Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 262: Flames of Destruction

Seven and a half months of things finally going smoothly, of problems that were solved using local resources even when [Raid Bosses] were involved.

A TV show that raked in huge rakings while still managing to scare people off [Raid Bosses], having built its popularity on Schadenfreude alone.

A research department that was capable of slaughtering even Tier 8s with impunity.

And a group of students who’d had a full epic run from the first Evolution to the third, in less than eight months, and gained that rarity of [Class] in an entirely artificial environment.

He’d have loved to imagine that this would be the new normal, a slow, gentle, calm growth to the peak, and then he could relax on a beach for the rest of eternity.

But something had kicked off, and now he’d try to help deal with it.

The alert had a location for the incident, the French city of Lorient. Unfortunately, he’d never been anywhere near there, so he’d had to teleport to Paris first, then run the rest of the way.

As he ran, he sent a message about what should be done with his trainees to the base network. They needed to be added to the situation carefully.

Isaac was, despite all his power, a grunt, someone who could be easily slotted into any given group of combatants. Trying to do the same with a whole bunch of shot callers would cause more chaos than a direct intervention from Loki.

[Continent Strider] went to work, rapidly increasing the speed of his run, but it wouldn’t help much over this short distance. Traveling almost five hundred kilometers in barely ten minutes would have been an insane feat even a year ago, but ten minutes were a lifetime in combat.

To his surprise, he wasn’t the only one who was traveling by using his feet. He was closing in on an eclectic collection of ten people running towards the site of the action, and judging by their Stats, they had to be at least twenty Levels into the fourth Evolution. Far too powerful to be mere civilians, and all but the dumbest civilians wouldn’t be running towards a literal warzone. Well, reporters might, but these people had combat [Classes]. And the alert/reinforcement request had been pretty explicit about how even powerful people should stay away to let the absolute peak of strength, as well as the professionals, deal with the situation.

What really cinched the issue with whether or not these guys were cult members was the fact that they attacked him as he passed.

If they’d done a better job of concealing their allegiance, they might have even been able to hurt him.

A lance of stone the size of a pillar flew towards his head at hypersonic speeds while the air seemed to turn into sirup as a time-slowing effect tried to turn him into a sitting duck. It might have worked if he’d still been in place when the field activated, but he’d already been dodging, [The Meaning of the Name] revealing not only the current state of the world but several potential futures.

Two long strides took him out of the temporal field, even at one-quarter speed no one could land a clean hit on him. Any attacks that got close were also affected by the field, something that theoretically should have left him with too little time to dodge. Theoretically.

A stream of water that could have blown down several houses tried to push him back inside the field, but missed.

A titanic fireball broke apart on Balmung, the flames harmlessly washing off his armor.

And then, he was in range of the nearest enemy. The woman was mid-transformation, clearly burning one of her cooldown [Skills] in an attempt to counter him, but it wasn’t going to be enough.

[Form of Horror] activated while he was in the middle of a slash, doubling his reach without warning. With five stacks each of [Piercing Strike] and [Power Strike] combined into a single [Legendary Blow], even transforming into a living tree wasn’t going to block his strike.

The second closest man had turned into some kind of knight, smoke rising from the gaps in the armor while coals glowed in the eyesockets. But Isaac could tell there was a secondary level of armor beneath every chink, gap, and weak spot, perfectly guarding against his normal anti-armor tactics.

He flipped over Balmung in his hand, grabbed it by the blade, and hammered it into the side of the man’s head in a full-power Mordhau. The move’s name translated into “murder strike”, which was rather appropriate given its lethality even against armored foes.

[Legendary Blow] glowed like a star, the red energy wreathing the hilt and pommel of Isaac’s sword promising nothing but death.

Upon initially getting access to a whole lot of standard combat [Skills] at Level 30 without threshold bonuses as a reward for getting [Legacy of a True Warrior], he’d been a little skeptical. Being able to teach them would be great, but it had seemed lacking for personal use as a lot of power did come from those threshold bonuses.

But then he’d remembered that the big limitation of [Legendary Blow] was the number of times he could stack a specific [Skill], not the overall number he could add to it.

So he’d thrown not just five [Power Strikes] behind that attack, but also [Powerful Blow], [Piercing Strike], [Armorbreaker] and even managed to make [Power Shot] a workable addition despite the fact that his weapon was of a melee persuasion. It cost a stupidly high amount of mana, but it worked just fine.

The knight collapsed, helmet dented in far enough that it had to be pushed into the skull, and Isaac charged past, a hurled blade with [Power Shot] accelerating the attack while the tip glowed with five stacks of [Piercing Strike]. It tore through the crowd control mage who was still trying to get up another temporal bubble and failing miserably.

His second sword likewise impaled another mage mid-cast and then he was among the squishiest of his opponents, claws flashing through the air and sending blood spraying across the ground.

An attempted backstab was cut off when he unleashed the acid cloud he’d cribbed from the Lindwyrm after slotting its Aspect. Trying to be sneaky against the user of a sensory [Aura] was hard enough, but doing so with acid melting every exposed bit of skin was downright impossible.

Both swords had finally returned to his hands, levitated there by his weapon telekinesis and that was the end of it. Blades rose and fell, every hit hacking off a limb or splitting a skull.

Less than thirty seconds into his cooldown [Skill], Isaac was the only survivor, standing amidst the corpses of his foes. Another four and a half minutes left on the clock for his transformation.

Should he risk running into someone with an itchy trigger finger, or should he waste the remaining duration on his transformation ability?

He’d risk it.

Long legs ate up the ground like nobody’s business and the boosted physical stats certainly didn’t hurt either, almost making up for the loss of the accumulated [Continent Strider] boost.

Lorient came into view with thirty seconds left.

Soldiers were dueling a trio of [Warriors] in the outskirts of the city, bullets pinging off solid steel while causing minimal damage but were successfully preventing the cultists from closing the distance.

Armor that had rendered the men invulnerable against attacks from Level 70-ish soldiers who’d already burned through their cooldown [Skills] proved insufficient against Isaac’s blades as he tore past, only pausing briefly to accept a party invitation by the closest soldier.

The current mess was, well, a mess. The person in charge of the party was nominally Jean Ardouin, but the General was lacking the power to keep abreast of everything on his own. He was still managing to coordinate the battle across a dozen fronts and had apparently all but killed the boss of the entire organization, it wasn’t enough to control everything.

Isaac had expected to get orders the moment he became a part of the command network, but he seemed to have flown under the radar.

Ardouin’s party [Skill] was simply called [Army Coordination] and was meant to do exactly that. Control an army. People could be added via his existing subordinates, multiple people could communicate through multiple channels, and new arrivals could slide into existing command positions under the big cheese himself while a “history” tab allowed people to inform themselves about things on the battlefield that they hadn’t noticed or been informed about as they happened.

It was a General’s power, one meant to work with everything an officer normally had at their disposal, such as their staff. With most of those people absent, Ardouin had to do more than even he could handle. Especially since half his focus seemed to be on trying to corral the Monkey King. Emphasis on “trying”.

So Isaac took one look at the situation, used [Lessons of History] to vacuum up every stray scrap of information he had available, used [The Meaning of the Name] to see who’d be the biggest problem in the next few minutes, and finally announced his target after five seconds of thinking.

Mind you, it wasn’t a big, pompous declaration of how he’d be rescuing a group of “lowly mortals”, merely a warning that he’d be coming in like a bat out of hell and asking the nearby people to pretty, pretty please not panic.

His target was the pyrokinetic.

There were three other enemy S-Rankers present, a warrior wielding twin sickles who was transforming both the ground and anyone unlucky enough to be in range into a wheatfield, an eight-tailed Kitsune that was currently clashing with Sun, and a sound mage.

Sure, the pyrokinetic was “just” an equally big of a problem as his comrades, but he would be the easiest to take down.

Isaac dodged left, then right, his path taking him through several patches of flame that burned on the ground. His senses had warned him that the flames would be painful in the few moments they took to assimilate, but in the end, it was worth it.

Samadhi Fire. Mythological flames that, in the stories, had even damaged the Monkey King. The kind that was wielded by the subordinates of the Jade Emperor when they’d tried to execute the meddlesome primate. Concentrated, raw energy that made up the very essence of fire.

That was the kind of power he’d just stolen.

It also came with a hefty price tag of over two thousand mana per second even after the discount from [Fire Soul], enough to drain his pool dry in little over two seconds of use. Barely useable in any kind of extended conflict. The original user of this weapon had to have most of his build dedicated to just being able to use that stuff.

But for right now, the biggest gain here was the fact that these incredibly destructive flames could now no longer touch him, no matter what.

This pyrokinetic might be a god on the battlefield, a shadowy figure illuminated in flames as the people around him burned to death. But to Isaac, he might as well have been a puppy. Physical stats in the toilet, physical combat [Skills] practically nonexistent, that fucker was so screwed it wasn’t even funny.

… weeeeell, it was a little funny. This guy was laughing as he burned people trying to make their lives a better place to death, and now, he was about to suddenly come face to face with someone who outclassed him to an even greater degree than he did the soldiers.

A massive gout of flame erased a dozen buildings behind Isaac as the pyrokinetic finally realized he was coming. Isaac was just fine.

The ground detonated in front of him, the kinetic force of the shockwave almost succeeding in throwing him off his feet, but Isaac had seen it coming with his [Aura] and jumped before he’d have taken the full force of the blast.

That particular futile attempt was followed up by a wall of fire, compressed enough that even plasma was sufficiently dense that Isaac couldn’t just run through it. So he jumped into it, canceled out his mass, and let the updraft of the flames carry him skywards.

A single burst of flame behind him once he was above the barrier, flinging him across it, and then his full weight returned to send him plummeting towards his enemy.

One of the massive swords that manifested with [Form of Horror] plunged clean through the top of the man’s chest, cleaving through most of the vital organs, the bottom of the spine, and finally a full meter of the ground beneath.

A solid hit to pin his foe in place so he could bring the second sword around to decapitate him. But before he could follow through a massive blast of fire flung him away. No real heat behind it, just a thick stream of condensed flame unleashed more for the force behind it than its other properties.

It was enough to delay him for several vital seconds, during which [Form of Horror] ran out. Suddenly a few hundred kilograms lighter, Isaac was flung off, skidding over the ground until he managed to drive a sword into the ground and hold onto its hilt.

Through the flames, he could see his foe standing there, a burning mask of volcanic rock looking dispassionate even as his lifeblood drenched the surrounding area.

Around him spread out a puddle of blood and whatever innards had fallen out through the terrible wound clean through his torso, the only thing keeping him standing being [Moment of Immortality]. It wouldn’t have saved him if Isaac had managed to decapitate him, but that hadn’t happened.

Problem.

An even bigger issue was the fact that the blade keeping him pinned had been conjured by [Form of Horror] and dissipated when the [Skill] had ended, freeing the pyrokinetic. No longer a sitting duck.

But the man didn’t retreat, didn’t try to get away, he just kept unleashing the flame.

Isaac swore internally. Phasing was out of the question, the mana in the flames could still be dangerous, [Phantom Step] and [Wave Charge] wouldn’t let him close the full distance and he’d be blown away again once they ended. Using [I Am The Sword] here would be a huge waste of a once-an-hour [Skill], but he couldn’t even properly utilize it as its effect was based on his momentum, which was nonexistent.

With his sensory [Aura] he could tell that the land behind him was being devastated for over a kilometer, buildings vaporized, all vegetation within a few hundred meters of the gout of fire ignited, and the ground turning into lava. The ground under his sword grew progressively softer until the blade slid through what was basically jello at this point and Isaac went flying. Thankfully, this new state didn’t last long.

A full twenty seconds after the flames started, they shut off as their wielder collapsed onto one knee, coughing blood. He straightened again after a split second, a second activation of [Moment of Immortality] propping him back up. But that brief second between activations had been long enough to cross the distance. Balmung flashed through the air as Isaac sped past, [Implements of True Death] ensuring that no matter what, the man in the volcano mask would not be getting back up. Having your skull and brain cleaved in half would have been lethal in ninety-nine point nine nine percent of people, but not being able to heal for ten seconds afterwards ensured that even the most insanely survivability builds wouldn’t be able to keep going.

The kill notification blinked in the corner of his eye, telling him that he’d definitely finished this fight.

Sighs of relief abounded from the soldiers around him, several even letting themselves fall to the ground, finally able to give in to their exhaustion. Others still began to express their gratitude to Isaac.

But he ignored them and started running. The sickle wielder was probably not going to last much longer against Schultz, one of Greece’s S-Rankers, Lena Zeneli, and France’s plant mage. Meanwhile, the Kitsune was being chased around by Sun, throwing up illusion after illusion while constantly retreating.

The sound mage, meanwhile, hadn’t used a single cooldown [Skill] where anyone could see and was dueling some of France’s best and looking perfect unbothered by the whole situation. Time for a fight on equal terms.