Book 2 - Chapter 1: Apple Archers

Tyr: Did you think that was the end? Nope! Book 2 starts now!~ :>

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In my book, the biggest scam the Apocalypse System ever pulled was what it did with the plants. Not the monster plants that move, fight and that grant experience when you slay them. And not the very, very many plants it left completely unchanged. I’m talking about Apocalypse Plants, which I hate.

There are, in the world, perfectly normal-looking pine trees that have sap so sticky that it will strip off even stat-enhanced layers of skin when you peel it off. There’s thorn bushes that have been enhanced so much that a stat-less person would be killed by falling into one. And there’s no point to any of it. There’s no gain for anyone, no animals that preferentially eat that stuff. It just made weird trees and bushes for no reason at all.

My opinion on the matter is that it probably has plans for them. Occasionally, you will see some weird designs shift, like it’s refining them. Lord knows for what. But for now, you are best advised to just avoid them. It’s not like there aren’t plenty of decent, normal plants to interact with instead.

The Guide, Navigating the New World, page 20

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Sean was beginning to absolutely hate trees. Which was saying something. As far as he knew, everyone liked trees. Kids liked climbing them. Hungry people liked eating fruits from them. You could cut them down and make cool stuff from them, or just listen to the wind blowing through them. They were even pretty just to look at.

Even guys who worked with trees liked them, which was amazing. Tree-trimmers and arborists liked trees, and some even loved them. He had yet to meet an insurance adjuster who really, really loved insurance, but something about trees was so wholesome, so good, that you could even love them if they were your 9-5 job.

These, however, were not normal trees. Every tree in this entire damned wilderness, every single one, was poisonous. On some of them, the leaves were okay, but the bark and sap would make you break out in rashes. Or both the leaves and bark were fine, but putting pressure on any part of the tree would make it eject porcupine-spikes that were coated in sleeping toxin.

But it was the trees with the bad leaves he hated the most. The porcupine trees could be skipped over, and the trees with the bad bark weren’t so bad as long as you minimized your non-shoe contact with them. But the bad leaves got everywhere, past the smallest gaps in armor, and into shoes where they’d seep poison through socks over time. As of right now, all the exposed parts of his face were covered in little leaf-shaped blotches of itchy, angry red.

That said, he’d tolerate it. He’d tolerate anything, even much worse, to put the hurt on even one additional William Tell.

William Tell (Level 37 Apple Archer)

There once was a man who loved his son a great deal, and due to an extensive set of evil-local-magistrate type circumstances, had to invent an entire school of archery revolving around shooting apples. Or something. Tell me you’ve actually gone back and read the source material here, and I’ll allow that I’ve taken some liberties with things. It’s a shockingly boring story, and that’s not my fault.

The point is that while he cared for his son enough to barely avoid shooting him in the head, you and him aren’t that close yet.

What is my fault is that you are fighting him now, and he doesn’t miss very often. The good news is that the only thing he can actually fire at is apples, so you should be fine.

Sean hadn’t seen the information screen on the William Tells until after he got hit by his first apple. The damn things walked around chucking them in all directions at an impossible speed, pulling fruit from who knows where and filling the air with it. If you got hit by one, it would stick, and then, and only then, would the Tells pull out their bows.

When they shot at an apple, they didn’t miss. No amount of dodging or getting behind cover worked. The only thing to do if he wanted to avoid getting shot was to avoid the apples themselves, which should have been easy considering the Tells couldn’t aim those worth a damn. But it threw so many of them so fast, especially when threatened, that Sean couldn’t get close.

That left ambush tactics. And he had been at it for days. Granted, it was better than hanging around in a sort of semi-conscious state in some sort of crack between worlds, only slightly aware of the passage of time, but only marginally.

After time-warping to the future from the normal pre-apocalypse, he felt he had done an admirable job not just getting used to the fact that everything was trying to kill him. And also to the fact that the myth-obsessed Apocalypse System running the show had made sure that nearly everything that tried to kill him was a horror-show version of some slightly-to-extremely misunderstood trope.

He had also gotten used to some things he felt were even more wrong, like the fact that invaders from outside his universe were trying to take advantage of the end of his world, speeding things along to make themselves stronger by consuming the last bit of power holding the world together. Or that the few people he had met actually trying to do that were massive, massive assholes who had tried to murder him or someone he actually liked every single time they had interacted.

After coming out on top of an increasingly unlikely string of long-shot bets, he had made it into the same competition they had. And now, for better or worse, he had to do his best to win the thing. And the first step was taking out a truly substantial amount of Swiss marksmen.

He just had to get used to not scratching at the burning, horrific leaf-rash on his face and he’d be golden. The ambushes that had failed so far, and there were plenty, had mostly failed because he had forgotten himself and scratched his face. With how thickly these trees grew, touching his face meant at least some rustling, and the Tells could hear that. Between his lack of self-control, branches that couldn’t quite hold his weight, and one very ill-timed sneeze, he had been trying ambushes all day.

He received nothing but arrows in the back for his trouble. Only the superior nature of his armor had saved him, but even a Zeus-skin leather suit wasn’t enough to keep him from getting injured, and pulling big triangular arrowheads from his flesh hurt like hell.

The only reason it had a chance to work at all was that in his travels, he had picked up a pretty good number of achievements, some of which actively reminded him of their purpose as soon as he started trying to hide rather than fight his foes directly.

Sean Lawrence
Level 35 Human (Prisoner of Time)
EXP: 0/1,520,000

Assignable stat points: 60

STR: 15 (19)
DEX: 40 (42)
VIT: 16 (18)
SAV: 30 (31)
MAG: 25 (31)

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Abilities: Shankmaster LV7, Adhesives Mastery LV4, Stitch Up LV5, Hard Time LV3, Cellblock Brewmaster LV4
Achievements: E-Raticator, Uncommon De-nominator, Three Spectral Bears (Active, Situational stealth in dark, natural environments), Make-shift Ranger (Active, improved stealth in wooded areas), Forest Dragon-kin, Mini-boss Massacre, High-Proof, Late-Start Long-Shot , Junkyard David, Front-yard Defender, Chaotic Alloy

It wasn’t anything he was doing that made the achievements work. They didn’t help him hide any better or make the trees hug him with cover any tighter. But for better or worse, he seemed harder to see in nature, and even harder to see if he was in a tree thick enough to be substantially dark in its boughs.

Finally, one of the Tells wandered below him, in his stupid green Swiss hat with his stupid Swiss mustache, holding an apple in his hand ready for chucking as if that was even how the story went.

No, I didn’t read the story, you fucking system bastard. But I know it didn’t go like that.

Without a target to chuck apples at, the Tell was still for some reason throwing the things, materializing a new apple every time it made a half-hearted lob at nothing. But not having a target to throw at also meant it was throwing basically all of its projectiles in front of it as it walked. When threatened, it would pivot in an unnatural, blurred-fast way that allowed it to throw fruit in what amounted to an omnidirectional dome around him.

But if it couldn’t hit him with an apple, it couldn’t hit him with arrows. Probably. He hoped.

Sean was breathing very, very softly as the Tell approached. When it finally moved directly under him, he had stopped even that. Perched on his branch like a gargoyle, he waited until the Tell had barely moved underneath him. Then, he let go and fell down. He held Mysterreamer, his chaotic-damage, taped-handle scrap metal stabbing knife, out in front of him as he did.

He must have taken a breath or shifted the branch in some way because the Tell ended up noticing him. At this point, Sean’s DEX and SAV were both high enough that while the fraction of a second it took him to fall through the air towards his enemy wasn’t exactly long, it was still time that he could measure and feel. All of his enemies were similarly quick, which allowed the Tell to wheel around with his ancient Swiss eyes blazing just in time to throw an apple directly at Sean’s center mass.

Sean considered activating Hard Time and slowing down the apple. His time-manipulation skill was the most powerful trick in his toolbox, and it worked even better on small, isolated objects. He reconsidered immediately. He was falling straight at the thing, and the apple was moving in a straight line at him. There was only so much he could do to get out of the way, even if he had nearly unlimited time.

After twisting his body as much as he could, he ended up taking the apple in the shoulder. It didn’t hurt, but it did stick. He ignored it, driving the Mystereamer down as hard as he could at the top of the Tell’s head, only partially missing as the Tell tried to duck out of the way. He ended up catching it in the back, just inside its left shoulder blade. It felt like stabbing a cinder block wall. Despite their human appearance, the inner anatomy of these things wasn’t lore-accurate. He hadn’t felt anything as hard to stab since the lumberjack.

The Tell did not go down. Instead, it fired off one of its arrows in a direction completely unrelated. That would buy some time, but Sean knew from experience that the arrow would find its way back to him. As the arrow left the bow, he reached down, grabbed the Tell around both ankles, and yanked. It wasn’t a STR build, thank goodness. The Tell topped forward onto its face, covering both its bow and its very dumb mustache with its own body.

Sean started stabbing furiously, trying to get Mystereamer’s random damage type effect to proc as many times as he could before the arrow was able to loop around. Moments later, the various wounds sizzled with several different colors, but the Tell didn’t seem all that near death. And the arrow was coming for him, weaving in and out of tree canopies as it sped in his direction. And for better or worse, it was going to hit that apple. There wasn’t anything Sean could do to make it miss.