Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 203: Human nature sucks

Safety regulations were written in blood.

Companies didn’t pay to install safety gear or create new regulations that took up their employee’s time unless they had to. That would have cost money, you see.

But when something happened, a new regulation was written to ensure the incident wasn’t repeated.

And again, over and over until you ended up with a thousand-page binder of rules that was a million times more complicated than it could have been if it had just been written right the first time.

That’s when an entirely new kind of trouble started as someone realized how much money all those precautions were costing the company and how comparatively unlikely it was that those things would actually happen. Happen again, anyway.

Why spend millions to hire five A or ten B-Rankers to oversee the harvesting of a seventh-Tier Hunting ground when twenty C-Rankers would do just fine?

And why not harvest more than both the laws and regulations allowed? Anything else was just leaving money lying on the ground, after all, and what did the lawmakers really know?

… yeah, like things would go that well.

The Equinox Event had gone over without a hitch, and now, today, the day before the Winter Solstice and four days before Christmas, thisshit happened.

Today was no epic battle for the fate of the world, no grand catastrophe that would be remembered decades in the future. Chances were no one other than the people directly involved would remember it a year from now.

But it was still a problem, and it needed a solution.

Isaac had hopped over using [Continent Strider] and he was the first one here. The reason for that was pretty simple.

As long as he wasn’t in the middle of a fight, he could teleport anywhere he’d been before, and he’d toured the entire country for precisely this reason. If something went wrong and he heard about it, he could be there faster than almost anyone else.

There were still too few people with mass-teleportation abilities for the anti-monster police and military unity to have dedicated portal mages assigned to them, which left them limited to physically traveling overland to any incidents. They could still do so at blinding speeds, but instantaneous travel was, well, instantaneous.

The monsters themselves were pretty weak as well, at least to Isaac.

What he was responding to here was the aftermath of someone overdrawing a Tier 7 Hunting Ground, specifically, the Eternal Wilderness.

The strongest creature would, at the most, be Level 89, the max for that Tier. A potential problem for anyone here save Isaac, but perfectly beatable by the kinds of people who’d be responding to this incident.

Old Reliable manifested in its Kabar form, split into five, and flew at the nearest monsters, straight into their open, roaring, mouths.

Swallowing a blade could inflict terrible damage, true, but swallowing a knife that transformed into a huge Zweihänder when it reached your stomach was incomparably worse.

The collection of supersized badgers, deer with lances for horns, dire wolves, and other forest critters began to collapse one by one as gigantic blades pierced through them, only to be replaced by a far smaller weapon that promptly hurled itself down the throat of the next closest monster.

The strikes weren’t immediately lethal, but sufficiently debilitating that Isaac could ignore their recipients and continue onwards.

Balmung lay in his hand and flashed whenever a monster got too close, removing limbs or heads with a single strike. Big and threatening as they were, these were just the small fry, the first monsters spat out by the collapsing Hunting Ground. The real threats were either deeper in the facility, or they hadn’t even spawned yet.

People had run outside past Isaac, and even the high-Level fighters who were supposed to be keeping an eye on things had retreated to hold the line at the exits, which left him as the only human in the facility. Living human, that was.

Whoever had been in charge of this mess had fucked up royally, but it seemed like they’d realized this early enough to start a timely evacuation.

Three gathering personnel and what looked like four fighters had still died, torn apart by claws and fangs, and were now spread out across various rooms and corridors in a grisly carpet of blood and body parts, but that number was far lower than Isaac had expected.

Outside, the blaring alarms were joined by a new kind of artificial noise, the howling sirens of the police vehicles that had arrived at almost the speed of sound and stopped on a dime the second they were close enough.

Isaac probably wouldn’t have had to help, after all, GSG-13 was perfectly capable of cleaning up this mess alone. Seeing as he was already here, though he’d finish the job, he’d just do so a little … simpler.

Now that there was someone outside guaranteed to be able to stop any monsters that made it there, he stopped attacking the monsters he met and just rushed past them, phasing through walls, teleporting through larger rooms, and on one occasion, using a bear’s head as a springboard to kick off of.

The heart of the mess was a simple affair, a flat, white sheet of energy that hung in midair … which was constantly spitting out monsters. Normally, when a Hunting Ground was destroyed and a swarm of monsters proportional to the amount of material extracted appeared, the process was instantaneous. Monsters manifest, portal vanishes, and done.

This thing though, it had been seriously overharvested and was continuously spitting out new critters, steadily building up to the strongest monsters the Hunting Ground could hold.

And until that happened, the damn thing was nigh indestructible. [True Strike] could destroy it, but only at the cost of almost all of Isaac’s mana, not something he could afford right now.

So instead of stopping the problem outright, he slapped on a flaming hot band-aid.

[Divine Fire: Barrier Flame] was a combination of three separate flames he’d stolen. Napalm for a stickiness that meant that anything which ran through his fire would have flames cling to its fur, hellfire so the fire could fuel itself on the life-force of the creatures that it burned, and the breath of a solar dragon for sheer heat.

The next monster that was launched from the portal turned into a flaming comet the second it reached the real world, went berserk, and keeled over dead five seconds later.

Isaac added a set of instructions to the flames which let them spread onto things that moved through the original patch of fire, but not move from those things and to not spread naturally from the site of the original blaze.

The fire would still do one hell of a number on the room, but the building would still be standing when everything was said and done.

Outside, the police had established a cordon to prevent monsters from getting out in the world, and now, they were moving inside at a steady pace, vanguard with a shield out front to guard against potential surprise attacks and keep monsters away from the people behind them, damage specialists following immediately after them, bullets and magic tearing apart any beastie that dared show its face.

Monster after monster fell before them, bodies vanishing beneath their boots as they advanced.

Four groups converged on the central area, entering as one and sealing off all entrances at the same time.

“How much longer until the portal vanishes?” one of them asked Isaac.

“Maybe a couple more minutes or so?” he replied from as far away from the portal as was possible without leaving the room “We should be seeing the strongest monster of this wave anytime now. It’ll be big and on fire, so you might want to stay back.”

Another minute passed fairly anticlimactically, with monsters appearing, catching fire, and usually dying before they even reached the humans in the room.

And then, the portal winked out when a titanic bear manifested. It still caught fire, of course, but considering it was bigger than the largest African Elephant, that would take a while for it to die.

Immediately upon seeing the humans, the bear reared onto its hind legs, skull bashing into the ceiling and smashing through it as if the building had all the structural integrity of a sandcastle.

“Back!”

Everyone without teleportation or phasing ability retreated from the room. The ceiling collapsing might not be enough to kill anymore, but getting trapped under rubble with the monster right there could easily be fatal.

Energy coalesced around the beast’s paws as it charged, every one of its blows unleashing shockwaves that tossed around tanks like toys and shattered load-bearing walls like kindling.

By the time the monster’s head bounced off the floor, separated from its neck, the room was well and truly wrecked.

Isaac took a couple of minutes to join the police’s party network and highlighted the few monsters that remained in the building.

“Do you need anything other than the standard stuff in the report? Isaac asked as he left the building. [Police Procedure] told him exactly what information he needed to provide, but the person in charge of the local situation might have wanted something on top of that.

“Probably not, we’ll only know for sure once we’ve gained a good overview of just what happened here.”

“If you need something from me, I’m just a phone call away,” Isaac replied and made to leave.

Tomorrow was the second Winter Event and while the situation was so that his help would almost certainly not be needed, but he still wanted to be present and some preparations still needed to be done.

“… got him killed, you fat fuck!”

Isaac barely noticed the mess in time to intervene. An overweight white guy, looking like a stereotypical corporate pencil pusher, had been loudly arguing with one of the people who’d been guarding the Hunting Ground for a while, but things had unfortunately escalated from there.

The two people having the screaming match were close enough that getting between them when the warrior swung his fist was damn difficult. Barriers were hastily projected between the pair, but they shattered.

In the end, it would have probably come down to how quickly the healers could reach the injured party.

If Isaac hadn’t teleported in the path of the fist.

One of the funny things about the new world was that while people could grow very strong and hit very hard, they generally didn’t grow any heavier.

This meant when Isaac took the punch to his right shoulder, he was sent flying, taking down the pencil pusher in the process, though the impact was vastly less dangerous than the fist would have been.

Isaac teleported back up to his feet, wrenched his broken shoulder back into place with an audible crunch, and healed the injury.

That hadn’t been caused by the blow, though, he’d manifested a thin layer of the [Aura of the Eternal Warrior] under his clothes and broken the bones himself without anyone noticing.

This had two effects.

Firstly, it scared the hell out of the man who’d thrown the punch. Because from his perspective, he’d just hit someone who could kick his ass with casual ease and that person had to be pissed because, well, broken bone. Also, the person who’d ended up with a broken shoulder hadn’t given a flying fuck about the injury and removed it in a matter of seconds. In other words, it was a rather solid power move.

And secondly, this was an incident that would inevitably become public record and serve as one of the few available examples showcasing his durability … while being completely incorrect. One could have referred to that level of caution as excessive, possibly even paranoid, but really, it was just good business. When one was as famous as Isaac was, most of one’s build was already public knowledge.

His active [Skills] had certainly been analyzed to death by various official and unofficial organizations. His passive [Skills] weren’t nearly as obvious, so the amount of info available on them was limited, but people had still figured out some things just from watching him. For example, the “only damage the stuff you want to damage” property of [Absolute Blade Mastery] had been noticed.

However, concrete information on his Stats was something no one had any real data on … until now. Sort of.

Isaac’s [Aura of the Eternal Warrior] blasted out, empowered by [Burden of Power].

“I don’t care who started this, I don’t care who did what. If someone tries attacking someone else, either me or one of the officers here, will take action. You’ll live, but you probably won’t be pleased with the outcome.”

“He got Jason killed!” the man who’d thrown the punch yelled “He cheaped out on security precautions and now people are dead. Why does he get to live?”

“Germany doesn’t have the death penalty, and tends to frown on vigilantes.” Isaac replied, [Aura] further pressing down on the man while a couple of officers cuffed him “This is a situation for the courts to handle now.”

There was a lot more he wanted to say, but it wouldn’t have been all that appropriate. Simply put, hiring vastly underpowered individuals to provide security was a dumb idea, but it should have been obvious that was what had been going on.

In other words, the fact that precautions were insufficient was something that anyone with half a brain should have noticed and called off the whole affair. By letting themselves be hired despite being unqualified, these guys were at least somewhat complicit, at least as far as Isaac was concerned.

At least it seemed like there was no way for the person most responsible for this mess to claim innocence based on a lack of knowledge. A lot of the time, when safety precautions were skipped, it was damn hard to conclusively prove that anyone in charge had known about it and decided not to do anything about it.

This time around, with the man having been physically present, wriggling out of the situation should be nigh impossible.

The situation here seemed to be well in hand, and would probably have gone well even without his input, but there was still more to be done.

Specifically, this situation proved that there needed to be some … addendums made to the current rules and regulations for commercial summoning.

At least this mess should provide a platform to use for that change to occur. Now if only that weren’t happening right around the Christmas holidays …