Chapter 18
Abundance of Vines = Abundance of Experience Points…?
My consciousness stared at the message flashing in my vision for a while. Just taking in the horrors of my decapitated head. That was definitely not something I was prepared to see when I woke up this morning. Damn, yeah, just think of how my day started, with Sam cooking me the best pizza to ever be crafted by a salmon person, to now, staring at my own bloody corpse. In a fishbowl. Twenty five years of nothing too exciting happening and now look at me.
And that wasn't even mentioning the eldritch horror I had just unleashed. She continued her murder spree. Most people ran, but a few tried to fight back. Their gunfire did nothing but make her even more crazed. She stomped everyone she saw to death. No one got as personal kills as me and Stephen. Why oh why did she hate me so much?
It didn’t take her long to hunt down all of the remaining Users. The last two managed to hide but it just delayed the inevitable. She pulled out the tree they were hiding in and slammed it against a mountain, crushing them like flies. Their bloody corpses were imprinted in the wall.
[ Match over! Eldritch Horror is victorious! Next match: tomorrow, 4:44 PM EST ]
And that was that. The view of the game slowly faded out, the last thing all of us losers saw was the giant Cthulhu girl doing a cringy victory dance and jumping up and down, rocking the whole world.
We were booted to a blank lobby room, extremely boring compared to the egg thing we'd been in before the match. Elevator music attacked us from all directions.
“What the fuck was that?” I asked before Stephen could so much as open his mouth.
“I have no clue dude. I haven’t heard anything about this. Let me do some research.”
I was way ahead of him, already searching the Interverse for answers. They were not hard to find. Apparently, since we jumped into a match right after the update hit, we were among the first to stumble upon the new Interverse surprise: Advance tournament entries.
It wasn’t just the battle royale game we played, the passes were being fought over in every area of the Interverse. I’m talking, not just the combat side either. There were reports of people having to sew intricate patterns to solve riddles to seal away a great evil. There were cooking competitions, where contestants had to make the best meals to satisfy a starving beast. Pretty much all of them had something to do with a great evil, usually a creature of some sort.
And even in our battle royale game the monsters were varied. Some were giant lava monsters, sea beasts with the power of the whole ocean in its depths, great dragons that could snap Godzilla’s back over their knee, Batman v Bane style.
“Why didn’t they mention this before?” Stephen asked, his eyes a blur too as he absorbed all the information in his own search.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
It was a good question, but we really had no way of knowing. EIther they thought this was a fun surprise… or if you wanted to go a bit pessimistic with it, you could think that they were mismanaging the tournament, just throwing things at the wall and seeing what stuck. I kind of leaned that direction, but I didn’t think it was that. The fact that all the events had a monster theme, they had to have planned it. But why?
There was a flashing light in the corner of my vision which I’d been ignoring. I gave it my full attention.
[ Items get!
> One Fishbowl Helmet
Okay, we lied, it was one item. And a lame one at that. Want to trash it?
Yes/No ]
Fuck, even the damn Interverse itself was coded to be judgemental to the fishbowl. Well screw that. I declined to trash it and moved it to my key items, where I could quickly equip it at any time. It looked good there.
But not as good as on my head.
I equipped it.
“Oh my god,” Stephen groaned. “You’re seriously keeping that?”
“Yes, fuck you. I love it.” I beamed at him, sure that it looked creepy and distorted from his side of the bowl.
“Well let’s see how you feel about your reduced experience gains.”
Almost as if triggered by his words, a new notification popped.
[ Calculating Gains! ]
Usually whatever activities I did the calculation process was seamless. But it actually took closer to five seconds as it crunched the math on every little thing that I did.
[ Many vines vanquished! Too bad they are only worth two experience points a piece! ]
My jaw hung open. After allllll that, I didn't make enough to level up a single Stat!? And what about besting the psycho girl, that didn't earn me anything?
"Wow," Stephen said. "That was the biggest waste of time ever."
"Yeah, and now if we don't beat a crazed monster girl we can't even enter the tournament at all. This is the biggest pile of bullshit!" I punched at the air, imagining my fists hitting the psycho chick.
An alarm went off, startling me.
[ Your appointment approaches! ]
"Oh, damn, I almost forgot."
"What is it?" Stephen asked.
"I set us up a meeting with a combat teacher."
Stephen looked excited. "Seriously? Perfect timing! Who are they?"
"Uhh, I dunno?" I threw up the ad I replied to.
He scanned it, his smile slowly diminishing by the second. "Darcy. There's no way this guy is legit."
"Why? He isn't charging anything so let's give it a try."
"He's singling out Statistic Anomalies members, he has to have ulterior motives."
"Well, let's ask him about it!"
Before he could argue further, I pressed the join button and we were sucked inside the room. There was a sensation of falling and then suddenly I was sitting on the comfiest couch I’d ever experienced. It felt like a cloud, enveloping me in a light fluffiness but also holding me firm. Stephen beamed in beside me.
“Whoa, this is nice.” He bounced a little on his seat. It somehow did not move my side of it.
“Does this couch make you want to reconsider being against your sitting Skill?” I said with a wink.
“Actually… yes.” He leaned back and sighed.
I did the same, my giggling caught short by a new arrival. A man now sat behind a desk in the middle of the room. His features were obscured in shadow, that side of the room suspiciously devoid of light.
Yet I wasn’t scared. I could not imagine a world where this couch could exist in a place where bad things happened. Maybe that was naive, all it took to put me at ease was a nice couch, but I couldn’t help but look at it that way.
And nothing about the room screamed death trap. In fact, it was familiar to me. Decked out in full bookshelves, framed diplomas on the wall. It was a classic Earth based therapist office.
I’d never stepped in one myself, but I knew the style from countless old movies.
“Hello there, young ones. So you want to learn how to fight, do you?”
The light on the desk clicked on, revealing an old man, hair as white as snow, a big grin on his face. “I was wondering if you two would ever find me.”