Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 272: Interlude Iceland

Iceland was surprisingly warm for something near the Arctic Circle in the middle of winter. It was also in the middle of bloody nowhere, with a tiny population that should have made hiding a base here fairly obvious. But based on the intel they had, it was more of a stopover location than anything else. Which apparently had the CSIs, or whatever they were called, drooling at the thought of finding travel documents.

So time it was to capture it.

Of course, despite being warmer than expected, it was still bloody freezing, wearing mostly metal was in no way helping the issue, and it was the middle of a bloody blizzard to boot.

And sure, people kept telling him that he was too tough to feel the cold, but Arthur still shivered as he trudged through the snow towards the target location. If all things went well, there wouldn’t be any powerful foes in there, but there was a reason he was here.

But the person he really felt sorry for was their local guide, who didn’t wasn’t anywhere near his Level and yet was out in a friggin blizzard regardless. Not to mention that he might be in the line of fire if shit really hit the fan.

The go signal came a few moments after they settled down to wait and Captain Dent, the military officer in charge of the whole operation started snapping orders. Spread out, activate anti-teleportation [Skills], hair-trigger on the backport [Skills] to yank anyone about to die out of danger, the usual stuff. Nothing that particularly involved Arthur, his order had and would always be to cool his heels unless something went wrong. Something always went wrong.

This time though, they hadn’t even done anything by the time someone walked out to greet them, straight through the wall, smoke billowing from what had to have been a sauna. At first glance, Arthur thought the man was completely naked, but thankfully, Iceland wasn’t one of those places where people saunaed in their birthday suits.

But the guy didn’t seem bothered in the slightest by the cold, lack of proper clothing, or the dozens of guns pointed right at his face.

“You know, I’d be really interested to know if you’re actually here for little ol’ me, or if you just think that all of us qualify for that kind of response,” He smirked, “I mean, you’re attacking us all over the world, right?”

He took a couple of steps closer, but stopped dead with a slight laugh when expressions hardened and more powerful spells were prepared, “You know, here’s the thing: you really should have brought more guys.”

After that, he gnashed his teeth in their general direction in a manner that could almost be seen as playful. Mouth opens slightly, head jerks a couple of centimeters forward, mouth shuts with a loud click, lips form into a shit-eating grin.

And then, a massive chunk of snow and dirt, almost the size of a car, vanished into nothingness and when the swimsuit-clad man charged, his feet hammered into the ground with more force than before. Had he eaten that much matter and added it to his own mass?

Oh, this was not going to be fun.

Gunshots rang out, each tearing the previous tranquility apart.

Spells rent the air, digging trenches in the earth around the target as he ran.

Another “chomp” at nothing dug a huge hole in the ground which he dove into a split second before flames washed past above him. This time, though, his jaws opened as wide as was humanly possible, and a spectral copy of his teeth and gumline appeared to tear through solid rock as though it were cotton candy.

And when he jumped, the ground underfoot shattered under the man’s newly enhanced weight.

Arthur tried to head him off, but a massive chunk of rock was somehow ejected from the glutton, pushing him above Excalibur and then landing amidst the soldiers like a damn meteor.

It was a disaster before his fists had even landed.

Isaac had once gone on about how strength didn’t always mean much unless there was mass behind a blow or the strength was being brought to bear using a sharp edge. Arthur had nodded along, and gotten himself some heavier armor made afterwards.

But what he was seeing here was the most extreme possible version of the advantage of mass. The bodies of the weakest here popped like blood-and-viscera-filled balloons, but even the strongest hit weren’t able to get away unscathed.

That’s when Arthur spotted the viscous green liquid running down the man’s knuckles. Venomous, on top of everything else. Bloody effing hell!

Another chomp at the air swallowed up multiple bodies, and the fucker began to bulk up. But only the dead vanished, the living just lost some equipment.

A limitation … great. Something that might be exploitable.

Arthur charged up behind the devouring fighter, and the instant he was between him and the survivors, he activated [Champion of Albion], the other central [Skill] of his fourth Evolution. It was a bit of an odd duck, as it didn’t apply to the long-lost kingdom of Albion, but whatever he wanted to protect right at that moment if he was between that thing and the threat. Which he was.

A massive fist, already ballooned up to the size of a watermelon, slammed into his chest plate and with a loud crack, bones broke. Finger bones, that was.

”Coming in with that much mass makes pulling punches a bit difficult, doesn’t it?” Arthur taunted as he slashed at the arm as it was drawn back, landing a deep cut. Trying to punch him head-on now that he was functionally an immovable object had been a mistake.

The roundhouse kick aimed straight at the side of Arthur’s head, on the other hand nearly did him in. Only a last-second dodge combined with canceling the immovable object effect prevented him from ending up with a broken neck. It might not have been enough to kill him on its own, being helpless certainly would have.

And then, the other guy dodged to the side, kicked off the ground hard enough to detonate a snowdrift, blinding Arthur for the crucial second needed to charge back at the soldiers.

Only for [Champion of Albion] to give him the chance to teleport between both his charges and the monster threatening them. It was enough of a surprise that Arthur managed to land a deep cut on his opponent’s chest.

And then the man gnashed his teeth again and the world went silent for the briefest of seconds while all the breath exploded from Arthur’s lungs without warning, only for a wave of force and noise to hammer into him as … had that fucker just eaten the air?

That disorientation was enough that he didn’t manage to reapply the immovability buff before getting kicked in the chest and flung through the air. A split-second later, the bastard appeared above him and landed another kick, only to bounce off as this time, the resistance to hostile acceleration was back up.

Despite the fact that Arthur was under the other guy, he somehow fell past him and got even faster. Gravity magic, on top of everything else? Oh, bollocks.

[Frozen Fortress] exploded around the pair, the [Skill] Isaac normally hogged up for grabs for once. Arthur landed perfectly in a well-placed hollow while his opponent hit a properly-designed slope, slid off, completely lost his balance and before he could regain anything even remotely resembling balance, Excalibur had already sheared his arm off.

And then with a “click” of teeth Arthur only heard, not saw, most of the fortress vanished and they were both back in freefall, hitting the snow below a second later. Thankfully, his armor and weapons weren’t touched by the current “devour”, but that was an infinitesimal silver lining.

“You’re a tricky one,” the now one-armed man grinned down at him while Arthur got to his feet, seemingly unconcerned with the injury, “You know, it’s kinda sad that you don’t know what we’re called. We’ve gone through all this effort of crafting the nastiest builds in the world and coming up with proper names, and then we end up in the history books with names like ‘fire guy’ or ‘horseman aspirant number sixty-nine’ when you guys don’t just get your names but also titles like ’sage’ or ‘promised ki- … oh come on!”

Arthur had lunged mid-speech, using [Extend Blade] to land another nasty hit but the manifested blade tip was so fragile that just being exposed to his foe’s [Aura] shattered it like glass. Oh, range extension [Skills] were so bloody useless at theirLevels.

He dropped the immovability and let himself be flung away by the next kick after a couple of bones in the other guy’s foot had cracked, electing to not try and absorb the entirety of the force of the attack.

“Anyway, I’m Jormungandr, Devourer of pretty much whatever I damn well please,” the fucker announced and stomped into the large rock he was standing on, then tore his foot sideways to shatter the top layer and hurled the shrapnel at the retreating soldiers. And then, his jaw twitched a few times, he didn’t even open his mouth, only the unnaturally loud clicking of tooth on tooth making it obvious what he was doing. Each time, a chunk of bloody snow vanished and with the final chomp, even the severed arm vanished. The lost limb didn’t regrow, but the stump instantly stopped bleeding.

“And today, I’m going to become a kingslayer as well.”

Jormungandr charged, and Arthur began to retreat, using Excalibur to keep the distance open as his unarmed opponent couldn’t block it, but it wasn’t quite enough. The punches fell like meteors, gravity warped at the most inopportune times, and chunks of ground vanished an instant before he could put his foot on it.

And even his armor was beginning to dent inwards, his opponent apparently thinking nothing of sacrificing bones to break metal, especially once [Champion of Albion] ran out.

Another gunshot rang out, and for a brief moment, as if it were the only sound in the world. Then Jormungandr collapsed onto one knee, briefly surprised and stunned, having completely forgotten about the soldiers since they shouldn’t have been able to hurt him.

Sure, they mostly kept Habicht around for his smarts and connections, not his [Skills], but he was not only a member of an elite, quasi-military, police unit, he led the damn group and had some nasty tricks of his own.

[Dial In] allowed one person to feed targeting information to everyone they were in a party with, highlight weak points, grant supernatural accuracy to the recipient of said information, and by spending mana, continuously increase the amount of damage done until someone took the shot.

It didn’t matter how tough Jormungandr was, how much dirt and rock he’d eaten, a bullet hammering into his temple with not just [Dial In] backing it, but every [Skill] belonging to the sniper who’d fired the shot.

“Fuck,” Jormungandr groaned.

Arthur tried to decapitate him, only for the world to warp and gravity pull him towards the snake-man. Somehow, he strongly suspected that this time around, he would be less resistant to getting eaten.

Borrowing one of Amy’s spells almost completely drained his mana pool and left him with just a single [Skill] to copy, but [Enforced Personal Space] was a million times stronger than its name would suggest. Jormungandr was hurled away as though shot from a cannon, plowing not only through the snow and dirt but absorbing whatever he touched until he climbed out of a furrow that looked like a bad movie’s UFO crash site, looking furious.

Arthur wavered, leaning on Excalibur’s hilt to remain standing, the tip of the sword planted atop a rock he was actively preventing the blade from cutting. His armor was dented inwards to the point where every breath caused sharp edges to cut into his skin, a few trickles of venom pouring into his bloodstream. [Assassin’s Bane] took care of most of it, but it certainly wasn’t good for his health even with it active. And if all his ribs were still intact, he was the actual king of England.

Yet his opponent didn’t seem to be doing much better, covered in blood and mud,missing an arm, bones poking from the skin on his remaining fist. Breathing heavily, career as a human black hole over, trump cards hopefully spent.

And even if he still had some remaining, Arthur couldn’t run here. The soldiers would be the first to go, and then, he wouldn’t put it past this cunt to go after the nearest town for shits and giggles.

[March] activated first, as he began to trudge forward, then he got the speed required for run and finally, when he was in range, [Charge] activated, taking with it almost all of his newly regenerated mana.

Jormungandr charged as well, the ground detonating away from his feet as his mass had to now be somewhere around that of a God damn train car.

A split-second before impact, he threw his sword and Jormungandr ducked out of the way … and kept falling, first his head and a large chunk of his armless shoulder, and then, the rest of his torso collapsed to the ground.

The freshly re-manifested Excalibur slid from Arthur’s fingers tripped over a rock and went sprawling, too beat to even see straight. With a grunt of effort, he pushed himself back to his feet and drunkenly staggered over to where his foe lay.

Another tooth-gnashing tore apart the ground in front of him, even the basically severed head somehow still alive, but as disorienting as the two-meter fall might have been, it was nowhere near what was needed to hurt him.

He got back up, again, and pushed on, the grotesque sight of the head snapping its head at nothing sending shivers down his spine. Ground shifted, air vanishing and subsequently returning with a thunderclap wasn’t doing anything for his health, but his opponent was weakening all the while and by the time Excalibur cleaved through the top of his skull and bisected the brain, he had to be seconds from death.

Human (Lv. 149 Pugilist of Endless Hunger) has been slain 75,000 XP gained

Oh, so that’s what his [Class] had been … when his legs buckled this time, Arthur didn’t bother trying to stay standing, he just dismissed Excalibur to make sure he didn’t land on it and let himself fall.