“What the hell are you doing?”
“Exercise,” he replied.
“I can see that. Why?”
“Nothing else going on. I figure maybe if I do enough, I can pick up a couple of stamina proficiency points or something like that. Better than sitting on my ass stewing while I wait for this damned thing to start.”
“You really think that’s gonna make a difference?”
“It won’t hurt, and we’re gonna need everything we can get.”
She didn’t reply, but Craig jumped down out of the RV and made his way toward Pete, hunching down beside him and starting to do push-ups as well. Within a few moments, Torgo had joined the group, and the crowd was beginning to get behind the action, counting the number of push-ups and doubtless wagering on how high that number would get before Pete gave up.
>> PATENT REQUEST ACCEPTED: Don’t be a Dick slogan.
>> Standard royalty agreement ratified.
Pete ignored the message, focusing all of his attention on the task at hand. The truth was, trying to rack up a few proficiency points was only one reason why he’d decided to start exercising. The most important reason was that he needed to get his mind off his mother. He needed to focus on something else, to push himself physically so that there was no room for anything other than the straining of his muscles and the rhythmic inhaling and exhalation of breath.
“I don’t care if you do get a proficiency point out of that shit,” Sam said. “No way in hell you’re getting me to do push-ups.”
Pete grinned at that. The truth was, he’d never been fond of push-ups himself. He’d always been tall and well-built, but in his case, that meant holding a lot of muscle and lacking flexibility and stamina. In the short time the Dominion Ultrimax contest had been running, however, he noticed that his body was undergoing significant physical changes.
The heightened agility of his Penny Pincher class not only gave him new abilities; it changed his physiology, making him more nimble, flexible, and improving his athletic capabilities. He didn’t feel as though he’d lost any muscle; it was just that his movements were faster, smoother, and easier to control. He could also stretch and bend in ways he’d never been able to do before.
While he hadn’t put too many points into his Constitution attribute, it was also clear that his stamina had increased a good deal since the contest started. He could feel the blood pumping in his ears, could sense the straining of his muscles each time he lowered his body to the ground and then pushed himself up again. The familiar burning was still there, and he was beginning to labor with his breathing, but he’d already far outstripped his previous personal best.
“Forty-one! Forty-two!”
The crowd shouted the numbers excitedly as he continued pushing himself, ignoring the pain and discomfort and blocking out everything except the need to keep going.
“Forty-three! Forty-four!”
The world around Pete narrowed to a point, the slap of asphalt directly in front of his face as he continued to push himself up again and again. The truth was, he had no idea how far this new physique would go. He was already sensing that he wasn’t going to be able to continue much longer, but he’d decided to keep pushing through until he met failure.
>> ATHLETICS PROFICIENCY +1
>> STAMINA PROFICIENCY +1
Pete grinned, sweat pouring from his brow as he pushed himself onward.
“Fifty-two!”
He experienced an odd sense of calm in the middle of this intense burst of physical duress. Pete wasn’t sure whether this was a trait he’d already possessed, which had been heightened by his recent experiences, or if it had something to do with the Berserker sub-class, but he found that pain was no longer as crippling as it had once been. He still experienced pain, of course, but Pete found that he could push past it, forcing his body to continue on where he would have been forced to stop prior to the contest.
“Sixty-eight!”
As he continued to push, Pete’s mind drifted, and he wondered how effective increased proficiencies in areas like Constitution and Wisdom would be, given that he had comparatively low attribute numbers in those areas. Conversely, would a point in a proficiency that sat within the Agility attribute be more effective because of its higher number?
>> PAIN TOLERANCE PROFICIENCY +1
“Seventy-three!”
Pete was vaguely aware of Craig slumping to the ground beside him and then rolling onto his back. The little goblin laughed and soon joined Torgo as the pair watched Pete continue his marathon of pushups.
“Eighty-nine! Ninety!”
The pain continued to increase, and Pete was now breathing so hard that his whole body was shaking each time he drew breath. Sweat poured down his face, dripping off his nose and lips as his arms started to shake and the muscles in his back began to seize up.
“One hundred and three!”
He kept pushing, wondering whether it would be possible to drive himself to exhaustion or whether his muscles would conk out before then.
>> STAMINA PROFICIENCY +1
He gritted his teeth, hissing with each shove of his arms, his wrists and fingers aching, body screaming for relief. Time seemed to blur as he continued pushing. His vision blurred, and numbness crept into the extremities of his limbs, but Pete kept pushing, kept driving himself to exhaustion.
The sound of the crowd shouting in the background drifted away, as did the sight and sounds of everything else going on around him. Pete felt a strange moment of peace, as though he’d temporarily been drawn out of his own body. The pain and fatigue fell away in an instant, and he found himself frozen in time, hovering above his body mid-pushup.
He looked around, thinking that he had been pulled out of the game by the System for some infraction or to announce some new betting stakes. Instead, the world was frozen around him. He could see Sam, Coop, and Grizzle watching from the RV while Craig and Torgo stood next to his body, frozen with fists in the air as they cheered him on.
“Nero? Is this like when I was fighting the Goblin Scrapers? Some kind of time freeze while the System offers me something new?”
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There was no reply.
“Nero?”
Nothing.
Pete tried to move his disembodied self toward the RV, wondering whether he’d be able to make contact with Sam or Coop.
“Guys? Can you hear me?”
No matter how he tried, Pete couldn’t move. He was simply hovering a foot or so above his own body, lying prone with his arms and legs outstretched as though he were skydiving.
“Guys?!”
Suspended in the sudden silence, Pete wondered whether this was some kind of Neo-Matrix scenario. Perhaps by pushing himself so far with the pushups, he managed to break through a simulated reality or to shatter the game itself? That didn’t do him much good while he was hovering above his other self with no one apparently able to communicate with him and no way for Pete to influence the game or the world around him.
“What kind of bullshit Neo nonsense is this?” he mused, trying once more to move himself to the side and failing.
A troubling thought arose as he hung there suspended in stasis. How long was this going to last? What if he were stuck like this for hours, days? He figured he wouldn’t starve, seeing as he seemed to be separated from his physical body. But what would three days hanging here do to his mind, let alone two weeks, or a year?
Mild panic began to rise, but before it could settle in, Pete was thrust unceremoniously back into his body. Pain reasserted itself, and he grunted with effort, muscles straining as he held himself just a few inches off the ground.
“Two hundred and five!” the crowd roared, screaming in glee.
Two hundred?
That made no sense. He’d just passed the hundred mark when he’d been taken out of his body, and Pete had already been at the point of failure. He had no memory of completing another hundred pushups, but it now occurred to him, as he struggled to hold his body above the ground, that Craig and the others had shifted position. Sam was out of the RV too, along with Coop. He could see the fluffy ferret’s feet a little to his left.
The sound of a honking horn coming from somewhere behind drew everyone’s attention, along with the screeching of tires. Pete let himself fall to the ground and rolled onto his back as the beeping horn sounded once more.
Sweat covering his face and obscuring his vision, Pete lay with his chest rising and falling, blood thrumming in his ears as a cacophony of aches and pains throbbed throughout his body.
“Must be the other drivers,” he heard Sam say. “Come on, Pete. You’ve had your fun. We need to get our asses in gear now.”
Pete accepted Craig’s hand as the goblin helped him get to his feet. In a way, that one act was more impressive than the pushups, and he felt an urgent need to vomit as he stood upright. Thankfully, he managed to suppress that need as the crowd shouted his new name.
“Vault Breaker! Vault Breaker!”
He turned and nodded in the direction of the toad creatures, all of whom wore “Don’t be a Dick” merchandise. With a titanic effort, he raised a hand in their direction, and the group practically exploded with delight, their throats swelling and shifting to a bright pink color in response.
>> ACHIEVEMENT: The Push up Punisher!
Congratulations! You just did more than two hundred pushups in a row, impressing everyone within sight and proving to those schoolyard bullies that you really are one impressive specimen. Will it help in a fight? Maybe not. Will it help you survive the Dominion Ultrimax Contest and secure a place for your people within the Dominion? Doubtful.
But it turns out folks are super excited about watching some dude perform repetitive exercises in the middle of the road for no real reason.
ACHIEVEMENT REWARD: Constitution +1
Pete frowned, too exhausted to speak. His right arm started to spasm, and his body slowly recovered.
[Nero] A Constitution point! That is truly an unexpected reward, Pete. I have never before seen the System allocate a full attribute point for an achievement like that.
He was unable to reply. All of Pete’s focus was on continuing to draw in as much oxygen as he could manage without heaving. He hunched over, hands on his knees as Craig patted him on the back.
“Well done, Pete. It seems that your hunch was correct. Torgo and I both picked up proficiency points in stamina, and I gained another point in athletics. It seems that you have been rewarded even further.”
Pete pushed himself upright and started pacing around. He gave Craig a thumbs up and turned to watch as two approaching vehicles came more clearly into focus. One was a plain black sedan, and the other was much smaller and painted with bright pink and blue colors.
While he gathered his breath and watched the oncoming vehicles, Pete wondered what he had experienced a moment before coming back to reality. He wondered whether that strange moment of stasis, where he seemed to move beyond reality, had somehow influenced the System into giving him that full point in Constitution. The question that followed was whether the System, and the Tongsly Belch Corporation by extension, knew about what had just happened.
“Jesus, that’s a Mini Cooper,” Sam said, squinting as the cars came into view.
The two vehicles drove up beside the RV. As Sam had suggested, one was a brightly colored Mini Cooper with swaths of vivid pink and blue painted on its exterior in an abstract pattern. The other was a beat-up old Ford Crown Victoria with dark, tinted windows, which looked like it was made in the nineties.
>> RACE COMMENCES IN SIXTY SECONDS
>> RULES ARE AS FOLLOWS.
Sam grabbed Pete by the arm and pulled him toward the RV as the rest of the group piled inside. He had caught only a fleeting glance of the Mini Cooper driver and had seen a middle-aged bald man with a long beard and a grim expression. The figure hadn’t looked at Pete or any of his group as the Mini moved up to the starting line but had just stared straight ahead.
+| Vehicles must stick to the highlighted racetrack. Each time your vehicle passes over the boundary lines, you will be penalized.
+| Vehicles must not hit any obstacles or make physical contact with other vehicles.
+| Players must not directly damage rival vehicles.
+| Players must not exit their vehicles for more than 30 seconds for the duration of the contest.
+| Vehicles must not be stationary for more than five seconds.
+| Specters cannot be dispelled by magic or any other means. If a player encounters a specter, they must endure possession for the period that specter is allotted.
Pete settled into his seat, frowning over at Sam as she started the RV’s engine.
“What the fuck are specters?”
She shrugged. “Some new bullshit way to mess with us. That’s not our biggest problem, though.” She nodded toward the cars sitting to the right of the RV. “Both of those are gonna be much faster than us, and if we let them get ahead, we’re not gonna be able to chase them down.”
The area map hovering between them zoomed into a racetrack view, showing a snaking track that led from their current position to the Novice Arena entrance, which was marked with a checkered flag.
“A lot of twists and turns,” Sam went on. “That’s gonna favor the Mini. But either way, both of them will smoke us in the straights.”
+| Obstacles can either be traversed or skipped. For each skip, your vehicle will be slowed down for a certain amount of time [10 to 30 seconds]. Avoiding more hazardous obstacles will incur a longer penalty.
The map disappeared from the screen hovering above their dashboard and was replaced by a cartoon view of a blue car driving over a ramp and through a shallow pool of water. The view shifted again, showing a top-down view where a red car and another blue car approached the same obstacle and where the red car skirted around it while the blue car went through. The red car then slowed to a crawl as the blue car shot off.
>> Each time a penalty is awarded, a coin will be flipped to determine whether the punishment is delivered to you or your princess.
The screen showed a large Belch Buck flipping end over end, then landing on one side, which showed a vehicle. When the animation repeated, it showed an image of a figure tied to a chair dangling over a pool of acid.
>> PLAYER PENALTIES:
+| - 1000 Belch Bucks.
+| Temporary Blindness.
+| Vehicle Swap: In the event that two vehicles are penalized at the same time, players may be swapped from one vehicle to another.
>> PRINCESS PENALTIES:
+| 2-inch drop.
+| 5-inch drop.
+| Acid eels are added to the acid vat (risk of causing acid splashing).
“Shit!” Sam barked. “We’re gonna have to play this one really carefully and hope to hell that these other bozos screw up really bad.”
Pete nodded. “Maybe that’s the play here? Instead of trying to drive as fast as we can, we concentrate on passing through all the obstacles and not getting any of the penalties.”
The sound of revving engines drew their attention to the Mini Cooper on their right.
Coop snorted. “I don’t think the others will be going slow and steady. And I wouldn’t believe that nonsense about the Tortoise and the Hare.”
Sam smirked. “Yeah, Aesop was a moron.”
The television in the rear cabin of the RV turned on at that moment, miraculously still operational despite the damage the vehicle had incurred. A sharp, grating voice spoke, and the voice was also channeled directly into Pete’s ears.
[Kraggle] Greetings, race fans! Welcome to the first of what will hopefully be many racing challenges in this season of the Dominion Ultrimax Contest. I’m Kraggle “Hot-Gob” Harnak, here to bring you a blow-by-blow account of the race, but before we get started, here’s a quick word from our sponsor.
The map display in front of Pete and Sam, the television in the back of the RV, and each of the hovering screens up ahead that showed Pete’s mother and the other “princesses” were replaced by an advert while details were blasted at high volume.