Chapter 79: Unreasonable Requests

Tyr: FYI we're changing the structure to match other sites. This is now Chapter 79. Ill be retroactively changing the other chapters too

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Balls with spikes. Balls with blades. And balls with short range laser beams that became two-inch orbs of eviscerating death.

The game of dodgeball quickly grew sticky. Literally. One of the transformations left a ball that was kind of gluey in a way that was uncomfortable to hold. If these new balls weren’t enough danger, the behavior of the balls also started violating the principles of physics. The balls would usually deactivate their new powers after a bounce and allow themselves to be caught by players on the opposing side.

Other times, they still bounced normally but that was only a pump-fake to get players to catch them while their transformations were still active. With balls that were as dangerous to catch and throw as they were to get hit by, almost everyone was cut, scraped, burned, melted, or bludgeoned in some way or another.

The exceptions to the rule were players with the right skill sets. Anyone with quick ranged attacks had a bit of an advantage in terms of stopping the ball, especially people who, like the now deceased squid, focused on mid-range force attacks. Beyond that, the only people who managed to avoid getting generally beat up were Sean and Spike, who were playing a different game entirely.

Both of them had grown up on this game. Not only that, they had grown up playing it as non-athletes. They had rarely won, but like a lot of nerds, quasi-nerds, dorks, and reading types, they played a more tactical game, hanging back and not drawing attention where they didn’t have to. They’d pass the throws to stronger players where it made sense and even got a couple of players out on fast-reflexes revenge throws after teammates stopped the ball.

For a while, the game was fairly even, mostly due to the sheer power of the more tanky players. At least a few members of both teams had slow-down-the-attack power-sapping moves that allowed them to decelerate big hits, catch the ball, and add a player-out-and-player-back-in swing that kept things close. So although things looked dire every once in a while, the balance came back each time.

But eventually, even that petered out. As good as the tanks were, none of them could keep entirely on top of the damage it took to catch the ball multiple times with the system shenanigans. Nobody had died yet, but once the tanks were too afraid to try and catch the ball, they were fairly easy to eliminate with glancing blows they couldn’t quite avoid.

“We have this, Sean.”

“Yeah, looks like.”

Spike was looking confident and Sean was feeling it too. Their team was down to three, just the two of them and mini-Eike. The other side also had three players left but despite the teams being even, both Spike and Eike’s servant were both stronger players than the would-be assassin and team captain. The remaining rock-man was probably a bit stronger than anyone left on the field but the concentrated fire of Sean’s whole team would soon overwhelm him.

Then disaster struck. The rock man reared back to take his next throw, the ball suddenly shrinking and spinning wildly in anticipation of the attack. The rock man very clearly poured everything he had into the throw. Just before he let go of it, Sean saw a flicker of motion behind the man as the assassin jumped up, knife bared, and buried the blade deep into the rock-man’s neck.

The ball rocketed out of his hand, now with a ridiculous amount of spin not only from the type of ball it had become but from the pain-and-shock driven jerk of the rock-man’s hand.

“Watch out!” Sean’s high SAV was screaming out that the ball was bad news but before anyone could overcome their shock from the sudden attack, it was too late. The ball hit mini-Eike first, catching him flat on the side of his face and immediately teleporting him to the sidelines, where he sprawled from the sheer force of the hit.

Spike recoiled as well as he could from the area but the ball was sheer chaos, swerving like a tornado through the air towards him and hitting him flat on the chest. It was now Sean and a team of three, united to defeat him.

Kind of.

Before the dodgeballs that his teammates had been holding hit the ground, Sean was moving to scoop them up. The other team’s captain was distracted enough by his teammates stabbing and bludgeoning each other to death that he badly whiffed his attempt to tag Sean out. With two relatively slow, cautious throws, Sean brought the game down to a one-on-one.

“It won’t be enough. Thank you for the win, though.” The team captain was a stronger player than Sean was. It wasn’t a huge difference but both Sean and he knew it.

Doesn’t mean I won’t try though.

Sean dodged a throw from the team captain, scooped up the ball, and threw it with everything he had. It not only wasn’t enough, it wasn’t even particularly close. Sean watched in horror as the team captain swayed into a safe position, extended his hands, and closed them on the ball.

It squirted away without touching him.

Oh, thank god. It was one of the slippery ones.

As close of a call as that was, Sean was terrified to make any more throws. The opposing captain was not. He tossed ball after ball, chasing Sean farther and farther into a corner until there just wasn’t any room left to dodge.

All but one of the dodgeballs were on Sean’s side now but the last one was a doozy. As the captain held the ball up for the throw, it shrunk to the size of a racquetball, humming with energy. Every ounce of magical understanding from Sean’s ultra-high MAG score was telling him that this ball was built for speed. It meant to be thrown fast and strong. And he had no more room left to dodge.

It was the worst possible situation for him to show his trump cards in. Eike’s ally was watching him, ready to soak in everything he could do. So were a few dozen other people. There wasn’t even any chance of them being distracted. Anything he used here would be known by all. Plus even if he revealed them, he didn’t know if he could win. The only way to get around everything was to lose.

But this was a competition, one where the odds were already stacked against him. Winning a game here, in a big way, would be huge. He couldn’t be sure that simply closing out the game would be enough to give him a first-place win, but he knew the competition wasn’t something he was going to be successful at with half measures. He needed to go all out all the time.

As the ball came in, Sean triggered Hard Time on both himself and the ball, creating the single biggest time differential he had ever made. At the same time, he threw and sped up one of his darts in flight. The projectile caught the ball and took some of the steam off while it went rocketing off into the distance with its mission accomplished.

The ball was much, much slower than it had been before the throw. It still hit like a truck. Sean’s knees bent as the ball impacted his hands and both of his wrists emitted distressing cracking sounds. The sheer force of it pushed him back as the spin on the ball burned the skin off the palms of his hands.

There’s no way he can throw this hard. This is the worst ball in the whole game, besides the one that might have been poop, Sean thought, still glad for the guy who had realized just in time to not attempt catching that one.

A split second later, the ball calmed down in his hands. He had it. Now it was just a question of whether or not he had managed to stay in-bounds. He glanced back, hopeful, leaning back to get a clearer perspective on his own heel. It was in. He was only in by a hair but he was in-bounds. They had won.

The entire his-team sideline exploded in cheers at once as they stormed the field, lifting him over their shoulders and tossing him a few times before Spike pulled him down and politely created some safe distance, which the other team members respected. The only person not cheering was mini-Eike, whose expression wasn’t exactly thrilled but was too guarded to get a better read on.

Almost immediately, the field went silent as the System sent out a notification on the results.

Trial Complete!

The Blue team has triumphed, not least because at least some of them have heard of the game before. Red Team, that means you’ve lost, and all but two of you will survive, which is honestly more on you than anything else. The Apocalypse System didn’t make stabbing teammates illegal but it also didn’t think it had to. Live and learn, I guess.

All surviving Red Team members will be given a small consolation prize of a dessert voucher good at any food cart so they have some nice sweets to cry into. Feel better, guys.

In the interest of confidentiality, Blue Team prizes and rankings will be kept confidential. Enjoy!

Sean immediately jumped to his next notification, schooling his face to be expressionless just in case he won.

Personal Rankings

You probably already guessed this, but you won. You got multiple people out, not as many as the top scorers but plenty to get an adequate score. You brought vital, need-to-know game information and tactics to the field, turned a 3-1 deficit into a clutch victory…

And, somehow, you caught the auto-throw accuracy speedball, which I swear was its actual name and not something I made up just now. That wasn’t really supposed to be catchable unless you did something really funky indeed. You outfuckied me today, Sean Lawrence. Don’t get used to it.

Enjoy your prizes. You earned them.

Rewards: Prism Stat Ring, 500 Village Credits, 4000 Base Improvement Credits

Holy shit, Sean thought. Looks like actually winning these things pays off.

He slipped on the stat ring, and was prevented from seeing what it did by the outward-bound teleport back to the village.

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The in-between places were terrible. Sean had never thought that he would feel that existing was too hard but being the only thing in existence in an endless stretch of nothing was changed his mind on the subject real fast. It made him feel like he was going to puke space-time, somehow.

The worst was he seemed to be the only person who felt it. As he sat on a brick-framed planter in the square and recovered, everyone else milled around, re-established contact with their teams, and compared notes on results.

Sean had just barely begun to get his stomach under control as a group of shadows fell over the planter. He wasn’t quite ready to talk to the other humans about how he had done, if he would at all, but he supposed there was no avoiding a conversation, at least. Gulping down the last bit of bile, he steeled himself to cheer on his friends or to console them if needed.

“Hey, guys, so…”

It wasn’t his friends. As his head came level, he saw not humans but a group of four nearly-human assholes, Eike at their head.

“Hello, again,” Eike said. “It was a nice trick you pulled teleporting us away, back then.”

“Least I could do,” Sean said, glaring up at his enemy.

“A conversation for another time, I think. There’s more pressing business at hand.” Eike stopped, as if expecting something, although Sean couldn’t imagine what.

“And what’s that? You wanted to apologize?”

Eike almost choked.

“Apologize? Are you insane? I’m simply here to claim back the prize owed to my team member.” Eike nodded towards mini-Eike, who was doing his best to bore holes in Sean’s head with his eyes. Eike’s hand unfolded, palm up, in front of Sean. “I’ll take it now, please. Make it quick. We wish to celebrate.”