Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 213: Hellhole

23 people turned as one, staring at the six people and three who’d appeared in their midst unblinkingly for what had to have been just a split second even though it dragged on endlessly, and it felt like it have been hours before Isaac thought to even draw his sword.

He was still faster than almost everyone else in the room, second only to Fenrir, who hurled his axe at one of their opponents, the one who looked like she was the closest to getting off a spell.

Isaac just charged, but before he could cross half the distance, bolts of energy began to fly every which way. His allies were flinging hails of simple [Bolt]-type attack spells while preparing stronger magic. All of the casters he’d brought with him had some manner of multicasting [Skills] and that advantage would, hopefully, carry the day.

On the enemy side, things were looking annoyingly good. They had a spread of basic spells comparable to those of Isaac’s allies, but they came out just plain wrong.

The magic within each spell was oddly shaped, as if accounting for something that he couldn’t perceive, and to a visual inspection, they looked off. Flickering weirdly, they were colored ever so subtly differently, and they just behaved in a weird way. Some exploded in midair, others flew through solid objects and even their intended targets as if they were mere illusions and others still, the most dangerous ones, tore through their defenses like tissue paper.

Wards came apart, unravelling like cheap sweaters, forcing the mages using them for cover to dive for cover.

Then, a blast of overwhelmingly powerful flame roared overhead as Aurelian finally got his act together. Unfortunately. The sheer amount of dust and grime that had built up on the floor, walls and ceiling was disgusting, true, but it also served as a barricade between them and the sanity-wrecking substance this place had been constructed from. Having all that revealed wasn’t much help.

The two closest madmen were incinerated, reduced to ash in seconds, but the rest were odly capable of tanking the impact. It either phased right through them, bounced off, or was deflected by magic.

What the hell were they?

The floor in front of Isaac erupted upwards, shifting into some manner of half-construct, half-biological monstrosity he didn’t even want to describe, but he cut it down. Tried to, at least.

Balmung cleaved the beast in twain with casual ease, but the broken parts came back together faster than he could blink.

[Grand Hellflame] washed over it, blinding the monster and hopefully, they’d finish it off. Isaac just put it out of his mind as “disabled”, considering how much damage it had taken.

From behind the flaming monster came the cultist who’d summoned it, wielding a longsword that moved and flickered as if it were a live snake, rather than an inanimate object.

Isaac’s sword leaped past the man’s crappy guard and was about to lop off his head, only for the swords to seemingly teleport at the last possible second, deflecting the lethal strike.

Attack after attack rained down, [Far Strikes] projected past the man’s guard, new blades suddenly manifesting out of nowhere to chop at Isaac’s enemy … nothing. No matter what he did, that damn sword was always there, deflecting his every attack.

Fifty-two attacks made in five seconds, fifty-two attacks deflected. And that was that. In time, he’d have probably won against someone who was clearly and incompetent wielding an insanely powerful weapon, but he wasn’t here to win a one-on-one duel, he was here to act as a tank.

A wave of sticky flames errupted from him, forcing his opponent back and creating a wall that sent the people trying to get past him stumbling back.

Behind him, the mages continued to work. Patrick continued to rain down his signature perfected spell constructs, no wasted energy or unnessicary complexity, despite having lost an arm, Hak was using a wider array of more common spells but adapting them to the people he was aiming at, cancelling out their attacks and having an incredible amount of success getting past their defenses.

Dr. Han was simultaneously shielding the group and working on healing Patrick while Raul was doing … something. It looked big, complicated, and Isaac had no bloody clue what it was supposed to do.

And on Isaac’s left, Fenrir fought. He looked like a rabid animal, huge swings of his soulbound axe rending the air while his [Aura] boiled around him like a living thing.

But there was a method to his madness. The first swing was easy to dodge, so was the second … and the third led his opponent to plant one of his feet on a patch of ice that was the end, the powerful warrior reduced a stain on the floor.

Slowly but surely, Isaac’s group was being pushed back. 5 of their enemies had already fallen, but the remaining seventeen had found their footing and were giving it all they had.

Seventeen B- to A-Rangers against a small group of S-Rankers was a bit of an unfair match for the former, but this wasn’t a normal group of enemies.

If Isaac had to put the issue into words, he’d have said they were too crazy to know what didn’t work and somehow, the things that hadn’t worked for anyone else functioned perfectly for these madmen. This wasn’t merely a matter of “the issue isn’t what you don’t know, it’s what you know for certain that isn’t so”.

Countless scientists, researchers, and fighters had checked and proved that the things Isaac’s current opponents were doing were impossible.

Whatever it was that they were doing, it was working.

At some point, something was going to give.

He or Fenrir would be too slow to dodge one of the spells they were getting peppered with.

Someone would slip past them.

One of the mages would take a debilitating injury.

There were a million things that could go wrong, and eventually, inevitably, one of them would come to pass.

Sure, they’d always have cooldown [Skills] to burn, but so did their opponents. Both sides were somehow managing to hold back their strongest tricks for devastating counterattacks. Despite their insanity, the madmen were still managing to hold onto that basic tenet of combat.

And then, Raul finally finished casting his spell, shaking the very foundations of reality.

There was a loud shattering sound as though the continental shelf beneath the city were breaking, the noise resonating with Isaac’s very soul.

Nothing seemed to change for a long time, the world remaining normal for a damn long time … and then Isaac was staring at his blade in surprise, and at the point where it had pierced his opponent’s heart, snake sword falling well short of what would have been required to save its wielder.

Isaac swore. Fuck he was being slow right now.

In the current situation, nothing was as abnormal as something, well, normal.

But it wasn’t just the world’s most frustrating blade that had stopped working. The ground was now comprised of regular old black-and-white stone, and the spells their enemies continued to be cast just as insanely as before but this time, they were working as poorly as they should have from the beginning.

That damn spell had restored the natural laws … temporarily. Here and there, patches of the ground were already starting to become weird. Eventually, there would be trouble. But not now.

Even the mental fog had lifted somewhat.

Right now, the advantage lay decidedly with Isaac and his allies.

… So their enemies legged it. Fuck!

Isaac summoned a Kabar and shifted it to one of Old Reliable’s least often used forms, a glowing blue crystal.

The so-called “Astral Piercer” form of the soulbound weapon was based on the Specter line of Aspects and could damage people’s ability to use their [Skills]. In most situations, cutting down his enemies with a single strike was preferable to having to stab someone multiple times only to leave them still able to attack him physically.

But this was the exact kind of situation it was perfect for.

Three of their enemies went down as the group fled. Two dead, and the last one in shock from the pain from taking a shot straight to his spiritual body.

That had been easier than expected, but maybe the spiritual damage from their surroundings had already done most of the work? Either that, or whatever power they’d tapped into had been draining in ways he hadn’t been able to observe.

“Raul, can you cast that normalization ability again?” Isaac asked hopefully.

The MVP of the fight that had just ended shook his head.

“That was an Evolution of [Nature’s Restoration], I got it when the battle started. It costs a lot of mana and has a lengthy cooldown.”

And that cinched it. They wouldn’t be chasing these people through their home turf, a place that was almost certainly actively working against them.

At least the next time they went down here, they’d be better prepared and far better equipped with specialized equipment, upgraded [Skills], and newly arrived allies.

Being in a place so detrimental to their psyche was truly awful, but it was doing wonders for training their mental [Skills].

[Analyze Person] had been bosted by a whole four Levels just by trying to figure out what his opponents’ deal was, and [Undying Focus] was currently teetering at the edge of Level 30, having already gone up a whole five Levels.

Besides, they had a prisoner, for all the good it would to given said prisoner’s mental state.

“We’re leaving.” Isaac ordered “The city is likely flooding at the moment, keep your water breathing abilities primed at all times.”

As they left, he noticed that Patrick was starting to ge the shakes. All of the people here had been in plenty of fights before, they had to have been to reach their current Level.

But losing a limb, however temporarily, was an entirely different beast.

It had taken Isaac himself years to get used to using limbs, and that was with them never remaining gone for more than a few days.

Unless something had gone very wrong when he hadn’t been there, this was the first time Patrick had suffered this level of injury.

The best way to help him was blindingly obvious, but it still took several minutes to figure it out.

[Expert’s Insight] was the final training [Skill] he’d unlocked from [Hildebrand’s Heir] and it had granted him the ability to directly transfer his experience to others.

He’d been passing along a lot of combat experience to his team members, but coping strategies for injuries hadn’t come up yet. Dealing with general combat stress, yes, but the current situation called for a very specific set of experiences.

After five seconds of stopping, Patrick was dealing much better and then, they turned another corner to almost run into a vortex of water and twisted space.

“Some kind of effect is holding back the water, I doubt it’s safe to walk through,” Hak observed, and the others agreed.

“Can you protect us from the water pressure if I break that?” Isaac asked, getting a series of tired nods in response.

When [True Cut] severed the knot of eldritch energy which held back the ocean, the water smashed into them with 500 times the atmospheric pressure at sea level pushing it onwards.

Even at the 4th Evolution, getting smashed around in an underground passageway by a force like that could have become dangerous.

They continued onwards, magic making the hundreds of thousands of tons above them a trivial matter.

As bad as the city had been until now, it was a thousand times worse underwater. The light from the spells that granted them sight down here was distorted as the water rippled from their movements. Shadows moved in the corners of the room, but it wasn’t clear whether that was due to the madness-inducing properties of the city, or just good old physics.

The next place they reached was the shaft they’d descended in and that gave them their first glimpse at the open ocean.

Isaac swept his [Aura] upwards to make sure the way was clear and rocketed upwards at the highest speed that still allowed the others to keep up.

Somehow, things got even worse when they left the city.

The ocean down here was dark and huge. Even with Isaac’s Perception, the sky above was barely visible, only individual photons reaching this deep.

As he ascended, the city that was already practically impossible to see due to the lack of light became even more indistinct, and the sky was still a long way away. Even with the strange emmenations of the city below long since having ceased to grate on his senses, he could feel himself grow even more unsettled.

Nothing above, nothing below, the only things that existed were the people beside him, both his teammates and their singular prisoner, and the freezing cold water that surrounded them.

Fuck, this was creepy.

At least there were no limits with compression sickness due to their overall toughness and they could ascend at speeds that would have killed regular people in short order.

And with any luck, the madmen below would drown, and then, they’d somehow find a complete explanation for the current mess amidst the corpses. Oh, and when the last cultist died, the city would return to normal to boot.

If wishes were fishes and all that.

But even without a proven theory, Isaac could still make a hypothesis. Basically, he had two ideas for why the city had shown up early and twisted.

Option one: R’lyeh had existed in both timelines and something he’d done in this one had resulted in the change. He’d inspired the [Engineer] who’d raised it up the last time to take another job, or said [Engineer] had stopped leveling due to Isaac, something along those lines.

Option two: the whole thing had been a long-shot trap. No god could fuck with Isaac directly, indirectly, or even through a dozen degrees of separation.

However, divine actions grew cheaper the less likely they were to succeed. A tiny change that caused a domino effect which eventually ended with the city rising early and becoming a trap for any curious time traveler.

A trap that would have worked if Isaac hadn’t had a mental resistance [Skill], had been at a lower Level. Any of a dozen choices would have gotten him killed if he’d made them differently.

And because success had been far from assured, it might have been cheap enough to be affordable.

Or it could have been a trap set in both timelines, something for the best and brightest of humanity to explore and lose their sanity to. Expect it had been defused in the other timeline, with the people who discovered it turning it into the center of commerce it had become in the other timeline.

And why had it taken him that long to come up with those … oh.

“Did anybody else feel stupid down there?” Isaac asked.

“Stupid how?” Fenrir asked, “If you’re going to ask me to explain quantum physics, I can’t do that no matter where I am.”

Isaac groaned internally. Not the time for jokes, but the question was a good one.

“Slower, dumber, and you’re suddenly having realizations now that you’re outside the city. You came up with a bunch of things down there that are clearly nonsense, and you’re coming to realizations that are blindingly obvious but you only had them up here.”

Hak swore “I didn’t even realize how bad it was. You’re right. We all did things when we really should have known better. That fight should have ended in seconds.”

Dr. Han shook his head “There has to be something behind it, some kind of underlying logic. It’s on the tip of my tongue, but I …”

“Maybe don’t look too deeply into the mind-melting secrets?” Fenrir asked.

Congratulations, Incarnation of the Promethean Spirit, for beginning to uncover a secret of the world!

You’ve found the sunken city of the Eldritch and come away with your sanity intact, as well as the kernels of the truth.

Ordinarily, you would only receive a reward upon uncovering a whole mystery or set of facts, but considering that this is functionally impossible with the riddle at hand, you have received a partial reward.

For partially uncovering a secret of such magnitude, you have gained 100,000 XP, as well as confirmation that there is something there to discover.

Isaac shook his head “No, Dr. Han is right, there’s something there, I just got XP for partially discovering a big secret. But we should leave well enough alone, we’ve already been exposed for way too bloody long.”

Behind him, Patrick and Hak sagged in relief.

Isaac took this as an option to look at his [System] messages and get the specifics of his upgrades.

Analyze Person (legendary, Level X)

Politicians, managers, hucksters. All kinds of people have all sorts of insights into the human condition, and the associated Classes have a myriad of Skills to help them with that, each one purpose-built for a specific kind of analysis, giving them the exact kind of knowledge needed to do what they do.

This Skill, on the other hand, is the distillation of a lifetime of experience reading people, empowered to a supernatural degree. It might not have the power of a focused Skill and therefore falls far short of the combined abilities of a social Class, but it doesn’t have to match the might of an entire Class because that is not its purpose.

This is a Skill that makes your current social skills useful in a world where magic can interfere with social interactions, as well as empowering said social skills with a lifetime’s worth of experience. In addition, it allows for a degree of insight into what Skills are interfering with your mind/arguments. In addition, blocking hostile social Skills will be easier and will work with a smaller Level gap than normal.

And now, the user will also gain the ability to see the person underneath whatever Skills and other effects might be changing them, hiding their true selves, or otherwise making it so that you are facing a different person than you normally would.

This scanning ability may not work at full strength against effects of significant power.

Undying Focus (epic, Level max)

No matter what kinds of damage an Undying Wraith suffers, no matter how badly they are injured, one thing will always remain. Their undying willpower.

This Skill grants the user the ability to directly alter their perception of pain, including completely shutting it off.

WARNING! Completely removing one’s sense of pain may lead to injuries going unnoticed!

In addition, it prevents tunnel vision, therefore allowing the user to keep track of their goal without overlooking anything in the process and even block out mental attacks.

Lastly, Undying Focus allows healing and regeneration Skills to heal brain damage and even restore damaged memories without requiring specialized Skills on the part of the healing individual.

Furthermore, this Skill boosts the user’s resistance to hostile aura effects.

After countless battles where this Skill has been used to ignore even horrific injuries and terrible pain, it has evolved to allow the user to remove health seeping and other negative status effects through sheer force of will.

And now, it has reached the pinnacle of its power, becoming able to push out all distractions, all hostile mental attacks (that are not vastly disproportionate in terms of power), and memetic hazards, as long as the user continues to focus on it.

The greater the assault on the user’s mind and sanity, the harder it is to maintain focus. But for so long as focus is maintained, the sanctity of the user’s mind remains intact.

Both of the [Skills] he’d used most often had hit thresholds.

[Analyze Person] would be a little more useful in the future, and come very much in handy if he was allowed to participate in the prisoner’s interrogation.

[Undying Focus], on the other hand, was bloody fantastic. If he ever had to go back down there, he’d be fine until the [Skill] broke … but when it did, he’d be screwed.

Really, he’d have to try out the [Skill] before he could know how well it would work in practice.

After an unbearably long amount of time, they finally reached the surface and found themselves in the middle of complete and utter chaos.

Having the city suddenly drop away underneath people had been one hell of a shock, and not everyone had handled it well.

Other than [Sailors], [Marines], and other [Classes] that involved being out on the open ocean, very few people gained abilities to help deal with the ocean during their natural progression. Aspects could help with that, but when you could hold your breath for several minutes, swim for hours on end, and functionally ignore the heat-sapping properties of water, who would pick them?

Which meant that when the city had suddenly shot downward, the results had been catastrophic. Anyone caught inside had been in huge trouble, and if they didn’t manage to get out before reaching a lethal depth, that was it.

But even those who’d survived weren’t necessarily in good shape, having bounced off walls as the city fell away underneath them and the streets flooded, or they’d had to swim upwards and out after escaping things that trapped them.

In the end, it was just the Marines still stuck in the ocean. They could handle the situation just fine, even if they weren’t happy about it. Many others couldn’t.

Isaac lit his hand on fire and started waving while using his [Aura] to start poking people on ships. It had been a bit overkill, considering the sheer number of people investigating the place the city had been, but he was desperate to get out of the water.

The swarm of ships had grown while they’d been underwater, now including at least three separate military flotillas and a single lonely frigate flying the German flag. Germany’s navy was tiny and lacked even a single aircraft carrier.

Isaac took a second to decide where to go. On one hand, the Americans had been here the longest, had the largest contingent, and were already making preparations to deal with the mental issues the city caused.

On the other, Bailey was on the frigate, as were several others Isaac recognized, and, well, he was German.

So he ended up picking the frigate and sent a message to Colonel Fairfield, asking him to join the meeting they’d soon have.

***

Dry, dressed in new clothes, and feeling much better, Isaac stood in the biggest meeting room on the Baden-Würtenberg Class frigate Sachsen-Anhalt with Bailey, Fairfield, Patrick, Dr. Han, and the vessel’s captain.

Even with so few people within, it was still cramped and there’d already been several incidents of people not used to the tight quarters on warships hitting their heads.

He didn’t know the captain but his teammates had apparently met her when dealing with the mess involving the Bodensee and a giant shark.

Kapitän zur See Caroline Maier didn’t seem particularly happy about having Fairfield here and the good Colonel would have clearly preferred to remain in charge of the situation, but it was what it was. Isaac was more used to dealing with Germany’s military, and that would probably help going forward.

“So basically, there are people down there who can tear through the defenses of some of the world’s strongest magic users, who either have some measure of control over the city or are being actively helped by it, you only took down a few of them and now we have to hope they all drowned. Also, none of you can go down there for hours, even days and we have no idea about why the city is there, or what the people inhabiting it want.” Maier summed up.

“We did get a prisoner.” Isaac pointed out.

“We’ve tried talking to him. He’s always contradicting himself but he’s always telling the truth because he believes he’s telling the truth. It’ll take a long time for him to be useful.” Maier informed him and Isaac swore internally.

“How are you holding up?” Bailey asked “Any long-term effects?”

“I used [Blessing of Innovation] to borrow a psychiatrist’s abilities and checked if anything changes with my mental state if I remove the effects of the city. I’m fine on the magical front, but I still don’t feel right.” Isaac said, “I think it might be for the best if I talk to a professional before going back down.”

“We’ve got an excellent psychiatrist onboard.” Both Maier and Fairfield said almost simultaneously.

“Do they have [System]-enforced confidentiality?” Isaac asked.

“Legal limits still apply with ours’.” Maier said, “Dr. Müller has to report it if you’re planning to kill someone or yourself, but he literally can’t say anything else.”

“Then I think it might be for the best if everyone talked to him once this meeting is over,” Isaac said “But for now, we need to create a plan to get the rest of the people down there out of there. Or retrieve their bodies, I suppose.”

Heart of Madness (Tier 7) has been summoned near your location.

Summon Location: Pole of Inacessablity, Ocean floor(4 km away, direction straight down)

It was starting to look like the people left behind in the city weren’t going to wait calmly to be dragged out of their holes.

“[Raid Boss], summoned at the city.” Fairfield said grimly, looking straight at Maier “Kapitän zur See Maier, under the treaty of Seoul, a nuclear strike upon a [Raid Boss] unleashed as a weapon of war is justified, but there are too many civilians in the strike range and there are sufficient forces gathered to deal with it directly. Do you concur?”

She nodded and Fairfield vanished, likely having teleported back to his own vessel.

The treaty of Seoul states that an unleashed [Raid Boss] may be fought without the use of nuclear armaments, should sufficient forces be present.

Local military leaders have concurred that this is the case and thereby invoked the treaty’s support functionality.

Merely by deciding to support this endeavor, you will receive the following benefits:

Automatic addition to command-and-control network for as long as you fight to destroy the [Raid Boss]

Minimum 10,000 XP gained from battle

+10 to all physical Stats during the battle.

While everyone scrambled to prepare, Isaac just jumped overboard and dove into the ocean until he could see the monster, able to analyze it.

He suppressed his grin with supreme effort, as looking insane after having visited an Eldritch city would have not been great.

But that was the thing, he was relieved. The [Raid Boss] might have been from a category called “Eldritch”, but it was solidly understandable and he knew everything about it.

The imprecisely named “Heart of Madness” was the perfect target to take his anger out on, something he could deal with.