Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 23: Weekend Plans

“Oh, what did you do over the weekend?”

“Well, I walked into the forest where Hansel and Gretel might have taken place in, summoned a bunch of extradimensional horrors and killed them all to get stronger. How ‘bout you?”

Isaac chuckled loudly as he imagined how that conversation would go.

He ducked under another branch and adroitly danced up one side of a large rock and down the other, still chuckling. He loved this, exploring the woods in a way that no ordinary human could. His stats were nowhere near where they’d been before, but still noticeably beyond human limits, especially his Perception.

Literally any man who had ever lived would have had at least some trouble making his way through a forest he wasn’t familiar with in the dead of night. But Isaac could do so with ease.

After a few more minutes, he finally found a nice and open clearing, perfect for what he intended.

Isaac dug a small divot into the ground with his hands, then drew a simple, Tier 1 summoning circle into it. A chicken bone and a shot glass filled with coke went in after it, followed by a surge of mana.

Acid Slime (Lv. 2) has been slain. 10 XP gained

The creature had barely had the time to manifest before he a glowing yellow stick pierced its nexus and killed it.

Now, every second mattered. Using a metal soup ladle, Isaac carefully began to fill one of the thick walled, acidproof, glass jars until the liquid turned cloudy from dissolved soil. The ladle was already starting to look pretty corroded despite only having been used for barely a minute.

As he watched, the acid slowly grew the pit deeper and deeper, slowing down as it did so.

It was a good thing, Isaac reflected, that that crap broke down rather completely while it was actively dissolving something, rendering it harmless if left lying around. Ergo, no pollution, which was a bit of a surprise given that these creatures were meant to be used to eventually end the world.

Then again, monsters whose very presence corrupted the world were unlikely to be summoned too often. There were a lot of things that were dangerous that people did anyway, but living chemical spills were unlikely to be particularly popular choices in terms of summonings.

Just like that, he had one half of the ingredients he needed. And the second was just another summoning away. Into a Tier 3 circle went a piece of chicken breast that had been left out far too long, a few iron shavings, and a rock. He charged it, but then decided to wait for his mana to come back before triggering it.

He sat down on a small fallen tree at the edge of the clearing and pulled out his phone to check some headlines.

‘First human hits Level 10, gains Class evolution!’

“Idiots.” Isaac muttered, not even entirely sure who he was addressing. He knew essentially for certain that there would be people who’d hit that Level before now, they’d just been smart enough not to scream it from the rooftops.

He himself was falling further and further behind in terms of raw Level and Stats, but the actual power differential wasn’t nearly as great. People who blazed ahead by ganking simple creatures wouldn’t have the same [Skill] Levels that he did, something that would later translate into weaker choices at the [Class] Evolution.

It would be the people hitting that first Evolution in the second week after the [System’s] Initialization that would become humanity’s future powerhouses, its greatest heroes as well as its greatest villains. Or, sadly, both.

Basically, a soldier in China had hit that Level and been hailed a great champion, followed by similar pronouncements from America, Russia and a few other nations.

… and then a poorly fotoshopped picture of the North Korean Supreme Leader with a Level 100 [System] window above his head had ended up on Twitter from the official account of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, instantly becoming everyone’s new favorite meme template.

Then again, both the picture and subsequent ridicule were perfectly in line with what one could have expected from that situation, so it was hardly surprising.

Quite a few articles talked about all the new advances science had made, though to Isaac’s knowledgeful gaze, it was clear that they didn’t really know what they were talking about. Hell, any of his colleagues would have been able to tell the same.

Only a handful talked about actual papers, of which there were few. Theirs had literally been one of the first, seeing as they’d done literally everything as quickly as they could. They’d set up a lab within a couple of days, ended up on track to write said paper thanks to Isaac’s shenanigans … and here they were.

Lastly, there was a lot of chatter about the economy. It was a dry topic, but oh so important. Almost all people were coming back to work now, though some were still staying at home, all the more convinced the end had come now that they’d had a few more days to see the true extent of how much the world had changed.

And just like that, twenty minutes had passed and his mana was back up to full.

The Swamp Devourer rose from the ground like the thing from the black lagoon, at least if one imagined the ground was the surface of a muddy lake instead.

It had four legs as most normal creatures did, looking alarmingly like an overly large crocodile’s legs, attached to a body that was mostly a frog’s mouth, except filled with countless needle teeth. Four eyes completed its image, two were the nostrils would be on a normal frog, the others slightly further back and to the side, all glowing a dark brown.

Not even bothering to hiss at him, it lunged, mouth agape and tongue lashing out to wrap around his throat. Isaac just grabbed it and lashed out with his knife, empowering it with [Power Strike] and severing the tongue just as it escaped the monster’s mouth.

Now, whatever resolve was keeping it silent failed and it let out a roar of pain as it charged again, not bothering to jump again. It was clearly smart enough to realize that jumping made its trajectory predictable and leaping would just end with it getting sliced to pieces.

It moved quickly, far faster than any crocodile could, mouth agape and ready to chomp down. It was fast, faster than Isaac by enough to make dodging an iffy proposition. So he didn’t bother trying in the first place, using [Spectral Shift] to phase through the charging monster and stabbing downwards with [Piercing Strike] as it passed through him.

The Swamp Devourer stiffened and keeled over, dead. And that was that. A quick glance at his Status revealed that [Power Strike] had levelled up once again, bringing the [Skill] up to Level 10 and granting it an additional effect.

Power Strike (common)

User’s next blow will strike with as much force as though the user’s strength stat were 50%+2n% stronger where n equals skill level higher.

This Skill may now also be safely used on arms and legs and has a reduced backlash on the user’s body.

Cost: 12 mana per strike, low stamina drain

The description itself hadn’t changed that much at first glance, allowing for the use of the [Skill] on his limbs and being less draining to use. Isaac knew he still wouldn’t have kept his thumbs intact during that stunt the other night, but it would have certainly helped.

The bigger difference was that the increase in the [Skill’s] power per Level had doubled, from one percent to two percent, making it a good deal stronger. All of that would be quite useful.

But simple XP and [Skill] Levels wasn’t why he’d chosen to summon this specific thing.

Instead, he heaved at the body and flipped it over, leaving it lying on its back. From there, he began to slice open its belly and flipped the large skin flap to the side. A little more digging then revealed a series of ordinary glands. Saliva, tiny sweat glands under the skin, the gall bladder built into the liver … and a rather nasty looking one that fed directly into its stomach. The acid gland the Swamp devourer had never had the chance to use.

Isaac grabbed it and opened up the bottle of acid, taking a moment to judge if it was enough, and then just squeezed the contents inside.

The resulting combination had reached a terrifying level of infamy in the other timeline, known to the world as Corpsemelter Acid. Through some kind of decidedly unnatural process, not really explainable by the current and non-magical laws of physics, the matter dissolving properties of the acid now only applied to organic material and the mass limited itself to eating the body of a single organism. Perfect for cleaning up after a battle and soon to become a favorite of hitmen and mobsters everywhere. When he released all those basic alchemy recipes he knew, this one would not be among them.

The viscous liquid bubbled and frothed for a moment, then settled down. Aaaaaannd done.

Now he could easily clean up after himself and melt anything he didn’t want to take with him afterwards.

But those fights would be something for later. For now, he needed something a little different.

Drawing out a Tier 4 circle took what felt like forever, but he still managed to finish in a timely fashion and put the material inside. A fist sized rock, a hunk of iron, a handful of dirt. Isaac waited for the last ten points of mana to recharge, filled the circle with enough magic to get it ready to summon, and then waited until he’d regained all that power.

This time however, he decided against browsing online, instead practicing with [Hundred Faces] a little.

His face slimmed down, cheekbones rising, eyeballs growing more visible. It slowly shifted to that of a wide eyed, innocent girl blinking at whatever weird thing that had happened. The very picture of someone who had absolutely nothing to do with the kaiju rampaging in the background.

Of course, he still had a male body, so that whole idea was likely to go poorly if here were to try it in real life.

But once the [Skill] hit Level 10, he’d be able to alter the rest of his body. Compress his muscles to hide them, decompress them to make himself look like Schwarzenegger, the options were endless. He just couldn’t use it to make himself physically stronger, sadly. But it was already pretty strong as was.

Another shift, and the face of a famous actor stared back at him.

He tried out a few more shifts before he decided to stop to preserve his mana and switched back over to his phone. He was just trying to do too much and outpacing his regeneration.

More depressing facts about the world, some doomsday predictions, and an actress he didn’t know was pregnant. In other words, the normal news cycle.

He scrolled through it for a bit, filled the circle when his mana hit full and then went back to the news.

Isaac noticed the battery was getting kinda low, so he hooked his phone up to the power bank he’d brought, then just kept looking through the news. Not because he expected anything good or important to show up, he was just killing time.

Eventually, his mana became full again and when he activated the circle, a rock golem erupted upwards. A body made from heavy rock, reinforced with iron bars where the bones would have been on a creature of flesh and blood, small streams of metal threading their way through the rock to reinforce it and keep it together, with several layers of dirt beneath the surface to cushion the monster against blunt impacts.

The monster’s basic moveset and capabilities were basically identical to those of a Slate Golem, just scaled up to the level of a Tier 4. On the surface. In reality, it was many times more durable, far less prone to cracking in large pieces, highly resistant to blunt impacts and simply too physically big for most standard weaponry to easily get at the core.

In short, one nasty motherfucker, tough as hell to take down.

But in the other timeline, these things had been known for an entirely other property, one that was exactly what he needed here.

The Golem lashed out, a massive fist whistling past with impressive force, but it wasn’t quite fast enough.

Isaac dodged that with a simple backstep, then sprinted forward and punched his blade through a leg joint, the orange-brown glow of a combined [Power Strike], [Piercing Strike] and [Sundering Strike] tearing rock like tissue paper. That single hit cost him almost seventy mana, but it tore through the metal rod at the core and sent out corrosive energies that weakened the surrounding material to the point where it couldn’t keep up the weight of the body anymore.

The weakened section of the limb crumbled and fell off to the side, the stump of the right leg smashing into the ground. To avoid falling flat on its face, the Golem punched its right arm into the ground to hold itself up.

Another [Sundering Strike] scraped along the side of the Golem, weakening the surface layer of armor, then punched it with a [Power Strike] in the same spot, causing a large chunk on the front of its torso to crumble away despite the metal reinforcements, followed by the first layer of dirt.

The next [Power Strike] slammed home, using the hilt of Isaac’s knife to hammer into the next layer, which had also been affected by the [Sundering Strike].

Another glowing red fist hit home, blasting a hole in another layer of armor.

Keeping its left arm firmly planted in the ground to keep its balance, the Golem swept the right arm out to try and pulverize Isaac’s skull, but he just dodged.

The instant it had both arms back on the ground to push itself back into a pseudo standing position, Isaac lunged, a blade glowing orange with both [Power Strike] and [Piercing Strike] hammered into the next layer of armor, blasting a basketball sized hole into it. He drew the knife back, then jammed it home one final time with a simple [Piercing Strike].

The Rock Golem stiffened and stopped moving, a trickle of dirt cascading out of the wound. Gotcha.

And that was how the golem stood there, on arms and legs, a very durable roof kept up by four metal and stone columns. As nearly everyone in the other timeline had known, if you needed a temporary shelter against the wind and rain, just kill one of these guys in the right pose and hang up some leather or plastic sheets to close up the sides.

Isaac had actually brought a few sheets of tent fabric and was hanging those up to cover up three of the four open sides, then laid down a waterproof sheet underneath the Golem. He laid down, using his backpack as a pillow.

Creating a temporary shelter could be this easy under the [System].

He took the time to draw out another circle, this time a Tier 3. He was looking for something that would be somewhat of a challenge, not a Tier 4 against whom he currently still needed a favorable matchup to safely kill.

Eventually, he came across a proper category he liked.

Summoning List (Feline)

Name

Material Cost

Mana Cost

Stray

Tier 1 Circle, Dead Mouse

10

Puma

Tier 1 Circle, Pelt, Mud, Rocks

25

Snowfall Lynx

Tier 2 Circle, Ice, Pelt, dust

50

Shadow Cat

Tier 3 Circle, Ash, Black Velvet, Razorblade

100

Saber

Tier 4 Circle, Kitchen Knife, Pelt

125

Jungle King

Tier 4 Circle, Ember, Ivory Chunk

150

Sky Panther

Tier 5 Circle, Eagle’s Feather, Cat’s Tooth, Pelt

250

…

Ah yes, the cats. Gigantic winged panthers that could snatch fighter jets out of the air, immense lions with manes of flame, sabretooth tigers with literal sabers for teeth … and a Shadow Cat. A proper stealth attacker, comparable to him in stats, a challenge.

While he waited for the mana to come back as he usually did, he began to properly scout the surrounding area. Every rock, every patch of leaves that might rustle when someone stepped into it, just everything.

Time flew by in what seemed like seconds and all too soon, he had not only charged the circle, his mana had also maxed out.

Darkness filled the circle, retracting a second later to reveal what Isaac considered to be a rather poorly named creature. It might be called a Shadow Cat, but that thing was a goddamn panther.

It seemed to fade into the darkness around it, whisps of vantablack matter sinking into the surrounding area to make it even harder to see.

But Isaac had already gained a good deal of distance and was in full sneaky bastard mode.

The panther looked around, head flicking to glare at anything that moved, but it could see nothing. The automatic summoner tracking power actually didn’t kick in if the Summoner was in some kind of stealth mode as stealth based [Classes] would have been useless otherwise.

It sniffed the air and leaped, hurrying through the underbrush near silently until it was looking directly at Isaac … but he’d already activated [Stealth] and turned invisible.

He’d been walking around for too long, spreading his scent far and wide, making tracking a good deal harder. It might have been able to tell in roughly what area he was, but not his exact location.

When it had turned as far from him as it likely ever would, Isaac sprinted forward silently and drove his dagger into its haunches. It hissed and spun around with incredible speed, barely missing due to Isaac flinging himself backwards.

For the very first time, he activated [Far Strike], raking the multi-meter spectral blade across its flank, creating a deep cut. The panther sprinted forward, claws extended to tear him apart … and flew right through him. By the time it had managed to turn around, Isaac had faded back into the darkness.

The Shadow Cat activated whatever superior version of its normal stealth power it had and went almost completely invisible, making tracking it a whole lot harder.

Isaac grinned inwardly. This was what he’d been hoping for. The Flow.

That wasn’t actually a gaming term, but rather an expression from psychology. It was the state of mind of someone doing something challenging but not so hard as to crush their spirits. The state that video games were meant to put their players into, just as puzzle books and the like did.

And that was what the Shadow Cat was. A fight against a proper enemy with powers that drew out the fight, challenging. A game of cat and mouse where the fighters played both roles simultaneously.

The ambush scene repeated itself twice more before the cat lay dead, but dead it was.

Panting, Isaac sat down next to it and began to skin it.

“Good fight.”

Once the skin had been scraped free of flesh and hung from the side of the Rock golem, he poured a good amount of Corpsemelter acid over what remained, as well as the body of the Swamp Devourer, then fled from the noxious fumes.

Isaac laid down in the little shelter and pulled out his phone, checking the news once again, but he was getting bored. It didn’t seem like there was much more he needed to know.

So, he checked his various forms of social media. Sam had answered to his message with an ‘ok, see what I can do’, Raul had asked him if he would like to join him and some friends on a hunting trip and Bailey had sent out a generic ‘have a nice weekend’ message.

But those were only the kinds of messages he wanted to see. There were dozens of others, from friends and family, all accumulated over the past five days.

His mother, his sister, his sister from another mister that had been one of his best friends since childhood … he wanted to talk to precisely none of them. One by one, he deleted the messages, removed himself from any group chats and blocked them.

Carefully, he set down his phone next to the charging bank and walked out of the shelter.

He’d liked all those people in the other timeline, loved them, in some cases. And then, they’d left. Some had simply drifted away as more distant friends and acquaintances were wont to do, others had died, falling prey to the monsters that were slowly conquering the Earth.

They were dead now, all of the people he’d known in the other timeline, gone forever. The people they’d become, the experiences they’d had and been shaped by, destroyed by senseless cruelty.

People with the same names, the same personalities they’d started out as, those lived once more, but they weren’t his people. Not yet.

And the instant he’d begun changing things, his friends from the other timeline had been erased. Oh, sure, he might try to create some fucked up facsimiles, piss poor knock offs of the real thing, by trying to recreate their circumstances. But it wouldn’t be them, not ever. Those people were gone and would forever stay gone.

He’d managed to ignore it. For five days, he’d pushed all of that out of his mind and focused on his task.

But now, those walls had crumbled.

A young tree shook as a fist smashed into it, followed by a second that glowed crimson, leaving a massive dent in the wood. Skin split, bone crunched, blood dripped to the ground, pain creating a momentary distraction from the agony in his mind.

Then he held up the mangled hand in front of his face, watching as bones slid back into place with wet crunching noises, splinters of wood pushing their way out through holes that closed up behind them, more pain flooding his system.

Isaac just sighed. He’d save humanity, but that life was gone. Those people were gone. And if it had been an option, he’d have saved Earth from a whole other planet, escaping familiarity.

The only exception was Sam, and that was only because they’d have both graduated and never spoken to each other again in a few months. This Sam was the Sam he remembered, and even then, Isaac had only talked to him because of the invitation to that damned party.

Isaac glanced at his mana bar, then punched the tree again. And again. And again until his hands were bloody but intact while his mana bar was empty.

Hot tears stung in his eyes and he wiped them away angrily, glaring around at nothing. He would save this world, that was all he could do for those he’d lost.

Name: Isaac Thoma

Class: Rogue

Species: Human

Level: 3

XP: 379/400

Health Status: Healthy

Mana: 0/150

Stats

Fortitude

17

Perception

23

Strength

12

Agility

16

Magic Power

15

Magic Regeneration

17

Free Points: 0 Stat, 6 Skill

Skills

Hundred Faces V

Stealth V

Power Strike XI

Piercing Strike XII

Sundering Strike VII

Knives XI

Sneak IX

Sweeping Strike I

Far Strike II

Manifold Strike I

Aspects

Aspect Skills

Specter

Spectral Shift

Hydra

Hydra’s Regeneration

Pulling up his Status Sheet showed that he’d gotten Levels in most of his [Skills] and was a stone’s throw away from having enough XP for Level 4.

He was getting to where he wanted to be, but he wasn’t anywhere near even just his goals for the weekend.

By the time the sun rose above the trees, he was Level 5.