scott had been stopped at the bear.

Sean listened to the argument as his stomach settled, then stood and started pacing. After nearly five more minutes of arguing, Hayden wasn’t out yet and they were still vulnerable and visible on the plains. He milled around impatiently, despite his best efforts to be mature about the delay. Every second that passed was another where they might be discovered or he might be asked about his own personal version of the wild and rambling plains experience, and he didn’t want either outcome.

Then his foot hit something. Something that mushed in on impact instead of clanging like metal or stubbing his toes like a rock. It was Hayden.

“Guys?” Sean said. “Get over here, now.”

There must have been something in his voice because the conversation stopped on a dime as the entire group immediately came towards him. By the time they got there, he was already on his knees in the tall grass, taking Hayden’s pulse. She didn’t have one. She was gone.

—

They took the necessary time to bury her and then ran back to the village as quickly as they could. Sean had never dealt with a real person’s corpse before, even though he had produced one. It wasn’t the kind of thing you just held your breath and worked through, and he had managed to not feel much about it until they got back. Now, sitting in their tavern, it was all starting to hit him.

That person was gone. Forever. He hadn’t known them well, but that still hit hard, bashing him with the unavoidable weight of reality. For people who had known her better, like Brendan seemed to, it hit even harder. He was sitting in a chair, hugging her too-large sledgehammer lightly, quiet in a different way now.

“I don’t understand what happened. She should have been able to handle that bear.”

It seemed like the bear was probably the likely culprit, although it was hard to tell from the slashes alone. Despite her heavy weapon, Hayden had worn leather armor, probably to split the mobility difference between heavy tank and damage dealer. The stomach of the armor had been mostly ribbons by the time the wounds in her neck had caught up with her.

“I agree, Brady,” Justin said. “It doesn’t make sense. But we could have all gotten unlucky there. She wasn’t very big. Without stats, it might just have been too much to ask from her.”

Sean didn’t say anything. But he felt the loss, and suddenly felt the danger of all this in a way he hadn’t before. He didn’t remember much of his proving ground experience anymore, but he remembered feeling invincible. Feeling like it was normal that the system wouldn’t actually feed him anything that would kill him, wouldn’t put him in a situation where he could actually die. But any of those animals could have taken him down with a lucky hit and probably should have. He had been skating on the edge of death for weeks and hadn’t even known it.

And really, that wasn’t just true of the proving ground. It was true of the entire experience. Somewhere along the way, he had begun to assume things would just work out, that he was on a very special hero’s journey of his own. If Hayden had given him one gift, it was bringing him back down to Earth in the most substantial way possible.

—

One by one, everyone eventually snuck away, leaving just Brendan at the end, still sitting quietly, wrapped around the hammer. Sean left last, lamely patting him on the shoulder before heading back to the base. There wasn’t much else he could do for him.

“That was way, way too long to be a stroll around the town, Sean,” Brett said. “I’m assuming you got caught up in this field dungeon business.”

“Yeah,” Sean said, throwing his pack on the ground before flopping down on the cold, hard floor. “A proving ground, no less.”

“No shit? How’d that go?”

“I’m now at 8 points per level. And I got ten points on top of that. And four levels to my combat skill. Kind of. Things got weird, Brett.”

He told him everything, front to back. The actual adventure parts of it didn’t take long, considering he could hardly remember them. The rulebreaker token and weapon token took a bit longer since Brett needed to stop and see them.

Talking about Hayden was the shortest of all, since Sean hardly wanted to talk about it in the first place. Even with a few questions from Brett about her wounds, that part of things was held down to a half dozen sentences or so.

“It spit her out?” Brett said. “Out of the system space, I mean. She was just laying there?”

“Yeah, in the grass. Ripped up pretty badly. We didn’t even find her until later.”

“Huh. That’s odd,” Brett said. “It’s weird that it did that.”

“The system doesn’t usually send people out of spaces, if they die?”

“I mean, there’s no saying what the Apocalypse System is thinking at any given time, and we’re in a whole new world. But no, not usually. If it kicked her out, something different was going on.”

“Maybe it just wanted us to see? To learn from it?”

“Maybe. There’s no way of knowing. I guess the lesson is just to be extra careful, but you probably already got that.”

Brett went to the soda fountain and brought Sean back something. “Here. Drink this. And go take a shower. Leave your armor and the prism ring if you can. I want to try some things. Take your time, too. This might take a while.”

Sean stripped down to his underclothes and stumbled into the shower, getting a small cup of bath soap as he did. The trick to showering without much in the way of equipment, he had found, was to use your clothes to wash you and at the same time, you used yourself to wash the clothes. After the few minutes that took, Sean just stood there in the hot water, trying to let it soak some of the accumulated hurt of the day away.

By the time he was out, Brett was putting in the last stitches of his repairs.

“Here, try this.” Brett tossed the armor at him. “I lined it with some of that nice fabric from before, and did some repairs. With any luck, the system will acknowledge it as a new project, now.”

Improved Zeutsuit

Where the previous Zeutsuit only granted substantial resistance to damage and didn’t do so much in the stats department, this version leverages quality, system-space materials and an improved version of the craftsman himself to create something that does a little bit more.

The biggest difference here is the lining, which negates the need for under-clothes while in the armor and brings the comfort-enhancing and anti-chafing components of your armor set under the purview of the armor’s self-repair function.

Refined armor joints and reinforced stitching at vital points have also played their part in making this armor extra-divine. Enjoy your stats!

Effects: Major resistance to piercing and slashing damage, improved resistance to blunt force trauma, average resistance to most forms of elemental damage. +5 DEX, +5 VIT.

“Mission success, Brett. The damage reduction is a little better and it gives some serious stats now. With the ring, I think that’s something like 66 stats in improvement, just today. That’s insane.”

“Don’t get too confident,” Brett said. “You weren’t the only person who won their game of dodgeball. And I’m guessing even those that didn’t are growing pretty fast. There’s a good chance you’re ahead of the growth curve though. Try to take advantage of that, if you can.”

Sean climbed into his armor, and moved around in it a bit. It really was much better. It wasn’t just more comfortable, although Brett had done a great job with that. It moved better, with less restriction around his elbows, knees, and waist. There was no way of saying how many stat points that was worth, adjusted for overall performance. But it was something.

“What do you think about the weapon enhancement token? Should I go shopping?”

Brett shook his head. “Hold off on that, if you can. As much as I want to push you forward, I doubt we could afford anything very good right now. I’d rather you get something fully broken later rather than something kind of good right now.”

Brett’s eyes suddenly dropped down and scanned back and forth a bit.

“Besides, it looks like you don’t have time at the moment, anyway. Grab your loadout. Quick.”

Sean looped up all his armor, just in time for the quickest transition to a new area ever. As the in-between space lurched away and his eyes adjusted to the light, he found himself standing on a thin layer of sand, surrounded by a circular wall of stone.

Daily Challenge: The Gladiator Arena One

Let’s be honest. I think we both knew this was coming at some point.