Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 104: Departure

Leaving South Korea was a bittersweet experience. On one hand, it had been amazing to be somewhere so much like the other timeline in its heyday. And then there’d been the joy of finally diving through Dungeons again … it had been pretty fun.

However, he’d really missed his home. Sure, they’d each had a hotel room to sleep in and store stuff they didn’t want to have to dip into their storage space to get, but that was very different when compared to how normal people dealt with it. Normal people needed eight or so hours of sleep every night, spent a little time before and after sleep in that room as well, and that could make a hotel room feel a little like a home away from home.

Not so much when all you needed in terms of sleep was maybe fifteen minutes. You walked into your room, collapsed into bed, and woke up in less time that some people took to shower. In and out in maybe half an hour, total. Hell, you could do that on a park bench if you wanted, but Isaac had done that on holiday once or twice, and it absolutely sucked. It made you feel alone and untethered and that wasn’t fun.

And that effect was present even when you had a hotel room because you spent so little time in there. Sure, Isaac spent very, very little time in his actual room at home, but it was there and it was his. He was really looking forward to going home, even though he’d still miss this place.

The flight itself, though, was far more pleasant than the flight here. Yoo-jin had sent his second in command with them to the airport, which had seriously helped with the security issue. When coming here from Germany, they’d had a decently high ranking police officer call ahead and say ‘you’ve got some high Level folks heading your way, don’t panic’.

This time around, the equivalent of … the Deputy Chief of the Police Department probably came close, coming with and vouching for them. As a result, airport security barely glanced at them and then they were past it.

Now though, he was on the plane and this time, he’d actually brough along something to do, or rather, a bunch of books to read, as well as downloaded some news stories to peruse at his leisure.

The consequences of his infodump had been, in a word, immense. The alchemical secrets alone had been impactful, but when combined with and lending credibility to the ‘assholes of the century’ list, it had been downright Earth-shaking.

Things were settling again now, but the back to back impacts of the [System] arriving, the Stormheart Gestalt, the Event, the [System] based terrorist group and now this had exposed some serious cracks in society. Those cracks had been there before, they’d always been there, but you normally didn’t really see them unless you looked for them or were directly affected.

But when something intensified those situations, be they racial injustices or wealth disparities, things went usually went to hell in a handbasket. And everything that had come with the [System] had struck at least one of the cracks.

Consequently, the world was in a far more precarious place than it had been at this point in the other timeline, society-wise.

It wasn’t people that were in danger, it were the societal structures that held up the world, but they’d bounce back, stronger than before and hopefully with a lot fewer harmful plans on what to do with the [System]. Hopefully.

However, even with all the tensions happening at the moment, they’d gained a lot of security from the [System]. Assholes off the street, cults smothered in the cradle and there were some very interesting rumors coming from North Korea at the moment.

Of course, that was all they were. Rumors, hearsay, and odd occurrences that media censorship hadn’t quitemanaged to cover up. At the end of the day, very little concrete, first-hand information came out of North Korea was available, but reading between the lines, it was abundantly clear that something was very, very wrong in ‘not-actually-paradise’.

One of the allusions he’d made in the infodump had been about how easy it was to powerlevel a few people up by a handful of Levels, force them to put all their Stat points into Magic Power, creating individuals that were fragile, weak and slow as hell, but could collectively summon [Raid Bosses]. They’d die, of course, but drop a terrifyingly powerful monster on someone’s lap in the process.

Oh, and North Korea had been founded on October 3rd, 1948, it was currently September and wouldn’t the anniversary of a county’s founding be an auspicious date for reunification, hint hint?

Well, it seemed that someone had picked up what he’d put down and actually done something about it. He, along with most of the world, couldn’t tell what was going on, but as long as people were taking some steps, that was good.

In the other timeline, there had been an incident involving a Demon Lord getting summoned in the middle of Seoul and afterwards, the entirety of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea had collapsed not with a bang, but with a whimper, and that was the end of that. That attack had been the last straw and someone had finally stepped in and it hadn’t even been that difficult.

Simply put, the [System] had massively changed the balance of power between democratic and totalitarian states for one simple reason.

In the old world, physical power was to political or financial power as a firecracker was to a nuke. The head of state might have been a fragile old or an young, overweight, unhealthy man that most of the people he dealt with on a daily basis could break with their little finger, but no one ever did because there were others with a comparable level of physical power that the leader’s political power would send against any would be attacker. And if the state in question was nasty enough, the attacker’s family wouldn’t be safe either.

That changed with the [System], where courageous or foolhardy individuals could reach levels of power sufficient to level city blocks with a wave of their hand and now, the leader of an autocratic state needed to be the strongest, period, because others that wielded even greater physical power could take over by sheer force of arms.

And that left any tyrant two options: they could either gain Levels and remain the strongest, or they could make sure everyone else stayed weak.

Sure, powerlevelling the big cheese was a problem, but there was the small issue of the fact that the other people would level faster than the boss, meaning they needed to be actually trusted and an absolute ruler had precious few of those.

Therefore, when someone went after those people, you ended up matching Level 30-odd [Supreme Intelligence Agents], [Masterful Operators] and [Phantom Spies] fighting [Supreme Leader’s Babysitters] who might be Level 10. Maybe.

Isaac could have done the same on his own, hell, he could have probably waltzed straight into the White House or Pentagon if he wanted to, they hadn’t had the proper defenses needed to keep someone like him out put it yet, but there was a very good reason against it.

He might have had the power to kill any head of state he wanted right now, and probably topple the state while he was at it, but he had no idea what to do afterwards.

… well, he knew what to do intellectually, but he certainly didn’t have any practical experience with it and he wasn’t willing to experiment with the lives of people to gain it.

Of course, various intelligence agencies had screwed up changes in government before, they’d screwed up by numbers and created tyrannical states that trampled human right in the past, but if Isaac had tried to go at this alone, anything he’d have created would have been worse.

On the other hand, things were entirely outside his control now and that was making him seriously anxious, leaving Isaac feeling like he’d just sat down on top of an anthill and now, they were crawling all over him.

Isaac decided this was a good time to stop obsessing about things he couldn’t really control anymore and checked his character sheet as a way to distract himself.

Name: Isaac Thoma

Class: Bladewraith

Species: Human

Level: 43

XP: 12,739/13,200

Health Status: Healthy

Mana: 1,000/1,000

Stats

Fortitude

60

Perception

110

Strength

60

Agility

120

Magic Power

100

Magic Regeneration

110

Free Points: 0 Stat, 3 Skill

Aura

Aura of the Crimson Dawn (short range, combat, blood, regeneration)

Aura of the Desperate Seeker (long range, sensory, mental, projection)

Central Skills

Form of Horror XIX

The Chosen Weapon XXIV

I Am The Sword III

Grave of Swords I

Skills

Hundred Faces XXII

Stealth XXV

Power Strike XXVIII

Piercing Strike XXVIII

Sundering Strike XXVI

Blades XXVII

Sneak XXVI

Sweeping Strike XIV

Far Strike XXIII

Manifold Strike XVII

Hunter’s Gaze XXVII

Phantom Step XV

Unknown Fear XVI

Bestial Regeneration XIX

Undying Focus XVO

Tools of Terror XIX

Fleeting Presence XIII

Crippling Blow IX

Absolute Blade Mastery VIII

Compounded Impact VI

True Cut I

General Skills

Gralloch X

Alchemy X

Aspects

Aspect Skills

Poltergeist (2 stack)

Poltergeist’s Flight

Poltergeist Shift

Hydra (2 stack)

Hydra’s Regeneration

Redundant Organs

Megalodon (2 stack)

Shark’s body

Wave Charge

Fata Morgana (2 stack)

Improved Basic Illusion

Perception Block

Blade Tempest (2 stack)

Blade Control

Eternal Blades

[Empty Slot]

He’d gained another four Levels, bringing him up to Level 43, and gotten [Skill] Levels across the board.

Meanwhile, thirty of the Stat points had gone into Magic Power to give him a total mana pool of one thousand, enough to summon the next tier of monsters. Sure, jumping Tiers was pretty dangerous at this point, but by choosing his battles, he could be reasonably certain of winning. Also, his new [Skill] was expensive as fuck.

The last ten points had gone into Agility, though, he really needed to get that Stat up.

Also, he’d bought another [Skill] and hoo boy, it was dozy.

True Cut (legendary)

What can be cut? Paper? Flesh? Bone? Rock? Metal? Air? At what point is something too hard to cut, and can you even cut liquids or gasses? What about things with no physical form to cut?

Well, with this Skill, the answer is that everything can be cut, no matter how hard, no matter how immaterial, no matter how conceptual it may be.

Defenses sundered with a swipe as a magical shield is destroyed in a single swipe or the very concept of armor ceases to function for the brief instant it takes for the target to lose its head.

However, not all uses of this Skill are as grand as that. At its most basic, True Cut can be used directly on the effects of another Skill and cut it, disabling it for a period dependent on the amount of mana invested.

IMPORTANT: Concepts cannot be destroyed, only damaged, and will return rapidly, possibly instantaneously, and can only be affected in a small area.

WARNING: The cost of this Skill depends on the target and may exceed the user’s mana pool by a significant degree, attempting to overdraw the mana pool will lead to the user’s death.

Cost: variable, depending on type (no types discovered yet)

The [Skill’s] description made it sound incredibly powerful, but Isaac knew full well that it was nowhere near as good, based on having had a similar one in the other timeline.

Yes, [True Cut] could be used to damage anything and everything, but the cost was almost always insane.

For example, it could be used to disrupt and slow the passage of time, but the cost was astronomical. Someone with a mana pool comparable to a Level 200 [Archmage] might be able to disrupt an area of space a few nanometers across for, at most … a couple of attoseconds.

The real advantage of [True Cut] was that it was a [Skill]-breaker. It could disrupt [Skills] it hit, destroying them and making it harder, if not impossible, to use them for a brief period of time.

Isaac could, of course, do something similar with Old Reliable’s Astral Piercer form, given that it disrupted people’s spiritual bodies, but that required him to strike at a person’s body directly while [True Cut] could be used on the a [Skill’s] effect to disrupt it.

Of course, that was also still very expensive and the mana cost was usually double or even triple that of the disrupted [Skill], so it wasn’t always worth it.

But if an opponent had built their entire fighting style around one or maybe a handful of [Skills] and one of those suddenly became unavailable, they usually lost in short order.

Also, some people had set up certain devastating combos that could blow you into next week and were usually damn hard to get out of once the first few strikes had landed, but not if you had this [Skill].

And then you had the old classic of simply cutting at the world itself, leaving immobile gashes that were as sharp as the edge of a portal.

Once he’d finished with his character sheet, read all the news articles he’d downloaded and devoured all the mythology books he’d bought, they were nearly home.

Bailey had ‘convinced’ the two students to drop by the university before going home, though that suited Isaac just fine. After all, there was something he still needed to do.

When they finally go there, though, the sheer number of changes was staggering. Not only had the new area to summon a Hunting Ground in been created, but the foundation for several heavily reinforced and hermetically sealed greenhouses had been laid, as that was where they’d be storing and trying to proliferate flora samples from the Hunting Grounds.

There had also been a large area earmarked for future construction to support their efforts, and it was fairly obvious where that area was.

Why? Well, a bunch of [Biologists], [Botanists] and the like, who hadn’t sped up the power gain process by killing monsters, were starting to hit Level 10, evolving, gaining access to new abilities and could now control plant life to some degree, shape the earth or do something else in that vein.

The end results were a corn maze, a large ‘mountain’ covered in alpine plants, a field of flowers that had, at one point, spelled out a naughty word which was still visible despite what had been done to cover it up and the like.

Apparently, superpowers and an area that they knew wouldn’t be used for a few months, minimum, had led to some people going a little, well, crazy.

And if Professor Bailey pushed hard enough, they might even get to use that area when they wanted to.

The teams building, on the other hand, was a mess. Well, it was cleaner than practically any apartment Isaac had ever seen, but it was still quite a bit messier than it had been.

“Well, it still looks better than expected.” Bailey nodded thoughtfully “Good job everyone.”

He raised his voice slightly and called out for the others to meet them in the conference room.

Once everyone was there, Isaac stood up.

“There’s something I need to talk to you about, but first, I need to take care of a few bugs of the electronic variety and then make sure there aren’t people listening in via other means, it’s kinda private.”

With that, he drew a set of tiny daggers, each about the size of a sowing needle, from a pocket and used [Blade Control] to send two straight at the pair of surveillance devices, reducing them to scrap metal with casual ease.

Then, he activated [Perception Block], creating a field around the walls of the room that made overhearing anything with high Perception damn difficult. It wasn’t a [Skill] he often used, but it wasn’t one he needed to use often, given that it wasn’t a combat [Skill].

“Ok, now I’m starting to get nervous.” Amy chuckled, but a serious nervous edge was also present.

“It’s a serious topic.” Isaac replied “It affects the future of this world, touches the secrets of the [System] and will determine the eventual fate of the human race.

“You see, once upon a time, I was …”

“Hah, I knew it!” Raul jumped to his feet “You’re from another world!”

Isaac chuckled nervously “Actually, no, but what makes you say so?”

“You always curse ‘gods’ instead of ‘god’. Who says ‘godsdamnit’? At first, I thought you were just a neo-pagan, but a lot of other things didn’t add up, so … other world?” Raul asked.

“No, I’m from Earth, always have been, but I did come from somewhere else. Another, alternate, timeline …”