Sponsored Apocalypse ch 21

A notification popped up while I was staring at the door.  I’d gained a level.

My back tingled in excitement despite the danger of what I’d just faced.  Maybe something was wrong with me, or maybe I was changing.  Part of me was still aware that I was gambling with my life on the line, but at some point I’d decided it was worth it.  I had to get stronger.

The level gain was important information. Now I knew that the bugs, and likely whatever else I killed in this place would  actually give me XP. I wasn't in a huge rush to leave this room, not after the Faceted had said that there was no time limit.

Instead, I cracked open the door and took a look at what lie beyond. Similar to last time, there was a hallway with lighting that didn't seem to come from any visible source. However, this time, the hallway itself was noticeably larger, the floor was dirt, and the holes in the walls were larger.

In the first hallway, the holes had been tiny and I got mobbed with flying insects. So I could only imagine that whatever attacked me this time would be larger and more dangerous. I was pretty sure that I’d figured out how this challenge was structured. However, I still didn’t know how many hallways I would have to traverse for every level of reward.

I didn't want to push it too far. So far, I'd run up against enemies that I had a natural resistance to, but who knew how long that would last? Even if all the creatures I faced would be venomous or poisonous, eventually, they'd probably be large enough to just kill me by tearing me apart.  I had no illusions about my personal level of power. Sure, I was much stronger than an average human now, stronger than I could have even imagined myself being just a few days ago. But it was a big world out there.

The memory of how the giant had destroyed my house was still burned in my brain. So I sat in my room for a while thinking about what I could do to make my situation better.

I went through all of my gear. And then my eyes landed on the shovel again that I’d just acquired. I got a crazy idea. What if… I thought to myself then I opened the door and cautiously left my room waiting to see if anything would move.

Nothing did. Once I was outside the door, I could examine the holes closer and I noticed they didn't actually start for another 15 feet. Before the first hole was just plain stone wall.

I considered my experience in the first hallway. The little bugs hadn't come out until I'd actually already passed the first sets of holes.  Probably so they could mob and surround me.

A plan began to form in my mind, but it was kind of dependent upon how the hallway itself was constructed. I advanced to five feet in front of the first set of holes. Then I removed my shovel from my pack and began to dig. Nothing really fancy, I just dug a hole to one side, a small hole to see how deep I could go.

The dirt didn't have any roots in it and even if it did, it wouldn't have mattered. And my digging speed was absolutely astonishing. With the shovel’s enchantment, the smaller size didn't impede me as much as I thought it might have. My superhuman endurance definitely helped.

After I dug a five foot deep hole, my back wasn't even hurting.

Now I knew that there was some serious depth to the dirt in this place. I stabbed the shovel down as deep as I could in the hole didn't feel anything hard. The led me to assume that it went even deeper. With these facts cleared up, I felt better about my plan, mainly because I could have another way to escape or give me some extra options if my idea went horribly wrong.

Next, I started digging dirt from behind me to stack in front of me, building a barricade. The hallway was much wider than last time, but not taller–it was only about eight feet tall.

That's still a lot of room to fill with dirt. But I could dig really, really fast now. I kept digging down lower behind me, keeping a ramp up to the door in case I needed to retreat.  Eventually I had to keep going lower and lower behind me, creating a deep hole in order to get the material necessary for my barrier.

After the barricade was complete, I only left a space in one place, a narrow opening.  My idea was to keep an opening large enough to throw my hammer through. I wanted to proceed cautiously. But if this worked out, it might be a great way to cheese some serious XP out of this situation.

When all my preparations were complete, I examined my work with a critical eye.  The dirt was compacted to the best of my ability, making it as strong as possible. I looked at my half-asssed wall and felt a sense of accomplishment. How long I’d been digging, I had no idea. I'd taken a few breaks but nothing too long. Before leveling up and getting tools like my shovel, doing something like this work definitely would have taken me much much longer. But as of right now I wasn't even winded.

Now that it was done, I realized that my entire plan had a flaw.  I’d been hoping that I didn't need to actually be physically present farther down the hallway to be atacked. If so, that was going to be a problem.

My barrier was in the way now.  If I couldn’t piss off whatever was here to kill me from my current position, I was going to need to dismantle my barrier or dig underneath it. Either option wasn't really super attractive.

I charged my hammer with [Angry Arrows] for the bare minimum amount, and then I threw it through the crack in my barrier. After ducking, I waited.  Five seconds later, the explosion made the ground tremble slightly. I waited again, watching through the crack and the barrier to see if any enemies would appear. Nothing happened. Damn, I thought.

So I was gonna have to do this the hard way. Through or under? I thought.  Under, I decided

I didn’t keep track of how long it took me to build a tunnel underneath my barrier. But it didn’t take as much effort as I’d feared because I'd removed so much dirt in front of it.  The hole I started was already lower than floor level. On top of that, the tunnel I dug didn’t need to be very long either.

This was still going to be the most dangerous part of my plan, at least I assumed so.  I tried to plan ahead.  The dirt that I took from the tunnel ended up piled behind me  instead of growing my barrier itself. This was so I could fill it in quickly if needed.

Once the tunnel was done, I was absolutely filthy covered in dirt.  It was a small price to pay.

Now was the moment of truth. I left my pack behind my barrier, climbed through the tunnel and basically found myself barely past the first set of holes.

Experimentally, I walked a few feet before noticing motion in the walls.  Then I turned around and shimmied through my tunnel as fast as I possibly could. On the other side, I didn't even look back. I just shoveled dirt into the hole, packing it, trying to fill it as quickly as possible. Once it was done to the minimum level I felt was decent, I charged up my hammer with [Angry Arrows] and threw it through the gap in my barrier.  Somehow I managed to pul this off before any of my attackers had breached my defenses.

Five seconds later, there was an explosion. I looked through the hole and felt the satisfaction of seeing hundreds of crushed, pulverized dark little bodies. Now that I've actually seen what had been preparing to attack me, I felt a chill. Big, nasty-looking red and black scorpion bodies were littered all over the floor. More poison, I thought. But no…actually venom, right? That's right, venom.

Half-remembered science lessons from high school ran through my head as I surveyed the carnage. I watched through the hole to see if any more creatures would arrive. And sure enough, about 10 minutes later, an entirely new set came out of the walls.  Luckily, they came straight at me, mostly ignoring what was left of my previous tunnel.

I threw my hammer again.   The weapon exploded and I crushed the last few scorpions that made it through the crack in my barrier this time. Unfortunately, the scorpions were small enough they could get through the crack rather easily. Still, the barrier helped keep the majority out, and it also protected me from the blast of the exploding hammer in close quarters.

Waiting for the scorpions to respawn again before blowing them up became kind of fun, strangely.

The problem was, every time I destroyed a new wave, the situation seemed to get dangerous.  At first I wasn’t sure if my eyes were playing tricks on me, but it seemed like more of the holes were generating scorpions to come get me, and they were getting more dangerous.  It took a few waves but I could veryify that my senses weren’t deceiving me.

But the bugs weren’t only getting bigger and faster, they were also even more venomous. I came across that realization after getting stung a few times.  Getting stung was something I’d been expecting, and I’d been relying on [Built Different] to save me.  And each time I got stung, it hurt like hell.  It was getting worse ,though.

I still chose not to use [Stalwart Pan of the Lonely Mountain].  So far all the scorpions were still relatively small, and they were mostly using their venom to kill me. However, I noticed that they definitely were getting bigger, and they’d started stinging with more force to the point where they were leaving blood before [Built Different] would stop the bleeding.

Between waves, I had some precious time to think. High Endurance was turning out to be super helpful in multiple ways.  Despite the difficulty of what I was doing, I had to accept that it was too easy at first, and definitely getting harder.  This was likely by design. I couldn't be the first person from a “Good” world to be tested like this. Others might have realized that they could use this place to farm experience.

So the bugs getting bigger and meaner was most likely a way to stop people like me, people who could use the limitless supply of weak-ish monsters to grow in power.

All at once I realized that I was playing a dangerous game. I remembered what the Faceted had said about me needing to concede before the beginning of a round to actually stop the challenge.  It sounded straightforward but there had to be a catch.

Now that I gave it more thought, after I’d reached the end of the first round, I'd been immediately teleported into a room that started the second. On top of that, this system seemed rigged up to punish anybody who was greedy…like maybe killing wave after wave of scorpions.

I had a hunch that just opening the door to look at what was outside was what started the round.  Nothing else made sense.  And as I thought about it more, my hunch grew into a certainty. There had been too many times in my life where people had fucked me over, for me not to consider about the “small print.”  A great example was when I had been sold the mobile home I’d been living in before for what I thought was a steal, convinced I’d be a home owner and could cut down on my expenses for good.

But as it had turned out, I actually had to pay rent on the land. But now that the mobile home belongs to me I was responsible for moving it. On top of that a few months later, the county had condemned my mobile home. I hadn’t been allowed to live in it anymore.  The land it had sat on didn’t belong to me.  My house was deemed worthless junk that I had the honor of paying to remove.

That one experience, getting taken advantage of by an unscrupulous landlord had cleared out every single cent of my savings that I'd managed to scrounge up in my adult life.

Somehow, this Assessment Room trial was starting to feel like a repeat of that.

So I thought more about the Faceted and realized how little I truly really knew about this situation in general. Aldina had fallen into the portal with me, too. I hadn't seen her since then, and it didn’t make sense that I as here by myself. At the very least I should have asked where she was.

Before this, a lot had happened in a single day.  But now I’d been in these tunnels for a while.  Probably between one and three days.  The time to calm down was likely why I was starting to be a little bit more logical about some of the other things surrounding me.

Clarity brought its own problems.

Now that I realized this…game was basically a death trap.  Before this, I’d been planning to farm the scorpions as long as they kept generating.  I was just going to stay in this area until the almost bitter end, then tap out once I was done with this hallway.  Without what I’d just learned, I thought it’d been a decent plan.

However, staying where I was…was not a good idea.  The door behind me was an exit, and there’d be no end to the enemies in this challenge. At first this had been a blessing, but now I was starting to get nervous.  The difficulty kept building, with bigger, stronger monsters attacking my crude dirt barrier.

The proverbial writing was on the wall.  I had to move, and if I waited too long, I was going to die.

Now that the decision was made, I needed to act.  When my [Angry Arrows] enhanced hammer went off again, destroying most of the scorpions, I moved.  I quickly used my shovel to take down enough of the barrier for me to get through.

Then I ran like hell.

Scorpions erupted out of the walls as I ran, jumping on me stabbing with their nasty little tails. My shovel was not normally a great weapon, but against giant scorpions, it actually did the trick.

But still, if I hadn't had [Built Different], I would have been dead 1000 times over by now for sure. I ran as fast as I possibly could. As I ran, I sort of confirmed that just embracing speed was probably one viable type of strategy to get through these hallways.  Moving really, really fast would likely work. Unfortunately, while fast, I was definitely not fast enough.  At least not enough to avoid stings altogether.

This time the door was farther away than the first one had been.  I finally reached it, blood trickling from hundreds of holes before the bleeding was stopped, venom staining and eating holes in my clothing.  But instead of going through the end of this hallway, I stopped about 15 feet past the last of the holes, roughly halfway between the last holes and the door.

And I began to furiously dig.

I threw my explosive hammer behind me every time I got a chance, every time it was charged.  My shovel slung dirt like I was posessed, one handed.  The other hand kept delivering explosive death with my regenerating hammer.

My attacks didn't kill all the scorpions, but it kept just enough of them off of me that I could work between swatting the rest with my shovel.  Their stings hurt like hell.  [Built Different] kept me alive, preventing me from being killed by the venom or bled out from hundreds, or even thousands of little piercing wounds.

This was a race against time, one that I would have never been able to accomplish without my superhuman Endurance. Sure enough, the Scorpions were getting thick and bigger.

Time seemed to blur.  I definitely had no way to tell how long I’d been in this tunnel other than my growing hunger, thirst, and desperation.  Without my incredible endurance, I undoubtibly would have passed out ages ago.  At this point, I could definitely admit that I’d made a mistake.  Trying to cheese the system for XP had definitely worked, was still working.  I had to keep waving away level up notifications.  Unfortunately, my gamble might still kill me.

If I had time to invest my points I’d gotten from my new levels, it’d be nice.  But I didn’t care to stop working even for a few seconds.  At this point, I didn’t even dare just turn and run for the door.  I’d get mobbed from behind.

Finally, I decided that I couldn’t put it off any longer and triggered [Stalwart pan of the Lonely Mountain].  I instantly got tougher, armored.  Now the scorpions had a harder time penetrating my skin.  My toughened exterior meant that even facing growing enemies, now I was less worried about being stabbed deep enough to stop me from working.

At least for a couple more hours.  There was definitely a time limit.

It was much more difficult this time around and took me far longer, but I finally managed to build a wall similar to the one that I’d had on the other side of the hallway.  It was holding for the moment.  The barrier didn't need to completely stop the scorpions, just slow them down enough that my hammer would destroy most of each wave.

On my side of the barrier, disgusting bug guts covered everything.  I was in constant pain, and my existence was narrowed down to mechanical violence, but now it was by choice.  Escape was an option now, and that gave me a fresh wave of energy.

Staying was gross, difficult, painful, and more exhausting than I could have ever imagined.  Still,  I somehow managed. This was for my future and so goblins back on earth wouldn’t ever be able to threaten me ever again.

The slaughter continued until after my [Stalwart Pan of the Lonely Mountain] buff wore off.  Even though the barrier helped prevent being mobbed by monsters, it grew more and more difficult to withstand the hoard.  They were almost the size of a cats now.

Each wave spawned faster, scampering out of their expanding holes in the walls. What's more, because I'd run down the entire hallway there were far more of them than before.

It helped me when I realized that for each scorpion I destroyed, its burrow that it had come out of needed to generate another one.  They were all on some sort of timer.

Scorpions generated from the beginning of the hallway took longer to get to me than the ones nearby, so I was able to think of each group as a separate wave.

Even though they were coming faster, I still had just enough time to recover.

Despite being almost out of energy, in excruciating pain, and completely miserable, killing and seeing level ups had grown somewhat addictive.  Then I noticed that the scorpions had gotten bigger than cats, big enough to start demolishing my barrier before I could blow them up.

I didn’t even have good weapons against bugs of this size.  They were climbing over each other to get to me, literally almost filling the tunnel. The explosions from my hammer still didn't damage the stone hallway, but the mass-packed scorpion bodies with their thick chitin was dulling the blasts of my hammer to such an extent that only the first ranks were dying.

Okay, time to go, I thought.  If I hung around much longer, one of those bastards was going to put their oversized tail right through my heart or something.

I turned on my heel without a backward glance.  The run over the last few yards to the door seemed to last forever.  I could hear the scorpions behind me, tearing apart my earthen barrier, desperately trying to get me before I could get away.

But I made it to the end of the hallway.  I didn’t hesitate, opening the door and stepping into a blinding white flash. As before, I found myself in the same stone room with a door.  This time a big “3” was next to it.

My mental state was not the best.  I was feeling dizzy and loopy.  I was highly tempted to open the door and look outside to see if the holes now were even larger than the huge scorpions that I’d just been fighting.

Curiosity killed the cat, I thought to myself and shook my head ruefully.  This was it.  I had to stop while I was ahead.  I’d already pushed my luck to the breaking point.

Out Loud, I clearly said, “I quit the challenge!”

I heard the Face3ted’s my mind. “So be it.”

It’s possible I could have imagined it, but the voice carried just a tiny hint of frustration.

My world went white again.