Chapter 7: Read the Note

Twenty minutes came and went in a flash. Punisher agreed to call his wife, and I got to hear all the mushy love between the two. It was a nice and wholesome thing to experience, but I had already seen years of that before returning to the past, so I was a bit calloused towards it. I spent all the time Punisher was talking to his wife finishing a last-minute note to hand off to him when we got transported. Twenty minutes was more than enough to give Punisher plenty of notes he'd need for his survival in the Verdant Abyss.

The note read:

Hey Punisher, first things first. You still owe me for At'tak Crushface, and now you owe me for this. I'll explain to you later why I know everything about the Five Seasons, but for now, just read up. I know you pretty well, and I know for a fact that you have a gun on you at all times. Right now, I know you have a M1911A1 that you got from your father strapped to you at this very moment. You might be asking yourself, "How the fuck do you know that when I've never told you?" Well, the short answer is, "Fuck you, I'll tell you later, you still owe me for At'tak Crushface. He was level 60, and I spent seven months of my life with energy drink IV's attached to me in order to max him out." Now that I got that out of my system, here's the list of things you need to know to improve your survival:

1. Everyone will spawn alone at the start and will have to find their way around the Verdant Abyss until they group up with other humans. You'll get the thing I called the system and explained to you earlier. It's useful and will give you a list of objectives to earn points for Earth's survival. Don't follow the objectives, just survive. I know a way to cheat our victory for the first season. I know I'm an asshole for not playing fair.

2. There will be other races in the forests. I want you to think of our enemies as orcs and elves, but their real races are the Veldan and the Alorae. The Veldan are green-skinned, 7 feet tall, and terrifyingly muscular. They also have blue eyes that can detect heat signatures, so don't even try to hide because you're going to be fucked. The Alorae are like witches, they use magic. They're also really beautiful, with pale white skin and vibrant green eyes. They'll make you think that they're friendly when they really aren't. Shoot first, don't let either of them get close.

3. The forest is filled with monsters, hunt small at first. Your first kill needs to be a headshot, and you'll be rewarded with a legendary skill that no one will ever be able to get in the first season because you are one of less than a dozen people in the Verdant Abyss with a gun. If you don't get a headshot kill, you'll still get a rare gun-related skill, but you're going to want that legendary one because I'll be roasting you hard if you miss that shot.

4. Use your compass to travel as far east as possible. This alien world has a north and south pole, just like Earth, so your compass will work just fine. Pull out the radios we got, they have a 6-mile range. Check in every half hour till you hear me, we'll meet up inside. I expect it shouldn't take more than a day or two to find each other. I have a lot of plans.

5. Last but not least: Fuck you and I'll see you tomorrow. Hopefully.

With the note done, I checked my watch to see what time it was. It was 11:58, which meant that I had to get the note in Punisher's hand right away. I folded the handwritten note, walked over to Punisher, and signaled for him to finish his chat with his wife.

"Okay, okay... Hey, babe, I've gotta go. Ronan's back..."

"Yes, I know..."

"Okay..."

"Yes, I'll get that done too."

"Alright, I'm going now. I love you."

Punisher hung up the phone and put it in his pocket. When he turned to face me, I held out the folded note, and he took it.

"Well, Punisher, we probably have less than thirty seconds left before we disappear. Got any last words?"

Punisher looked a bit worried, which I was happy to see. He was, at least somewhere in his mind, believing the crazy stuff I was warning him about. "I don't know, Ronan. I guess I just hope that you're fucking with me and we're actually just going camping later."

"I wish that was the case."

I looked at my phone and checked a timer that I had set. We had exactly ten seconds left on the clock, so I did the one thing I had wanted to do ever since I woke up from my unplanned nap before coming to the mall.

"Hey Punisher, I have something really important to tell you. I buried the treasure under the..."

And at that moment, I felt the familiar stretching feeling of my body being pulled upward. It was what I would expect a hamster to feel if they were flushed down a toilet, except in this case I was the hamster and the toilet was some kind of super-advanced technology that was warping my body from one location in the universe to another location somewhere billions of miles away. This was the sixth time I had experienced this feeling, but only the first time I had experienced it since I had returned to the past.

The feeling came and went, and there I was again, back in the Verdant Abyss.

"Alright. I'm ready to kick ass and chew bubblegum."

I paused for a moment, smiled, then pulled a pack of gum out of my pocked. After I unwrapped the gum and put it in my mouth, I whispered to myself, "...and I'm all out of ass."