PE 2: At Least It Isn’t Dodgeball

John put the thoughts about Frank’s unexpected absence, and speculations about how their inevitable next clash would go, out of his mind. He still had a Quest to complete, and about half of the PE class were people he hadn’t Observed yet today.

Since there was plenty of PE class left to use the spell on everyone in attendance, he didn’t bother prioritizing his targets and just fired away. Well, he still looked for danger symbols in their nameplates first, as he wasn’t keen on repeating the Wentworth Experience.

He found no Abyssals during his laps. A few people with more fancy-sounding titles had him check the counter on the Quest just to be sure, but they were just regular people with fancier titles.

The closest thing to a discovery was that his RP with Conroy was at a whopping -76, but that wasn’t all that surprising. It was well known that the coach had it out for nerds in general, and even among those, he was on John’s case more than anyone else’s in the class. Why that was, the Gamer had no clue. Maybe once he’d maxed out Observe it would tell him, but by then it probably wouldn’t matter to him anyway.

While John mused on that, the coach left briefly along with a pair of students in order to fetch supplies for whatever the class was getting put through next. Meanwhile, John took the time to check the rest of the class for Abyssals. He did find one too, though until he checked the Quest counter he wasn’t sure she actually was Abyssal, rather than just another one that looked Abyssal-ish but wasn’t.

Beth Gyrff
Lvl 10 Athlete
Wall Dancer
18 years old
RP -15
Guild: -
Guild Rank: -

The girl was a petite ravenette that John would have considered categorically small before meeting Qhila. Their body types were similarly bottom oriented as well, though Beth’s thighs looked more like firm muscle compared to the kobold’s squish and that probably went for her butt as well.

Attitude-wise, her pose seemed to display bored indifference. There might have been more to it than that, but with her back turned John couldn’t see her facial expression. In any case, he vaguely recalled her doing well in PE, especially track and field stuff, but seeming to not be a part of the sports cliques. That her ‘guild’ entries didn’t even show an athletic team or something seemed to support that.

Further thoughts on that were cut off by Conroy’s return. Based on the supplies in question, John knew what they were going to be doing before the coach even opened his mouth. ‘Yup, looks like long-’

“LISTEN UP, EVERYONE! We’re playing longball for the rest of class, so you’re being split into teams. I’m going to call out a list of names. Everyone named come over here, your team starts out batting. Everyone else starts in the field. JOHN NEWMAN.”

Conroy followed that up with calling for what was mostly the lower half of the class in terms of athleticism. If he was hoping to make the rest of John’s team hate him over getting dragged into a certain loss, that probably would have worked better if setting up one-sided matches like this wasn’t a regular occurrence. Similarly, any attempt to foster building dread in John over the team he was getting was undercut completely by it being so predictable.

It was only ‘mostly’ the lower half because when the coach did this, he stuck one or two athletic students in the loser mix. Usually, he went with loners or people from the less generally popular sports like the swim team or track and field. Presumably, the reason he did this was to deflect any criticism of unfairness if any parents ended up complaining.

As for why John was picked first and for the batting team, the answer was simple considering the game they would play. Longball was a game that the coach had picked up from God, or Gaia as it turned out, knew where, and it was a hybrid of sorts between dodgeball and baseball.

Aside from pitching rules that made things easier on the batter, it was mostly baseball-like. The dodgeball component came in via runners being rendered ‘out’ by someone on the field team throwing the ball at them and hitting. The runner then went back into the line of people waiting to bat.

By putting John’s team as the first batters and John in front of the batting line, Conroy maximized the amount of times where he would have the ball thrown at him. To make matters worse, getting hit with the ball stung worse than the dodgeballs for indoor use, and John wasn’t sure it wouldn’t come with a few points of damage.

Given his low HP from the fight with Frank, that could be a problem. The tooltip had said that running out meant whatever put him at 0 would leave him fatally injured if it was left untreated. How getting hit by a thrown ball would give him a life-threatening injury, he wasn’t certain. He was certain, however, that he did not want to find out.

John accepted the quest without hesitation, there was basically no reason not to. That still left the issue of actually pulling it off, though. Checking his health bar, it had ticked up from 6 to 7 since the end of the fight. How many hits that would equate to was unclear, but the punch Frank had thrown from a kneeling position during lunch had hurt more than a ball, so he could probably take at least one hit without failing.

On the topic of failing, the first step in his strategy here was to do just that at batting. It didn’t get him off the hook since he was just made to wait at the starting base until someone did hit the ball down the field. John would be wholly unsurprised if that was a deviation from the actual rules that Conroy had come up with so people couldn’t avoid being target practice that easily.

Still, it did mean that whenever the ball did get hit, he would have a fraction of a second more to run before the field team got a hold of it and could throw it at him. Once at the next base, he could just stop and be ‘safe’, in the sense that hitting him with the ball wouldn’t benefit the opposing team.

The batter following John did the same, though it was unclear if it was on purpose or just genuinely failing to hit the ball. In either case, he welcomed it as this meant more targets for the other team to choose from.

On the third batter’s third swing, the ball was finally struck. John launched into a full sprint immediately. Rather than even trying to pace himself, he simply trusted in his improved and buffed END to keep him going.

John was noticeably faster now, but less so than he had hoped. It was a lot less than the ~50% his STR had increased. No use complaining about that now, though, and he still made it nearly halfway to the next base and the safety it promised before the field team got hands on the ball.

The first throw was at John but from quite a distance. If he had tried this pace two days ago, he would’ve been in enough tunnel vision trying to will himself to continue by now that he wouldn’t notice the ball and thus be an easy target. Instead, he simply slowed down to a jog for a few moments and saw the ball pass in front of him.

Unfortunately, that also meant the ball was now behind him. Fortunately, the one who grabbed it was among Frank’s almost equally stupid flunkies, who prefaced his toss with yelling, “EAT THIS, NERDMAN!” John was now getting close to the base, so he just dove forward, hoping to go under the ball and into safety at first base at the same time.

The gambit succeeded, as confirmed by the jock swearing, and John got up just in time to see the guy who had been at the bat get hit in the shoulder. Taking a moment to calm his breath, John realized that that was actually a good thing for him, though less so for the team.

If his team got a total of three outs, they would go to the field immediately. And with overwhelming likelihood stay there until the next swap was **** by the clock. The faster his team went to field, now and whenever they were returned to batting, the less time John would spend in the line of fire.

Two more batters went without success. Both were girls and both were very obviously not making an effort. If John had been that obvious about intentionally failing, Conroy would’ve been yelling at him immediately. He always went easier on girls, though, so him letting this slide was no surprise.

The third batter practically shot the ball into the ground, effectively putting it right into the other team’s hands. The smart play there would probably be to either return the ball to the pitcher and send every runner back to the base they started at, or try to shoot an out on the batter who was close by. Instead, the girl who got it, one of the cheerleaders that had been jeering before, turned around and tried to shoot John with it.

Dodging that one wasn’t a problem, but the series of point blank throws that followed were. Two narrow dodges later, John was on the ground and unable to dodge the next one. He hadn’t even made it halfway to the next base.

-2 HP

Point blank hit, but at least he had managed to shield his face with his arms. That might have taken him to 0 HP otherwise. While the focus had been on him, the other runners had all made most of a base. The jocks made a half-hearted attempt at one of the other couch potatoes on John’s team, before everyone was safe at a base and they sent the ball back to the pitcher.

John returned to the back of the line waiting to bat. At least, the way things were going, John wasn’t actually gonna be up again before his team got its third out and were sent to field.

That prediction turned out to be correct, and John took a field position pretty far from the batter. It wouldn’t be the first time someone tried to shoot the ball at him, but like this it seemed a lot less likely.

As it turned out, taking the distant field position didn’t prevent it entirely, but he was far enough from the batter that the attempt to shoot him just let him catch the ball instead, making it something of an own goal. Not that it would matter.

John’s team’s stint in the field came to an end by the timer, as expected. John had kept time by checking the duration ticking down on his Enhance Muscle buff, which he also took the opportunity to refresh. Surprisingly, the coach actually did stick with the full time, instead of shortening it to get John and the other nerds in class back into the line of fire sooner. Maybe Conroy thought losing by a mile would feel humiliating. Which, to be fair, it had the first few times.

In any case, it was back to the front of the batting line. John knew from experience that being called up first made him the informal ‘team captain’, and trying to slink to the back of the line wouldn’t fly. Once, the coach had paused a game to make John spend 10 minutes failing to do 20 pushups over that ‘offense’.

John tried to deliberately fail batting again, but he still had to get close enough to hide that he wanted to miss. This time, he essentially missed the miss and ended up hitting the ball after all. Ironically, it ended up by far the longest shot he’d ever made as well. Not that ‘longest shot he’d ever made’ was a high bar.

He actually managed to get closer to safety at the base with this than the first time he ran. If he had had any confidence in his ability to do this consistently, it might be a better plan than flubbing on purpose.

The first throw at him was from far enough away to make dodging easy, but once again put the ball behind him and out of sight. Instead of trying to turn around to keep an eye on it, he just threw himself forward in something vaguely resembling a roll as soon as he got close enough to the base. He wasn’t sure if that was necessary or not, but he also didn’t really care.

It took two more batters before the ball was sent flying again, and this time one of the field players caught it in flight, meaning everyone just had to return to the base they had started at on that shot. As a result, a whole 4 people were waiting at the starting base when the next decent batting hit.

With the ball not instantly in the other team’s hands like before, John had a real chance at making the next base this time. That went even further when the first person to get the ball actually threw it at someone other than John.

Out of the corner of his eye, John noted the footballer, who had telegraphed a toss with a shout before, giving the other guy the stink eye over that. ‘If I still had any doubt that I’m extra shit listed, it would’ve just died…’

-3 HP

The ball hit John in the back more than a full second after he reached the base. In principle, there was supposed to be a rule against throwing at people who were safe at a base, but hoping that Conroy would enforce it in this case would be beyond naive.

It wouldn’t give the HP back anyway, nor put John in the temporary safety of being ‘out’, so ultimately he didn’t really care. What he did care about was making it to the end of class without being hit again, because the next one would empty his health bar.

Next up to bat was the team’s token athletic student, who was none other than Beth, taking her first swing. Between her disinterested attitude and a frame and athletic record that seemed mainly leg-focused, John wasn’t really expecting much.

Thus, when she proceeded to bat the best shot that was likely to come out of his team all game in her first try, John was quite surprised. He didn’t stand around to gawk for a moment, though, he just got running. Taking a beat to get moving was a mistake he probably couldn’t afford the one time he’d already made it.

‘Note to self: don’t judge Abyssals’ capabilities by their physique. Which really should’ve been obvious since I can basically double my strength for part of my body, and I’m not even a physical class… Actually, do I even have a class?’

He didn’t have time to check that now. After making it to the next base, he looked towards the ball and saw that it had gone past the people standing furthest afield, who were now running to get it.

Judging that to give him more time to run to the last base than the next successful batting was likely to provide, he pushed on. What would have been squarely beyond him a week ago was now only a moderate strain.

John made it all the way to the last base before the longshot trying to hit him came, and on account of it being a longshot it wasn’t hard to dodge. Thankfully, nobody was brazen enough to try for another, because John wasn’t sure even that would be blatant enough for the coach to intervene.

Predictably, his team accrued 3 outs before he was up to bat again. His second stint in field was even less eventful than the first, on account of no one even trying to shoot the ball at him this time, and like the last it went to time. Then it was back to batting, but between his first and second swing, the bell signifying the end of class rang.