The Forerunner: A GameLit Progression Fantasy, page 26
There was no response, and he was surprised until he remembered that Laurel had her. He had gotten so used to having his “stalker” around that he felt lonely without her. He thanked Laurel and stood up when number 93 entered the pit.
Surprisingly, he was an ogrum. Given the anti-human bias of the elves, he assumed it would be an álfar. The ogrum was an impressive specimen, large and muscled even for his people. He had a warrior’s mien, his demeanor calm and unafraid.
“Did you know?” Zed asked.
The ogrum looked startled as Zed hadn’t spoken to any of the previous challengers, even when they had tried to trash talk him.
“Did I know what?" he asked slowly.
“That some scumbags tried to get me to throw this fight.”
The ogrum looked embarrassed. He did know.
“I had nothing to do with that. I’m glad that you’re not going to throw it.”
Zed watched and listened to him very carefully. As far as he could tell the ogrum was sincere. Either he was a very good liar, or he was telling the truth. He didn’t know the ogrum people well, but all of his experiences with them led him to believe that lying was not their forte.
‘Good, I won’t kill him then.’
‘Sons of Greeks! Let us go
In arms against the foe.
Till their hated blood shall flow
In a river past our feet.’
It was an extremely difficult fight. The ogrum wasn’t quite as fast as Zed, but he was close. He was stronger than Zed and had a similar amount of experience. Zed tried to analyze his style while he took punishment and dished it out.
‘He doesn’t do much in the way of footwork, but his head movement is good. I’m not seeing any major weaknesses in his striking. Time to take this to the ground.’
Zed threw a feint and then lunged at the ogrum’s legs to wrap him up. He was stunned, literally, when the ogrum threw a vicious knee straight into his face. Through muscle memory and sheer force of will he continued the movement and held onto the ogrum’s legs. His vision was dark and all he saw was color blobs moving around—the infamous “stars” that indicate a major concussion.
‘Damnit, damnit, damnit!’ Zed raged. All he could do was hold on while his mind recovered and blows rained down on his back. He drove the ogrum backwards and through sheer muscle memory from jiu jitsu drills, he put a leg behind the ogrum to trip him up, causing him to fall backwards with Zed on top.
While Zed would normally start working on a submission right away, he needed time to recover. He simply lay on top of the ogrum and rested. He wasn’t worried about passing the ogrum’s guard, because the ogrum didn’t know enough about ground fighting to even have one.
The ogrum tried to hammer him in the head, but even in Zed’s compromised state it was easy to control his arms enough to prevent any damage. Once Zed could see okay and think more-or-less normally, he got to work. He got into side control while controlling the ogrum’s far arm, and then stepped over the ogrum’s other arm and linked his legs, trapping that one as well.
Both of the ogrum’s arms were trapped and his head was exposed. The ogrum was moving wildly, knowing intuitively that he was in a bad position but not knowing what to do about it. He tried to free his arms but Zed had all the leverage. He flailed his legs, but that did nothing for him. Zed had him in the “crucifix” position.
“Surrender!" he shouted at the ogrum.
“No!”
Zed freed his left arm, the right being sufficient to restrain the ogrum’s arm, and started smashing the ogrum’s defenseless head into the ground. Out of a sense of mercy he paused again and said, “Surrender!”
The ogrum gnashed his teeth but finally said, “I surrender!" After the announcer called Zed as the victor, he released the ogrum and got up. The ogrum nodded at him with a split lip and blood running out of his nose, and limped out of the pit.
After Zed sat down he quickly increased the regeneration up to 250. He wouldn’t leave it there during the fights, but hopefully the little extra would make a difference while he was resting.
“It’s a little depressing to think that an ogrum is smarter than me," Laurel said while handing him some soft food.
Zed chuckled, specks of blood flying from his lips. “It’s just as well, since I don’t think I would like dating him.”
Laurel chuckled, but when she saw his face better she said sadly, “Oh, Zed… your face!”
Zed smiled, but stopped when it hurt. “Does this mean the wedding is off?”
“Jerk. No, I’m not letting you off that easily. You’ll just have to be the one to wear the veil.”
When they had talked about the wedding she had asked him about his people’s traditions. She had laughed when she heard about the veil.
“I get it now. It’s about hiding the ugly bride. We’ll just use it to hide the ugly groom instead this time," she said.
Zed wanted to continue the repartee, but he was too tired and too hurt, so he just grunted.
Laurel got up close to his face and said, “The money doesn’t matter, Zed. I don’t want to see you hurt. If you get into trouble, surrender. Please.”
He wasn’t sure how to respond, so he just closed his eyes tiredly.
‘If the next 7 guys are stronger than that ogrum, I’m in trouble.’
Fortunately, they weren’t, significantly less so, in fact. Zed realized that the conspirators must have bribed Augustin to move him up in the lineup to try to make sure that none of the other challengers would defeat Zed.
‘Whatever the reason, I’m glad,' he thought.
‘The terrible! The strong!
Who made that bold diversion
In old Thermopylae
And warring with the Persian
To keep his country free;
With his three hundred waging
The battle, long he stood,
And like a lion raging,
Expired in seas of blood.’
The next six fights went significantly longer than the first 92, mostly because he was giving himself time to heal. It was at the tradeoff of losing more stamina, but it was a price he needed to pay.
‘Sons of Greeks! Let us go’
‘In arms against the foe.’
‘Till their hated blood shall flow’
‘In a river past our feet.’
And then it was time for challenger 100. Zed was so tired he could barely think. He was eating and drinking as quickly as he could to give his regeneration fuel, but it was just putting off the inevitable.
‘As long as I last longer than #100, I don’t care if I drop afterwards.’
When Zed saw the last challenger enter the pit, he was stunned. It was not a humanoid, it was some kind of gelatinous creature. He remembered when he and Dan were on the road to the city they saw such a creature. And here was one again. The creature had to squeeze through the door to the pit. The wood door sizzled and started dripping after it passed, while the stone wall seemed unaffected. The crowd gasped and laughed.
‘Oh, crap. How am I supposed to defeat this thing? Punch it? Drink it with a straw and turn my insides into soup?’
He was pretty sure that he could easily take it down with a few fireballs, but no external magic was allowed. He didn’t bother looking for Laurel. He knew what she would say—“Surrender”.
‘No.’
He knew it was stupid, but he was going to find a way to beat this piece of crap and the BS rigged challenge. He didn’t know how, but he was going to find it. He circled the creature to give himself some time to observe it and hopefully find a weakness. It wasn’t very fast, but it made up for that by being extremely flexible and stretching itself out, which unfortunately was a very effective tactic in the confines of the pit.
Its flesh was transparent so Zed could see its insides. He hoped that there was a core or something that he could destroy that would disable or kill it, but he didn’t find anything. Before long it had him trapped with its elongated body. Zed did the only thing he could think of—punch it.
As Zed expected, the punch seemed to have no effect and the gelatin’s flesh was corrosive to his flesh. Having tempered his body it resisted the acid, but the skin on his hand still started dissolving.
What he hadn’t expected was that he wasn’t able to pull his arm out. There was some kind of suction effect that prevented him from escaping. He could pull back some, but the gelatin would come with him. In fact, it was creeping up his arm and was almost to his body.
‘Not good!’
The skin on his hand and forearm was almost entirely gone and muscle was showing. His heart was pounding in panic, and the last thing he heard before his face was engulfed was a woman’s voice screaming, “ZEEEDDDD!”
All of his fear, frustration and pain turned into a red, hot rage. He came up with a plan that at normal times he would never even consider. But at this moment? He had no hesitation whatsoever.
He started building a fireball, not outside his body but inside the hand that he had punched the gelatin with. Because he didn’t have to expel the mana it formed faster than ever, into a blindingly white, then purplish-white, then straight purple ball of plasma. His hand and forearm were, of course, vaporized. Zed noticed but didn’t care. The plasma reacted with the flesh of the gelatin, turning it into a massive flame from the inside. A moment later it exploded, hurling what remained of Zed into the pit wall.
Not sure if he had blacked out for a time or not, Zed raised his head and looked at the pit. There were bits of burning goop spread throughout—including on the audience. It was pandemonium. Zed just laughed, which sounded more like a raspy hiss than anything else at the moment. He slowly got up, noting his missing arm and missing skin and flesh, but deciding to deal with it later. For now it was enough to get up.
“I don’t know what to say, folks! Have you ever seen anything like this? I haven’t! ZED ‘THE DOMINATOR’ has dominated all 100 challengers, and even exploded the final challenger! This will be one for the ages…”
Zed tuned the announcer out at that point. It was enough that he had won. Having accomplished that, it was time to rest. Zed fell into a dark oblivion.
Chapter 34
Zed woke up in an unfamiliar room. He was in a bed with the lower half of his body covered by a sheet and blanket. Laurel was sleeping in a chair beside the bed, her folded arms and head resting on Zed’s legs. Zed didn’t want to wake her up, so he moved carefully while looking at his arms and upper body. There was lots of new skin, and his missing right forearm was still growing back. It was close to the wrist now.
‘It can’t be a good sign of how weird my life is that none of this freaks me out,’ he thought.
He thought about going back to sleep until he realized that he was ravenous.
‘Oh, right. Regeneration.’
He tried to gently lift Laurel’s arms and head so he could slide his legs out, but she woke up as soon as he tried.
“Hey, you," she said, a little sleepily.
“Hey.”
“How are you feeling?
“Hungry.”
“Let me get you something. I’ll be right back.”
When she left Zed looked at his legs. They were fine. He was still wearing the pants he fought in, and they had definitely seen better days. Fortunately there was not a “wardrobe malfunction” in the pit.
Laurel brought back a full plate of meats, cheeses, and fruit. His mouth was watering already. He immediately started eating as soon as she set the plate down.
“So," Laurel said. “Yesterday.”
‘Dang it. This is going to be another one of those talks, isn’t it?’
“Yeah," he said.
“Why didn’t you surrender, Zed?”
He thought for a while about how to respond to that. Why didn’t he surrender? There was only one real answer.
“At first because I didn’t want to. Later because I couldn’t.”
“What do you mean you couldn’t?" she asked, starting to sound angry. Actually, she had already sounded a little angry, this time it was just obvious.
“I mean, when my face was engulfed no one would have heard me.”
“But you could have surrendered any time before that!”
“Yeah," he agreed.
“So why didn’t you?!”
‘This isn’t going to go well,' he sighed.
“Because I didn’t want to.”
“Why? What was so freaking important that you didn’t want to surrender? Was it the money? Was it your pride? I can’t think of any other reason, so one of those must have been more important than your life! More important than me and our marriage!”
Zed took another long while to think about how to respond. Finally he said, “There’s a lot of ways to answer that question. The money is important. We need that money. To buy farmland, to spread the farming knowledge as far and wide as we can, to help farmers get the resources they need to implement the new techniques, to buy land to have somewhere for humans to live, to convince other factions to join us—we need the money for a million things, and it won’t be enough.”
“Would it have hurt my pride to surrender, and is that part of why I didn’t? Yes. But that is too simple. Do you know why I acted like an arrogant prick at the beginning and announced my victory like it was a foregone conclusion? Because they need to believe in my strength. That I am powerful enough that they do not want to ever mess with me, and that they want to be on my side. Appearances matter, and if I had surrendered that would have all gone down the toilet.”
“I’ve given you two reasons why I didn’t surrender. They’re true, and I believe them, but the even truer reason is—I did it because that’s who I am. I always believe I can win, and I refuse to lose.”
“You can say that that’s stupid, and hell, looking at it I would sort of agree with you. But…," Zed sighed, “that’s just who I am.”
Laurel was crying and chose to say nothing.
Zed was sad himself at seeing her. “It seems like somehow or other I always make you cry around me. I’m sorry. I don’t want that for you. I love you and want to be with you, but if this is not what you want, I get it and certainly wouldn’t blame you.”
Crying, she asked, “Why does it always have to be your way? Why can’t it be a compromise?”
Zed grinned and said, “Well, being the elder in the relation…”
“STOP IT! Not everything should be turned into a joke, Zed!”
The grin melted off of his face and he said, “You’re right. I’m sorry. I agree that it’s not fair to you. For what it’s worth I do think about these things and try not to do stupid stuff. I didn’t do the challenge on a whim or to be cool. I did it to save humans, and elves, and dwarves, and ogrums, and gelatinous jelly monsters, and whatever the heck else is out there. And the truth is, I would do it again. Maybe my lack of compromise means I’m not ready to be married. I don’t know. All I know is, I will do whatever I have to to try and save my family.
“I want to marry you, have kids with you, and spend the rest of my life with you, but if this is all too much, I get it. Think about it, and let’s talk in a couple of days, okay?”
She nodded her head.
“Thanks for taking care of me," he said as he got up, walked over, and kissed her tenderly on the forehead. He then walked out of the room and the Naïlos’ home.
**
“Zed! How are you feeling?" Dan asked after Zed walked into the house.
“Great!" he said sarcastically as he held up his arm without a hand. “I’m missing a hand and my fiancée is dumping me.”
“Laurel? Ah, crap. I’m so sorry, Zed.”
“It’s alright. She may not be dumping me—we’re going to talk in a couple of days—but I’m pretty sure that I see the writing on the wall.”
“Well you may be a cripple, ugly as sin, and woman-less, but at least you’re filthy rich!”
“How much did we make?”
“Between the winnings and the bets, around 230,000 gold.”
“It’s a shame we didn’t have more to bet with, then we really could have cleaned up.”
“Yeah, but c’mon, Zed, 230,000 is nothing to sneeze at.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Sorry for being a downer.”
“No worries. You’ve more than earned it. Take some time to heal and decompress. And if you really do break up with Laurel I could have Annabelle set you up with someone.”
“I appreciate the thought, Dan, but I’ll pass. Like you were saying, I just want to rest for now.”
“No problem, just let me know if you need anything.”
“Will do.”
**
Zed did spend the two days resting and eating, and occasionally learning physics and chemistry from Iris. He had decided that Iris was right, having a solid background in the sciences was important for him to be able to understand and develop his mana abilities. Fortunately, it was noticeably easier now with his improved mental enhancements. It’s not that he was inherently smarter now. He just went through the same process he had before, but faster and with fewer headaches.
At the moment they were working on the physics of gasses. He had to admit that being able to think of direct applications of the things he learned made the lessons a lot more interesting.
‘You see how lucky you are to have me?’ Iris said.
‘Yes, you’re truly amazing, Iris.’
‘I can hear the sarcasm in your thoughts, you know.’
‘Of course I know. I wouldn’t have said it otherwise.’
‘Jerk. If I’m going to be your teacher we should bring back corporal punishment. I should be able to hit you with a ruler or something.’
‘If you figure out how to do that, let me know.’
‘Hmph.’
‘All joking aside, Iris, I am very glad to have you back, and thank you for taking the time to teach me.’
‘That’s better. And you’re welcome.’
On the appointed day Zed got ready to call upon Laurel and see what she had decided. He was nervous but also somewhat fatalistic.
‘It’s interesting to me that you refuse to lose in physical contests, but just kind of give up in your relationship.’
