Eventually, we got access to a bookshelf for the base, something the System offered that stocked a rotating selection of Earth literature based on the tastes of the reader. I think Sean felt bad for me being stuck in the Shanktuary so many hours a day, or something, and he popped for it instead of something actually useful. I told him not to, but it really was nice. I got a lot of reading done, in between other things.
One of the books taught me a term called survivorship b...
2024-01-21 20:27:45 +0000 UTC
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While the Apocalypse System wants nothing more than for you to enjoy yourself while experiencing the places and things it creates, it’s obligated to note that your enjoyment is not the actual purpose of these things. As you’ve gathered by now, the purpose of a metered, organized end-of-world management system is to produce outlier-strong survivors who carry the strength of the world with them.
Survivors who make sure that world isn’t forgotten, at the risk of their ow...
2024-01-20 20:14:23 +0000 UTC
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“Oh, neat,” Sean said. “I have something like that too. Weapon-wise, I mean. It will be cool to see how you use it.”
The orc gave a war cry as a response and started moving in.
“Not much of a conversationalist, I guess. That’s fine,” Sean said. “There’s still a kind of communication this way.”
The orc was good with those chains. Very good, really. Sean wasn’t getting any information from the system about its level or even the normal descriptions he’d ...
2024-01-19 17:04:09 +0000 UTC
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Tyr: FYI We are now transitioning to 5 chapters a week. Aka Mon - Wed - Fri - Sat - Sun.
---
I should have seen it, really. How long had Sean been away from his normal life? A month? And the whole month, people had been trying to kill him. He had been knocked unconscious multiple times. He had been buried alive, shot, stabbed, cut with mind-energy, and chased by utterly silent monsters through midnight forests.
And now someone h...
2024-01-17 19:25:48 +0000 UTC
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“Holy shit! He materialized hard!” Brady yelled.
Justin looked over at her, slightly exasperated.
“What does that even mean?”
“It means the rest of you came out sort of soft and smooth and he splatted out of space-time like spilled pudding.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Justin said. Brendan nodded in agreement.
“No, she’s right,” Sean said, laying on his back, trying to get his stomach to settle back down. “Dropped pudding is ...
2024-01-15 18:46:48 +0000 UTC
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Eventually he stopped keeping track of the individual animals he had fought. There were dozens of them. Probably. His mind wasn’t working right anymore. He could vaguely remember that the plains were supposed to be for something or to be on the way somewhere, which didn’t make sense. As far as he could remember, he had always been there.
And then, there was a man. A tall man, bound with lean muscle, shooting at him with a bow. He was in his way, between him and wherever he was going...
2024-01-14 23:23:10 +0000 UTC
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“It should be any second now. Once it drops, we bolt,” Brady said.
“Do you think the walls will drop before the general notification?” Spike asked. “If there’s any delay, it might not even be worth getting out there first.”
“I think so. Or at least at the same time,” Sean said. “If this was a prize, it was meant to give an advantage. If the walls came down a few minutes after the notification, it would give everyone else time to muster their forces. The system ...
2024-01-13 18:42:29 +0000 UTC
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You might think that a soda machine wouldn’t be that big of a deal. That it wouldn’t be the single most important purchase we made. Or that it wouldn’t come in clutch in the biggest of possible ways and wouldn’t, in fact, be the crux of the longest-shot chain of events I had ever seen or even imagined.
You’d be right. It didn’t do any of that stuff. It was just awesome. Have you ever heard of slushies? It’s like this… listen, find a slushy, right now. The sy...
2024-01-12 20:48:43 +0000 UTC
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By then, I had managed to get a little bit of intel on all the races in the competition. It wasn’t that hard. I was a craftsman, and so were almost half of the shopkeepers. There was a rapport there. We were the same kind of people, same kind of jobs, and same kind of history dealing with combat classes who wanted more out of us than they deserved or were willing to pay for.
The shopkeepers weren’t universal in their hate for all of the different competitor species, but...
2024-01-11 20:18:18 +0000 UTC
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Tyr: FYI we're changing the structure to match other sites. This is now Chapter 79. Ill be retroactively changing the other chapters too
---
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 behavio...
2024-01-10 19:38:33 +0000 UTC
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“Wake up, you bastard.”
“Wha? Brett?”
“How have you survived this long? You sleep like a drunk brick. It took me five minutes to wake you up.”
“I’m just lucky, I think. And I don’t sleep outside much.”
“Well, thank the heavens for this base, I guess. Get up. I got a system message assuring me I’d be safe while you were gone. I bet you have one saying where you are going.”
Sean checked, and found he did.
Village...
2024-01-09 17:00:53 +0000 UTC
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Team Competitions, Collaborative Efforts, and You
Team competitions and collaborative-effort missions award competitors based on multiple variables. The largest, most heavily weighted variable is simply whether or not your team wins or if you and your collaborators are successful in your goal. The dangers of failure aside, losing teams and unsuccessful collaborators gain no rewards at all.
Once you and your friendly co-competitors are victorious, however, thi...
2024-01-09 16:56:24 +0000 UTC
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“So to be clear, you won’t be able to afford anything better than you have right now.” The youngish, surprisingly ripped girl behind the counter at the blacksmith’s shop said, glancing at the weapons strapped to various parts of Sean’s body and trying not to grimace. “Not that what you have isn’t… nice.”
“Oh, yeah. This isn’t exactly a buying trip. My class has some pretty crazy restrictions on weapons, if that makes sense.” Sean motioned towards the forges, anvi...
2024-01-09 16:53:34 +0000 UTC
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Rules Governing Inter-Competitor Combat
- Within the village proper, no combat is allowed.
- Attempts to strike, shoot, impale, burn, or otherwise wound a competitor will inevitably fail at the attempt stage.
- As various attempts to harm other competitors will fail at the attempt stage, no punishment will be issued for attempts or threats to harm another competitor.
Imagine a scenario in which one competitor is parti...
2024-01-09 16:52:59 +0000 UTC
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“Here it comes. Finally,” Sean said.
“Sean…” said Brett.
“What?”
“You shouldn’t get excited over the next version of death-traps the system is going to throw at you. It’s weird.”
Sean supposed that wasn’t wrong. Whatever the system was sending his way, it almost for sure wasn’t going to be fun and good. Still, he was antsy to see it in a weird way he couldn’t quite explain. He had been watching the clock as soon as he had run out of producti...
2024-01-08 20:29:29 +0000 UTC
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Sean blinked.
Three fucking levels? That’s… double. Two times as many levels. Fuck.
Scrambling nearly every moment of one’s life and spending the rest of what little spare time he had left passed out from exhaustion didn’t leave much time to meditate on the nature of things, sure. But it burned Sean’s ass that he had apparently been sitting on three whole levels of advancement, lacking a little bit of peace and quiet to think about the concept of time.
But...
2024-01-07 17:35:03 +0000 UTC
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“Holy hell. These are the bad rewards?” Sean was incredulous. Some of these improvements were massive despite seeming small. Slightly improved ranged attacks? Absolutely a big deal, especially as he built up his ranged arsenal. Full, unqualified improvement to footwork? Gigantic.
Even improved blunt force damage was huge, even if only one of his weapons dealt it. If Sean had learned one thing from this warm-up that the system didn’t mention, it was that having different kinds of d...
2024-01-06 17:19:43 +0000 UTC
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No, it shouldn’t have worked. It was dumb.
The Big Book of Brett, PG. 23
—
Sean ran around in a circle. Jogged, really. Brett had rigged up the tub well enough that the flow of powder was pretty uniform. Brett had accumulated quite a bit of powder over the last couple of days from various cans, bottle caps, and other metal bearing objects. Anything aluminum, it turned out, was pretty easy to turn into metal powder.
Even so, Brett said it might all...
2024-01-05 19:15:08 +0000 UTC
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“So what you are telling me,” Brett said while filing away at the last remnants of the steel block. “Is that he was pretty much like every other offworlder ever.”
Sean had slept longer than he meant to, but being clean, dry, and rested felt much better than the inverse.
“I mean, I’m not sure. I think I’ve met five offworlders now. That’s a pretty small sample size.”
Brett set down his file. “Listen, Sean. I can’t say there aren’t good offworlders, som...
2024-01-05 19:09:25 +0000 UTC
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Sean’s first attempts at throwing the apples weren’t great. They were sticky, which was something he could deal with, but it made throwing with his gloved hands very, very hard. However, the same wasn’t true of his spear. The tooth that made up the tip of the spear could pierce the apples just enough to hold them in place and Sean whipped them loose by swinging the spear as hard as he could.
The effect of this wasn’t entirely unlike those tennis-ball launchers people with poor t...
2024-01-05 17:24:48 +0000 UTC
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I’ll always be kind of thankful to that squid.
Here I was, alone in a building with no entertainment besides that weird guide, on my third shower and second nap of the day, and Sean was out there fighting for his life. I had no idea what was wrong, outside of the fact that Sean hadn’t come back in a really long time. If you asked me what was probably going wrong, I would have probably guessed he was dead, or had a broken leg, or something of that nature.
...
2024-01-04 22:16:18 +0000 UTC
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“Dammit, yes, but plans change as situations do. You almost got yourself killed.” Sean wiped the blood away from his rapidly mending nose as Stitch Up’s post-fight buff pulled it back into the correct position. “You almost got me killed. These things hit hard, and you let this thing hit me full force while I was tangled. I barely dodged.”
Apologies. This entity was mistakenly over-committed to Sean Lawrence’s instructions. Does entity Sean Lawre...
2024-01-04 22:15:04 +0000 UTC
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Half the area meant, naturally, double the density of enemies. And while Sean had expected to need a few more adjustments to the size of the area before the density started to be a serious problem for him, he was wrong. It was almost immediately a big difference in both good and threatening, dangerous ways.
The good news was that target acquisition was no longer a problem. Sean and the squid ran into the first enemy within literal seconds of leaving their camp, a single boxer who was pr...
2024-01-04 22:12:42 +0000 UTC
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When Sean reached the final boxer, it had almost caught up to the squid. That said, it was only the cephalopod’s excessive slowness that made this possible. Its psycho-kinetic strikes had absolutely shredded the boxer’s thighs and calves, restricting it to a snail’s pace relative to Sean’s stat enhanced running.
Even with various ribs still in the process of snapping back into place, he made it to the threat several strides before it caught up to the squid. Jumping the last seve...
2024-01-03 19:17:24 +0000 UTC
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“Okay, that worked. It’s incredible how useful that is on the apples.”
Sean’s biggest problem dealing with the Tells’ homing beacons was the fact that they would stick to any object he used to bat them down. He couldn’t find enough branches to sacrifice like that, and using anything but his shield meant the weapon would be out of service once an apple was stuck to it. But whatever force the squid man was projecting to knock the apples down either dissipated so fast the apple...
2024-01-03 19:16:03 +0000 UTC
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It was a weird time. Sean came from the generation of people who had proved too soft to deal with the Apocalypse, and I always got the feeling that he was above-average soft even for them. It wasn’t the kind of thing that you could just tell him to stop doing. He had grown up different than anyone else, and the few weeks of danger he had been through weren’t nearly enough to fix that.
Sometimes, that meant extraordinary things would happen. Not just anybody managed to m...
2024-01-03 19:14:09 +0000 UTC
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Hi Gaians and Earthlings,
Hope you guys had a great Christmas and New Years! We're excited to be back writing for y'all. And what better way to show our joy than a small mass release? Three new chapters are waiting for you.
Our goal for January is to bring the advanced chapter count as close to 20 or 25 as possible. In other words, we want to get to a Zogarth (50) chapters ahead of public release by the end of February.
Is it going to be hard? Yes. Is it going to involve a l...
2024-01-02 22:42:37 +0000 UTC
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Sean was so far into the process of admitting that he didn’t really understand how his leveling worked that he didn’t even think about it much anymore. Cowering under a Tell, he felt the gnawing feeling of a pending level and checked it out. Not only did he have another six stat points to work with, but both his healing and alchemy skills had kicked up a notch.
Sean Lawrence
Level 36 Human (Prisoner of Time)
2024-01-02 22:39:24 +0000 UTC
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The thing that I eventually realized about Sean was that, despite whatever failings he might have, he was from the era that the Apocalypse System grew up on. In a way, they were the same generation. They had watched the same TV. They had read the same books. They even knew the same references. Not just knew them. They both liked them. Knew which ones to like.
I get that the Apocalypse System isn’t a person. I even know why you don’t want to think of it that way. But, st...
2024-01-02 22:38:55 +0000 UTC
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This is, at best, a basic guide. Sooner or later, you are going to go to places I haven’t been, see things I haven’t seen, and have life and death fights with them. It’s just how it is. Even if I really had seen everything, and I haven’t, the world is constantly changing. The Apocalypse System is constantly spinning up new beasts, new spaces, and new troubles. No encyclopedia could possibly document it all.
If I described a squirrel that breathed fire, I knew it mig...
2024-01-02 22:23:46 +0000 UTC
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