Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 77: Jaws?

Two days ago

Isaac headed deeper into the under-construction building, a slight smile playing on his lips. His first stop was his office to drop off some things, and then, he’d head over to the new meeting room. And yes, he did get his own office now, decorated with fanciful weapons and pelts, as well as a couple of little trees made from metal wire and little crystals, making it look like something in between the inside of a hunting shack and some fortune teller’s tent.

That was on purpose, though. He didn’t want to look crazy or as if he were a part of some kind of fringe occult thing, but seeming a little kooky would help cover up any small inconsistencies.

Overall, the team had gotten quite a bit better equipped on the bureaucratical side of things. They’d been borrowing other professors’ secretaries up until now, but Professor Bailey seemed pretty sure he’d narrowed the list down pretty well.

Sadly, they’d gotten a ridiculous number of applicants owing to the fact that they offered power levelling as one of the ‘perks’.

“Good morning, Adam.” he called out “So, did the rest of the things for the Korea trip get prepared?”

It was something he’d brought up a while ago, as an example of dungeons actually working, and wanted to visit because them being defined merely as autonomous monster spawners had made them very much a no-no topic. Yes, dungeons were dangerous, but they could also be fantastically rewarding … if properly handled.

Sadly ‘they did it on the other side of the world and it worked, here’s the research’ wasn’t enough to convince anyone of something that, at least conceptually, was a world ending danger. Temporary spawners like Lairs were fine so long as you broke them when you were done, but dungeons took time to grow and had to be left alone to do so, and no one felt comfortable with that.

But South Korea had done a pretty good job of using them to grow the strength of their people. This was something they could point to, but there was only so much you could get out of the currently published works. After all, this was only a two and a half month old branch of research and there were only so many academic papers you could put out in that span of time.

A lot of the time, when they were applying to try out new branches of research, they were basically throwing a bunch of research notes at the relevant committee and that was that. But from foreign research groups, all they saw were the complete projects, and there were very few of those.

So, they’d be heading over there soon enough. Him, Bailey, whoever had advanced the furthest in analyzing that damn Rifthunter’s portals the most. That damn monster was pretty strong and damn hard to contain, so they could only analyze it in brief bursts and it was such a complex ability that it took for-e-ver to actually get. [Portal] would be beyond fantastic … but they had to get it first.

And after they’d explored some dungeons, gained some good XP and information from that, it’d be just about time for the first big summoner’s convention, which would be taking place in Singapore, just a hop, skip and a jump away from Korea.

“Well, that depends on if we’ve gotten that damn shark out of the lake, but I think we should be all set to head off to Asia by our original date.” Bailey replied offhandedly and Isaac nearly walked into a wall.

… well, not exactly. He had years of experience on battlefields and solidly superhuman levels of physical ability, there was no chance of him failing to turn a corner just because he’d heard something surprising. But if it hadn’t been for that, if this had been the him from this point in the other timeline, he probably would have ended up kissing concrete.

“Wait, what?” Isaac frowned. He’d spent most of last night and all of this morning adding to his [Aura] control instruction manual, planning to look up the news once he was in the meeting room, waiting for everyone to arrive, trusting that either automated alerts or the people in his life would tell him about things he needed to deal with now.

“Someone summoned a large shark, we think it’s a Megalodon, into a large lake. Apparently, we were the local coast guard‘s first call once they’d gotten started on the lake evacuation order. Well, I’m not sure if ‘coast guard’ is the right word when they’re on a lake, but that’s beside the point. No boats, no swimmers, no one is supposed to go out onto the water until we can deal with this. Still, the shark can’t get out of the lake, so this is both a decent way to check how monsters behave in a natural ecosystem and someone needs to try something before the Marine and Luftwaffe carpet bomb the lake with depth charges.

“I think it’s going to go fine, though. Professor Sturm from the aquatic biology faculty knows more than I do, you remember him, right? Anyway, I’d like you to stay here, watch over the experiment, we’ll deal with the shark and hopefully be back in time to watch the monsters to start spawning in, otherwise, just take notes on as much as you can handle and kill the rest.

“Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see how the news handles this. As far as I know, there are seventeen people confirmed dead, but now the lake is clear of potential targets and no one is stupid enough to go out there with that thing in the water. Generally, whether they make an attempt at fear-mongering or put out a somewhat optimistic piece about how we can now deal with these monsters, that’ll tell us a lot about the general attitude towards the [System] as a whole.”

Isaac grimaced at that. First, there was another dangerous monster out there. Contained, sure, but still out there in the wild, which sucked.

Also, he’d be staying behind as the team, his closest friends in this timeline, went off to fight their first ‘wild’ monster without him.

Sure, if Bailey’s assessment of it being a Megalodon was correct, they’d be fine. Hell, all of them except Raul had their second Evolution, and the only reason Raul was lagging behind was because he was still trying to decide on which [Class] to pick, not because he was putting any less effort into advancing.

The [System Researcher] might be a truly fantastic [Class], but it was also quite solidly a [Mage] [Class], which simply didn’t fit him. He was an outdoorsy person, who’d gone to university to get a degree that would later see him spend almost all of his time out in the wilderness as a ranger. Your [Class] needed to be something you liked, doing something you hated to get stronger was a more difficult route to power. And it wasn’t like Raul hated magic, it was just that he liked nature a hell of a lot more.

Really, they could handle themselves, and the chances of this being a Tier 6 with casualty numbers that small were practically nil. And even it was a weak Tier 6, they’d be able to handle it after all that time spent practicing with them. They weren’t helpless chicks and didn’t need him playing mother hen.

But godsdamnit, it stung. He knew he couldn’t do everything himself, he’d always known. But at the very least, he’d have wanted to be there for the first thing the team dealt with personally.

Yet despite all that, he would stay. Because coming along would only make himself feel better while delaying the experiment about autonomous summoning by the five days the monsters had already spent locked in cages, time that would have been wasted if they had to kill them all and start over once they were done with the shark.

Going just for the sake of his own feelings would be, in short, completely unconscionable. But that didn’t mean staying here wouldn’t suck, especially given that he’d inevitably get stuck with some kind of babysitter. He didn’t need one, but it made sense. No one would trust a single person to be able to keep a lid on potentially hundreds of monsters in case things went bad. Hell, if it hadn’t been for his new [Class] and the newly weakened automatic spawning, he wouldn’t have trusted him to deal with that.

Survive? Sure. But kill each and every single creepy crawly as a literal horde? Yeah, nope.

Still, his Status was looking pretty nice.

Name: Isaac Thoma

Class: Bladewraith

Species: Human

Level: 31

XP: 7,439 /9,300

Health Status: Healthy

Mana: 600/600

Stats

Fortitude

50

Perception

95

Strength

60

Agility

95

Magic Power

60

Magic Regeneration

80

Free Points: 0 Stat, 9 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 XVIII

The Chosen Weapon XXII

Skills

Hundred Faces XVI

Stealth XVIII

Power Strike XXVI

Piercing Strike XXVII

Sundering Strike XXV

Blades XXVI

Sneak XVIII

Sweeping Strike IX

Far Strike XIX

Manifold Strike XVII

Hunter’s Gaze XXIV

Phantom Step XV

Unknown Fear XIII

Bestial Regeneration XVI

Undying Focus XIV

Tools of Terror XIX

Fleeting Presence VIII

Crippling Blow VI

Absolute Blade Mastery II

General Skills

Gralloch IX

Alchemy X

Aspects

Aspect Skills

Poltergeist (2 stack)

Poltergeist’s Flight

Poltergeist Shift

Hydra (2 stack)

Hydra’s Regeneration

Redundant Organs

Dunkleosteus

Gills

Fata Morgana

Improved Basic Illusion

Perception Block

Blade Tempest

Blade Control

Eternal Blades

[Empty Slot]

Sadly, legendary [Skills] were damn expensive, so he’d only been able to grab one, the one best suited to dealing with large groups of enemies without wrecking the surrounding area with his AOEs.

Absolute Blade Mastery (legendary)

All throughout history, countless people have staked their lives onto these pieces of metal, living and dying by the blade. Some may have wielded it in anger without any training at all, other spent their entire lives honing their craft without ever having to raise their weapons in a real fight even once.

Yet none of them have ever reached this stage, because they couldn’t. Normally, there is always more to learn. At some point, you will solidly run into the issue of diminishing returns, but your path will never truly end.

And then, there’s this Skill. Might not grant absolute skill with the blade, but it allows the user to truly master it in all of its forms, in two different ways.

Firstly, now any and all skill and experience with any blade carry over to any and all other blades. Never, ever, under any circumstances, will a tiny difference in balance, length or weight screw you up, never again. You can pick up an entirely new type of sword that you’ve never even conceived of, as long as you are a master of some manner of sword, you will also be a master of this one.

Secondly, never again will you cut something you did not mean to cut. You have absolute control over your weapons, you could shave a furious cat actively trying to murder you with a gauntlet sword without ever even so much as inflicting a single scratch, this is the level of fine control you hold now that you have this Skill. Hell, you could wave a chainsaw around in a crowded disco and unless you want to hurt people or destroy objects, the only issue would be the noise.

The first boon didn’t sound all that great, given that he’d been easily using the many different weapons his soulbound knife, Old Reliable, could turn into. But that was a skill gained over nearly a decade of combat, not an absolute ability. If he switched over to an entirely new weapon, then there was every chance that he wouldn’t be able to use it properly.

And even just focusing on the various forms of Old Reliable, there might still be an issue given that he primarily practiced with certain forms and barely used others.

Up until now, this hadn’t been an issue, but those small differences would be a huge problem when extreme precision was required and taking this [Skill] would ensure that never came to pass. And he could pick up ‘new’ swords with casual ease now, even if he hadn’t used anything like them before.

Still, if that had been all this [Skill] did, he wouldn’t have picked it. It wouldn’t have been worth the 5 [Skill] points, well, it would also not have been worthy of the ‘legendary’ title, but that was neither here nor there.

It was the secondary effect that made it so incredibly valuable. High-Level fights were incredibly destructive, especially when the situation came down to having to make the choice between a measured attack that would give one’s opponent to get another attack off and an all-out attack that would destroy anything in its path, but also, well … destroy anything in its path, environment included.

Sure, it only worked with blades, but with Old Reliable, he always had one on hand. And all he needed was one more Level and then, he’d be able to buy one of the two central [Skills] of his new [Class].

Bladewraith

Central Skills (double cost)

I am the Sword

True Cut

Skills

Endless Cut

Wave Slash

Absolute Blade Mastery

Shockwave Cleave

Parry Anything

Indestructible Blades

Eternal Arsenal

Bladed Armor

Perfect Strike

Compounded Blows

…

General Skills

Aura of Sword’s Intent

All of these were damn strong, but also damn expensive. He was used to being able to buy a handful of [Skills], the ones he really needed, and then save the rest to get all the [Skills] he wanted from his next [Class], and so on, and so forth. That stopped now, sadly. Just another 2,000 XP to go, and he’d get his first properultimate attack. [Form of Horror] technically counted, but that was a transformation, not a single strike.

Once in the meeting room, he plopped himself down in a random chair and waited, already planning for the future. He’d have a full plate a few weeks from now, first going to Korea, a time during which he was guaranteed to be very busy, and then he was going to be a witness in the trial against Arianne Krebs, the serial killer he’d helped catch a couple of weeks ago. Well, in all honesty, he’d caught her, full stop. The police had been there, they’d led him there and they’d have tried to take her in themselves, but they would have all died if he hadn’t also been there.

With everyone else gone, annoying as that was on an emotional level, it would leave him plenty of alone time until the monsters started spawning in. Well, he’d inevitably end up with someone else because him being the only person preventing a literal horde from erupting from the basement of this building would look safe to precisely no one.

But until then, and whenever his ‘babysitter’ wasn’t looking over his shoulder, he could get some stuff ready to release to the world. Mostly more [Aura] stuff to be released as soon as it could have realistically been discovered, but also a list of potential future baddies that people could pursue right now. He’d looked into each of them and was only including the ones he could confirm were also present in this timeline.

Anything else had a high likelihood of damaging his credibility, or at least the one of his fake persona he used to release that stuff, and that would be an issue in the future. So far, all he’d released was a rough ‘this is why summoning is a bad idea’ essay a few days after Initialization, but now was a realistic time for at least somestuff to have been discovered and released.

Sadly, there wasn’t that much to tell. Most of the big bads had used aliases, usually Dao names and the like, which made tracking them down here tricky. If he had individual targets to go after right now, whose trajectory was set to take them down the same dark road they’d taken in the other timeline, they’d already be dead right now. But he didn’t, other than a few burgeoning organizations that didn’t deserve to be brutally shattered. Yet. And he'd feed that info to various intelligence agencies and have them deal with them.

Those people would become more dangerous than any terrorist group currently in existence, and between the data he’d send out and the stuff people with an intelligence agencies’ research capabilities, that should become rather apparent pretty soon.

The other thing he’d be releasing were some very basic potion recipes, and an incomplete set at that. Humanity had discovered a lot of truly incredible things in the other timeline, but that hadn’t been enough to save them, so he needed to speed it up.

When it came to the [System] itself, he was already doing so, and he was funding and giving materials to people finding new and interesting ways to create things, like Helmut Stagmer, the [Blacksmith] and Professor Chandler, the Professor of Chemistry turned [Alchemist].

But as much as things had already been sped up, making things go even faster would be great.

The real issue with speeding things up was the precise method. He could just dump any and all information he had out into the world, but even discounting the issue of him outing himself, that would actually be a really bad idea. For one, having to dig yourself through all those literal mountains of unearned knowledge would have subpar results. Figuring out what was important, understanding how something worked without having access to bunch of supporting literature that Isaac sadly hadn’t memorized, all of that would be difficult.

Also, having all that information handed to them would leave humanity’s scientists in a far worse situation, given that they wouldn’t gain the Levels, [Skill] Levels, high rarity [Class] Evolutions and simple experience when dealing with the [System] that they would have gotten if they’d reached this level of understanding the normal way.

But here, he was going to be handing them a few basic potion recipes that would be incredibly useful and would save many lives in the future, also giving them a basic idea of what a potion recipe was meant to look like, while still forcing them to figure out how those damn things were meant to work. It should speed things up quite a bit.

He’d upload the information to the internet later, and by later, he meant on some weekend when he was free. He’d use the same tricks of buying a new phone while wearing a different face, shifting forms several times whenever he was out of sight of both people and potential cameras, and then upload it in a random internet café.

To this purpose, he’d even be heading out of the country, into the Swiss city of Chur, where he’d released his first bit of information. He really didn’t want to offer any option for geo-profiling by giving people the chance to start extrapolating data from the multiple times he’d uploaded things.

Still, between his ability to shapeshift and not leave behind any physical traces like hair or skin cells, he’d be a stone cold pain to track down, worse than Krebs. She might have been impossible to recognize via facial recognition, but at the very least, she had the decency to always wear the same face. Him, not so much.

He’d also set up a way to delay the public release of the data until he was in Korea, hopefully making it appear as if he weren’t he one who’d uploaded it, being halfway around the world. Well, there really shouldn’t be any reason for people to suspect him in the first place, but this should prevent him from ever really being considered in the first place.

As for making sure no one connected this to his other famous public manuscript, the one about [Aura] control, by analyzing his writing style, he had a trick for that. Simply, he’d written that one in German, rather than English, used autocomplete on a lot of the sentences rather than making his own word choices, and then run it through multiple different translation programs, only smoothing out the grammar afterwards. It was still the same in terms of content, but it used very different phrasing than he normally did while writing something in the English language.

And when it came to how he’d come to gain his auric knowledge, that was pretty explainable, given that there was a pretty straightforward line of reasoning people could easily follow.

First, he’d gained strength as part of the research team, working himself to the bone to stay ahead of the strongest monsters that were currently being summoned.

… and then, he’d come face to face with someone stronger, someone who was, arguably, a monster. He’d won but lost a hand in the process.

Driven by a need to never feel that weak ever again, to win the next fight like this one decisively, he’d run off into the woods for a training montage, evolved, and unlocked his [Aura].

He’d then taken that [Aura] and tried out literally everything there was to try, and everyone knew about it thanks to the erratic bursts of [Aura] that had been clearly noticeable even from outside the building.

While he just sat there, thinking, Professor Sturm bustled into the room, heading straight for the laptop connected to the big screen on the wall, with several students or assistants Isaac didn’t recognize streaming inside after him, sitting down around the table.

Finally, the last people of the team trickled in, and Professor Sturm straightened up, ready to present while Bailey sat at the table like everyone else.

“Alright, depending on when you last looked at the news, you might not have heard about this, but there’s a shark in the Bodensee, Germany’s arguably largest lake, and based on a few blurry photos, we’re pretty sure we’re dealing with a Megalodon here.”

Patrick raised his hand, indicating he had a question “Er, arguably biggest lake?”

“It borders Austria and Switzerland as well as Germany, so some people argue that it isn’t Germany’s biggest lake. It’s not really important, though.

“What is important is the shark itself. Based on your experiments with the dinosaurs and how you managed to correlate Stats to Tier and how that differs from what they should have, based on size and muscle mass, that thing would be able to shatter any unenhanced boat on that lake like kindling, with the sole exception of the big ferries, and even those are at risk.

“We’re going to be using a normal Great White Shark, Carcharodon Carcharis, for comparison when it comes to hunting methodology, a comparison that has held true so far. Basically, they dive deep into the water to conduct an attack from below, impacting their target at high speed. Great White’s use this to stun seals while the prevailing theory on a Megalodon’s hunting habits is that they use this burst of speed to surprise whales and damage their flukes, limiting their mobility until they bleed out.”

“I’m sorry, but what’s a fluke?” Isaac asked.

“That’s the tail fin.” Sturm said “Given what we know about how monsters that are essentially [System] empowered animals grow stronger, that same attack could reduce a sailboat to kindling with one hit.

“The point is that right now, that entire lake is a deathtrap, and no one is sticking so much as a toe into the water.”

“Shouldn’t the shallows be safe?” Raul asked.

“Not necessarily. A Great White can swim in water with a depth as little as a single meter. Assuming that the this scales precisely with size, all a Megalodon needs is water maybe three meters deep and that covers most of the lake. Believe me, no one is going out on the water right now.”

“And what about the risk of this shark escaping the lake, swimming out along some river and reaching the ocean?” Isaac asked. That might take care of the immediate issue of having a bloodthirsty monster in a lake that was popular for swimming, fishing, recreational sailing, etc. … but it would also ensure that a countless swarm of said bloodthirsty death machines would haunt the Earth’s oceans once more.

“Very little. The Rhine river does eventually reach the ocean, but it runs through several narrow areas before then, and the military is already working towards ensuring it does not survive going through those chokepoints.” Sturm replied “However, the biggest issue right here and now is getting the shark out of the lake. I’ve already gotten request from the Marine to do projection about the ecological consequences of hurling depth charges into the lake until the shark is dead. I don’t have the precise numbers on that, but just from my work with the fish farms that work to ensure there are still fish in the lake, year after year, I know the consequences would be bad.

“Putting aside the human element for a second here, this thing will cause a massive, if localized, ecological disaster, either when they start spawning in more of their kind or in their violent removal.

“But this situation, as horrible as it is, also represents an opportunity to observe a monster in the wild, how it interacts with other animals, if it needs food if it is available and to what degree it will go to get it.

“As of right now, the goal is to get a good look at it and how it acts, then get it the hell out of there …”

Sturm went on to talk about a few weak points and plans, but there wasn’t much he had. When he studied sharks, he studied their physiology, not how to fight them with magic powers that hadn’t existed back then.

Everyone but Isaac headed out after that, first helping grab some gear and then they drove off in one of the university’s busses while he flipped open a spare laptop and started typing. He didn’t want stuff he specifically released anonymously on his work laptop, ever.

‘Babysitters’ cycled in and out, occasionally it was Professor Bishop, who’d evolved his [Class] into an [Ulfhednar], sometimes Professor Chandler talked his ear off about his latest discoveries, trying to convince him to try them out, but most of the time, he was dealing with high Level police officers and even, on one occasion, a Bundeswehr soldier.

Basically, if they were over Level 25 and could be assumed to be reasonably professional, they were in the building to ensure that there were multiple people guarding the three rooms of monsters, counting down towards the autonomous spawns.

Isaac sighed internally. He knew there was no way in hell he’d be allowed to do so, but he wished he’d been doing this alone if the rest of the team couldn’t be here.