Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 1: Skill Selection

Yeah, nope. While the [Office Drone] was quite a bit stronger than the rather insulting name might indicate, granting [Skills] that boosted intelligence and even percentage based boosts if one was told to do something, it was far from fantastic.

Mind you, it didn’t even have to be a superior who gave the order. A simple “Mate, do you think we should kill that monster?’ ‘Yep.” was enough to grant a ten percent boost to all stats with the right build.

But at the end of the day, a hidden powerful side to that class wasn’t enough to make Isaac choose it, especially not with the knowledge he now had.

“Select [Rogue].” Isaac ordered, the combination of a verbal order and proper intent behind the words making the [System] obey. Figuring out how to properly command the entire interface was something that took most people at least a few minutes to figure out.

Even as he flicked the entirety of the screen that had just popped up in his vision of to the side, Isaac got dressed, then grabbed his phone, keys and wallet from his bedside table.

Right now, people all over the world would be startled as that prompt appeared in their vision. For those in Germany and the rest of the Central European Time Zone, it was currently 7 am and a lot of people would still either be in bed or still waking up, while others were going along with their normal days or even still asleep.

The initial reactions would be shock, disbelief, and then, the panic would start. Mad rushes to the supermarket, desperate fights over high calorie easy to keep foods such as rice, flour and oil. Also, for some reason, toilet paper.

To get stronger quickly and prepare for the incoming issues, he needed plenty of resources no normal person just happened to have on hand, himself included. It would be for the best to get them as quickly as possible, before everyone else fully recognized the breadth of this event and flooded any and all shops in preparation for the apocalypse.

Isaac, of course, knew that the true apocalypse wouldn’t happen for a few more years. Right now, however, there would be chaos for around a week until things calmed back down and he knew he had the food to last that time. Eating nothing but rice, beans and basic bread made from nothing but flour, water and baking soda wouldn’t be fun, but It would keep him alive.

It had taken him all of forty seconds to get ready and leave the apartment, passing the mirror in the hallway once he’d locked the door. An unfamiliar face stared back at him. The green eyes were the same, as was the deep black hair, but everything else seemed staggeringly unfamiliar. He was a bit heavier than he had been in the, er, future, not overweight, but still noticeable. His face also lacked the deep frown lines, worn into his face through a decade of combat.

Once outside, Isaac hurried to the hardware store, seeing only a handful of other people outside, looking harried and swiping at the air. Yes, smacking the illusionary projection of the [System] interface was a perfectly fine method of using it, but it also made one look a little silly.

Isaac knew the way to the hardware store and followed it from memory, allowing him to use the Interface via mental control without running the risk of going the wrong way.

Name: Isaac Thoma

Class: Rogue

Species: Human

Level: 0

XP: 0/100

Health Status: Healthy

Mana: 110/110

Stats

Fortitude

11

Perception

9

Strength

9

Agility

10

Magic Power

11

Magic Regeneration

10

Free Points: 0 Stat, 5 Skill

Skills

It was the same interface he’d always had, though he was a little dismayed at the low stats. Even his dump Stats had been in the low hundreds during the final battle, but now he was back in the body of an ordinary human, with above average Magic Power and Fortitude, but below average Perception and Strength, with ten being the average across the entirety of the human race.

Seeing as he was still at Level 0, he had not yet received any Stat points. Only the five Skill points he’d received for choosing a [Class] were available.

[Skills] were graded on a ranking from common, uncommon, rare, epic and finally legendary, costing one to five points to purchase.

[Rogue], being a common rarity starter [Class], only had a mere handful of higher rarity [Skills], but those weren’t what he needed.

Ultimately, each [Class] had some basic requirements. [Rogue] required a very basic understanding of how to use a knife and how to be sneaky, also on a very basic level. [Healers] needed a decent understanding of the human body, [Mages] needed some grounding in the sciences related to their type of magic, and so on.

Once one upgraded the [Class] at Level 10, his knowledge, [Skills] and the things he’d achieved would be taken into account when his options were generated.

As for what [Skills] Isaac wanted, it hadn’t taken him all that long to choose.

Hundred Faces (common)

Ultimately, even the greatest criminal is unable to completely avoid being seen. But what is seen doesn’t have to be the user’s true face. This skill allows the user to adjust their face, within reason, to allow for some degree of anonymity.

Cost: 30 mana per minute while adjusting

It was a rather basic disguise [Skill], but it might be needed sooner rather than later. Getting those supplies was important and if whoever was running the store at the moment had run off, he might have to break in.

Isaac pulled up his hood to ensure that his shifting face wasn’t seen by any passersby or cameras that might be around. As for getting into the store, smashing the main window was the only real viable option, time wise. Isaac was actually rather good at picking locks, but chances were he’d need an actual set of picks to crack whatever the store’s main door used.

Not having used a mirror for this, the end result was likely going to look extremely weird, but he’d used the [Skill] often enough in the future … calling it the future was just plain weird, he realized with a start. The future was what was going to happen. Referring to the hell he’d just escaped from as the future made it feel predetermined, after a fashion.

It reminded him of those old Terminator movies, if he was honest. The future you were from was shit and anything you did here wasn’t going to make it any less shit, only ensure that there were still humans out there to complain about how shit it was. Damn, that was depressing.

Anyway, he’d used that [Skill] aplenty in that other timeline and could judge his appearance fairly well through the basic feedback it granted the user. He wouldn’t be winning any beauty contests like that, hell, a hundred years ago he might even have ended up in one of those barbaric freak shows. But as long as the end result didn’t look like him, that was fine.

And now, on to picking the rest of his [Skills].

Stealth (common)

Use magic to shield the user’s form from visual inspection, as well as muffling noise created by the user. Quality of shielding will increase at higher levels.

Cost: 1 mana/sec

Piercing Strike (common)

User's weapon is covered with energy, increasing its ability to penetrate armor. This effect lasts for a single strike. Should the weapon in question be stuck within an opponent, the effect will last for .5 sec, allowing for removal of weapon or further cutting.

Cost: 10 mana per strike

Sundering Strike (common)

User’s next strike will weaken the targets armor around the point of impact. This damage is permanent until it is fixed/healed. This effect can be stacked until the armor is destroyed.

Cost: 12 mana per strike

Power Strike (common)

User’s next blow will strike with as much force as though the user’s strength stat were 50%+1n% where n equals skill level higher.

Cost: 12 mana per strike, low stamina drain

In essence, he’d combine the active [Skill] [Stealth] to fade from sight and using the knowledge about how to be stealthy he’d gained in the other timeline to make sure he didn’t disturb anything in his surroundings.

There was also a [Sneak] [Skill] that granted knowledge of how to properly sneak around, but that could be earned through effort. [Skills] that were also skills could be gained with the prerequisite knowledge, effort and the desire to actually get it, while [Skills] that produced actual preternatural effects almost always needed to be bought with Skill points.

He’d do the same to get the [Knives] [Skill] and then train them both up rather quickly thanks to his immense pool of knowledge.

The rest of his [Skills] were used to modify how his weapons hit his enemies, from tearing through armor to permanently weakening said armor. By using multiple such [Skills] concurrently, he could even eventually gain the [Manifold Strike] [Skill], which he’d eventually upgraded to [Manifold Blade Empowerment].

In fact, now that he didn’t have anything better to do as he headed to the store, he attempted to carefully place his feet to produce minimal noise.

It took all of the remaining walk to the store, but eventually, the prompt he’d been waiting for popped up.

Skill earned: Sneak (common)

Grants user basic knowledge of how to move stealthily, from avoiding making noise to reducing visibility. Higher levels of this Skill will allow the user to have an overall lessened impact on the world at large, to the point of near complete invisibility.

The description on that [Skill] was both exaggerated quite a bit and underselling it to an insane degree. If he could train it up high enough, then he’d become a hole in the world, able to dance through a crowded mall in his underwear and no one taking notice, but a sufficiently high Perception stat could pretty much nullify its effect.

Thankfully, the hardware store was open and empty. It had, after all, opened mere minutes ago and people tended to generally be more concerned with food at times of crisis, rather than the tools needed for survival. This place would get swarmed soon, but for now, Isaac had the run of the store.

He knew what to buy from memory, having summoned the beasts he wanted to summon countless times before. He also needed a proper knife to fight with. No German hardware store he knew of sold proper combat or hunting knifes, but one of the larger ones meant for wilderness survival should do just fine while he ordered a proper one from Amazon.

So he grabbed the biggest one he could find, some tools to round out the small toolkit he had in his apartment, chalk, rock salt and semiprecious stones. Also, he got some more generic items such as boxes of screws and the like. If he left this place with nothing except what people would soon be able to recognize as summoning materials, then that might rouse some suspicion.

After all, what kind of person would know to buy these things a quarter of an hour after the information on what they were used for was released, buried under an encyclopedia’s worth of other information?

Accounts of what certain standout powerful people had done this day would become public in a couple of years, as well as statistics on just how many people had reacted in what way.

Some people had panicked, others had ignored the weird floating boxes, thinking they were drunk, high, or both.

And then, there had been the mere handful that had truly embraced the [System], choosing to delve deeply into its mysteries, gaining power and skill beyond what even the greatest of man would have been able to achieve before its advent. Yet even those people would not have been able to read far enough ahead to already know all of this.

Therefore, Isaac walked up to the counter with only about half the items in his cart being what he actually needed, and most of those having myriad uses besides summoning.

“Good morning.” he greeted the cashier once he’d hefted the goods onto the counter, as well as a couple of bags so he could actually carry this stuff home with him.

“Morning.” the man was a bit on the older side, looking at him with a bit of a side-eye.

“Interesting day so far, isn’t it?” Isaac asked, seemingly leaving it open as to what he was talking about. It made it sound like he wasn’t actually sure the weird thing in front of him was actually real, asking the other person to confirm that they’d seen said thing as well without outright stating he’d seen something that was likely a hallucination.

“I suppose that’s one way to put it. Scared the hell out of a lot of people. I’m actually the manager here and the only reason I’m working the registers is because everyone else is trying to call their families or something.” the apparent manager replied, far less guarded than Isaac had been.

“Yeah, phone lines are thoroughly blocked. There isn’t much I can do about anything, so I just decided to say ‘fuck it’ and go on with my day.” Isaac shrugged. A lot of the people panicking had tried to contact friends and family, to see if they were alright or maybe do a sanity check, subsequently blocking the phone lines quite thoroughly.

In his first life, Isaac had been one of them, stuck on his phone for hours until he’d finally gotten through to his parents. Now that he knew he wouldn’t get through anyway and that they’d be fine regardless, he didn’t bother to try and wouldn’t do for quite some time.

“That’s probably one of the biggest points in favor of the idea that all of this is real, isn’t it?” the manager asked “What else could get literally everyone to start using their phones at the same time?”

“What indeed? But life goes on and quite honestly, I don’t think how I act right now will massively change things for the better or worse.” Isaac shrugged, paying in cash, silently glad for his habit of paying for everything without the use of a card when he bought things in person.

“This is going to be a mess for someone way above both our heads to sort out, that’s for certain.” the manager sighed. “Hope you have a better day than I’m having right now.”

“Have a nice day.” Isaac bid him goodbye and left the hardware store.

… and walked straight into utter pandemonium. Just from where he stood outside the hardware store, there was at least one car crash, two broken windows, one burning trash can and more panicking people than he cared to count.

Yep, that was what people did when confronted with something upsetting and world-changing. Panic. Not everyone, mind you, but enough to cause … this.

Of course, the people who were panicking the most were those who were familiar with the heretofore fairly unknown genre of LitRPG, where life became a video game. Yet in the next couple of years, it would soar in popularity given how similar it was to how real life had become.

The Apocalyptic LitRPG genre in particular had started being used as philosophical thought pieces based on what could have happened, seeing as they tended to be a bit more on the, well, apocalyptic side of things.

And who better to imagine just how bad people gaining video game powers could be than those who had read hundreds or even thousands of pages of books related to that topic?

As he walked home, Isaac pulled the purchased knife from its sheath and placed it on his belt. From then on, he began to mentally go through how he could use this weapon. How to draw it in several different situations, where to target a multitude of different enemy types, how to use his [Skills] to compliment this fighting style.

Ordinarily, he’d be going through the motions as he did that, but waving around a knife in public was rather frowned upon and would continue to be so. Isaac could play around with it in his apartment, later.

More chaos greeted him on the short walk and someone was even already drawing graffiti about the end of times on a nearby wall. All of this would calm down in a week, when it became clear there was no other shoe to drop. Of course, it did drop, but not in the foreseeable future.

Once in his apartment, Isaac slammed the door shut and locked it behind him, set down his bags and drew his knife.

Skill earned: Knives (common)

Grants user basic knowledge of using knives, including throwing and non-combat applications. All knives are slightly reinforced and can take more damage.

Perfect.

Now, all he needed to do was summon eldritch horrors from outside of normal time and space, kill them by the hundreds and begin to walk the road to power.