Sponsored Apocalypse 2: A LitRPG Adventure, page 1
SPONSORED APOCALYPSE 2
©2024 Blaise Corvin
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CONTENTS
Also in series
Recap
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
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RECAP
Miles “Shrug” Lindstrom received a quest almost two years before the world ended. He took the idea of an impending apocalypse seriously and prepared meticulously. When the countdown day finally arrived, it marked the end of his world as he knew it.
All of the equipment and provisions he had stockpiled vanished. In their places, he received advancement points to use with the mysterious new system that had been introduced to everyone on Earth. However, Miles discovered that he also had access to another menu—one to purchase upgrades that most others did not have. He used all of his points in this exclusive menu and received some strange abilities. At first, they seemed to have limited utility but later proved to be effective when used in tandem with other skills.
Almost immediately after the apocalypse, Miles met a mysterious man who suddenly appeared in his house wearing what looked like a dog mask. The man gave him a few pointers and other advice before disappearing. Then, when a giant cyclops tore apart Miles’s house, he escaped into the woods. After his first fight to the death with monsters, he met up with his friend who owned a gun store. Together with several other people, Miles helped defend the store from monsters.
During a particularly nasty attack by large, ogre-like monsters, a woman using magic killed the last of the creatures and asked for medical aid to help her injured friend. She introduced herself as Aldina, and after Miles used his healing ability to help her friend, she informed the group in the gun store that the world was going to get worse, not better, and that leveling up was extremely important. She also mentioned that firearms were not a good way to gain experience killing monsters unless someone had a relevant skill to pair with them.
After educating the group, Aldina still owed a debt to Miles for helping her friend, so she accompanied him to a couple of dangerous destinations in town to gather needed supplies. Upon returning to the gun shop, they discovered that all of their friends had been killed.
Without anywhere else to go, Miles accompanied the mysterious woman as they leveled up.
Then Aldina revealed her secret, secure bunker. She explained that this was her third life. The reason she knew so much about the end of the world was that she had experienced it before in other dimensions, on other worlds.
The next day, Miles and Aldina went searching for monsters to gain experience. They found the aftermath of a goblin attack, fought a group of them, and entered a challenge portal. In the challenge portal, Miles was able to intuit that the Faceted within was not friendly.
Rather than focusing on doing well enough to earn better rewards, Miles took advantage of the system to kill monsters for experience. Wisely, he ended his trial while he still could, and the unhappy Faceted was forced to award him with the prize.
Once Miles and Aldina returned to their world, where barely any time had passed locally, the two agreed to go their separate ways but meet back up in four days. Miles was soon visited by the masked priest again and brought to another dimension where he met the god Anubis.
Anubis requested that Miles become his champion. After a deal was struck, Miles agreed. As a result of this pact, he was gifted a terrifying companion, an oblivion hound that Miles named Bacon.
Back on Earth, Bacon was turned loose on all the goblins in the area, which he killed efficiently on his own. While Bacon was massacring goblins, Miles met up with the human resistance in town, a group currently headed by a man named Sheriff Gray. Miles asked for information and then bid his farewells to a group of four brave young men that he met, who had been patrolling and hunting monsters as part of a larger effort.
In order to level up as quickly and efficiently as possible, Miles backtracked to where he had seen a group of more powerful monsters called water kobolds. He attacked them and managed to use a combination of skills, including poison, to wipe them out, receiving a genocide achievement through the system. Then Miles was able to choose a class, Dark Contractor.
As Miles finally slept after spending the large number of points he’d earned through the system, some townspeople, led by Sheriff Gray, investigated the aftermath of the goblin destruction. They discovered that an unknown, terrifying creature (Bacon) had actually saved several people’s lives by massacring goblins. During the course of this investigation, Sheriff Gray confirmed that the giant cyclops was in town as well.
Around the same time, Miles, now the champion of the god Anubis, awoke.
After waking up, Miles met again with the town’s defenders, who informed him that Sheriff Gray was aware of his existence. They implied that he had the town’s blessing to keep hunting and killing monsters. They also let him know that the giant was in town.
Armed with this new information, Miles went off on his own to find new adventures, to grow stronger before meeting up with Aldina again. As he took the first few steps of this new journey, he received a new quest similar to the one he’d gotten before the apocalypse occurred.
His new quest was to kill the giant in town, and he had a time limit of two days to do so.
ONE
My bravery about the new quest that I had received, and my dismissive attitude toward it, melted away the longer I walked. Even though I had grown a lot recently, I still had terrifying, crystal-clear memories of the giant casually ripping the roof off of my rental house.
A bounty on the giant was…a lot to think about. But I had to admit a part of me loved that I was being pushed to get revenge.
At one point, I had actually gotten the impatient idea to just head to town and burn the whole place to the ground with all of my brand new abilities. It didn’t take me long to realize how dumb that idea was. After all, I still didn’t even know exactly how many goblins had been around that my hellhound, Bacon, had destroyed. By now, I had to imagine that the town was crawling with monsters. It seemed the entire purpose of the roaming human defenders was to kill monsters before they could actually make it to town. Despite the meat grinder, there were sure to be many monsters that got through.
Going to town was likely a death wish—I was having delusions of grandeur. The giant wasn’t going to just sit around and let me try to kill it, either.
And there might still be human survivors. Even if I had a nuke in my back pocket—which I didn’t—I didn’t think I could indiscriminately kill everything without knowing for sure I wasn’t killing innocent kids and dogs or something.
Once I set
tled down, I knew better than to run into town right now. My first few hours of experience after the world had changed hadn’t exactly been a walk in the park, neither before nor after my friend’s shop in town had been demolished.
I mused as I walked. Taking the next two days to get stronger was the best course of action. Now I was planning to use every minute of it that I could. My mind wandered, and I took a look at my character sheet.
Miles Lindstrom
Title(s):
First Ten to Five
First Five to Ten
First Transcendents
Challenge Room Champion
Champion of Anubis
Goblin Vanquisher
Xenocide
Level 41
Class: Dark Contractor
Traits:
Merciless Xenocide: Poison
Stats:
Str: 9
Dex: 6
End: 12
Int: 7
Will: 10
Origina: 1
Luck: 6
Reflex: 7
Armor (nat): 1
Available Advancement Points: 0
Affiliations:
Sponsored by Anubis
Associated Sponsor Titles: New Champion
Boons:
Eternal Struggle Reward System
Class Skills:
Entity Domination
Sense Summons
Prime Skills:
Tsukumogami Embrace
Spirits of the Past
Built Different
First to Five Eyes
Lower Prime Skills:
Bone Strengthening
Elastic Joints
Natural Armor
Basic Magic Resistance
Lower Mystic Mind Armor
Active Skills:
Saliva of Hared Ha
Bone Truth Eyes
Basic Enchanted Sleep
Pulverizing Pebbles
Angry Arrows
Transfiguration: Alcohol to Water
Toxic Breath of Hellas Portentis
Equipment-Related Skills:
Better Days Auto Whisk
Beaded Benediction of Delayed Solace
Stalwart Pan of the Lonely Mountain
Lindstrom Family Hammer
Private Malone’s Last Stand
Weeping Island’s Resolve
Passionate Earth Mover
Enchanted Equipment:
Iron Bracelet of the Weeping Island
Skills:
Dagger Combat
Hammer Combat
Magic Combat
Club Combat
Spear Combat
Sword Combat
Scythe Combat
Explosive Combat
Enchantment Combat
Earthworks
Ambush
Healing Salve Application
Firearms (pistols)
Combat Endurance
Pet Combat
Familiar Communication
Poison Application
Chemical Warfare
Execution
The sight was still satisfying in a way that I wouldn’t have been able to imagine before the world went mad.
When I had first met Aldina, she gave me some ideas I hadn’t thought of, places to find antiques that would synergize with my ability [Spirits of the Past]. Since then, I’d done a lot of brainstorming, trying to come up with a few other places I might be able to find old items with a soul. Aldina had pretty much already nailed it. I couldn’t think of many other concentrated places for antiques.
Raiding a museum would be amazing. But at the moment, I was heading to a local junkyard I knew of. Of course, junkyards had been one of Aldina’s ideas.
I paused my musings long enough to stop on the side of the road and listen. There was definitely some sort of commotion in the woods not very far away, and I decided to check it out. The experience of skulking through the underbrush reminded me of the first few terrifying minutes of escape after my house had been destroyed, then my very first fight with goblins. I’d come a long way since then.
Back then, I’d been in good physical shape and had a few skills. The me back then was incomparable to the superhuman me now. Unfortunately, I probably still looked cooler back then, carrying a badass glaive and not too weighed down. Nowadays, I felt like I was becoming increasingly covered in antique junk.
I figured out what had been making the commotion in the forest pretty quickly. Two zombies were awkwardly walking their way through some bushes and making an absolute racket. It looked like one of them might have been an original-original zombie when the apocalypse started—one that appeared from elsewhere. The monster was wearing clothing that probably hadn’t been popular on Earth in three hundred years.
The other zombie, a big man, had on a monster truck T-shirt and was wearing boxer briefs. The two zombies became aware of my presence at about the same time and immediately altered course through the underbrush toward me. With all the vegetation in the way, they were much slower than they would have been on the street, which still wouldn’t exactly have been blazing fast. Thank God.
I hadn’t seen any running zombies yet, and I desperately hoped they didn’t exist in real life.
As the creatures grew closer, I realized that with my skill [Built Different], I might actually be completely immune to zombies. The way my skill nullified status effects during combat meant that if a zombie bit me, I would immediately be in combat according to the system, and then any virus or curse the zombie imparted with its bite would be instantly nullified.
I shook my head at the thought. Back when I’d first received [Built Different], I’d felt the skill was underpowered. But by this point, I could confidently say it had saved my ass dozens, if not hundreds, of times.
Seeing the slow-moving zombies gave me an idea.
I felt like I had a decent amount of time, so I ran away for a few seconds just to give myself space and then broke a small tree off to use as a makeshift spear. Keeping an eye on the way I’d come from, I used the antique pocket knife I picked up in town several days ago to fashion a crude but effective spear.
More than anything, this was an experiment in how to conserve my supernatural power. My antique bayonet, [Private Malone’s Last Stand], was a really good weapon, and I could use the bayonet’s skill to magically lengthen it. However, I couldn’t elongate the weapon for an unlimited amount of time.
I’d seen the screen for my bayonet so many times now I could imagine it in my mind’s eye:
[Private Malone’s Last Stand]
This bayonet was attached to an M1917 during World War I. Private Malone and one other soldier fought an entire squad of enemy soldiers by themselves in brutal trench warfare. The heroic charge ended in ultimate disaster but burned a record of an indomitable warrior’s spirit in the pages of history.
You may activate this blade for one hour per day. Activation creates a spectral blade extension. Extension can be activated and halted at will. All activation time is cumulative per day. Each activation requires extra stamina, and any more than three activations will cost an extra five minutes of the total activation time.
Once my spear was done, I turned to find the zombies again. It wasn’t difficult since they were still making so much noise in the forest and weren’t far away to begin with. As I closed in, I considered my spear’s reach and the natural advantage it gave me against monsters. My bayonet had served me well so far, but mostly because I had been fighting creatures smaller than me with a shorter reach. There was a reason why bayonets were meant to be fixed to the end of a rifle, making an impromptu spear.
I still fondly remember the glaive that I used in the first few hours of this new, messed-up world. It hadn’t had the reach of a proper spear, but it had still been a badass weapon.
Testing my shoddy wooden spear against zombies turned out to be educational. It was easy to stay outside of their reach, especially with the added agility that I now had. But even with my superhuman strength, I had a hard time getting a clean shot on their heads, which was the only way to put them down for good.
The jabs of my spear with its crude, sharpened tip kept glancing off their skulls or just penetrating the monsters’ cheeks and mouths. It was quite a gruesome sight. And with all of the blood and viscera generated by my clumsy attacks, I was glad I was pretty sure that I couldn’t catch whatever made zombies, zombies.
