Book 2 - Chapter 2: Run Tell That

Huh. But it is headed for the apple, right? Sean had an idea about that. Springing forward, he gave the Tell a stab in the neck for good measure as he eyeballed the steep, downward angle the arrow was descending on. Then, he aligned his body just right, trying his hardest to keep the Tell occupied with the stabbing to not disturb his angle.

The arrow sliced through the apple cleanly, but Sean was right. It was tracking the apple, not him, and after it passed through the shiny red delicious apple, it continued on the same trajectory it had approached at. Which, luckily for Sean, was led it on a collision course with the back of the Tell’s neck.

The arrow didn’t quite finish off the Tell, but with the monster still pinned to the ground, it hardly had to. After the extra dollop of piercing damage was added to the mix, it only took several more stabs before the Tell stopped moving.

Sean’s first kill in what he was coming to think of as the inner space felt meaningful. Even though he knew it should feel the same as any old monster slaying had outside, the time tracking and previous failures hunting the Tells made this win extra sweet. It was more significant, carried more weight. It was as if he was doing something important.

The Apocalypse System almost immediately ruined his fun.

Run Tell That (Quest)

Welcome, contestant, to the great game. If you’re here, it means you’ve been warned, re-warned, and re-re-warned that it’s dangerous in here. Death lurks around every corner, blah, blah, you’ve heard it. And it’s true. This isn’t a nice place, and every element of it is designed to be its own unique kind of difficult.

You’ve already noticed that about the trees, I think. The trees took some work. They had to be tested and optimized to be as annoying as possible. But as dangerous as all this is, and as lethal as everything is going to be, everyone deserves a warm-up. Everyone gets a chance to find their footing.

The William Tells have levels, yes, but in the same way that the Junkyard Goliath had a weak spot that made its levels matter less, most enemies you will face in this space will have abilities that belay the implications of their levels. For a few of them, this means they will be weaker. For more, the difficulty will be increased. And some, like the Tells, are a mixed bag.

Is that a little incomplete? Don’t worry about it too much. You’ll have plenty of time to figure it out.

Quest Parameters:

Destroy 100 William Tells (1/100)

Time Limit: None. As a warm-up, All participants will exit at the same moment, regardless of time spent in the trial.

Rewards: Variable, quality dependent on performance.

“Well, hell,” Sean muttered. “That’s some warm-up.”

From what he could tell, the high enemy count actually worked in his favor. Going from level 35 to 36 gave Sean as many stat points as one of his opponents going from 45 to 46. But the higher levels took a lot more experience to attain, which meant any situation where he was guaranteed to clear the same number of enemies as his opponents was great. He’d still have less experience, but the stat-gap would be smaller.

As for what kind of performance would juice his rewards, his guess was as good as any. It could be overall combat performance, it could be avoiding getting injured, or it could be finding secret treasures. He had no way of knowing.

But the fact that he had effectively unlimited time meant he had a new immediate goal. He needed to find his base.

—

Sean had precious few advantages over the other competitors. He had to assume that virtually everyone had more experience than him, and that virtually every non-Earthling had better training. But one thing he did have that was a somewhat rare, at least according to the system, home base, one that was supposed to follow him from plane to plane as he traveled through the system spaces inside the Earth.

Sean had a lot of time to think about random things. And with some first-hand experience, it was now weird to him how stories and shows he had watched back in his own time had treated safe sleep like it was a given, like you could just set up camp in the wild, monster-filled wilderness and expect to wake up alive. He had tried that exactly twice in the past few weeks, and had been attacked exactly twice during the night.

If the monsters weren’t afraid of fire, and there was no way to know if they would be, it was trusting your life to luck.

If he could find The Shanktuary, then he could sleep in relative safety, in an actual bed, with access to an actual shower. His alternative would be strapping himself to a poisonous tree and hoping he didn’t get found, appled, and riddled with arrows before he could shake off the sleep and do anything about it.

The only problem was locating it. He had no idea where it was. Since it was a basement with a stairway up, the exit would either have to be built into the side of the hill or else stick out of the ground. He guessed he’d probably see it if he passed it. But if these woods were anything like the last wooded system space he had found himself in, they might literally go on forever.

He was afraid to even start seriously traveling to look for it, since every step he took might be taking him farther from it. But given that he couldn’t even cook food safely until he had located his shelter, he had more pressing issues in terms of hunger. At least he did, until he confirmed that all the Tells dropped food.

Tell’s Apple

Do not, I repeat, do NOT eat the apples the William Tell throws. Those are not meant to be a food item, do not digest right, and will make you feel very, very sorry about your choices if consumed.

This one is different, though. It’s a drop item, packed with vitamins, minerals, and a certain amount of System-imbued energy whose details you haven’t yet earned the right to know. But just one of these babies, if eaten, will keep you going for an entire day. Maybe longer if you conserve your energy.

Sean didn’t eat the item apple. Given that his hunger wasn’t all that dire yet, he tossed the apple into one of his plastic bags, and wrapped it tight to keep it as fresh as he could. The system’s description seemed to indicate there was something to the apples besides mere sustenance, and he wasn’t about to waste them if he could help it.

He’d have to, though, if he couldn’t find his damn house. Or at least a cave or something. Checking the Tell over for more loot and not finding anything more exciting than a broken arrow, he set off.

He had only moved a few steps before he got the feeling he was going in the wrong direction.

Which is weird, right? Because I don’t know where it is, Sean thought. It was a vague feeling, probably bullshit, but he ran with it. It wasn’t like he had anything better to go off. He set out to eliminate more directions, getting a vague sense that another one was wrong and that the third was neutral at best before finding a direction that felt mostly good, and setting off that way.

I’m going to find that damn base. If I have to be in this stupid every-tree-is-poison woods, the very least I want is a working shower.

—

The next Tell that he found was another tough fight, but he had the trick of it now. Knowing that the arrows tracked the apples meant he could spin to a certain angle at the last second to give the projectiles what they wanted without getting turned into a pincushion.

That said, it was hard work. The monsters could throw a lot of apples, and fired their bows at speeds so fast their hands blurred as they pulled, nocked, and let loose arrows. Making a single arrow hit an apple at a safe angle wasn’t that hard, but making it work for three arrows from different directions coming in one after another with only split-second delays was much harder.

Still, he could handle it. He prioritized redirecting arrows that were headed for vital areas, and counted on his Stitch Up skill’s passive healing and his superior armor to help with the rest. Soon enough, he was in range of the Tell. This time, he tried something different.

As good as the Tells were at shooting arrows and throwing apples, they didn’t seem to be that good at close combat. So while they were surprisingly sturdy, they didn’t put up much of a fight once Sean could close the distance. And that sturdiness had only been tested by his Mystereamer’s piercing and random elemental damage. He hoped blunt force damage would be a different thing.

Keeping behind the Tell as best he could to prevent getting hit by stray apples, Sean put his improvised Trash Compactor flail into play. He spun it a few times before loosing the substantial weight of the spiked end of the flail at the Tell’s head.

It didn’t kill the monster in one shot, but the first hit caved in one entire side of the Tell’s face and sent it reeling. All its attempts to chuck apples at Sean stopped temporarily as it reeled from the blow, disoriented from the impact. Sean didn’t waste any time getting the flail in motion again, smashing it once more to get it on the ground and another time to stop it from moving for good.

After retrieving another item apple, he kept walking. The next time he ran into danger, it was two of the damn mustached bastards, and the light was already fading. Luckily, the Tells weren’t the fastest on their feet, and he was able to circle around and away from them without picking up too much damage from arrows. A couple of the apples and arrows still found their mark and they hurt like hell, but it was better than dying in a fight he wasn’t confident he could win yet.

And then, suddenly, he was headed in the wrong direction. There were plenty of terrain changes in the forest, and as he walked over the top of a hill, he suddenly went from feeling confident and happy in his course to subtly dissatisfied with it.

That’s not normal. Something’s up.

He ran back down the hill, feeling good about his course again, until he had another sudden mood shift. Triangulating, he ran in multiple directions one after another, playing a game of hot-and-cold until finally, standing on one particularly large rock, he felt nothing at all.

Branches weren’t rare in the forest, and he carefully tested trees until he found one that didn’t either try to spike him with spines or poison him before ripping off a branch, setting it on top of another rock, and levering the bigger boulder out of position.

And there, set flush with the forest floor, was a metal door. It was at the wrong angle, much flatter than it had been when it had lived in the side of a giant crater, but otherwise just the same. Reaching down, Sean grasped the handle and yanked, pleased to find the system hadn’t pulled any tricks and locked him out of his home.

Once inside, he verified the lights still worked, he still had running water, and that his shower still operated just fine. The lights and water were an open question for him, since presumably something entirely different made them run in the base’s original location. But if the system was reluctant to downgrade a base and left it with the same capabilities, then Sean was happy to overlook something that didn’t make sense.

If all the base provided was a more or less safe hiding place, water, and a bed, it would be worth all the trouble. But it was about to be much, much more.