Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 119: Interlude Yoo-jin

Yoo-jin stood in front of a vast group of high Level people, the military’s vehicles swarming around him, but even while he snapped out orders, he only had eyes for one thing. The purple crack in reality before him.

He was, of course, familiar with most of Isaac’s signature [Skills], just as he’d memorized all publicly used abilities of every other S-Ranker and A-Rankers. It let the man take a single opponent off the battlefield, isolating it from its comrades while making sure his own allies were safe from it.

And Isaac had used it to buy them vital time. Yoo-jin hadn’t known the man for very long, but in that short time, they’d at least started to become friends. But he was also fully aware of the fact that the two of them would likely never meet again. That delaying move would undoubtedly save countless lives, but Yoo-jin was under no illusions that he’d be seeing Isaac again. Fighting that beast one on one for however long the [Skill] lasted was unlikely to be survivable.

“Guildmaster Seon, how much longer do we have?” a voice rang out beside him, though the speaker was actually fifty kilometers behind him, fed through a complicated web of [Skills].

Yoo-jin himself didn’t have a true Leader-[Class], only the [Party Leader] [Skill], but that was enough. He’d put several [Generals] and a couple of [Admirals] into his party, and then they’d be the ones using the Army-[Skills]. One of them could make it so that Yoo-jin was treated as the source of any [Skills] used at a slight increase to their mana cost, allowing them all to support the war efforts from afar.

Another minute passed with the rift just hanging there, unmoving, and people began growing antsy. Or hopeful. Some were fidgeting wildly, others starting to drop their current state of readiness as they assumed the [Skill] being up so long meant Isaac had won.

But Yoo-jin ignored all of that as he continued to snap out orders while using his [Skills] to create frozen defenses for use in the upcoming fight. Glacial bulwarks and spikes to pierce the feet of the monster in case it charged at them.

Nearly five minutes after it had appeared, the crack in reality shifted for the first time, purple light twisting and flaring as a clawed arm came into view.

Alarm and horror rippled across the faces of the gathered warriors, previously hope-filled expressions turning horrified, all assumptions of victory wiped out.

Then, two beings popped into reality, both looking horrible. It took Yoo-jin a second to connect Isaac to the horrifically burned reptile-thing that stumbled away from the demon, but by then the man had already shifted back to human.

The right half of his face was a burned and blackened mess of flesh, but the left was twisted into a horrific, rictus grin of savage glee. Most of his clothes were still intact, likely having been protected by the transformation, but it didn’t take a medical professional to tell that he was in a horrible state.

Yet as bad as its opponent looked, the Demon Lord looked worse. If Yoo-jin was forced to describe it, he’d say it resembled a corpse killed by the world’s most incompetent executioner, subsequently dragged behind a motorcycle for a couple of kilometers, then finally reanimated and sent to fight a particularly ornery stray cat.

A suspiciously person-shaped hole clean through its head, an arm nearly severed by a series of increasingly powerful blade strikes, countless wounds that glowed green and seemed to have the flesh around it sloughing away … each of them signatory [Skill] of Isaac’s.

And even with all of that damage, far more than Yoo-jin ever could have imagined even another S-Ranker to be able to inflict, the damn thing was still alive. He’d stacked half a dozen vision and sensory-related Aspect [Skills] to grant him an incredible array of perceptive abilities so he could make his plans with as many facts as he could and right now, all of them were telling him the exact same thing. That absolute monster was still alive and combat capable.

“[Glacial Fortress]!” he roared, the shout not necessary to activate the cooldown [Skill], but it functioned as a warning to everyone else that something big was going on. Even if you didn’t recognize the specific [Skill] being used, the fact that someone felt the need to yell it meant that it might be a good idea to hit the deck.

Now that he had eyes on the monster, dropping the massive iceberg-like structure around it almost perfectly and locking it down was perfectly doable.

He then followed this move up with an order to get Isaac out of there as the world exploded into a storm of fire and fury. Professor Kim had arrived four minutes ago and immediately gone to work, setting up a massive magical array through which every iota of mana not desperately needed otherwise was fed. An immense lance of lightning with dozens of nasty curses hammered into the demon’s chest, knocking it on its ass. It had been an incredibly powerful attack, but Yoo-jin could tell that it was one of her cooldown abilities, so a second strike would not be forthcoming.

As the monster rose back up, a gigantic crater in its chest, a hail of lesser abilities hammered down on it, each inflicting a small amount of damage, but even all of them together came nowhere close the amount of damage the opening blow had inflicted.

The first few jets flashed past in strafing runs, sticking to their guns as the [Aura] was still playing merry hell with any explosive or powered weapons used. Meanwhile, the helicopter gunships were surrounding the monster at a safe distance, guns blazing, but they were likewise saving their missiles until something could be done about the [Aura].

For now though, that [Aura] was being pressed down on the front ranks of melee fighters as the demon charged, threatening to obliterate them all, though enough of them had combat [Auras] and the right training to block out the sphere of black fire.

“Shields!” Yoo-jin snapped and cast his own [Winter’s Vanguard], manifesting a truck-sized sheet of ice in front of himself. Countless more panes of energy and tough material joined it, creating a thick yet scattered wall of defenses. It seemed like it might be able to stop the charging hulk, yet it might fail as well.

“[Unified Defense].”

The [Skill] name was announced in an even, calm tone, as though the entire battle was nothing more than an academic exercise in fighting a [Raid Boss], and it the very air itself shivered as it rang out clearly throughout the battlefield even though the user was all the way in Seoul.

It was a [General’s] cooldown [Skill] and it hit like a damn truck. In a sense, all Army-[Skills] were a lot like cooldown [Skills] because they had separate mana pools that could only be used to activate that specific [Skill], but their strongest [Skills] also incurred week- or month-long cooldowns and had power to match.

The countless shields suddenly came together in midair, slapping against each other and sticking in place, layering into an incredibly tough barrier.

So, when the building-sized [Raid Boss] barreled into the wall in an attempt to leap among the army of Hunters, it bounced. Countless shields cracked and even broke, but they were only the surface layer, everything deeper remined intact and then shifted, creating a slightly smaller but fully intact barrier.

Even as it flew through the air, the demon gathered a ball of hellfire between its palms, then unleashed a massive blast of power down at them. The various ‘gunports’ that had opened up in the shield snapped closed in an instant, but the attack’s power was so great, the top three layers of the quadruple-layered shield shattered, yet the last layer suddenly flexed and warped, redirecting the vast majority of the energy into a single pane, which began to glow brighter and brighter. And Yoo-jin recognized it as a fellow S-Ranker’s cooldown [Skill], one which could absorb an insane amount of energy and if it survived an attack, in would invert and reflect it.

He was pretty damn sure that under normal circumstances, that particular shield would have shattered like a coffee cup run over by a steam roller, but the [Unified Defense] had somehow managed to divert only as much energy as it could take into the reflective shield, which now shifted from black fire so dark it seemed to devour light into a mass of roiling golden flames. And as the Demon got back to its feet to charge at the now unprotected army, a lance of said golden fire tore through its already injured right shoulder, completely severing the arm.

They’d already inflicted a massive amount of additional damage to the [Raid Boss], but most of that stemmed from their big attacks, the ones they couldn’t use continuously because they couldn’t continuously use them. Cooldown [Skills] could make this thing flinch, but unfortunately, it was starting to look like only they could inflict significant amounts of damage. That wasn’t to say regular attacks weren’t doing anything, the small strikes that had been peppering the monster’s hide had removed the top layer of skin from most of its body and savaged the muscles and organs underneath, but they still had nothing on the stronger strikes.

An angry roar smashed into them as if it were a physical thing, sending people who weren’t properly braced or had anti-knockbakc [Skills] stumbling and hurling a single plane that happened to be too close out of the sky, but that wasn’t the dangerous portion of its response.

The demon might be down a hand from the last time it had used this particular trick, but even with the liquid flames streaming from just one palm, the ‘lake of fire’ still threatened to engulf their front ranks.

“[Tyranny Breaks].”

Another of the people supporting their efforts from afar used a powerful [Skill], the Army-[Skills] name ringing out, audible to all. Though this time, instead of a clipped, professional tone, the statement was delivered with conviction, with unshakeable confidence that no tyrannical structure would last forever, that it would always be torn down.

The onrushing mass of fire came apart into ineefectual sparks, and those vanished the intant Yoo-jin swept his [Aura] against them.

[Frozen Blade] activated, turning the oversized longsword in his hand into an insanely large thirty meter instrument of death that no normal person would have been able to move. He jammed it into the deepest injury on its torso, then triggered [Winter’s Frigid Grasp], his other cooldown [Skill], and the demon’s chest was suddenly covered in a thick layer of hoarfrost.

A lance of black fire tore over his head, someone’s shield barely blunting the attack. Rapidly cut off screams told Yoo-jin that the attack had, in fact, hit at least a few people.

A half dozen fighters charged into melee while the tanks remained as living bulwarks against attacks, tearing into the monster’s feet and calves with their weapons while sending anything with at least a little range at vulnerable spots out of their normal range.

“[Empowered Barrage], [Phantom Salvo], [Instantaneous Reload].” Three different people activated their [Skills] in rapid succession, the names not ringing across the battlefield but rather being fed directly to Yoo-jin through the [Party], informing him of what was about to happen.

The up until now mostly useless fleet of gunships suddenly seemed to ripple as they emptied every weapon’s rack they had at the monster in a single massive, magically empowered salvo, which was immediately followed by a spectral copy of the first, not empowered by the same magic but immune to the premature detonation effect of the [Aura] because they lacked physical components. Another second later, every single one of those weapons was fully rearmed, the relevant munitions teleported from the various airbases around the city straight into the battlefield, and then those too were unleashed.

The monster’s [Aura] swept through the first two salvos, barely knocking down a twentieth of the incoming munitions and withdrew suddenly as if the monster had decided it was useless. This allowed the final salvo to strike unimpeded, the smoke and sprays of gore hiding the monster from view for a moment.

A moment later, all of that was blown away as the [Aura] flashed out as a massive shockwave. The tanks in the front row of Hunters managed to block it and many of the flying [Mages] dropped down behind them, and half the melee fighter at its feet likewise survived, but the airborne war machines weren’t nearly so lucky. The jets came in on strafing runs and therefore, only a few were in range of that attack at any given moment, but the helicopters … not so much. They’d stayed nearby at what should have been a safe distance, but that had still put them within range of the attack and not a single one remained in the air as the demon’s [Aura] reestablished itself.

But even with all the damage that the demon had inflicted, it had suffered greatly in return. Flesh hung ragged from exposed bone in its sole remaining arm, something that might have been its kidney-analog had simply fallen out of its stomach cavity and merely standing seemed to take an inordinate amount of effort.

And then, the confident voice from earlier spoke once more, though this time, it was closer to a spiteful hiss.

“[Tyrant’s Die]”

For a moment, nothing seemed to happen, then the Demon Lord’s flesh rippled and tore as whatever ridiculous, unnatural force had held it together thus far lost an immense amount of power. A keening wail escaped its mouth as its injuries began to affect it almost as they would a normal creature, but whether or not that would be enough to kill it, or if the reduction in its resistance would be permanent, they’d never find out.

Why? Because everyone decided to take that as their cue to unleash everything they had, burn every cooldown [Skill], blow through everything they’d been saving for an emergency, and the Demon Lord was torn to shreds. Even as it fell to the ground as a mess of pulped meat covering mostly shattered skeleton, the fire didn’t abate, even though the notification that indicated victory had long since appeared.

Least Demon Lord (Lv. 45 Raid Boss) has been slain. 8,000 XP gained (50,000 XP distributed across 1,349 people as per their distribution)

Heroic Deed has been noted and will increase future Class Quality

It was an absurd amount of Experience, and the ‘will increase future Class Quality’ part sounded fantastic, but Yoo-jin couldn’t even begin to feel happy about any of it. Not with everything that had been required to get here.