Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 64: The Lazy Grind

Name: Isaac Thoma

Class: Undying Wraith

Species: Human

Level: 24

XP: 10,316/5,000

Health Status: Healthy

Mana: 500/500

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 XVIII

Skills

Hundred Faces XIV

Stealth XVII

Power Strike XXIII

Piercing Strike XXV

Sundering Strike XXIII

Blades XXIV

Sneak XVII

Sweeping Strike IX

Far Strike XVII

Manifold Strike XVII

Hunter’s Gaze XX

Phantom Step XIII

Unknown Fear X

Bestial Regeneration IX

Undying Focus V

Tools of Terror X

Fleeting Presence I

Crippling Blow I

General Skills

Gralloch IX

Alchemy IX

Aspects

Aspect Skills

Poltergeist (2 stack)

Poltergeist’s Flight

Poltergeist Shift

Hydra (2 stack)

Hydra’s Regeneration

Redundant Organs

Dunkleosteus

Gills

Examining his status as he walked home, Isaac grinned. The Event had been exhausting as hell, but the XP gains were insane.

The [Skill] Level gains were less so, but he hadn’t really gotten that creative with them, or struggled that much. At least discounting [Hunter’s Gaze], which had gained a whopping three Levels in a single day, hitting Level 20, while [Unknown Fear] had reached 10, giving both of them a new effect.

Unknown Fear (epic, Level X)

There are many things that people are afraid of. Mostly, those things are definable, specific things. But there is another kind, the fear of the unknown.

With this Skill, the user becomes the embodiment of this fear. An unknowable entity, become fear itself.

It will block out any same Level and rarity Inspection Skills as a matter of course and is boosted by any stealth Skill, gaining strength as if it were one Level higher for every two Levels in a stealth Skill. Further power is gained based on Agility.

In addition, this Skill may now be used to project a false status when Inspect style Skills are used. However, the user of Unknown Fear does not have true control over what the other person sees, they can only switch between showing them whatever they hope to see, something menacing, or merely a blank façade.

It was an excellent way to fuck with anyone trying to get a good look at him.

Hunter’s Gaze (epic, Level XX)

There are many possible upgrades to the basic Inspect Skill. Some allow for improved examination of details, others are far better at piercing information protection Skills.

This one is different. It loses any ability to gaze past defenses for raw details unless the defenses are very weak, but gains an incredible power at getting rough information on the user’s foes.

Barring an incredible Level disparity, the user will be able to sense whether someone’s Stats are higher, lower or comparable to the User’s, how many Aspects they have and what their overall affinities are.

But by using the information gained via this Skill, an Undying Wraith will be able to deduce anything Inspect could grant, and more.

In addition, this [Skill] allows the user to see mana and sense the purpose of Skills being used in front of him.

After countless fights where this Skill has been used to seek out every secret an enemy held has evolved to see absolutely everything an enemy might try to hide, instantly recognizing passive Skills, all manner of active abilities and slotting them into a newly gained mental library and highlighting any past experiences with similar Skills. Lastly, it gains vastly enhanced Privacy penetration abilities and further grows as the user’s Perception increases.

There were many ways his vision [Skill] could have evolved. Something that showed him how to react to attacks he foresaw, allowing him to methodically pick apart his enemies, avoiding attacks with seemingly casual ease.

He was really glad he hadn’t gotten that, though. He could already do that somewhat well on his own without [System] assistance, which would have made that a waste of a [Skill] evolution.

Another possibility he could have seen was a more precise scan that actually gave him names and numbers if he used it long enough or on a weak enough target.

But this was a hell of a lot better. It could now pick up more than ever before and ensured that he could recognize anything he’d seen before again, without needing to even think about it. It made sure the information he needed was always right there, no matter how brief his first encounter had been. Given the reality of new monsters coming from Events, it was more valuable than ever before.

Soon, his home came into view and he could access his dimensional storage room without having to waste any more of his Lesser Space Elemental Cores. Not that he had any to waste in the first place, not anymore. He’d used the last one he had to store close to a ton of beef from the Helios cattle he’d negotiated for himself. It sounded like a lot, but really, that was something you could gain from a mere three summons. He’d also managed to grab enough Uraeus venom to give himself a decent level of fire resistance once he’d drunk them. He’d certainly earned them.

He'd also ended up briefly demonstrating his Elemental-Hunting method and made sure everyone ended up with one core to access their storage in case of emergency, though they’d have to inscribe the cores themselves. He hadn’t taken one for himself, given that there was only a small risk of him running into issues during the twenty minute walk to his home, and if he did, the soulbound weapon he could always access would be a hell of a lot more useful than anything he had in his storage.

But in his frazzled, still mostly exhausted mind, it was the beef that was the real prize. Just thinking about it made him drool a little. It possessed a level of marbling you’d be hard pressed to find in the finest of wagyu steaks, never mind the other flavors it contained, flavors not found anywhere in the natural world.

Carne Asada Tacos, Burgers, hell, just a properly seasoned steak … he’d need to go shopping before he could make most of that, which would have to wait until morning. It was still the middle of the night, sadly.

Still, he had a grill in one of the containers, so he could throw some steaks on there right now after seasoning them a little.

So that was where he stood twenty minutes afterwards. Charcoal burning merrily, him drinking beer while he waited for the coal to be reduced to embers so he could toss on the steaks.

Next to him, the ground was soaked and covered in icy fragments, a decently sized tub filled with both in addition to several bottles of beer and soda lying in the middle. He’d summoned an Elemental type monster called a Freezing Torrent right above the tub and chopped its core in half before it could do more than stare at him.

It was a pretty basic Elemental, made from ice and freezing cold water, useless in most respects though it made for a pretty easy way to fill a tub with ice water. Still, his current tub was a little too small, which left him with a muddy mess surrounding it. Perhaps he could buy something larger? Hell, perhaps he should just turn the grocery run into a large shopping trip?

He'd need a few more cores unless he wanted to buy a car, but he had hours until the shops opened. He could kill a few Elementals without turning this into a work thing.

The last dregs of the beer left the bottle and Isaac tossed it into the spatial storage, then picked up the whiskey tumbler off the table next to the grill. He’d filled it half full with whiskey, then added some water to ensure it definitely wasn’t flammable anymore, and finally topped it off with Uraeus serpent venom. The whiskey made it quite a bit less disgusting, and both his [Alchemy] [Skill] and past experience had told him that it would enhance the effect slightly.

He even got another Level in [Alchemy] for his troubles, putting it at Level 10.

Alchemy (common, Level X)

When combining things with magical properties, many things may happen, some good, some bad, some just plain explosive.

This Skill is a catch all that supports these kinds of pursuits by granting basic knowledge and making its further acquisition easier.

It will also highlight useful alchemical ingredients and give information about their most common uses.

Perfect. Isaac rarely actually did alchemy, and when he did, he almost always followed a given recipe instead of developing his own brews, but it was still a nice upgrade.

And speaking of alchemy, in a month or two, he’d likely start releasing recipes from the other … no, bad Isaac, now was not worktime.

Silently chuckling, he tossed back the entire glass of socially acceptable neurotoxin and flaming snake venom. It burned going down and settled in his stomach like a miniature sun.

A ‘ruptured stomach, scorched stomach lining’ warning popped up in the ‘Health Status’ part of his stat sheet before vanishing along with a decent chunk of [Bestial Regeneration’s] banked mana. Supposedly, he’d increased his fire resistance like that, at least a little.

Slowly, Isaac reached out and lowered his hand into the grill, and it took an unnatural amount of time for it to even feel uncomfortable. After all, he wasn’t vulnerable to fire, he was just not excessively able to recover from the injuries it inflicted and at his Level, he was pretty tough. There might have been a slight gain in resistance, but nothing significant.

Shrugging, he mixed the next batch of whiskey-and-venom, downed it, and repeated the test. This time, the amount of mana needed to heal the damage he’d just inflicted upon his insides dropped by a couple of points. Huh, and there it was, proper, quantifiable proof for his increased resistance. After all, he’d used one whole vial in both batches.

So, he repeated the process. Again and again, until his stomach stopped feeling like he’d drank tabasco straight from the bottle and his mana stopped vanishing to heal internal injuries. At some point during these efforts, [Bestial Regeneration] hit Level 10. That one had always been a bit of a pain to raise, given that improving it required him being hurt.

Bestial Regeneration (epic, Level X)

No matter how good a fighter is, injuries are inevitable, given enough time. Therefore, this Skill is as invaluable as it is indisputable that it will find a use.

It allows the user to store excess mana generated by Magic Regeneration for the sole purpose of fueling the user’s regeneration Skills. This pool will be used to automatically heal any injuries sustained unless this Skill is explicitly suppressed and will used up before any regeneration Skills draw on the user’s mana pool.

In addition, it may be set to prioritize specific organs and body parts over others.

This pool’s size is Skill Level*15

The gained mana storage per Level had increased, as was the ability to set it to prioritize specific things. All in all, a very simple yet powerful upgrade.

Isaac just shook his head, irritated with himself. It was far too easy to get sidetracked and start some form of grinding. Again.

Still, he could now safely put his hand into the grill, laying in into the bed of glowing coals, all without taking a lick of damage. He wasn’t stupid enough to assume he was now completely immune to all fire and heat, powerful magical flames would likely still hurt him, but as far as the mundane stuff was concerned, he might as well be invincible.

The steak had finished by now, so Isaac pulled it off the grill with his bare hands and plated it up, then did the same with a couple of balls of aluminum foil he grabbed straight out of the embers. Baked potatoes, made properly, wrapped in aluminum and placed directly in the fire. Delicious.

A single long jump took him to the top of the roof he’d had built over his summoning area, almost as high as the surrounding trees were tall, the sky filling his entire field of view. Only him, his food, and the endless vastness of the universe. A lawn chair appeared in front of him, summoned from the storage room.

But mostly the food. It was divine. Well, the potatoes weren’t, but that was besides the point. Isaac chuckled softly at the unintentional pun. And then, he set down the plate, sank back into the lawn chair, and closed his eyes.

For the first time since returning from the other timeline, he slept properly. Not to get enough rest as to no longer be tired, not because he had to, but simply because he wanted to. It was an indulgent, unproductive waste of time, but the same could be said of basically everything people did for fun, for leisure, anything but work. At least from a certain point of view.

From another, the one he was taking, relaxing was good for him, so it was productive in that sense.

Just taking a nap did feel good, but he woke up after maybe an hour or so regardless. His body was simply no longer built for sleeping a third of to half a day, sadly.

Isaac decided now was a good time to check the news again. The last Event monster had been taken care of, people were pretty confident on that front, so people had stopped dying to it directly, but casualty numbers were still fluctuating wildly. Estimates were being overthrown, like some analyst simply assuming that the people of Africa would jump at the chance to get limited time loot and had assigned five hundred casualties to every known incident of any kind, resulting in vastly inflated numbers. And so on, and so forth.

But even as some overestimates were being proven false, underestimates were also coming to light. A ‘Skalli’ breaking a dungeon core near a major city, unleashing the monsters within as an artificial dungeon break. Why it had even been in there and how it had reached the core without slaughtering all the monsters guarding it was anyone’s guess.

Sure, breaking the core would unleash all surviving monsters upon the surrounding area, but if that had been a deliberate act of terrorism, why on Earth wouldn’t the people responsible just break the core directly, instead of somehow getting the damn wolf in there? Or had the wolf somehow chased a fleeing dungeon master into their own bound dungeon and killed them in the core chamber, then turned its wrath upon the core itself?

Isaac just shook his head in annoyance. If he found out who was responsible for this, they’d better pray they didn’t encounter him in a dark alley. That being said, he suspected he’d have to get in line.

And then there were the additional casualties that were piling up as the Event materials were being misused. The news only referenced a certain video of someone drinking venom to gain fire resistance without having the necessary toughness and/or regenerative ability to survive the experience.

Said video was available online and Isaac had decided to watch it. As one might expect, the sight was harrowing.

Some poor sap had also quite clearly demonstrated what happened when the user of an Ulfhednar cloak didn’t stop despite its use feeling wrong.

The team was all comprised of scientists, whose usual reaction so something going alarmingly wrong was to try to get to the bottom of the situation. This person had decided to ignore the feeling of wrongness that apparently accompanied the transformation if the user wasn’t qualified and ended up turning into a lycanthrope, or as a normal person would put it, a werewolf.

But not the standard ‘transforms into a wolf’ kind of werewolf. No, a two legged beast, three meters tall, arms like tree trunks and fingers tipped with claws like steak knives. And they were probably stuck that way, but there was no way to tell.

They’d been struck with the rage and feral instincts that often accompanied the transformation in stories, gone on a rampage and been gunned down. Well, blown up by multiple rocket propelled grenades. Regular bullets had just bounced off, leading to the deaths of the officers who’d fired them, delaying the monster for all of thirty seconds before it continued to hunt down civilians. The local National Guard equivalent was what had eventually gotten the kill.

Isaac nearly put down the phone but hiding from the world would not make said world any less bad.

The next news segment he came across was somewhat more humorous, though, being greatly reminiscent of that one meme of two people in a Spiderman costume pointing at each other in an accusatory fashion.

But these two weren’t wearing superhero costumes, at least not a proper, modern one, which was probably for the best, given that they likely would have otherwise been sued.

No, this was the ‘uniform’ of someone people considered to be one of the world’s oldest superheroes, hailing from ancient times, the Great Sage, Heaven’s Equal, Sun Wukong, also known as the Monkey King.

One would not have been wrong to simply call these two cosplayers, but that was a vastly oversimplified way to put it.

They were people who were picking [Classes], [Skills], equipment and everything else to emulate the mythical figure and eventually gain the right [Class].

[Monkey King] was an extraordinarily powerful, legendary, fourth Evolution [Class]. It wasn’t entirely clear if the [System] had just given up and generated it because people were trying to get it, or it had always been available, but the point was, it existed.

And what a [Class] it was, generating Jingu Bang, the staff of the Monkey King, as a soulbound weapon and even granting a cloning [Skill], one found in no other [Class] or Aspect, at least not as far as Isaac knew. Oh, and then there were the dozen or so truly insane defensive [Skills] that rendered the user close to unkillable.

Isaac wondered which of the two was the real Monkey King, or if it even was one of them. Well, both of them were fake, obviously, but someone had gotten that [Class] in the other timeline, changed his race to [Mythical Stone Monkey] and chosen the title [Great Sage, Heaven’s Equal]. A very impressive future powerhouse.

Still, that was hardly the only [Class] like this that existed and those two weren’t the only ones who chased the specters of ancient myths and legends, of great historical figures and actual comic-book heroes.

Davy Jones prowled the depths of the ocean on a ship filled with the animated bodies of the dead, occasionally running into a submarine captain whose every [Skill] flowed into making his vessel more and more self-sufficient and increasing its size. Also, he styled himself after Captain Nemo, from the old novel ’20,000 miles under the sea’, his ship was called the Nautilus and one of his [Class] Evolutions had been [Captain of the Nautilus], though near the end, it had evolved into something whose name Isaac didn’t know.

Of course, other people were creating themed builds without having a specific person in mind to emulate. A man styling himself a pirate, going by the name of Captain Thatch, sailed the seas with the Jolly Roger flying high, all the while acting out the overly romanticized version of his ‘profession’. He didn’t give a flying fuck about naval law, taxes or any form of authority, but he also ran around kicking assholes in the teeth, killing monsters and saving people.

No one reached the higher Levels without being at least a little kooky.

Others styled themselves after historical figures or merely happened to follow a similar path and gained an inheritor [Class] as a result. There’d been a serial killer who went after prostitutes in London who’d become [Ripper’s Heir].

All of those [Classes] were pretty damn strong and being deemed to be the inheritor of, say, Gregor Mendel or Louis Pasteur came with one massive heaping dose of prestige, but Isaac was on a pretty damn powerful path as well. His own. One shaped by his own choices and custom made for what he needed it.

Besides, there weren’t any historical or literary paths that fit what he needed, not as far as he knew.

Isaac reached into the pocket space to try and grab another beer, but his hand came back empty. Right, they were all in the tub of ice water … which was still on the ground.

With a sigh, he dropped through the roof, landing right near one of the summoning circles. Actually, he did need a few more cores, didn’t he? Besides, there was something he wanted to try out …

The Lesser Space Elemental appeared and was torn to shreds by a fully empowered [Manifold Strike]. With the high Level of all the component [Skills], it was able to tear through the spatial warp as if it were made of tissue paper, something he couldn’t have managed a mere twenty-four hours ago.

He’d have tried that at the university, but he was trying to demonstrate his technique, not brute force. And given how easy that had been … maybe chopping up another one or two to go shopping with wouldn’t be too bad?

Still, beer first. It wasn’t like he’d be affected by just one in any way. So that was how things went. Get beer, jump onto roof, drink beer, drop down and kill Lesser Space Elemental, then return to the roof with a new drink and read a book or watch the news.

All the way until the first soft rays of dawn began to peek over the horizon. Isaac picked up the phone to call his mother, but swiftly put it back down when he realized it was still 5 in the morning. It was literally the morning after the longest day in the year, sunrise was obviously going to be damn early.

Still, he had the all the cores he needed … and he could finally get the second stage of extradimensional spaces, the Extradimensional Room. It required the same core, but more mana than he’d had a day ago.

So, why the hell not summon it now, right before he went out to buy stuff? He could certainly pick up furniture as well.

He headed over into his storage container and retrieved a large tarp, then painted a Tier 6 circle onto it. The mere sight filled him with apprehension, he was fully aware of just what could come out of one of these things.

But he was summoning an inanimate area where the laws of spacetime where a little screwy.

Congratulations! You’ve surmounted immense odds and managed to create an Extradimensional Room, a member of the [Rewards] type summons.

Each person can only have one Extradimensional Room, and it may be accessed from anywhere within 10 meters of the original ritual.

Re-using this ritual will move the existing Extradimensional Room to the new site, anchoring it there until it is moved again.

The room itself is 5x5x5 meters in size and is inaccessible to anyone other than the owner while there is no one within. If there are living creatures within, the doorway used to enter it is faintly visible to anyone with powerful magical senses and can, in theory, be broken into with extremely powerful spatial, portal or teleportation magic.

The user may also add in a material sample to create the illusion of the room’s boundaries being made of this material, as well as windows to observe the outside, antennas to access satellite feeds, … (see full list?).

Isaac grinned and stepped inside, finding himself in a decently sized cube bordered in walls made from black matter and azure lightening. It looked spooky, but he’d be able to change that with just a sliver of any other material, which he could soon get.

Anyway … time to take another nap before going shopping. It was nice to take it easy like this, even if it wouldn’t last beyond today.