Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 56: Event

Isaac had been sprinting through the forest at top speed, moving so fast and pounding his feet into the ground with such force that he had to actively step on roots and push off them, ordinary dirt being thrown away like feathers in the face of a hurricane and sending him flying as he stepped on it. His shoes hadn’t survived the ordeal particularly well either, so he’d phased out of them after maybe ten seconds of running.

Normally, he ran through these woods free of care and full of exuberance, enjoying the freedom that came with cutting loose. This, this was desperate sprint, a race against time as he tried to get to the lab as quickly as possible, to try and reduce the impact of this new situation as much as possible.

Then his mana hit full again and he jumped, activating [Poltergeist’s Flight] and accelerating himself by using the sword throwing trick once again. This time, he’d even somewhat figured out how to control the spin of that movement, turning into something closer to the side-to-side waving motion of skating, still chaotic, but he was quite a bit better at this than before, not that it really mattered right now.

His second ‘flight’ allowed him to reach the university campus and he deactivated the [Skill], falling straight towards the building in which they worked. It was probably locked, but he wasn’t aiming for one of the doors anyway. One brief phase later, and his naked soles were sliding along the linoleum floor with a painful squeak. He took a couple of steps to the side and dropped through the floor, plopping straight into the meeting room and sitting down. No one was here yet, but that was alright, it gave him a couple of minutes to think.

First of all, there was the small issue of XP, namely, where to put it. He’d been planning to stockpile it and stay at Level 16 for a while, grinding [Skill]-Levels, Aspects and then spending them all in one big burst once he was ready to evolve, but the situation had changed now. In all likelihood, there would be at least one major incident close enough for him to be able to help, and he needed to be in his best shape for that.

Also, he’d be fighting new and unfamiliar foes for the first time in … he wasn’t actually sure. It certainly had never happened in this timeline. When he was fully aware of an enemy’s capabilities, tactics and temperament, he was perfectly willing to go at it underlevelled, but doing the same to a completely new opponent … bad idea. Capital B Bad Idea.

Over thirty-two thousand experience points vanished into the ether as he levelled, netting him eighty Stat points in a single go, which he promptly spent. Five went into Fortitude and ten into Magic Power, bringing them both up to fifty. Fifteen into Strength to bring the Stat that had been lagging behind somewhat back in line with everything else. Another ten points went into Magic Regeneration to increase his ability to fight continuously for a long time, while his main Stats of Agility and Perception were each increased by twenty points.

His body shuddered at the suddenness of the increase, the single biggest number of Stat points he’d ever used at once being applied in less than five seconds. It was incredibly uncomfortable, but the feeling passed quickly.

As long as he applied common sense to what he summoned, even unfamiliar creatures should be easy enough to handle, right?

And then something else dawned on him, horror flooding his veins like liquid nitrogen, a burning cold feeling that sapped both strength and will. Something had clearly been changed in the [System], given the Event that was currently happening hadn’t taken place in the other timeline. Who was to say that other things hadn’t been changed as well? Little alterations that wouldn’t change them in major ways, but still be enough to trip him up, or a complete overhaul whose end result still fit the meaning of the name while completely negating his other timeline knowledge.

… and then Isaac facepalmed, his hand blurring through the air with enough speed to generate a noticeable gust of wind. Loki had said they hadn’t been … and he’d also been right on the money about Isaac having had everything he needed to figure that out as well.

There were a few people in the world who could make or break humanity’s struggle for survival, people who’d have an outsized impact on the course of history. Therefore, anything targeting those people would be a large-scale alteration, making it something neither side wanted to risk. Who knew what kind of advantage could be wrung from a blank check for a decent sized divine intervention? And Isaac was one of those people.

There was only one man who’d get tripped up by monsters getting altered before they were first summoned, and he was immune to divine meddling.

Something that might be possible was simply removing monsters or [Skills] that he wanted to get from the [System] entirely, or making obvious changes on the off chance that that might interfere with some plans he might have made, but that would have to be made obvious. Isaac resolved to be super careful and pay careful attention to each and every menu he came across. But hidden alterations that would trip up him and only him were impossible, the god’s own rules said so.

And as far as his plans went, he was the only one who knew them and while he’d told Loki plenty, it was nowhere near enough to betray his attentions. Hacking out parts of the [System] wholesale in the hopes that he’d needed one or more of the removed parts was an option, but not a very good one. It could very well utterly ruin any and all of his carefully laid plans, but even if it turned out to be a relatively cheap option, balance wise, given that he wasn’t being targeted directly, making such largescale changes would essentially allow for the world to be saved in one giant Deus-Ex-Machina and that was the end of that.

No, his divine foes would be forced to sit still and wait patiently to see if humanity’s darker instincts brought it to extinction, only able to make tiny alterations.

That was actually kind of pathetic, Isaac reflected. He might be a mere mortal, but he could do whatever he wanted as long as he could whether the consequences. The gods, meanwhile, powerful as they were, couldn’t. They did one thing and were then forced to wait for their enemies to react, unable to prevent whatever move they were about to make, until they could do anything. Even neutral gods like Loki were trapped by the limitations of their domain, forced to commit evil to even out any good they did and vice versa, all within their narrow slice of reality.

Even as weak as he was compared to them, he was free. Not just free to do what he wanted, but also free from any kind of direct interreference. Something that affected him peripherally might be fine, but anything that was specifically aimed to include him in the targeted group, area, or category was not. Or at least not if his foes wanted to still have any chance at victory.

This current mess was a fine example of the former, screwing him over not specifically, but as a member of the human race as a whole. Nasty, nasty business.

Yet despite that, Isaac could feel a familiar excitement bubble up from the very center of his soul. A new foe to fight, to discover, to overcome. No matter how bad this might be for the world, a part of him found it incredibly invigorating.

Isaac shook his head quickly, as if that could banish the dark thoughts. Well, they weren’t dark per se, but incredibly inappropriate. Time to get his head in the game. He pushed himself to his feet and strode over to the store room, the Event’s summoning list open in front of him so he could see what they could summon, what was the easiest to summon and would therefore have to be a priority and so on and so forth.

For a brief moment, he also looked over at his Status sheet and noticed just how many [Skill] points he had and decided to grab a few new ones.

The first one, [Fleeting Presence], wouldn’t really help him with the situation at hand, but he’d been eyeing it for a while, so he decided to go ahead and grab it.

Fleeting Presence (epic)

There one moment, gone the next. Completely gone.

This Skill tells the user how to erase all traces of their presence, such as footprints, avoid breaking branches and trampling shrubs.

However, it also stops the user from shedding all the usual traces that all humans leave behind, such as skin and hair cell.

It also prevents the oils found on human fingers from leaving behind fingerprints, though it will not prevent fingerprints from appearing if the user were to touch a material that is easily imprinted upon, such as soft wax, putty or a heavy layer of dust.

The second one was considerably more useful, and also a hell of a lot nastier. Fights during which he used it heavily tended to end with the enemy blind, lame and crippled, a miserable existence whose end might even be a mercy. But sometimes, picking an enemy apart piece by bloody piece was the only way to win.

Crippling Blow (epic)

Striking down a target with a single attack is the sign of a truly excellent Assassin or other stealth based combat Class.

But sometimes, that simply isn’t possible. A foe is too large, too good at regenerating, or simply has more than one point that needs to be targeted in order to kill it. And that’s where this Skill comes in.

Activating this Skill will cripple any mechanism, biological, mechanical or magical, that the user touches and can be projected through armor or hide at a length of up to 5 cm, increasing by 1 cm per Skill Level. This requires the user to focus on the specific thing they want to disrupt (i.e. sensory organs to impede perception, limbs to slow down movement, natural weapons to reduce offensive power, etc.). By default, this Skill is very painful, but that can be increased to near-crippling levels for a slight increase in cost.

Cost: 20 mana per use minimum, can be increased up to 100 to affect powerful enemies or tough body parts

Really, it wasn’t a very nice [Skill], but it was also going to be damn useful.

It was designed for use against bosses and the like, with [Hunter’s Gaze] helping to identify the best spots to target with this [Skill]. Back when he’d actually known the anatomy of basically all his foes, he’d have been able to achieve the same goal with his existing [Strike]-type [Skills], but that no longer held true. Now, the sheer convenience and ease of use [Crippling Blow] provided trumped the need to save a few [Skill] points. Though save the rest he did. During the first two [Classes], up to Level 25, each Level gave three [Skill] points. This would drop to 2 per Level for the third [Class] and then finally to 1 per Level from that point onwards. If he needed to spend the points he would, but having some left over was still incredibly important.

Name: Isaac Thoma

Class: Undying Wraith

Species: Human

Level: 24

XP: 1,524/5,000

Health Status: Healthy

Mana: 387/500

Stats

Fortitude

50

Perception

65

Strength

45

Agility

70

Magic Power

50

Magic Regeneration

60

Free Points: 0 Stat, 19 Skill

Central Skills

Form of Horror XIII

The Chosen Weapon XVI

Skills

Hundred Faces XIV

Stealth XIV

Power Strike XXII

Piercing Strike XXIV

Sundering Strike XXII

Blades XXIII

Sneak XVII

Sweeping Strike IX

Far Strike XVII

Manifold Strike XV

Hunter’s Gaze XVII

Phantom Step XIII

Unknown Fear IX

Bestial Regeneration IX

Undying Focus IV

Tools of Terror VIII

Fleeting Presence I

Crippling Blow I

General Skills

Gralloch IX

Alchemy VII

Aspects

Aspect Skills

Poltergeist (2 stack)

Poltergeist’s Flight

Poltergeist Shift

Hydra (2 stack)

Hydra’s Regeneration

Redundant Organs

Dunkleosteus

Gills

Still, his Status sheet was looking nice. A little bare on the Aspect front, but that was perfectly fixable. And hewould be, before evolving, if he had any say in the matter. There were a few he certainly had an eye on, but he still needed to go ahead and grab them.

That was guaranteed to be a pain, though. There was a solid increase in Aspect drops when fighting higher Level monsters, and other than that bonus going away, there was no decrease when going up against lower Level enemies. However, the 5 percent overall drop rate for Tier 5 monsters was going to make getting arduous. Then again, his current powerlevel was high enough that he could simply tear through his foes at high speed, making up for the reduced drop rate with the sheer volume of slain monsters.

Isaac was now standing in the storage room and rooting through it, picking out all the materials necessary to summon all the monsters up to Tier 5. Realistically, that would be all anyone would summon, and if they went above it, well, Tomahawk or equivalent missile time.

No one knew this yet, but the first five Tiers were taking it easy. All of the monsters should be beatable by a human of the same Level, barring a supremely bad matchup like Ephemeral vs. physical fighter or Lesser Space Elemental vs. anything other than a [Spatial Mage].

That no longer necessarily held true from Tier 6 onwards. Some monsters, without even being bosses, needed multiple people of a similar Level to defeat, never mind the actual bosses, all of which were at least at that Tier.

Lastly, there was a significantly greater range of possible Levels at that point. Tiers 1 through 5 covered twenty-five Levels. Tier 6 alone covered twenty. Once people broke into summoning those kinds of monsters, there would be hell to pay. But given that people had barely started summoning Tier 5s after the LA disaster, hopefully not even this gods-damned Event would prompt someone to go for a Tier 6. And if they were willing to risk it, then nothing he could do about it except spit on their grave.

For him, in this current situation, summoning a monster that powerful just so he might be able to warn some utter, weapons-grade nitwit, who probably wouldn’t bother to check for any information prior to summoning anyway. It would barely help matters and put the entire team in incredible danger, even him.

Isaac soon realized that almost all of the Event monsters could be summoned by basic materials, which, in hindsight, actually made a hell of a lot of sense. After all, the point was to push people to summon recklessly and forcing them to search for a bunch of super hard to get and expensive materials might prevent them from doing so, or at the very least give them the time to think about what they were doing.

Then he checked their current stock of those materials and as it turned out, they had everything, though their stores of various accelerants were lower than he’d like. A recent experiment with teaching the [System Researchers] various fire Elementals’ flame control abilities had depleted them and most of the monsters belonging to the Event required them.

On the other hand, a lot of things counted as ‘accelerant’. Disinfectant, booze, gasoline … so plundering one of the many chemistry labs on campus or doing a run to the gas station would quickly and easily solve the supply situation.

Finally, Isaac began to create plans on what monsters to summon. Start with a Tier 3 and scan it with his [Hunter’s Gaze] to see if its stats were comparable to a non-Event Tier 3, then head on from there. Those monsters should be weak enough to definitively beat, but high enough that he could sense something about its stats other than ‘pathetically weak’. After all, [Hunter’s Gaze] only told him where their Stats relative to his, rather than hard numbers.

Suddenly, his phone chimed and he whipped it out to see a message from Bailey. It was actually located in the research group’s chat and it told them all to head to the site of the new building that was being constructed, a building which, as far as Isaac could remember, wouldn’t be finisher for three months, minimum.

Isaac left the building the same way he’d entered it, a gigantic leap in an intangible state, followed by a rapid run across campus. Seeing it at night was somewhat surreal, the normally well-lit and bustling roads and paths dark and dreary, utterly devoid of life. He left behind the ‘core’ part of the campus, containing the canteen, main lecture hall and the like after five seconds, heading out through the scattered greenhouses and other agricultural research buildings. Orchards, immense flower gardens, the campus really was beautiful, wasn’t it? He’d simply never truly paid attention to it all.

And then he’d arrived, at the edge of the campus, where the bones of a truly gigantic building rose. A two-hundred meter by two-hundred meters mess of concrete and steel girders, surrounded in a basic construction fence with a pair of large cranes rising right inside the perimeter. The base for the building was completed, but they hadn’t even started with everything above ground. Isaac also caught sight of Bailey, standing on the concrete, so he hopped the fence just like the professor must have done.

“Hey Adam, what are we doing here?” he asked.

“I’d hoped to show you this building while it was completed, but then this happened and we need the summoning areas. They’re the large boxes in the corners of the building. While we wait for the others to get here, I’d like you to go ahead and draw out the summoning circles, do your own analysis of what should be summoned and retrieve the summoning supplies.” Bailey said, tossing him a ring of keys.

“Actually, I have a solution for the resource situation.” Isaac said, withdrawing the inscribed Lesser Space Elemental Core he always carried with him in case of emergency and triggering it.

Several more cores, a dozen in all, dropped out of the sky and Isaac pulled the bottom of his shirt forward, catching them all in it.

“I figured out how to kill a Lesser Space Elemental. You can use one of these to create a dimensional storage you can access from anywhere within fifty meters of where you summoned it, or you can access it from afar by spending an inscribed core. If someone creates their space here, we can then move 27 cubic meters of stuff for every core we spend, and I have a bunch.”

“I’ll do that once everyone is there. I …”

“Hey Adam, hey Mr. Thoma.” a new voice called out, followed by an older man in his fifties or sixties going over the fence with a flying leap. He also had a crossbow and quiver strapped to his back, as well as a large hunting knife attached to his belt, all clearly enhanced with [Skills]. An aura streamed off him, feeling like wilderness, blood, patience, danger, echoing with the twang of a bowstring and the thump of a falling body. It really was quite fascinating how different scanning basic and evolved [Classes] using [Hunter’s Gaze] felt, but regardless, the man was clearly some kind of evolved [Hunter].

There were also two Aspects present, one once having belonged to some kind of very dangerous large cat, the other having been sourced from some kind of very large serpent.

“Good evening Professor Bishop.” Isaac greeted him “I see you’ve levelled. Are you here to help?”

“I am, Professor Bailey called me. Apparently you all expect there to be a wave of panicked summoning as people see the great treasures promised by this even disappear before their very eyes?” Bishop sighed “You’re probably right about that, but the chances of you actually preventing anything are slim. Can’t fix stupid, sadly.”

“I’m going to try, though.” Isaac shrugged, then tossed the older man another Lesser Space Elemental Core. He liked the Forestry Professor well enough, and could appreciate his attitude towards risk taking as well as life and death. Not fatalistic, but realistic and accepting.

“That’s a Lesser Space Elemental Core, you can use it to get a dimensional storage space.”

“Huh, thank you.” Bishop inclined his head “So, what are we doing?”

“I’m waiting here for the rest, you’re checking the summoning list and seeing what you think might be best to summon, and Isaac is getting the circles ready.” Bailey said.

Isaac took this as his cue to leave, heading down into the guts of the building via the half-open staircase. It split into four corridors, one in each cardinal direction, once it reached the bottom. Some basic signs drawn out in spray paint clearly denoted where certain things were meant to go. In the middle of each corridor, on the right side, a massive metal door was located, leading into what was likely the summoning room. No other doors were on the same wall, but the opposite one was lined with normal office doors.

He could even spot several that had the sign ‘office of Professor Bailey’s team’ put on there. Clearly, there was a summoning room in each corner, accessible from one side via the corridor, two other sides facing the outside and the last one being lined with offices and conference rooms, connected to a different corridor.

Isaac decided to just go ahead and pick the summoning room opposite to what was likely his future office, slid the key Bailey had given him into the lock and pulled it open. The door was heavy. Fine for him, but a hell of a lot heavier than any normal door, not even the solid steel doors that held shut the cabinets for explosive chemicals. It was at least a meter thick and strongly reminded him of the ones that guarded the crown jewels in the Tower of London, which he’d once seen while on vacation, years ago. But that was besides the point.

Seriously though, these doors would have withstood an attack from many Tier 5 and functionally all Tier 4 monsters even if they’d been just normal, ordinary and mundane. But they weren’t. They’d been reinforced with every [Skill] available to the [Architect], [Construction Workers], [Steel Mill Foreman], and so on. Mind you, not just the ones they’d had before, but the University had paid each of those people to select every reinforcing [Skill] their [Class] had available and infuse them into his building. And then Karl, wielder of an epic magic and engineering [Class] at Level 20 the last Isaac had seen the man, had thrown everything he could have at it. You could set of a bomb against this door and barely leave a scratch, and the rest of the building was built to the same standard.

Isaac slowly trailed his hand along the smooth metal for all of two seconds before he hurried in and drew Old Reliable in its knife form. The places where the circles were meant to be chiseled into the ground had already been outlined in spray pain. They lined the far end of the room, on the opposite side of the door.

He hurried over, wreathed his blade in [Piercing Strike] and began to make smooth, straight cuts to carve circles for Tier 2, 3 and 4 into the ground. Then the headed outside and drew a Tier 5 circle on the ground of the corridor in front of Bailey’s future office with a sharpie.

Then he headed back outside, where he saw Bishop was gone, but Karl was there, talking animatedly with Bailey.

“Hey Adam, I have a nice list of monsters which should give us good information on what’s going on, carved circles into the summoning room opposite our future offices and prepared a circle for you to get your Extradimensional Pocket with.” he reported.

“Right, I’ll do that in a second.” Bailey said, then turned back to Karl “So basically, what you want are as many material samples as possible out of this because you’re fairly certain you can replicate them using your [Class]? I don’t see a problem with that, once we’ve figured out as many traps in this Event as possible. Isaac, do you have your suggested summons yet?”

“Yeah. I thought we’d try with an average Tier 3, then we can use our various versions of [Inspect] to check if it has Stats and magical abilities in line with what we can normally expect form its Tier. Then we can repeat that with a few others, possibly branching out into other Tiers to see if we need to be any more careful than we normally are.” Isaac suggested.

“That was my thinking as well, but I think we should start at Tier 1, let’s not take any risks. This entire thing makes my skin crawl, it feels like Patrick was right on the money about this whole thing having been created with malicious intentions.” Bailey sighed.

“Unfortunately, if a monster is far stronger or weaker than me, all I can tell about its Stats is that they’re very high or very low.” Isaac shook his head.

“Fine, Tier 2, but no higher for the first summon.” Bailey told him, then swore under his breath.

“I brought as many summoning materials as I could carry.” Professor Bishop called out, running over with a wheelbarrow full of stuff as well a stuffed backpack on his back.

“Thanks. Can you wait up here for a few more minutes until the others arrive, point them our way?” Bailey called back, receiving a nod in reply, and then hurried down the stairs at a rapid pace. Suspiciously rapid. Someone with his stats should have fallen down them in a heartbeat, but handily survived the impact even if it happened to be skull-first.

Isaac grinned inwardly. Bailey was just as adamant about not modifying others as always, but clearly, he’d changed things about himself. The [Skills’] use was not visible to [Hunter’s Gaze] as they were only used during the alteration process and were now inactive, which was interesting. He’d have to watch out for that in the future, it could be used to easily conceal a certain level of power from his sight. Sure, at some point, the alterations would be significant enough to be visible from the outside, no [Skills] needed, but everything up to that point? Dangerously hard to spot.

The ritual of getting Bailey his Extradimensional Pocket flew by in a flash, followed by the Professor goggling at the new [System] tab for a moment, but then he entered the summoning room and closed the door behind them. Pulling out a few odds and ends from his jacket pockets, he headed over to the Tier 2 circle and readied the summon.

“I’m calling a Dwarf Solar Dragon. You guys ready?” he asked, receiving two nods in return “Isaac, you’re the toughest one, try and keep it off us without getting hurt in turn. I’ll heal, Karl, your priority is limiting its movement. We’re all smart people, I trust we can figure out when to deviate from those roles and when to stay within their constraints, but in essence, let’s do this like we talked about before.”

Isaac nodded “Sure.”

They had talked about some basic tactics if they were ever in a fight together, but this would be the first time actually using them. How did that saying go, ‘break a leg’? Isaac just chuckled inwardly.

“I can regenerate and Bailey is a healer, what could possibly go wrong?”