Chapter 83: Stephen Evens

Eventually he stopped keeping track of the individual animals he had fought. There were dozens of them. Probably. His mind wasn’t working right anymore. He could vaguely remember that the plains were supposed to be for something or to be on the way somewhere, which didn’t make sense. As far as he could remember, he had always been there.

And then, there was a man. A tall man, bound with lean muscle, shooting at him with a bow. He was in his way, between him and wherever he was going.

“Press on,” Sean said, sprinting towards the obstacle with his stone sword held off to his side.

Sean ran, ignoring the first few arrows that pierced his chest, then finally found his limit as a broadhead bolt took him in his throat. Before he could learn the true difficulties of trying to breathe around an arrowhead, the sheer shock of it knocked him out. He wasn’t aware of the moment he stopped breathing and the man with the arrows disappeared.

—

ERROR. SYSTEM APPEAL IN PROGRESS.

SYSTEM ANALYSIS COMPLETE.

Sean was suddenly awake, in the way that a man hit by a taser in deep REM sleep could be described as suddenly awake. Apparently the Apocalypse System got impatient, and forced things a little.

Sean was pissed, but a little fuzzy on the details of why. He figured reading the rest of the message might help him remember.

Press On (Achievement)

Okay. So. First, understand that usually competitors don’t get real individual messages. As much as it might seem that I’ve been getting to know you and we’ve been forging one of those personal connections you hear about, the difference in your messages compared to other people’s can for the most part be considered cosmetic. The content is the same as it would be for everyone else but otherwise it’s just a custom reskin to help keep you engaged.

This is not that. This is, as your preferred communication profile demands I phrase it, something much fuckier.

The deal is that the general design for the outer-village-area assumed you’d go to the more prominent System Spaces first, then hit up the outskirts once those got boring. Y’all hopscotched that order and got into the proving ground a little early. That should have made it a little harder but not much. Not like what you got.

So remember how the Apocalypse System said your Forest Dragon-kin title was weird, and we’d have to figure out more about it later? Turns out we should have gone with “sooner” on that because part of what that two-way relationship apparently does is tune you into nature a little better in a way that did not interact well with the whole plains-spirit-journey motif of the zone.

Which still should have been okay, right? It’s not like you’d have three fucky things happening at once. But then it turns out the whole “this is a slog, let’s see how well they can tolerate hours and hours of walking punctuated by extreme violence and terror” thing didn’t play well with your perception of time, which is the exact kind of thing that System Design Autocorrect should be able to catch so long as someone doesn’t also have a bunch of dragon magic throwing up divide-by-zero errors, and such.

For the record, you were never immortal in there. You got really close to dying a bunch and just never quite lost that last drop of blood that would have pushed you over the edge. Most people would have given up. I say that to mean that you would have given up too. If only you weren’t completely mindfucked by your dragon-supplied foreign connection to nature which made the weeks of walking through fields seem more natural to you and slowly numbing your more human reflexes.

The practical upshot is you were in there so long that you blew through a bunch of bosses you shouldn’t have been able to kill, triggered a boss you couldn’t have possibly defeated, got killed in the “was legally dead for a second” sense, and the sheer screwed-up math of it all finally caused a system review of what was going on.

In the Apocalypse System’s defense, it all looked really normal from the outside right up until you got killed.

With how screwed up your brain is right now, I’m guessing you got about ten words of this. Just keep reading notifications, it will get fixed. That’s a promise.

The Apocalypse system wasn’t wrong about that last bit. Sean’s head was swimming, and not just because the system had chosen to dump all this stuff on him while he was experiencing the nausea and terror of the in-between place. The change in environment had jarred a little bit of his mindless, plodding-friendly mental numbness from his brain, but not nearly all of it.

He did get “keep reading”, though. He did.

Mental Readjustment (Special System Reward)

Congratulations! You’ve sustained serious mental trauma that substantially and permanently rewired the way your brain works in a negative, highly inconvenient way. Bad news: you are now a barely-functional mess of confusion, bad reflexes, and severely lacking self-preservation instincts.

The good news is that so long as you okay the following prompt, the system will do some magic-mushrooms talk-therapy stuff on your head, roll back all the trauma parts, and fix the vast majority of the damage.

The only downside is that your memory of the weeks-long torture session you went through will get a little fuzzy. But if you don’t mind forgetting a few things, we can fix your thinky-bits right up.

Will you allow massive brain rewiring for the purpose of rolling back mental trauma?

Y/N

Again, Sean was not following as well as he’d like, but he was able to gather just enough information from both messages to get that choosing Y would at least make things change from how they were right now. Since almost anything seemed preferable to this, he clicked confirm on the affirmative option.

Suddenly, the entire detailed meaning of the last two messages clicked into focus in Sean’s mind and he went from pissed in a fuzzy, indistinct way to furiously angry in a hyper-focused, will-rend-the-meat-from-the-bones-of-his-enemies sort of way. He had read enough PR releases in his day to know this was a massive, massive fuck-up on the System’s part.

“I’m fucking pissed still!” Sean yelled into the infinite not-darkness. “Even with everything numbed down! I want it on the record that I’m still incredibly pissed and if given the option, I will absolutely file a complaint on this or something.”

There was no answer and after a minute of waiting, it became apparent the only way to move forward was to keep working through the notifications.

Endless Plains Proving Ground Complete (Special Proving Ground, Apocalypse Competition Variant)

Apocalypse events provide a unique, chaotic ground for growth. If you want solid, mid-range results, you don’t go to an apocalypse to get them. It’s only for those who want massive, massive outlier success and will accept an almost limitless amount of risk to get it.

That said, and we want to be really clear about this every single time, there’s a limit to how much you can get out of a proving ground. Apocalypse proving grounds are absolutely fantastic, but are broadly pass-fail affairs unless weird stuff happens.

For you, weird stuff happened again. Did you know you killed an entire buffalo? You were deep in some spirit-of-the-wild battle trance and just, you know, murdered an entire buffalo with a pretty stock human body. Are you confused as to how? So is the Apocalypse System. For that matter, so was the buffalo.

Anyway, you get what everyone gets, to some extent. But you also get some more goodies on top of that. Enjoy.

Rewards: Shankmaster gains four levels (Withheld, See Special Note). You now gain 8 stat points per level (Non-Retroactive). You gain ten free stat points for your max-level clear of a proving ground. As your body purges a large amount of time-affinity energy you took in as a sort of toxin, you might retain some.

With no frame of reference for how anyone else did on the trial, Sean had no idea how much better his rewards were. Some of it was concerning. He was apparently suffering from time-poisoning, which might mean anything. But for now, it was a ten point stat advantage and a huge upgrade to his Shankmaster skill.

Kind of.

Special Note: Your weeks of battle-trancing across North American fauna means you got a lot of really specialized, high-pressure melee experience. That said, we had to roll back your brain a little bit so you wouldn’t zombie-arms your way into almost instant death.

If the Apocalypse System just adds that experience back in, your brain will pop. The best we can do is release that experience back into your system in a controlled way, over time. Get ready for the fastest progress you’ve ever had, if you don’t include your growth on the plains that we took away.

That left one notification, and it was a big one. A big, weird one.

Stephen Evens (Achievement)

The Apocalypse System, like the greater System, is a System of rules. Can those rules be bent? Sure. Is it always clear how the rules are being followed? Not at all. Do the rules make everything fair? Not even a little. But they do exist, and the System always follows them.

Or nearly always.

You have stumbled into an ultra-rare situation where the system put you on a track for death, no matter what you did, robbed you of options and choice, and generally screwed you over. The Apocalypse System is not a person and cannot be genuinely sorry. It’s a real limitation that, as a System, it’s powerless to remove.

But it can make amends.

The system broke a bunch of rules, some major, and some minor. Now you get to break some rules yourself. Remember how we described the village rules as “near-absolute?” You just found one of the very, very rare exceptions to those rules. Congratulations.

Rewards: Single-use Rulebreaker Voucher, Single-Use Classbreaker Weapon Absorption Token

The hell? Sean thought. How is this enough?

He had been through hell, almost literally. And now the system was buying him off with honestly weird stuff that seemed to have limited applications at best.

Rulebreaker Voucher

Saying the word “Rulebreaker” with this voucher in hand allows you to break a single system-imposed village rule. Note that this is truly a single rule, not whatever it takes to accomplish a single rule-breaking goal. You can definitely stab somebody. But unless you can put them down with a single stab, “stabbing someone to death” is not a guaranteed result.

Classbreaker Weapon Absorption Token

Do you use swords but want to have armor-piercing blunt damage? Do you use hammers but want them to channel spells like a mage’s staff? Do you use guns but want them to go “thwang!” when fired like a bow for some reason?

This token is for you. It takes a pre-existing weapon and absorbs some combination of the stat buffs, damage type, or handling characteristics of another weapon, integrating them additively to what the original, consuming weapon already has. This is always better, never worse, and gives you an opportunity to really screw with the system logic that usually defines words like “blade”, “club”, or “polearm.”

The best part is, it can’t fail. Not absolutely. If you ask the voucher to do something it really can’t do, it will just refuse to do it. You keep the voucher to try again.

And with that, before Sean could start dreaming about what he’d do with it or complain again, the system kicked him back out into the real world and a whole different kind of hurt.