Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 154: Threat Rankings

“And why exactly do you think that the Korean threat ranking system is good enough to be used globally?”

… needless to say, those two days of taking things easy hadn’t happened. Instead, after the mess with the Wendigo, he’d gotten sucked into a morass of bureaucratic quicksand that had utterly refused to let him go, all of which had cumulated in today’s meeting.

This little meeting room, buried in the guts of the team’s buildings, where everyone had their own personal chairs and the mini fridge was filled with all sorts of weird crap, it was normally used for intra-team meetings. But today, it was being used in a global video conference, discussing the future of, well, everything.

The previous Event had been the “cleanest” to date, with the fewest deaths overall and basically no destruction of property, yet the perception of it had been massively warped due to the sheer amount of attention a certain pair of jackasses had caused.

Couple that with the fact that governments were starting to not just react to the new state of the world but properly come to grips with it, and the powers that be were reacting on a far greater scale than before.

Which had then lead to this, with the “conference” table that normally held their laptops, coffee cups and snacks being moved to the corridor outside, and the massive wall screen being used for a grand video conference for the second time in its existence.

Overall, the whole affair greatly reminded Isaac of that classical “conference of world leaders” so often seen in alien invasion movies, though here, it wasn’t actually heads of state arguing their points, it was high ranking military officers, scientists, and ministers.

Sadly, the armchairs that normally sat in this room would have given an odd impression to the people on the other side of the screens and had also been moved outside, which left Isaac sitting on an uncomfortable standard conference room chair, and he’d already been doing so for close to an hour. That would have been bad enough already, but the fact that the conversation had only gotten started properly five minutes ago made Isaac want to curl into a ball and die.

But that wasn’t an option, and this was important, so he put on a nice mask with [Hundred Faces], as he internally imagined fireballing the damn screen.

“Yes, I do.” Isaac nodded “The South Korea letter ranking system is an accurate and easy to understand way to describe the power a person holds while also being flexible enough to account for humanity’s constantly rising power level.”

“Don’t we literally have a baked-in way of ranking people within the [System]?” one of the UN appointees asked and Isaac nearly facepalmed. Amy, who’d deliberately shifted her chair out of the camera’s field of view, did smack her palm into her forehead, using magic to ensure the sound wasn’t heard by the other people in the conference.

This whole affair might not have been picked over during the conference, sure, but Isaac’s inadvertently broadcasted speech about how Levels didn’t necessarily correspond to one’s power level had been the subject of many discussions during the last couple of days. Talk shows, reworked training methods, and so on, and so forth. No one should have had to go over it during this meeting.

“I believe that that has been gone over to death in both the media and government-internal discussions. Levels alone only give Stat points, and those are only a small part of what can be gained through the [System].” Professor Kim pointed out, her face failing to betray any indication of the annoyance Isaac was sure she had to be feeling. Good self-control or magic?

“Ah yes, the infamous graveside speech, the one th- …”

The man was suddenly muted and he turned off to the side, speaking to someone off-screen. Clearly, someone over there had more brains than the nitwit who’d actually ended up in front of the camera.

That was the annoying thing about politicians. The skills needed to get a political position were often very different from the ones needed to properly execute said position.

“Fundamentally, the ranking system assigns everyone a letter rank from F to S, with F being the lowest and S being the highest.

“F will always describe those who still have their starter [Class], unless they have greatly boosted themselves using Aspects.

“Meanwhile, the strongest one thousand people are assigned A-Rank, Ranks D, C and B are distributed between those extremes. Then, anyone currently in the A-Rank category who greatly exceeds the average power level of said Rank are assigned S-Rank, which is sometimes referred to as the ‘Superlative’ or ‘Standout’ Rank.

“Of course, that system was built around the population of a single nation, to adequately decide on what level of strength is needed for A-Rank on a global scale we’d clearly need to base it on a far greater number than just one thousand people.” Yoo-jin explained.

“That way, the scale can easily keep up with the constantly rising power of the people it measures. Then monsters and other threats are then ranked in accordance with what kind of person is needed to beat them without undue danger.”

“And what is beyond the S-Rank?”

Isaac just sighed internally. What part of ‘highest rank’ had failed to register.

“Nothing.” Yoo-jin said flatly “Hence the name ‘Standout’. S-Rankers break the mold, greatly exceed the power of your average ‘strongest person in the city or state’, epic or even legendary [Class] holders that can affect change on a national scale. And S-Rank threats are problems of the same scale, the kind that shouldn’t even be attempted to be fought, just hit with a nuclear or similar scale response because they’re too powerful for even the strongest ‘regular’ response.”

“And beyond that, so strong they can’t even be fought? Why do those still have the same rank?”

“Because at that point, it doesn’t matter.” A gruff voice cut in, and it took Isaac a bit to realize it had been one of the American’s who’d spoken, a woman in the uniform of a Major General.

“If we’re dealing with something so strong it breaks the mold, outpowers our strongest fighters and cannot be taken down using the nuclear options, we’ve already lost. Not only that, but it will be able to almost certainly destroy or at least severely damage the whole world at that point. Standing back won’t be an option, all you’d be doing is waiting to die. If something that strong appears, we’ll throw everything and the kitchen sink at it because it might work. Because the only remaining option will be lying down and waiting to die. All adding a ‘we’re boned’ threat level would do is ruin morale.”

That should have been the end of that, but this wouldn’t have been a political discussion if it had been.

So, two long, boring, pointless hours of discussion later, that part of the meeting was done.

“We’re all agreed, then? Both people and threats will be classified based on their strength, from F-Class to S-Class, with the exact definitions being created after this meeting by the Dungeon Guild of Seoul, Research Team Bailey, …”

Aaaaaaand the only thing that had been changed was that the word ‘rank’ had been swapped for ‘class’. Bloody fucking pointless. But sure, the politicians had had to change something so they could feel like they’d contributed something.

Still, it wasn’t all bad. As far as Isaac was concerned, they could have called it the “Adorableness Scale” and named each Rank, er, Class after increasingly cute animals, starting with “Spider Class” as the weakest and “Kitten Class” as the strongest, all that really mattered was that there was a ranking system being implemented globally and that the people who were working out the nitty-gritty knew what they were doing. And given that he was one of the people working on that, this was a given.

Three hours in, the meeting had finally achieved something useful. Problem was, it was Friday the 23rd of December and due to the time difference to New York, it was already 11 pm. By the time this mess ended, it would probably be mere hours from Christmas morning for Isaac.

“That is the first talking point done, next on the list is the overall discussion of how to deal with low Level monsters that have gotten out into the wilderness, but during the initial discussion, I received several messages asking me to add an additional talking point about how to best create society of high rarity [Class] holders.” The chairman leading the meeting said “Unless there are major objections, that will become the next talking point.”

Isaac immediately jammed his finger on the “I’d like to talk” button in the video conferencing program.

“Ah, the first speaker on this topic will be Dr. Thoma.”

“Thank you.” Isaac responded “There are quite a few papers on that topic that have been written on that subject and perusing a summary of those should answer most questions on that topic, but I’d like to give a brief overview now so we can move on to the next point. A full, in depth discussion here and now would have required a level of preparation that no one here has done.

“Fundamentally, one can gain XP from just living one’s life and evolve one’s [Class] once one has enough.

“However, the quality of said [Class] depends wholly on the exact path taken to get there. People who have dedicated themselves to improving one or more parts of their [Class] will receive an Evolution that focusses on this.

“Another way to improve [Class] quality is to do great deeds, defeating devastating threats, training legends, or making some kind of great contribution to humanity’s knowledge base.

“In addition, slotting an unusually high number of Aspects for one’s Level can also grant a high rarity [Class].

“Lastly, being some sort of trailblazer can grant a great [Class].

“But taking the easy road will cost you a great deal in terms of [Class] quality. We’ve proven that conclusively in the case of Aspects, someone who is merely gifted Aspects instead of earning them will not receive a [Class] as good as someone who slotted Aspects they gained from monsters they killed themselves. Becoming extremely proficient in using said Aspects will bring the quality up again, but it will then be a different high-rarity [Class] that is offered, being based on the proficiency rather than the Aspects themselves.

“We’ve also seen a similar phenomenon in people who gain their Levels by fighting the weakest possible monsters that will still give XP, never levelling their [Skills] or really putting in much effort. That is how people like Maxim Hawkins and Teddy Byrne reached Level 90 before nearly anyone else, yet only hold uncommon [Classes].

“In essence, the [System] penalizes people who take the easy road, and there are no real exploits either. Ambitious, hardworking individuals will excel in this new world, likely even more so than in the old one. Excellent training, preferably by high-Level [Trainers] can help, but a working education system alone would be a good start. The path to getting citizens with good [Classes] is the same one that was needed to get highly skilled and educated citizens before the [System].”

Five minutes of a seemingly pointless Q&A later, they continued on to the next topic, which was once again just a rehash of previous discussions.

Monsters got out into the wilderness and needed to be dealt with, yada yada yada. They already had the Treaty of Seoul as a guideline as to what to do about [Raid Bosses] and many of the weaker monsters weren’t such a big problem, not really.

The stronger a monster was, the bigger and harder to miss it was. And if it wasn’t big, it was fast, and fast monsters tended to easily find people to attack and when that happened, the cops or military were dispatched to deal with the matter. Simply put, strong monsters couldn’t hide well enough to survive until they replicated.

Weaker monsters, meanwhile, were a huge problem. Children were at a severe risk of dying as they didn’t have any kind of strength enhancement, where almost every adult had put at least a few points in their physical Stats and could take care of the weakest of monsters. The real issue was the ecosystem and how monsters could utterly demolish those, especially carnivorous ones.

The solution was to just use park rangers, the coast guard and so on to clear out the places monsters were likely to be hiding, yet somehow, by the time the politicians came to that conclusion, it was Christmas for Isaac and Christmas morning for many of those who were located east of Germany.

It was probably a good thing there wasn’t a table in here now, otherwise, Isaac would have been severely tempted to bang his head into it, over and over again, until either the table broke or he finally slipped into blessed unconsciousness.

“And finally, the last point, proper summoning regulations are currently in the process of being written. The final wording will be the responsibility of the individual nations, but a degree of international homogeneity will doubtlessly be helpful. Sadly, recent events have necessitated this discussion to occur before a more comprehensive draft could be prepared.”

Isaac skim-read the proposal and could feel his heart skip a beat as he figured out the full extent of the trouble the latest Event had caused.

The governments cracking down in a knee jerk reaction to an utter idiot getting himself killed would not go over well. And based on what Isaac was reading here, it would also likely be an over-reaction.

Which would lead to the mess that he’d been afraid off, where the government would seemingly hoard power as they levelled the police and military while suppressing the power gain of the general population.

And then people would rebel. In many cases, the “rebellion” would remain verbal, but not everywhere. In others … not so much. And as social order grew shaky, the world would slide that much closer to Armageddon.

Thankfully, Isaac managed to become the first person to speak once again.

“Fundamentally, this is a very complicated problem, and I’m afraid I’m going to make it even more complicated. At this point in time, levelling has very much become a part of the culture, and any suppression of it must be carefully managed. Most importantly, it must avoid giving the impression of the governments of the world hoarding power while restricting their citizens’ growth. Undue restrictions, or even those that merely appear to be such, will just drive summoning underground and remove all chances at proper oversight.”

On one hand, no stupid decisions were made. On the other, no decisions were made as it finally got so late that the meeting ended and people would “mull things over” during the Christmas holidays.

The worst part was, Isaac couldn’t really have hoped for a better result.

Still, once he’d properly recovered, Isaac could try and go for one his [Class’] political [Skills] and make sure the next meeting went over a hell of a lot better than this one.

But now, finally, he could lay down his head and just sleep.