Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 78: The Clock strikes Thirteen

The sound of weapons clashing filled the empty summoning room, Isaac’s souldbound blade in its knife form striking a telescoping metal baton, over and over. No teleports, no preternaturally lengthened weapons, no active [Skills] of any kind. This was about speed, and only speed. Well, personal skill also counted for something, but was only a distant secondary concern compared to the sheer impact their difference in speed had.

Around them, two [Auras] flared, both covering a huge area, interweaving and pushing against each other. One, the weaker one, was pale blue and gave of the feeling of a solid wall despite how ephemeral it was. A commander’s [Aura], that connected a group of people, transmitting orders instantaneously while also able to immediately return any responses given.

It was similar to a sensory [Aura] in the sense that it wasn’t all that immediately durable could be pushed aside easily enough, but it could also be projected past other [Auras], albeit at a vastly reduced strength.

As for the person wielding that [Aura], well, it was the extendible baton, it was Polizeihauptmeister Habicht, and he really shouldn’t have been here.

First of all, unlike Wirt, he was from Leipzig, a city halfway across the country. Also, he wasn’t just a member of the police’s tactical unit, the SEK, he was in charge of the damn thing, at least the local department.

Or rather, he had been in charge of the Leipzig Police department’s tactical division and even then, being a babysitter this far away would have been beneath him. Yet

Now though, he’d been put in charge of a newly created department meant to take care of any and all monsters that went free and endangered the general public. Grenzschutzgruppe Thirteen, or GSG 13. They were in good company, the last GSG unit, GSG 9, being the German Federal Police’s anti-terrorism strike group. Someone had clearly had a lot of fun naming the new one.

In the other timeline, it had had a different name. It had been formed in response to an incident similar to the damn shark in the lake, but it definitely hadn’t been the exact same one. Something involving a Hill Troll, maybe? It had certainly been something chaotic in an already chaotic time, so Isaac didn’t remember the particulars.

First, it had been called the Emergency Anti-Monster Response Force, die Anti-Monster Notfall Gruppe, or AMNG for short. They’d later dropped the ‘Emergency’, calling it just the AMG, but the name still held echoes of the desperate circumstances that had create it.

Now though, someone had taken the time to create it thoroughly and from scratch, and then given it a name that was both well thought-out and kind of badass.

It was a truly ridiculous thing to be so deliriously happy about, but he was. It was a sign that he’d changed things for the better, not because he’d made it happen, not because he’d worked tirelessly to change something big, it was simply a cute little sign that things had changed.

And even though he had all those responsibilities, someone had still felt it was a good use of his time to have him train under Isaac, and that also felt good. He was certainly being helpful, but he was also being seen as helpful. Also, he was strengthening one of the people who’d be standing between the people of this country, and by extension the world, and the monsters. Not only that, but Habicht would likely also take a large part of that training with him to train others, his future subordinates, with it.

“Gotcha.” Isaac said, lightly tapping Habicht on the forehead with his knife. Normally, this would have been supremely unsafe, but his ability to prevent his blades from inflicting any damage made this pretty ok, though convincing him of that hadn’t been easy.

“Damn, you’re fast.” Habicht grunted. He was a few Levels below Isaac, but that was only part of the reason for their difference in speed.

The older man’s second Evolution [Class] was a Commander-type, and that demanded a vastly different attribute distribution.

Commander-type [Classes], meaning anything designed to command other people, empowering them and granting supernatural communication channels. But such [Skills], ones that affected multiple people over a decent period of time and to a significant degree, cost a lot of mana. A metric fuckton. And that was mana the user had to pay, it didn’t come from the environment or the recipient. Well, there were versions where the Commander activated a comparatively cheap [Skill] that gave his subordinates temporary access to a new [Skill], and then they could pay the mana cost that created the actual effect, and then there were variations that involved the linking of mana pools to sustain [Unit-Skills] … and about a million others.

But in the end, it all boiled down to this: nothing happened for free, everything incurred an energy cost, and the caster/user/wielder/whatever-else-there-was had to pay it. Of course, anything that had a large scale effect, like [Unit-Skills], was stupidly expensive.

Much like with his [Form of Horror], his ultimate [Skill], that cost usually exceeded the mana pool of most people who held such [Skills], at least when they first got it.

Instead, they came with a separate ‘capacitor’ that any excess mana regeneration would flow into until it was full, and that capacitor could only be spent the specific [Skill] it was attached to, and nothing else, though in certain cases, there was the option of only spending some of the capacitor. Anything that functioned like that also had a cooldown, which, depending on the [Skill] in question, could be measured in months.

Most people only got one or two every Evolution, their central [Skills] if they were active ones.

But not Commanders, they were basically all cooldown-[Skills]. Sure, you had a [Sense for Tactics] here, a [Battlefield Eye] there, the usual enhanced senses and interpersonal [Skills] one would expect a [Tactician], [General] and the like to have, but the rest … everything else required an absurdly high amount of mana but was independent of the user’s mana pool.

All of that was a very roundabout way of saying: Commanders were basically all Mana Regeneration, stat wise, leaving Habicht a little bit below Isaac in terms of physical stats and that gap would only widen as their Levels increased. It really wouldn’t have been a very fair matchup even without Isaac having ten years of [System]-combat experience on the man.

But Habicht had wanted to spar to see what it was like to fight against someone that much faster than him, so that was what they’d been doing.

“This is hardly a fair contest.” Isaac replied in response to the comment about his speed “I’d rather not fight a [Iron-willed Guardian of the Law] when he actually has the proper support, even if said support is at a lower Level than either of us. One on one combat isn’t what your [Class] is meant for and we both know it.”

Yes, that was Habicht’s actual [Class] name, but only in the English language. In German, the language his Status screen had been using during the Evolution, [Gesetzeshüter des Eisernen Willens], the name sounded good and proper, it had gravitas, it fit. He’d earned it for staring down the continent’s most prolific serial killer, someone who could have torn his head off before he could even blink and had nearly done so several times, after all.

But when it was translated into English, even the [System] badly mangled it, there were simply certain phrases that didn’t translate properly.

And as to why most people used English [Class] names, it was pretty simple. English was the language of science, and most of the discoveries about the [System] had been made by science. Well, a large chunk of them had been made by them, but that was beside the point.

“I suppose.” Habicht shrugged “But who can choose to fight all their battles only when the conditions are favorable? Certainly not me.”

“Speaking of favorable conditions, why aren’t you at the Bodensee with the others, dealing with that shark?” Isaac asked.

“GSG 13 isn’t quite ready yet and if a big intervention is necessary, it will involve the kind of heavy ordinance that only the military has, a paramilitary police unit like mine isn’t allowed to use them. In the end, I decided that learning how to better use my [Aura] was the best use of my time. How about you, why aren’t you there with all your coworkers.?”

Isaac sighed “I have to babysit the monsters. Won’t be much longer though, they’ll start spawning in maybe ten minutes from now and then I’ll have to start writing down everything that happens. But until then, another round?”

The ring of metal striking metal began to fill the room once again, knife clanging off baton, until another [System] window popped up.

Warning! Automatic Summoning has been activated on [Acid Slime]! Slay the original monster to stop this effect.

Isaac jumped backwards to create a little space between the two of them, to give the other man a chance to read the notification and stop. But he didn’t need to, because Habicht had stopped fighting just as quickly as he had.

In the other timeline, Isaac had sparred with people who were better fighters than Habicht, people who had better reflexes, but he’d only rarely sparred against someone who had the kind of discipline that proper training instilled.

Warning! Automatic Summoning has been activated on [Stray]! Slay the original monster to stop this effect.

He pulled a laptop from his spatial storage and sat down on a chair which likewise appeared out of thin air.

There were several Excel sheets that had been prepared well ahead of time, all he had to do was put in the data as he got it.

His [Aura of the Desperate Seeker] was pushed out to the max, encompassing all of the various crates and cages that held the various monsters, and he just sat there, writing.

There were a lot of experiments being conducted here.

Would the monsters start autonomously summoning in the same order they themselves had been summoned it?

Would having multiple monsters of the same kind speed up the process, or slow it down?

Would the autonomous summoning slow down as the number of newly created monsters increased?

And if so, would killing the newly spawned monsters bring the speed back up?

And so on, and so forth.

To test the last hypothesis, Isaac lazily swung his knife, a [Far Strike] projected through the wall, [Starfang] active and turning an Acid Slime into a sooty stain on the floor.

It was a cool trick, though. He could slice through the walls of this place with his blades, but his new [Absolute Blade Mastery] meant he wasn’t doing any actual damage in the process.

Sadly, this little trick wouldn’t let him outright bypass armor, at least not unless it was so weak as to be inconsequential. Annoying, that.

So that was what he spent the next couple of hours doing. Typing, splattering monster guts all over the place and watching Habicht grow more and more nervous as the flood of ‘Warning! Autonomous summoning has been activated on [Organism X]!’ messages continued.

At some point, [Far Strike] went up a Level, hitting Level 20 and Isaac took a moment to read it's new description, but then went right back to documenting the results of the experiment.

Far Strike (common, Level XX)

Upon the User’s next melee attack with a bladed weapon, the blade will extend by 2+0.5n meters where n equals skill level.

In addition, the User may now imbued his weapons with ten mana to create a range enhancing aura for a full minute. This extra reach is 0.5 meters, gaining an additional 0.1n meters, with n being every Level in this Skill over 10.

After countless battles where the user has used this Skill to destroy foes that thought they were safe due to being out of range, this Skill has evolved to grant him even an greater reach. The user may now input more mana at will, with the range doubling with every additional 20 points of mana invested.

Caution: Extremely long blades may give way if engaged along their entire length, this may be mitigated by applying a second Skill to strengthen it (elligble Skills: Piercing Strike, Power Strike).

Cost: 20 mana minimum, no maximum mana investment

Not bad, not bad. He now had the reach to cut apart skyscrapers, though it was more likely going to be used against monsters than buildings.

So far, this had been a good day. He wondered how the others were doing?