Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 42: Heart of the Storm

“I find it very hard to believe that you managed to figure this out already.” someone scoffed.

“I’ve named several good arguments and not heard any counterarguments. Barring any compelling reasons to not uphold this hypothesis for now, we should operate under the assumption that these things can recombine and that we need to destroy each and every single one of its parts to kill it.” Bailey shot back.

“Before this devolves into bickering, tell me something, Professor Bailey. How does that help us?” the Director, Office of Operations, asked, his name of Elliot Allen appearing beneath his face now that he was speaking.

“For one, it warns us of the fact that the Gestalt will likely soon reform and be stronger than it was when it first split apart. And if it’s split apart, there’s a reason for that, I think it’s after electricity, absorbing it straight from the grid. You need to cut off the power from LA in a large radius.

“In addition, having found its name confirms the Tier. That will give us an idea of how strong Tier 5s will be in the future.” Bailey replied evenly.

“Alright, anything else?”

It was at this point that Isaac spoke directly to Bailey once more.

“Do those things have cores? Can you ask him that?”

“We already covered those.” Bailey said, quickly muting himself “They don’t, they’re raw elementals. Why?”

“If they’re raw Elementals without any kind of physical core, that means that they’re coreless masses of power. No real physical weaknesses, but they should be massively vulnerable to mana, just like ghosts. Also, exploitation of elemental weaknesses should play merry hell with them.” Isaac explained and suddenly, Bailey’s face lit up.

“Actually, I have something else. Those things don’t have a solid physical form, so they have to be held together with mana the same way Ephemeral beings are. Fighting those requires putting as much mana into the attacks that hit it as possible … and one of my other assistants just sent me a list of such [Skills] that should be available to anyone with a law enforcement [Class]. Anyone who still has unused [Skill] points and can get those particular [Skills] should do that.” he said.

“So, how would you lot fight that thing if it were here?” Eisenberg asked.

“Just like Professor Bailey said, grab my sword, layer as many [Strike]-type [Skills] onto it as I have access to, then shove it where the sun don’t shine.” Isaac said laconically.

“I don’t think that’s exactly what he said.” Karl commented while he continued to type his list into the computer.

“It’s the gist though. Take mana using [Skill], hit anything that looks remotely important, rinse and repeat ‘till enemy is dead.” Isaac shrugged “Doesn’t matter how you phrase it, the core idea doesn’t change.”

“Does anyone have any idea why lightning rods still work to send electricity into the ground while anything that directly hits the earth doesn’t?” another scientist asked, making Isaac celebrate internally. Now he didn’t have to bring it up himself, thereby allowing him to not appear suspicious by having all the answers.

“Because it takes a lot of mana and concentration to make any kind of element behave in a way contrary to how it normally acts. Dirt and concrete are extremely bad conductors and asphalt is so bad it’s actually considered an insulator.” Bailey replied immediately, having done experiments about that upon Isaac’s prompting.

Of course, Isaac had wanted to do them on fire so Bailey could tell everyone about just that, but didn’t really have a way to explain his insistence on why that element had to be fire and he didn’t want to let the others pick a random one, which would run the risk of the chosen element not being fire. Therefore, he’d suggested testing a bunch of different ones to see if there were any differences.

And one of those had been lighting.

“We got so fucking lucky!” he sighed, sagging in relief “We literally just tested that.”

“Better lucky than good, eh?” Amy asked, jabbing him with her elbow “Now shut up, I want to listen to this.”

Isaac shut up.

“Magically generated elemental energies are, fundamentally, the exact same as their mundane counterparts with a little magic mixed in. Without input from the controlling entity, it’ll act exactly like you’d expect it to. If the lightning hits something relatively unconductive, like the ground, the Elemental can call it back into itself relatively easily. If it hits something like a lightning rod, it’ll get sucked straight into the ground.” Bailey explained.

“At this point, I think it might be a good idea to start hammering metal stakes into the ground to divert the energy or at the very least force it to use more of it.”

“Professor Bailey, how certain are you of that?” Allen asked.

“Dead certain. I’m currently in the process of writing a paper towards that end, but the experiment part of that has already been completed.” Bailey replied.

“Does the fire department still have all those [Hydromancers]?” someone else asked.

“Probably.”

Isaac’s mouth twisted into the barest hint of a grin. While a lot of firefighters had ended up grabbing their job as a [Class] and never looked back, those that had looked through the list of what was available had often ended up becoming mages of some stripe. Therefore, there should be at least some [Hydromancers] available. And their powers could block out electricity.

“In that case you should ask if they’d be willing to use [Water Control] or [Aquashield] to block some of the lightning.”

“Block electricity with water? Are you nuts?”

“I don’t think we have the time for me to explain how water isn’t actually conductive, it’s the ions in the water that allow electricity to travel through it and the water generated by [Hydromancer] [Skills] is pure water unless it’s explicity stated otherwise in the [Skill] description.”

“That sounds made up.” a police officer next to Isaac commented quietly.

“I’m assuming if it were, everyone else here would have corrected that in a heartbeat.” Amy corrected.

Meanwhile, the main screen shifted again, giving a closer look at a fight unfolding in one of the city’s many suburbs, a broad street lined with similar looking, one-story houses. Police officers with riot shields were lining the street, catching stray arcs of electricity on them while the majority of the Elemental’s attacks struck the extendable batons that had been jammed into the road, acting as impromptu lighting rods.

For a brief moment, it looked like they’d win this handily. Several other police officers were firing their guns into the mass of electricity, each projectile stealing away a tiny bit of charge, weakening it in an infinitesimal way.

Some of the bullets left faintly glowing trails in the air, showing that they were being empowered by some kind of [Skill], but they were few and far between. Clearly, only a few people had them and their mana was clearly quite low.

The Elemental started moving around to the side, trying to get past the line of ‘lightning rods’, but these cops had surrounded themselves with the batons. Given how slow that thing was, it took a while to find that out.

Now, Elementals were generally dumb as a bag of hammers, and being only a small part of a greater whole, that went doubly for this one. But they still had some kind of instincts, as clearly evidenced in its response to the situation at hand.

Arcs of lightning began to lash out directly at the officers taking cover behind their lightning rods and some were simply absorbed and sent into the ground, but then the elemental flickered and the lightning arced upwards and over the barrier, weakening in the process.

The camera cut away for a moment, showing a brief interview with a terrified local.

Another minute later, however it showed the scene from before again, with some rather conspicuous looking Lichtenberg fractals burned into the ground, a couple of the batons had fallen over and were glowing with molten heat and there were fewer police officers there than before, but the Elemental itself was coming apart at the seams and collapsed.

Sparks flew, most of them smacking into the batons and vanishing, but others lit a handful of small fires where they struck dry grass and bushes.

The next scene shown was another Elemental being destroyed, but in a far more PG-13 way that could be shown on TV in its entirety. A woman, no, teenager stood in front of the monster and held up a hand, sending a cloud of suffocating darkness straight at it, tearing it to shreds.

The quorum of scientist, meanwhile, had gone back to brainstorming possibly solutions.

“Do you think a Faraday cage would work, given that it generally behaves like normal electricity?”

“Mostly behaves like normal electricity. It might be able to force itself out with enough energy.”

“Shouldn’t it take more energy the further it tries to deviate from its normal behavior?”

“It does.”

“So why not use a cage with a finer mesh?”

“It’ll just end up burning its way through.” Bailey cut everyone off “Magical lightning can be focused in such a way that it can melt metal even from the inside of a Faraday cage. It’s an order of magnitude more difficult, but doable.”

“How do you know how hard it is?” someone asked, voice suspicious.

“We checked. Watch.” Bailey said coldly, then pushed himself back and away from the relatively fragile electronics he was using to communicate, grabbed a hollow ball of mesh from the shelf and opened up a door on the side. One of the miniature Faraday cages they’d used to check if it was possible to get out of.

To the surprise of everyone except Isaac and the rest of Bailey’s team, the professor’s right hand turned into an orb of lightning and jumped inside, then vanished into the cage, which he subsequently shut.

This was Bailey’s evolved [Class], [Biological Researcher]. It was ranked epic, the same as [System Researcher], but changed in acknowledgement of the fact that Bailey had reached a very high academic rank in that particular field.

But unlike [System Researcher], [Biological Researcher] was far more focused on the creatures instead of the [System] itself, also lacking the cheat-tier power of copying magic simply by seeing it happen.

What it did have was an even more BS [Skill] called [Corporeal Mimicry] that allowed him to scan so called ‘patterns’ from monsters, be they purely biological or magical, so long as they were part of a being’s body, he could copy it, as evidenced by turning his hand into a tiny elemental.

He could then apply those patterns onto himself and other people, though he was very reserved when it came to doing so, given that they’d be permanent. Well, technically permanent, he could reverse them with a single touch and a trickle of mana, but without his intervention, anyone who worked on would be stuck with the changes.

So, Bailey had stuck to seeing what could be done on himself for ethical reasons, reversing them all moments after they were no longer needed.

But if they ever got the authorization for him to do that for someone else, even just temporary before a battle to be reversed the instant the fighting was over, it would be an utter game changer.

Mind you, the only abilities he could copy were the ones directly linked to something physical, so mimicking something like a Wraith’s weapon or armor manifestation wouldn’t fly, but regeneration was something they could easily swing. Blood marrow of a troll, muscles of a hydra, cellular structure of a slime, the possibilities were practically endless.

Of course, there was a very good reason to limit what someone with that kind of power was allowed to do, given the sheer mass of horror scenarios could be created.

Isaac knew Bailey wouldn’t do anything crazy, but the law- and policy-makers didn’t care about that. Nor should they, a general ‘everybody, let’s be really frickin’ careful with this’ without special treatment for specific people. There’d be enough times to create a way to apply for usage or something like that, later.

Through Bailey’s webcam, they could clearly see the orb of lightning zip around inside the Faraday cage, bouncing off the walls repeatedly, then suddenly glomming onto a specific section and condensing, an action that was accompanied by a look of strain appearing on the professor’s face. Suddenly, a part melted and droplets fell into Bailey’s other hand, though he didn’t seem to mind, the palm having been shifted to match the scrap of Flame Drake hide Isaac had gifted him.

“As you can, see, it is possible to destroy a Faraday cage using lightning elemental abilities, but our experiments have clearly and conclusively shown that this takes a considerable amount of focus and far more mana than any other application of this power.” Bailey finished his explanation.

“You’ve been levelling.”

The flat, accusatory statement rang loudly in the brief silence that had followed Bailey’s explanation.

“Yes. If you have a better idea to examine [System] monsters than simply summoning them, let’s hear it.” Bailey replied icily.

“HEY!” Allen snapped, glaring at the collection of scientists “Let’s table that discussion for now, people are dying. If it doesn’t have the potential to help, it doesn’t matter.”

The professor who’d spoken looked sheepish and kept quiet. Looking at the man, Isaac realized this was the same professor who’d sent them an angry letter after their first paper had been published on a topic he’d been researching himself. No wonder he’d taken a shot at Bailey when the opportunity presented itself.

Allen then took a deep breath and continued “So, you’re saying Faraday cages are out. The power’s off and we’re working on creating temporary lightning rods to protect my men and force the Elementals to spend more energy in attacks. I’ve also had people grabbing the [Skills] Professor Bailey sent over. Anything else?”

“Actually, has anyone asked the civilians if they have any mana based [Skills]? I realize this might a very dicey proposition, but some people might have what you need. A defensive [Skill] here, picked up ‘just in case’, something to infuse tools with mana to make them better there, and so on, and so forth.”

“Anyone with a [Class] that uses guns should be able to get [Enhanced Impact] or an equivalent [Skill].” Raul suddenly appeared next to Bailey and spoke into the mike.

Allen pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed “I’ll see what I can do and make sure that anyone who ‘helps’ has the absolute minimum of discipline to actually be helpful. I …”

Suddenly, Allen vanished from the screen, the artificial background blanketing the entire screen. Yells and curses suddenly echoed from the speakers, followed by some very loud gunshots.