Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 195: Sneaky Bastards

The archer came striding over the hill behind Arthur, arms blurring faster and faster and arrows growing stronger and stronger.

Even if he hadn’t seen the S-Rank badge glinting at around the man’s neck, Arthur still would have recognized him solely based on that [Skill]. Yushin Yi, a member of the Dungeon Guild, and wielder of an ancient bow that had once belonged to a legendary ancestor that had earned him an equally legendary [Class].

[Salvo of History] was one of those few interesting abilities that grew stronger in ways other than mere Levels. Simply put, every time it was activated, it threw out one arrow for each time it had been activated, with its power depending on the Level of the [Skill] at the time each time it had been activated. The first few arrows had basically just been [Giant Arrows], but at [Salvo of History’s] Levels had increased, each new shot had gained new powers.

So when the final arrow left the bowstring, it homed in on the largest enemy, nailing the writhing mass of bone scythes and disgustingly wet flesh tentacles straight through the center and ignited, burning so hot the projectile was reduced to ash in milliseconds.

And the monster, damp as it was, fared no better. It turned into a thrashing, screaming pyre of fire and disintegrating flesh.

That initial salvo had torn the absolute fuck out of the line of monsters and if the swarm had been limited to just those killed during the raid, it would have ended all of this in a single decisive strike. With the stored bodies, on the other hand, it had merely bought them some breathing room.

Then, the second Korean stepped over the hill. There was no badge visible on her outfit, but the wave of vicious-looking vegetation that swept along aside her was just as good as one. Yubin Kyo, another S-Ranker, an utterly terrifying [Green Mage]. This had just gone from very dangerous to merely threatening to exceedingly easy.

Now how lucky had they gotten to have not one, but two Korean S-Rankers randomly be in range to help? Because while all S-Rankers had been taught Isaac’s re-equip [Skill], Arthur could still recognize someone on holiday if he saw them.

He sent of a party invite, added them to the general command and control comms channel, and altered the plan once they’d agreed to follow his lead. He hadn’t even had to ask, they’d offered the second communications had been established.

And in the distance, he could hear various reinforcements who’d portaled in outside of the anti-teleportation field close the distance.

From that point onwards, it was simple. Have Yubin send toxic or explosive plants into the building to take out the monsters in preparation for the assault while Yushin takes out anything that dared show its ugly mug. And when there were only a few monsters left, he sent Steff in to wreck the ritual that was animating all those corpses, and that was that.

Watching a living weapon go through the undead like a knife through butter was a real joy to watch, especially as both those things weren’t metaphors, but rather, a literal description of what was happening.

Unlike nearly everyone else, Steff basically only had a single power. Sure, his starter [Class] of [Warrior] had given him some other [Skills], but he basically never used them.

From his first Evolution onwards, every [Class], [Skill], and Aspect had fed only one thing, his ability to cut things in half. Not just bisect physical objects, such as enemies or walls, but spells, clouds of toxic gasses, or even the mess that sprayed out whenever an undead was cut apart.

It all broke against him like the tide against a rock, rendering him all but invulnerable to attacks that he could see coming. Well, his mana had to last and some attacks were unblockable, like the counterattacks that had reduced Arthur to his current state, but otherwise, he could shrug off even city-killing attacks.

Arthur watched his friend via the bodycam of the cop following him, nervous even though he knew he really shouldn’t be.

Steff walked straight at a monster that had been built up around the corpse of an enemy mage by wrapping it in layers of flexible bone armor with dead flesh placed in between to cushion impacts.

The bony spikes that surrounded the outside of the monster should have made any attack a dangerous endeavor, as should the many, many scythes, morning-star tentacles, and massive lamprey-like mouths that could swallow a man whole.

But when the attacks struck Steff, they were pulled back while vastly shorter, the tip severed as if the weapon had struck Excalibur edge-on. Then, he ran right through the monster, the only difference between that and how he would have walked through open space was the fact that normally, people didn’t wave their hands through the air to smack an undead’s head. When the edge of Steff’s hand struck the grinning skull, the bone split as if it had been struck by a giant axe and fell apart. And then he was through, not even a single spot of dirt on his skin or clothing.

What followed was a string of curses from the cop who was wearing the bodycam as the mass of flesh suddenly lost cohesion and slopped onto the ground as a putrid wave, drenching the commenter’s boots and legs.

Come on, did you expect fighting monsters comprised of torn-apart and crudely stitched-together body parts to be a clean endeavor? Even the freshest of bodies weren’t exactly clean, let alone the ones that had been stored in the basement for God only knew how long.

From that point on, it was even smoother sailing. Steff charged ahead, hacking apart all the monsters just by running into them, while the people following after him tried to dodge the resulting mess amidst swearing and curses directed at both him and his ancestry all the way back to the stone age.

Enough monsters had been cleared out that his mana lasted all the way down to the central ritual circle, which had created a massive, black crystal the size of a person that emanated sinister energies that transformed the area around it into a horrifically twisted mockery of living land, with plants dying, drying out, hardening and turning into a “natural” barrier. Grass to caltrops, hedges to walls, trees to block ranged attacks.

They verified if anyone knew anything about such crystals if they’d explode, or if there was a specific requirement to break them. No one knew anything and the darned thing was clearly a problem, so Steff got the go-ahead to punch it.

As it turned out, things really were that simple to fix. The crystal turned out to be extraordinarily tough and had to be hacked into several pieces before it finally lost cohesion and shattered, but shatter it did.

The last few undead kept moving and the plant life wasn’t restored, but the area stopped growing worse and the dreary atmosphere dissipated. Steff burned all his mana except his emergency reserve clearing out the last few undead, and the rest was taken care of as well.

The end … except for the huge mess that still needed cleaning up, the sheer number of various reinforcements that needed to be directed, and the imminent shitstorm over how off the rails the whole operation had been. As the person who’d been in charge in the end, a lot of that would fall on his shoulders, especially if Caradec wasn’t alive to take his share of the lumps (aka all of them), but he’d be dishing out a fair amount of crap as well. Setting up the anti-teleport formation couldn’t have been accomplished just by the Chief Constable. Someone had to have okayed the whole affair, and that person also deserved to be hung from the ceiling by their bollocks.

In a quiet moment, Arthur leaned back against a tree, closed his eyes, and activated the ability [My Round Table] had gained when it had hit Level 10. Communication.

He was still aware of his surroundings and would be able to react if something happened, but right now, the thing he saw in front of and around him was a medieval hall with a large round table at which he was seated.

The only thing that looked out of place was the hologram projector in the center of the table, the sci-fi-tech gadget at extreme odds with everything else visible.

But hey, this was an imaginary space that served as a communication hub, he could decorate it however he wanted, and he liked it this way.

“So, I’m guessing things didn’t go well?” the only other person in the space asked. Isaac wasn’t supposed to know anything about the raid and contacting him would normally have raised some serious red flags, but [My Round Table] was a pure-[System] kind of communication. There was nothing traceable, to weird mana threads to follow, no nothing.

Arthur shook his head and used the holoprojector to show the crystal and the devastation it had wrought.

“Do you have any idea what that is?”

“Elemental Lands, Undeath Subtype, from the Structures category of summoning. The ritual summons a crystal that transforms the surroundings into an elemental area that matches the element you added to the ritual. Fire ignites everything flammable and turns the flames into Fire Elementals, water desiccates the soil and any living beings with open wounds, then turns that liquid into Elementals as well, and so on, and so forth. Undeath animates all corpses and fuses them into more-dangerous amalgamations while killing all the plant life around it and turning it into fortifications until the entire area is basically a minefield.

“The elemental energies cover an area ten kilometers across in the first day, then by another kilometer every day until the area’s radius has doubled, then the rate of expansion halves, the pattern continues from there. At forty kilometers, it only expands 250 meters every day, at eighty only 125 meters, and so on, and so forth. Breaking the crystal will immediately dissipate the energy, but you’ll still have to deal with all the monsters that were created.” Isaac explained.

“And how much of that can I excuse knowing?” Arthur asked.

“Basically nothing.” Isaac shook his head “The crystal is vulnerable to long-range bombardment, so I didn’t prioritize investigating it, and the spreading energies look threatening enough that very few people felt comfortable seeing what happened if you left it alone long enough to spawn more than a couple of monsters. You definitely shouldn’t know what that was.”

“Are there any aftereffects?” Arthur asked.

Isaac shook his head.

“So that’s it.” Arthur said, “Just a prisoner to interrogate and a police officer to tear a new asshole.”

“You have a prisoner?” Isaac practically screamed with excitement, then calmed himself down with apparent effort “Excellent. Make sure they don’t get assassinated, and see if there are any [Skills] on them to silence them remotely.”

“Those exi- … of course there are [Skills] like that,” Arthur added a few more choice swearwords, then had Isaac pass along every single technique for ferreting out and removing such [Skills]. And then, it was time to get back to work.

The trio standing watch over the prisoner looked at him as if he’d grown a second head when he rattled off a million different scans they had to run, but there weren’t any questions. Not when there was a sudden surge of mana and the prisoner started foaming at the mouth while blood ran from his eyes, nose, and ears.

By the time the healer had been fetched, the effect had ended, leaving the prisoner in an even worse shape, but still alive.

***

“So, this bunch of berks can kill their people at range if they don’t want them talking. The only reason we’re not trying to interrogate a corpse is that our prisoner is so incredibly tough that the [Skill] failed.” Chief Constable Bell, who’d replaced Caradec, said when the mess was reported to her.

She looked like she wanted to swear up a storm but held off in favor of snapping off more and more orders about how to guard the prisoner and transfer him to somewhere better protected than their temporary base camp in the middle of rural Cornwall. Literally anywhere else, basically.

So, that was done. Now Arthur just needed to find Caradec and flay him alive.

***

“… and what possible reason could you have had for doing what you did? You got half your people killed and several of mine as well!” Arthur growled, his face merely a couple of centimeters from the now-former Chief Constables. There hadn’t been enough time to formally remove his rank, let alone do the due diligence that would be needed to make it stick, but even now, it was clear in just how much trouble this … utter disgracewas.

“Mr. Wells, would you please take a step back and sit down?” one of the new officials asked and Arthur shot him a withering glare and eased up. Slightly.

“We won’t know just how many strips to tear off him if you don’t let him speak, and he might not get all he’s got coming to him.” Bell pointed out “That’d be a crying shame, wouldn't it?”

Arthur finally relented and sat back down, still glaring at Caradec, his [Aura] pressing down on the worm.

“The plan was to wait until the first wave of enemy reinforcements arrived, use the teleportation interdiction field to prevent them from escaping, and finally get some prisoners. I mean, the only concrete information we have on these Satanists was provided by someone who is almost immune to truth spells and gained it in a way that is literally impossible to verify. What was I supposed to do?

It was with great difficulty that Arthur managed to suppress his urge to get up and snap this … this maggot like a twig.

“And it worked … right?” Caradec smiled weakly, but he was met with stony stares.

“You had prisoners already, just not high-ranking ones. You could have gotten the high-ranking ones too without insane casualty numbers. And you know how? By using your head, you little …”

Arthur didn’t recognize the new arrival, a woman who’d announced herself by tearing Caradec to pieces so thoroughly, it was a thing of beauty. It was like watching the Mona Lisa as it was painted, Michelangelo’s David as it was being hewn out of a formless piece of marble, akin to standing in the Sistine Chapel as it was being turned into the timeless piece of history it was.

The nicest part was how the comparison of Caradec had to be an evolutionary freak as he clearly shared the spinelessness of a jellyfish despite clearly being a mammal, but it got so much worse. If the jellyfish comparison was a firecracker, most insults were on par with a Tsar-Bomb.

A piece of art. Except, you know, this was an art piece that consisted solely of swearing and cuss words.

But as satisfying as watching that had been, it hadn’t really gotten them all very far.

“The point is, you had a way to block teleports. If you’d told people about that, it could have been planned around, and you could have had reinforcements vastly closer.” Bell pointed out “Also if people had known that there wouldn’t be further hostile reinforcements, they could have used the entirety of their [Skill]set without having to save anything for the next fight.

“And lastly, if you’d told people about the ability to block teleportation, others could have helped come up with great uses for it. For example, you could have had the field in place to ensure that no one teleported right on top of your teams. I’d call that a damn obvious plan, and someone would have figured it out if you’d asked for help, one hundred percent.

“We know from the after-action report that the enemy randomly teleported in, they didn’t know where any of our people were and it was just terrible luck that they caught both the command post and one of our biggest groups of reinforcements. If you’d had the field in place over those spots, most of this mess could have been avoided.

“Then, there was the whole issue involving how you were not prepared in case communications were cut off.

“And we haven’t even gotten to the part where you ran when a single enemy operative teleported into the command post.”

“I …” Caradec started to say something, but the new arrival cut him off again, from a seated position this time. Arthur could now see her name badge and finally recognized her rank patches. Deputy Commissioner Derrien. He hadn’t met her before today, but he was already beyond impressed with her.

“The only thing left for you to say is why you didn’t tell people about your plan. Depending on your answer, this will either be treated as a career-ending level of incompetence or you deliberately working against us. In case you missed it, that would be treason.” Derrien said coldly “So, either explain, or we’ll go forward assuming the worst-case scenario. Here’s a hint, you wouldn’t enjoy that.”

“I … I don’t … it’s all his fault!” Caradec yelled, voice quaking, pointing at Arthur.

“What. Did. You. Just. Say.” Arthur growled.

“You heard me.” Caradec said, voice growing steadier “I wanted to avoid any leaks, and low and behold, who dropped in on us? A pair of Asians. And we all know you’re friends with that Japanese ice mage.”

Oh, good grief. Just when he’d thought that shitstain couldn’t have gotten any worse, Caradec managed to top himself in the awfulness department.

“Tourists.” Bell said “You’re talking about two Korean tourists, who got free tickets from the Guildmaster because they overdid it a bit working. They heard the fighting and hurried over to help.”

“If it helps, I can prove that I didn’t have anything to do with this.” Arthur said, took a deep breath, and rattled off the “I didn’t do nothing” speech Camelot’s legal department had whipped up for a situation where you needed to prove to a truth-teller that you were innocent.

“I, Arthur Wells, did not have anything to do with the Korean S-Rankers showing up. I did not facilitate it, I did not provide the information needed for someone else to do it, I did not ask, suggest, hint, or otherwise make someone do anything of the sort in my place. I was not, directly or indirectly, the impetus behind the situation.”

Of course, there was no doubt in his mind about which pair of scoundrels was behind this, but educated guesses weren’t evidence, or something he’d made statements about.

“See?” Bell said, glaring at Caradec “We got damn lucky we managed to stop whatever those people summoned, otherwise, we’d have been forced to just cordon off the conference center and reduced to bombarding it with bunker busters until something gave way. There’s absolutely nothing you did that helped, and a lot that was the exact opposite of help. You …”

“Oh really? The opposite of help?” Caradec threw up his hands in consternation “Do you know what’s the opposite of help? Getting saddled with a bunch of jumped-up civies for support, and now I’m getting judged here for trying to do what was best?”

“No, you’re being judged for thinking what’s best.” Derrien growled “And being wrong about it. Even you should have been able to realize that given how everything turned out.”

“I will not stand here and be ins- …”

It was obvious where that was going, and Derrien cut him off with a swift gesture of her hand. A simple “shut up, dude” gesture wouldn’t have worked, so she’d gone for the direct approach, preventing them from hearing his rant.

“If you have something reasonable to say, write it down.” She told him more calmly than Arthur could have managed.

Caradec had done a perfectly fine job of undermining himself, there was no real need to keep this going. Now, it was time to think about how to properly squeeze their prisoner for all the information he held.