Chapter 82: The Nothing Space

“It should be any second now. Once it drops, we bolt,” Brady said.

“Do you think the walls will drop before the general notification?” Spike asked. “If there’s any delay, it might not even be worth getting out there first.”

“I think so. Or at least at the same time,” Sean said. “If this was a prize, it was meant to give an advantage. If the walls came down a few minutes after the notification, it would give everyone else time to muster their forces. The system doesn’t usually give literally nothing.”

Justin nodded.

“That makes sense. But if the wall doesn’t come down, I still vote we run for it unless something changes. There might be achievements for the first team in a dungeon or to finish one.”

Everyone was in agreement. As much of a threat as other teams might pose outside the city, the only safety they could really hope for was keeping as far ahead of the power curve as they possibly could. The long-term key to not getting attacked was being scary to attack. If they became weak relative to their enemies, the knife was coming for them sooner or later, no matter how careful they were.

“Okay, it’s down! Go! Go!” Spike yelled.

The disappearance of the wall had been so sudden and silent that Sean hadn’t noticed the change until Spike yelled. He was a step behind the entire group, but he caught up and soon reached the front of the pack. They were all running as the notification hit.

“Guys! Notification is out. We probably have two or three minutes before the other groups get moving.”

The world outside the wall was a generic plain spotted with various kinds of terrain in a weird kind of miniature way. Off to the group’s left was a forest but one that looked like it was made up of just a few hundred trees, like a large grove. To their right, the terrain got clearly mountainous and rocky, without the benefit of actually being at the elevation of a mountain.

In front of them, however, the plains continued. They had very briefly discussed the relative merits of running a bit past the obvious options and had decided that it would probably be better to get a head start on the off-the-beaten-track system spaces than run the risk of sharing a system space with a hostile party.

“Guys! I don’t see anything past this point,” Sean said. It looked like whatever the system had planned for them, it was closer to the village. In front of him, there was nothing but empty plains, as far as the eye could see. “We should turn back.”

There was no response.

Did I lose them? Sean thought, skidding to a stop. His new ring was a hell of a thing, and it goosed his speed in more ways than just the DEX increase would imply. Something about having all his weaker stats shored up at once had a total effect greater than the sum of its parts, but he hadn’t been moving fast enough to get completely out of earshot of the others. Even if he had, someone would have called him back.

As he wheeled around, he found nothing. Not only were his friends gone, so was, well, everything.

The mini-forest should at least be visible from here. The mountains might be hard to see, but not an entire grove of trees.

Sean immediately began burning rubber back in the direction he had come. It was hard to tell how fast he was moving now. The uniformity of the terrain meant he had no frame of reference. And then, after a minute or so, the damnedest thing happened.

He ran out of breath. Adrenaline and alarm being what they were, he hadn’t noticed his fatigue catching up with him until it caught him hard, sending him into an oxygen-deprived tailspin and leaving him bent over, hands on his knees, gasping for air.

At some point during his growth, running out of breath had pretty much ceased to be a thing. Oh, sure, he’d get a little short of breath during fights, but he’d recover just as quickly the moment the pressure was off. The VIT would keep him going and also refill the tanks as fast as it could once he wasn’t spending all his energy trying to kill swarms of things.

This was like he didn’t have stats at all. Like he was just a normal guy again.

In the split second that followed, he started to notice other differences. His armor had changed. Instead of the distinct, unrealistically high-quality god-leather Brett had put together for him, his clothes now looked more like normal, mundane leather, unenhanced by the system at all. His weapons were gone. His pack was mostly empty, containing only a water skin and a largish bag of dried meat.

Worse, his status screen wouldn’t open. He didn’t have any non-regeneration skills that could be activated just by willing it, so besides Hard Time. He risked a charge to see if it was working. It wasn’t. Over the last few weeks, he had become familiar with the feeling of using the skill and could feel the subtle surge of something when he activated it. Now, there was nothing.

As near as he could tell, he was powerless. And he had no notifications, at all.

“Uh… System? Apocalypse system? Are you going to give me any idea what’s going on, here?”

A window popped one second later.

Press on.

He asked for information a couple different ways after that. If the system had any explanations for what was going on, it didn’t appear to be sharing them.

He started walking. He was on his own, but hopefully not for long. If he could find a single member of his party, they could work on figuring it out, together.

—

Two days later, he saw his first sign of life. It wasn’t a party member. It was a wolf.

The land wasn’t completely uniform, he had found out. Here and there, there were creeks. He had filled up his water from them a few times now and was grateful to find they weren’t poison when he didn’t die outright after drinking the water. That wasn’t really the system’s style anyway. Somewhere along the line, he had found a big, fallen tree, the only non-grass plant he had noticed out here. He stopped at it long enough to break off several branches and some long-dried out bark, in case he needed a fire.

He kept one of the thicker, less rotted branches in his hand as a weapon. It was better than nothing.

The light hadn’t been changing and he found he didn’t need sleep. Every time he stopped for more than a few minutes, he’d get the same notification he had before.

Press on.

Without anything better to do, he obeyed. He walked and walked, zoning out for hours at a time, hypnotized by the uniformity. He wasn’t sure whether the wolf had just appeared there or if he had been so deep in his Sean-thoughts that he hadn’t noticed the animal until it started snarling and barking at him.

And then it was at his throat. Or nearly so. Sean didn’t have system notifications to help him identify the thing, but he somehow didn’t think he needed to. This was a Wolf branded wolf, in every way normal. It wasn’t a thematic grandma-eating wolf or a pig-house-destroying wolf. It was just a very large, very hungry, very wild type of dog determined to make a meal out of him.

His fight-or-flight reflexes kicked in just in time for him to bring the stick upwards, getting it between the wolf’s teeth just in time to keep it from ripping out all his favorite arteries.

There was no artistry in the fight that followed. It was rolling and biting and being bitten, pounding on the wolf with the branch while it clawed, snarled, and somehow survived the worst he could put out, until it didn’t anymore.

At some point during the fight, the branch had broken, leaving Sean with a jagged edge to stab with. He wasn’t sure when the wolf had actually died or how many stabs it had taken in the end. He didn’t even know whose blood was whose. He just knew he had won.

Press on.

And, with all his wounds, he knew that was the only way, somehow. He stood up, found his stick had changed to sharpened bone, decided not to question it, and pressed on.

—

His wounds didn’t heal as quick as they would have with full vitality, but they did heal. It took a week for the worst of the scratches to heal up, as near as he could tell. Time was wonky here. Maybe even broken. He couldn’t tell. In the same way there was nothing to judge distance by, there was nothing to judge time by either. He tried counting steps, for a while, before eventually deciding it was pointless.

The next animal was a small bear. Sean didn’t know enough about bears to really know what kind it was. By the time Sean got to it, he had been out of meat for days and out of patience for longer. There was no point in waiting to see if the bear was aggressive. He knew the score.

He ran at the thing so aggressively that it reared back from him, the same way that fake survival guides said they would when they said, “make yourself look big.” He managed to get his spear into the animal’s throat before it really started fighting back. At that point, it was mostly running, rolling, and minimizing how badly he got savaged until it bled out after that.

By the time it died, he probably should have been dead. It had opened him up pretty well.

Press on.

There was no way he could do that. There was only so much a human could survive without stats. He was beyond that.

Press on.

Fucking Apocalypse System. The fucking deal was you’d make me powerful so that I could make a build. Do video game stuff. Strategize. And now I’m bleeding out on some anonymous, completely non-unique dirt and this is all you have for me. Fine. Fucking fine. I’ll show you “press on,” you asshole.

Sean rolled over, and tried to rise to his feet, feeling an enormous amount of pain and surprise as he realized he was actually able to do this. All the agony seemed appropriate for the size of his wounds but somehow his ability to walk forward wasn’t hampered. So he did, one burning step at a time.

—

How long was it before he realized his spear was now wood and flint? It could have been days. Must have been days, really, because the worst of his wounds had already scabbed over. He wasn’t sure if he was losing his mind or if it was just the result of not having any use for it besides experiencing pain and boredom. Some important parts might have been deactivated.

The spear wasn’t anything special, really. It was sharp, sure. It looked like someone had worked hard on it. But it wasn’t an especially interesting object. Nothing he couldn’t make himself. He almost threw it away to spite the system then reconsidered. This might be hell. Maybe someone had caught him with an attack he didn’t see and the Apocalypse System had decided this was an appropriate way to keep him in stasis until the competition was over and it could dump his body out.

When the next enemy ended up being an entire damn elk, he didn’t complain. He didn’t even really ask if it was supposed to be there. He just slid under it, let his arm get gored, swallowed the pain, and stabbed it again and again at what amounted to its armpit before it brought a hoof down on his head and he let his body fight on autopilot.

Press on.

Press on.

Press on.