Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 81: Once more into the breach …

The ‘Children of the System’, or ‘Systemers’ for short. He should have known.

They were actually on the list he was planning to ‘publish’ later, but the issue was, there were simply too many people on it, even though he’d limited it to the ones he had solid information on. After all, namedropping a bunch of people he didn’t know anything else about would detract from the list’s appearance of legitimacy.

Also, there were way too many fucking people and organizations on that list for him to deal with them on his own, not to mention that he didn’t have things like those organizations’ full rosters or the civilian names for most of the ‘big bads’.

But damn if hindsight didn’t make him feel like he should have been able to do something, even if the rational part of his brain was probably right about the fact that he couldn’t have predicted this, that all he could have done was go after everyone on that list and random chance would have decided if he got the right group to prevent this.

And as for the Systemers themselves, he didn’t know much about them either, but he knew enough. Among other things, he had a solid grasp of their doctrine. Basically, they wanted to put all knowledge in the hands of the [System], and gain it back by levelling and improving their [Skills].

Where that would lead was eminently predictable, though. Hell, it had been thoroughly predicted in literature even before the [System] had become reality and after the initialization, countless philosophical and sociological papers had been written on the topic, all of them boiling down to ‘a world that rose and fell with the Level of its inhabitants, hardship bringing levels and advanced science, the easy living that followed dropping the Level back down, bringing that level of prosperity crashing down, hardship returning and resulting in the Levels increasing again … and so on and so forth, leaving humanity stuck in an endless loop until the end of time’.

The basic idea of strongly disliking institutionalized learning wasn’t that wrong, but most cults, and most conspiracy theories, for that matter, had some reasonable elements to them, they just either took things way to fucking far or hid a bunch of bullcrap underneath that one reasonable and logical thing.

Really, the biggest lesson for his adult life he’d learned in school was how to keep his temper and not punch the petty tyrant who’d let the most infinitesimal shred of power go to their head and was abusing it to the absolute maximum.

These guys weren’t that big an issue in the far future, where their unwillingness to learn lessons from others’ failures would bite them in the ass, big time. But for now, that was still a sustainable way to live.

Isaac was also pretty sure that idiotic, self-destructive ideology had been provided by one of the dark gods, making them one of the people nudged down the wrong path that Janus had mentioned way back when. But they’d still let themselves be convinced and they couldn’t be receiving constant guidance, so he still held them culpable for their actions. He’d thought they were safe to leave to the various intelligence and law enforcement agencies once he sent out the list, because he hadn’t known about them causing any big incidents until a year or so from now. He’d also assumed that the dark gods couldn’t sic ‘em on the research team because going after him, be it directly or by targeting his friends, allies and loved ones, would affect the balance between the two sides too drastically to be worth it.

But knowledge of future events was growing less and less useful with every passing day. That being said, some things were linked to symbolic dates that had existed before the [System], and those could still happen.

Like that guy who’d summoned a Plague Wight on Louis Pasteur’s birthday and killed it as a ‘symbolic defeat of disease and to honor a great man’, then uploaded the video onto the internet. Of course, that had gone over like a house on fire, but Isaac didn’t really much worry about that. All the right precautions had been made and all that, so not only had no one been maimed or killed, there had never even been a real risk of that happening.

And as long as everyone kept their lives and limbs, it was the thought that counted, right?

But other than said incidents linked to symbolic dates, he couldn’t count on anything happening again, and the risk of incidents that only happened in this timeline occurring rose exponentially, incidents he couldn’t predict or deal with directly, only make sure that others had the tools to deal with them.

And one of those incidents had been this one. These assholes had decided to go after the team on their own, with no input from any divine jackasses. That being said, they’d screwed up by the numbers, as usual.

They hadn’t known the team’s Levels, they hadn’t considered that a bunch of academics might know how to fight even if said academics had spent most of their working time taking down mythical monsters and given how Patrick had found that one guy, they clearly hadn’t thought things through and realized that a researcher might just have good senses.

The guy who’d summoned the latest shark was now in custody, but there were undoubtedly several more around here, but he knew where to find them. Simply put, they were almost certainly the people who’d been summoning Tier 5 monsters to power level themselves after the first attempt had failed miserably. And to how he’d found out, it was simple. Patrick had texted him about the issue and asked for tips with handling sensory overload. It hadn’t meant much before the deliberateness of the shark summoning had been revealed, but now that it had been, things made sense.

From then on, tracking them down had been easy. He’d had a rough direction, east of the hotel, and a starting point, the site of the battle. There were cops there, gathering evidence, but none of them were able to even catch a glimpse of him as he practically floated around the area, noting some of the more interesting and unique tricks employed by Amy and Patrick. They’d been practicing, good for them.

Here, he’d located the guy’s footprints, noticing the small amount of monster bits in his bootprints. A smattering of Drake blood, Rock Golem powder, shed Hydra scales, all tracked along on the bottom of his shoes.

The police had locked the area down pretty well, locating the weird material traces in the prints and concluding what he’d been doing prior to coming here and dumping more sharks into the lake, but they weren’t quite ready to try and backtrack his path through the forest.

Isaac, on the other hand, could see perfectly in the dark and had a nose like a bloodhound … when he wanted to. One could choose to not utilize certain aspects of one’s enhanced senses, so he kept his sense of smell at normal human levels because if he didn’t, the world simply stank.

He’d then flitted through the woods like the wraith both his current and previous [Classes] had been named after, reaching the next town over in mere minutes and locating these guys’ base of operations mere moments later. It was a large, covered arena, the faded sign outside proclaiming it to have been used for something involving horses. It was definitely too small to have been a racetrack, so maybe something less speed focused and more acrobatic … what was that thing called where someone held a line attached to a horse, leaving the animal to run around them while someone did tricks on its back?

Eh, it wasn’t like it really mattered. What did matter was that the place was pretty perfect. The sandy-like substance that covered the floor was both solid to provide solid footing, but also somewhat yielding, it could be easily drawn in to create summoning circles and it would absorb blood pretty well. Couple that with facilities would take care of athletes before and after their competitions, or at least had done so, it was a pretty good place to use as a summoning arena.

Now all that remained to do was to decide how he would deal with them and in what state they would be afterwards. It was oh-so-tempting to give in to the fury burning within his chest, ping that place with his [Aura of the Desperate Seeker] to find out how many people were in there and their locations, switch over to the [Aura of the Crimson Dawn] and go full berserker on their ass, to rend these motherfuckers limb from limb and then wash his hands of the whole affair. [Fleeting Presence] would remove all of the physical evidence humans normally shed, except what he’d carried around on his clothes, but he’d removed all that before coming to the forest. He’d simply put his current outfit into storage and pulled out a new one, but only the outfit, instructing the storage space to hold onto anything and everything on the clothes.

But a massacre, no matter how awful the would-be ‘victims’ were, wasn’t the right choice. For one, these guys were pretty well spread out, and the fact that had happened so early was another point in favor of the ‘egged on by a god’ theory. He could kill these guys, but that wouldn’t take care of all of them. Sadly, their aversion to writing crap down and instead relying on [Skills], their own memory and [Skills] that enhanced said memory had inadvertently given them a pretty solid level of information security, which would be one hell of a problem if he killed them all.

Also, if he killed them all, the headlines wouldn’t read ‘murderous religious cult exterminated, people praise unknown savior’, they’d read ‘followers of a new religion butchered, manhunt underway’. It would make him look awful, but if he was careful about it, he wouldn’t be connected to it. But these guys would be, and they’d be martyrs.

There was another way though, simply rendering them unable to hurt anyone else while still leaving them alive. Their quality of life would suffer grievously, sure, but he didn’t care about that.

Now he just needed a plan. A lot of his [Skills] were both distinctive and known, meaning that using them might lead to this being tracked back to him, which limited him to his basic, generic active [Skills]. His regeneration and phasing should be fine, though, given that that particular combination had already become a classic, in no small part due to his recommendation. A [Rogue] type using them wouldn’t raise any red flags.

As for his [Aura], now that was a problem. [Auras] were pretty distinctive, and incredibly easy to recognize again, but there were ways to disguise them.

The best one was to use a minimum Tier 6 Chimera core to temporarily splice an Aspect into one’s [Aura], changing how it felt. Sadly, there was a little issue with obtaining them, namely, that the monsters themselves ran on a gacha system.

Summoning List (Chimera)

Name

Material Cost

Mana Cost

Chimera

Tier 1 Circle, Dice, Parts from one Animal

10

Chimera

Tier 2 Circle, Dice, Parts from one Animal

50

Chimera

Tier 3 Circle, Dice, Parts from two Animals

100

Chimera

Tier 4 Circle, Dice, Parts from two Animals

150

Chimera

Tier 5 Circle, Dice, Parts from three Animals

250

Classic Chimera

Tier 5 Circle, Hair of a Lion, Skull of a Goat, Fangs of a venomous Serpent, Amethyst Crystal

400

Chimera

Tier 6 Circle, Dice, Parts from four Animals

600

…

Basically, you stuck in the bits from as many animals as the summoning list specified, then the [System] would add in one of any animal that had ever walked the Earth and hybridize all of them into one giant monstrosity. With how many animals were fused into a Tier 6, the number of ways to possibly combine them all was immense, making preparing for them damn hard.

Therefore, he’d decided to not get some just yet.

Thankfully, that wasn’t a problem, though. He’d just stick to his sensory [Aura] and keep his touch light, avoiding intersecting with other [Auras] too much, etc. It would require techniques he couldn’t possibly have access to right now, but those very same techniques would ensure no one, least of all these guys, was aware they were even in play.

Lastly, there was merely the small, infinitesimal issue of someone being able to recognize him or his rather distinctive weapon, but there were also solutions available to both problems.

For the weapon, he simply manifested Old Reliable in the boneblade form, the one based on the Aspect of the Dunkleosteus. It was one he’d never wielded where it could be seen and he hadn’t told anybody that his blade’s forms were based on his Aspects, just that he could unlock new ones by fighting monsters. Given that his penchant for fighting Ephemeral beings and Hydras was fairly well know, he also had a solid explanation for why he had them.

And as far as his face and body went, well, that was what [Hundred Faces] was for. His skin rapidly grew taught, stretching over a bony, practically skeletal body, growing alabaster white at the same time. Meanwhile, the whites of his eyes went red as he enlarged the blood vessels within and his green irises turned into a brown so dark even he’d have thought they were black.

If there’d been a mirror before him, a creature of nighmares would have been staring back at him. Bone-white skin, red eyes with black voids in the place of an iris, clothes so dark they seemed to suck in the light.

A massive Zweihänder made from bone was lazily resting on his shoulder, while a ritual dagger looking knife, also made from bone, hung from his belt.

And with that done, he charged.