Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 212: The Descent

The city was somehow even worse now that it was occupied. Before, Isaac had been able to half-delude himself into thinking that this place was some kind of exhibition, a fanciful recreation of a city from a story, or even a poorly constructed illusion. Something that, while still decidedly strange, at least made sense.

Now though, now it was something straight out of a horror movie. Screams and cries of horror echoed in the distance, but whenever one checked them out, there was nothing there. Or there were people there, but they were perfectly fine, just annoyed at being disturbed.

Just a few minutes ago, the group had passed a dozen arguing people who’d come to rescue someone after hearing blood-curdling screams of pain and pleas for help only to run into others who thought they were in trouble.

It had devolved into a shouting match pretty quickly.

There were countless additional issues involving people getting lost and stumbling out of the city believing they’d been there for hours or even days, when in reality, mere minutes had passed.

Reports of individuals completely disappearing were also circulating, but those were very much unverifiable at the moment. With how screwy communications were in the city coupled with how easy it was to get lost, it was entirely possible that the “disappeared” were just wandering around a couple of streets over.

The Marines, meanwhile, were both making good progress and none at all. Military discipline was carrying the day against the strangeness of the city, but their careful and methodical approach was seriously hampering them.

Clearing a normal city building by building, room by room, was standard practice and perfectly possible.

Doing the same to a city that had buildings that literally didn’t exist until you doubled back … their progress had slowed to a crawl about two seconds in. At least the section they’d cleared was hopefully going to stay that way.

The hell of it was that magic could quite handily describe everything they were seeing. Sure, the mystical energy might be far from understood, and stumped researchers on a daily basis, but it was something they knew off, something they could manipulate, somethey they could use.

This mess, not so much. It was the old ghostly staple of things moving without any reason, or suddenly floating in midair. Except there were explanations for things like this happening, ranging from wires to magnetism.

Except here, they knew for a fact that all those “reasonable” explanations were untrue. No scientific truth to discover, no stage magician to threaten. Just complete and utter bullshit.

They reached the center of the city in less than ten minutes. The path was still the furthest thing from straightforward, but the knowledge gathered the last time around helped.

So, after getting turned around twice, hitting dead ends three times and at least a dozen different falls due to people tripping over objects that had literally not been there until someone had stepped on them.

Standing there, looking down into the abyss, Isaac felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. There was nothing there, nothing visible, nothing noticeable, nothing that should engender any kind of reaction. And he was certainly far too experienced to be jumping at shadows.

And they still didn’t know where this place had come from, or why it existed.

The obvious answer was that it was some kind of honeytrap created by the cult he’d already been fighting, but there were a million holes in that idea.

Those folks weren’t allowed to take action until a certain amount of time had passed, only to make preparations. Completely and utterly shielding this place to the point where something this unnatural had no effect would have been an incredible amount of work.

And what were they supposed to do with everything when they were allowed to take action?

The slow erosion of the city’s inhabitants’ sanity would take a long time, too long make the whole affair useful. They couldn’t use it until their timeline was up, and at that point, there were a million more effective ways to destroy the world at that point. Summoning [World Bosses] was, for example, a fantastic way of wrecking the place, though they’d probably only managed to that once, maybe twice, as there was basically no chance the summoners of a monster that powerful would be able to get away to summon a second one.

Did that mean that the city itself was their enemy? Some kind of sinister consciousness that inhabited this place, managing things behind the scenes akin to a Dungeon core, growing in power until it played host to a million living weapons, high Level individuals teetering at the brink of madness until one final things pushed them over the edge and then … something happened?

Dungeon cores could advance some by killing people during a dungeon break, but would former human inhabitants count as monsters for that purpose?

Besides, Dungeons had a certain air about them, an energy that one could sense, from the mana that infused every surface to the [Auras] of the monsters that awaited within. This place … not so much.

Isaac couldn’t think of any definition he could give for this place, no category he could use. This was the world under the [System], where all monsters could be traced back to where they’d been summoned from, they came with a definition already baked in. This place didn’t. It was new, unfamiliar, and it was getting on his last nerve.

Which meant that there was just one more thing to do in the here and now. Go down into the hole of nightmares, and find something whose ass they could kick.

Patrick sent a ball of light floating into the hole, revealing, well, a hole. Deep, dark, with slick walls that were covered in algae, and a darkness so absolute that seeing through it was impossible even with Perception at the four-hundred mark.

Nothing to do but grit your teeth and push through.

Isaac was the first to follow the light source, jumping down and landing on one of his floating blades, using it to slowly descend.

Fenrir just jumped in, collided with the opposite wall, adhered to it with his frost magic, and then kicked off it to do the same to the opposite wall. Again and again, he bounced off the walls of the shaft like a rubber ball until he reached the bottom of the illuminated section, where he remained upon his icy perch, waiting for the others to catch up.

Everyone except the pair of melee fighters just floated down on cushions of magic, like sensible people.

Then, the six of them hung there, a hundred meters deep in the shaft, and they still didn’t see anything.

The caves and tunnels that surrounded them, black holes in the walls of the shaft, had relocated during their descent, but they were still in range for Isaac to sweep them with his [Aura]. They were empty. Just muck, algae, and silt.

So they descended another hundred meters, deeper into the pit, the sky turning into a pinprick high overhead.

Still nothing.

Attempts to illuminate the bottom of the shaft failed, no matter how much mana was poured into the lighting spells. At some point, the cone of light being projected downwards just diffused and became so indistinct as to be basically non-existent.

The descent was an excercise in futility … until it wasn’t. The section of floor peeled from the darkness like some primordial leviathan of the deep, appearing so quickly that Isaac nearly attacked it out of surprise. Fenrir also managed to avoid lashing out, though it had been a close thing as he had to snatch his thrown Dane Axe back out of the air.

But a dozen quickly cast attack spells blasted out, splattering across the ground and obliterating the algae covering.

While the spells quickly petered out, the damage was done. Everybody had been jumpy as hell already and the obvious lapse in discipline hadn’t helped matters.

And when the smoke cleared and the floor under the algae became visible, things got a million times worse.

A black so dark it sucked in the surrounding light, a sterile white that hurt to look at, intermixing, overlapping, even occupying the same space in places. Somehow.

Fenrir waved his hand and iced over the area, the inclusion of countless air bubbles making the ice opaque and stopping them from seeing the mess.

“Try to avoid hitting the ground if you can,” Isaac warned. It was superfluous, everyone had already figured that out.

He leaned back, staring towards the surface. Ho-ley shit, they were deep. Around a kilometer under the surface of the ocean. Thankfully, everyone here could either breathe underwater, or was tough enough to survive in water this deep.

But now, they’d found caverns that led more than a few hundred meters into the rock.

“Where too first?” Fenrir asked.

Isaac held up a hand to shush him “Still trying to figure that out. But whatever happens, we’re sticking together. Splitting up would have been bad enough up there, down here, it would be suicide.”

Before them lay either four or seven paths, the number changed every time he blinked. And the paths that appeared/disappeared were different each time, but there was a single path that was always present. Gotcha … maybe.

“Dr. Han, if you would.” Isaac asked and once again, the world shifted and twisted as the combination of [All See] and [Kingdom Come] activated once more … and barely helped. The of the paths forwards still only existed part time, but they were there, and they lead somewhere.

But the main one, the only constant path in this chaos, that was where they needed to go. Why? Because there were signs of people. And people meant answers.

Sure, said signs were just a few candy wrappers and some footprints, but they were still there, still present, and felt far more real and solid than anything else here.

Slowly, they krept closer. Isaac using [Sneak] and [Stealth], the others layering several thousand points of mana in anti-detection spells over themselves.

The path was far longer than it had seemed at first, and having to be cautious meant that they’d slowed down to a crawl.

They’d been moving for maybe ten minutes when the ground lurched and began to shudder.

Oooooh hell, was the city sinking? The section they were in was certainly descending, and there was a high chance that the whole place was returning to its original location at the bottom of the ocean.

“Prepare for underwater comba-” Isaac began to warn when he was rudely interrupted by a shout in the distance.

“Take that you hunk of %&$§ junk!”

“Did anyone else hear a weird noise in place of a swear word?” Isaac asked. The others nodded.

Human warped to become part eldritch abomination, or eldritch abomination pretending to be human and doing a crappy job of it?

More voices rang out as they crept forward. The main language used was English, interspersed with several other human languages, but several words from the other language were thrown in. Every word, every statement ground on Isaac’s eardrums like nails on a chalkboard … if the chalkboard had been situated within his ear canal.

“But this can’t work. %&/Q§ saw the city.” A worried voice said.

“Yeah, the city. The weird one, where things stop existing if you stop looking at them. We’re going to, hehe, be totally invisible. Now we’re no longer up there, now they will think we stopped existing.” A second replied, every word dripping with insanity. Isaac shivered.

“The god-city is truly a marvel.” A third voice said in a tone that made Isaac reminded Isaac of a church preacher “It has blessed us by lifting the veil from our eyes, showing us the naked horror of reality, and set us free. $§&%$ will destroy our foes, be it by breaking them into submissive servants for us, or by erasing their very souls and using the remains to fuel our ascension.”

So there were people here, but they were definitely not normal. “Eldritch” was a summoning category, but those were just weird things, not … this. Were they actually worshipping the city?

And Isaac had never, ever, heard anything like that language. The power to hurt one’s enemies merely by speaking wasn’t something that could have been kept secret easily. If anyone had gone out into the world and used this ability, it would have gotten out, as rumors and hearsay at the very least.

All of this was new and different.

The group stayed put a few turns away from where the voices were originating for close to an hour to eavesdrop. It was very uninformative, not because the people weren’t speaking, it was because they weren’t making any bloody sense. Each and every single person in that room was certifiably insane, and that was putting things mildly.

Insane laughter as someone collapsed after being cursed out in the incomprehensible language.

Personalities shifting mid-sentence as people argued with themselves more than everyone else.

Information being presented, then the exact opposite statements were being made with the same complete sincerity as the original.

These people’s minds had snapped like stale breadsticks.

Not that Isaac could blame them. He was already feeling the effects of his surroundings after just a few hours, wearing away at his mental barriers. They were holding, for now.

Down here, message spells didn’t work and you couldn’t teleport in or out either, so Isaac strongly suspected that these folks had been down here since before the city had risen. They’d also apparently been working furiously to get it to return to the ocean floor if their conversations were anything to go by.

In fact, the “city wasn’t meant to rise” was one of the bits of info that Isaac did believe, because it was mentioned so damn often.

“We know enough, let’s head back and tell give a report,” Isaac ordered. Sure, he could have just sent back a messenger, but that would have meant splitting the party. He could also have just gone ahead and gone on the offensive and dealt with the situation directly, but that would have been a huge risk.

He didn’t have anything to go on here, nothing to gauge these people’s strength by. He couldn’t even risk trying to analyze them because he didn’t know what kinds of detection abilities they had. In fact, he wouldn’t have put it past them to have ended up with powerful sensory [Skills] after staring into the proverbial abyss for so long.

No, they’d do this with the maximum amount of parano-, er, caution, and come back here fresh in a few hours and secure in the knowledge that even should something happen, there would be others with all the knowledge needed to take their place.

… They didn’t make it more than ten steps before the world shifted and suddenly, the path back dumped them right into the chamber with the people they’d been dropping eaves on. Wait, that didn’t make sense… why was he even thinking about that nonsense, there was fighting to be … but that wasn’t the priority, not what he wanted, they needed to be getting out of here.

And why the ever-loving fuck was he this stuck inside his head in the middle of a bloody fight?