Chapter 38: Choice was Just an Illusion

Leaving the woods at a different angle, Sean expected that he might end up pretty far from home. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Instead of disgorging him at an unknown location, the woods appeared to have accounted for the weird different-dimension feel of the space inside the woods by keeping track of where he had entered. As his eyes adjusted to the light, Sean found himself exiting the woods at roughly the same spot, to the point where he saw his own trailing footprints and the much larger scraping tracks the Dump Goliath had left.

Luckily, he didn’t have to look very hard to verify some very excellent news. Wherever the Dump Goliath was, it wasn’t here. As much as Sean didn’t understand how stealth worked, he very much doubted it was part of the trash giant’s build to any substantial extent. And even if it was, level 50 didn’t seem high enough to hide an entire humungous garbage golem.

Which was great because the system hardly delayed in blinding him by giving several apparently mandatory pop-up notification screens.

Proving Ground Cleared! (Infinity Forest, Level 15 Proving Ground).

Calculating Accomplishments…

Accomplishments Calculated!

Some Apocalypse System Spaces go beyond themes to attain specific purposes. Some of the most important among these are proving grounds, spaces meant to test an individual’s advancements around certain thresholds. For appropriately leveled individuals, the spaces won’t pose a lethal threat. It’s more of a “what kind of shit do you get up to” kind of thing.

You entered a proving ground significantly underleveled while fleeing something, which is pretty rule-of-cool compliant. Then, you killed a named rare, a hidden field mini-boss conglomerate, a pretty mean cat, and several herds of things you just saw and decided had to go.

You also crafted rare weapons from entirely forest-sourced materials, and saw ALL the must-see tourist stuff.

On top of that, you somehow forged an actual friendship with a full-on dragon without even knowing what that means, and are leaving the forest having more or less conquered it while still under the level cap. You stupid, stupid magical man.

The Apocalypse System wants to stress that it isn’t a sentient being, and that these messages are automatically generated with a conversational tone meant to be thematically appropriate to the topic of discussion. The fact that I need to add that disclaimer should be your best clue that you did really, really well here. S-Class clear stuff, man. S-Class clear.

Rewards: He Was Lichened to a Rock (Regen Skill, Consumed), Make-shift Ranger (Achievement), Forest Dragon-kin (Special Achievement, Non-System), Mini-boss Massacre (Achievement), High-Proof (High-level Proving Ground Clear)

“Huh!” Sean wasn’t sure what he was expecting when he exited the forest, but it wasn’t this. It made more sense that he couldn’t enter it again, now, and even a little more sense that the few humans he knew had never mentioned it. The population of the town didn’t exactly seem permanent, and he had to think that a lot of them were transplants and wanderers who had been over-leveled for the proving ground long before they arrived. They’d maybe just think of it as another forest if they entered it at all.

He could think about whether he needed to scold Brett and Estesia later. Right now, he had achievements to read.

He was Lichened to a Rock

This skill has been absorbed by another class skill, Stitch Up, granting extra XP to that skill. In addition, Stitch Up now grants a very small amount of resistance to blunt force trauma.

Further description withheld due to a lack of sufficient grounds to access the information.

That’s weird, Sean thought. But it was more than okay, considering eating the skill raised Stitch Up not one but two entire levels.

Make-shift Ranger

You have spent an extended period of time in a particularly woodsy area, doing various stuff. You’ve made fires, tried not to step on noisy sticks, and observed bark. You’ve heard, like, the voice of the trees, or whatever.

The point is that you’re now a little less out-of-place in wooded environments. This makes you harder to notice, harder to track, and generally sneakier in areas that have many trees or tree-like plants.

Mini-Boss Massacre

You have mercilessly hunted and destroyed every named rare, mini-boss and otherwise special enemy in an area that had two or more of them to kill. The fact that you didn’t actually seem to want to do this is immaterial. Despite their best effort, they were unable to eat you, and instead ran full-force into the grave.

The stats of mini-boss and named-rare are slightly decreased (-3%) against you in the future, and both have a very small (<1%) chance of loot rerolls in your favor.

Make-shift Ranger seemed pretty good, at least judged by the standards of an achievement Sean had done absolutely nothing intentional to get. In contrast, Mini-Boss Massacre seemed incredible. The loot was one thing, but any overall decrease in the strength of enemies that were outlier-strong against him was a huge, huge deal.

Sean was beginning to understand what had happened a little better. The system wasn’t calling what had happened a class advancement, but the level of benefits he was getting from his camping trip were far beyond what made sense for the effort. More importantly, they seemed somewhat aimed at improving his class in ways that were relevant to the kinds of things he got up to.

That idea of the proving-ground as an overall class advancement test was only strengthened by the next screen he called up.

High-Proof

You have obtained enough high-level achievements in a proving ground to maximize the possible benefits. Oddly, this isn’t as well-rewarded as you might think, as the achievements themselves account for a large portion of the reward.

What you do get is separated into two broad categories: Stats, which you probably expected, and Clout.

In regard to your stats, you gain 1 retroactive stat per level, and levels gained past this point grant 6 free stat points each time. Note that this reward is standard for all level-15 proving ground clears, and is not affected by your performance. However, as an extra bonus, you gain yet another additional stat point for every level under and inclusive of 15 you had when entering the forest [8] as a small but significant compensation for the additional risk you weathered.

In terms of Clout, this title counts for significantly more in certain Apocalypse System calculations. Further information is restricted at this time.

Well, actually, that’s pretty good, if you think about it. The rules of the proving grounds seemed to reward how weird his experience was and not just how elite his combat performance was. While he was pretty sure the kind of training the offworlder assholes got would help them out with **the latter, he doubted they were the kind of people who would do very well with the former.

At the very least, he had an idea that they didn’t do very well with Cedarhelm. But, things had apparently gone very, very well for Sean with Cedarhelm. He only had an inkling of it when he left the forest, where he liked the dragon and the dragon had been nice to him. Sean would have put their relationship at “warm acquaintances with the beginnings of trust”, if he had to put it in words. According to the notification related to that, their relationship was something a bit more complex than that.

Forest Dragon-Kin

Forest Dragons of Cedarhelm’s type protect a planet, mostly keeping to themselves as they do. They have no concept of family you’d recognize, and their nature as guards means they, as a general rule, don’t trust particularly easily.

When you couple that with the fact that they are very, very careful about what they say, you can figure out that the word “friend” doesn’t come easily to them. What it means differs a bit for each dragon, but know that it means a bit more to Cedarhelm than when you describe a relationship as “a friend from work.”

You have, by a dragon’s own admission, become friends with him. That’s an achievement, but not one that the Apocalypse System planned on or can grant without consulting the conventional System.

Some rewards will be granted beyond the friendship itself, but they are delayed. Await further notifications.

Sean hadn’t known that the friendship was that important of a thing to Cedarhelm. He made a mental note to be a better friend to Cedarhelm anyway. There wasn’t anything the dragon really needed from him as far as he knew, and it was unlikely that Sean’s level 14 strength would be of great help. And, on top of that, Cedarhelm probably deserved a bit more friendship than Sean was dishing out, if only because of what the ancient dragon had done for him so far.

But really, it wasn’t even as logical of a thing as that. Sean didn’t have a lot of friends, even in his own timeline. Not close ones, at least. And sometimes, finding out that someone likes you a lot is enough to make a friendship grow, in and of itself.

—

Sean may have known where he was relative to the junkyard, but the exact direction of his bunker was a bit harder to calculate. He had been running pretty desperately when he entered the forest, and didn’t keep perfect track of the maneuvers he was trying. But the nice thing was that he knew his home was also on the edge of the forest. If he walked long enough while keeping just outside the treeline, he’d hit it eventually.

He had thought about heading straight to the market to get updates, but it had also been some time before he had been able to have even a hobo’s shower in relative comfort. He wasn’t sure of it, but he suspected the town had probably banded together to get rid of the trash titan. If not, it was a little confusing where the thing actually was, since supposedly it was programmed to mercilessly track him at all times.

If it was alive, given that it wasn’t waiting for him when he left, the next best bet was that it “followed him” in the same direction they had been moving after Sean had disappeared into the forest space.

When he arrived at the crater finally, it turned out he was right about the town. The crater was much, much more shallow now. It looked like the market people had lured the golem there, maybe to get it to a lower height, and taken it down. If the trash filling up the bottom of what amounted to Sean’s front yard was any indication of its health, he didn’t need to worry about the Dump Goliath anymore.

Sean almost risked going into the bunker right then, but thought better of it. There were times that he did dumb things, but that didn’t mean that Sean was actively trying to be dumb outside the big, necessary risks he needed to take. The golem looked dead, but actually sneaking into town and asking Brett or Estesia about it would cost him nothing besides a reputation for being smelly, and at least one of them voluntarily worked within nose-shot of the market outhouses. It was a better-safe-than-sorry situation, and he was going to be safe.

Around the time he decided that, he found out an important truth that most people learned by the time they were introduced to this concept called school. Choice was just an illusion. As Sean jogged around the lip of the crater towards the town, his footing suddenly felt shaky, like the ground beneath him was being lifted up. Off-balance, he jumped just in time to avoid the pillar of trash that erupted out from underneath him, but his DEX was nowhere near high enough to keep himself from tumbling down the side of the crater with a bunch of displaced dirt.

As he rolled and tried to get his footing, Sean managed to catch a few glimpses of the bottom of the crater, confirming what he already knew. The Goliath had been waiting for him, and the trash was already reforming into a giant.