Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 226: Primate Pandemonium

"We should go to the British Museum next!” Viktoria cheered as she out of the Borough Market alongside Tanja and Isaac.

Isaac snorted “That takes the whole day to see properly, and it’s already 4 in the afternoon. Maybe you can go there with Mom and Dad next weekend. But what do you think of Kew Gardens? It’s a beautiful park.”

“Is there a playground?” Tanja asked, lighting up.

“No, but there are badgers,” Isaac told her, and her grin broadened to the point where it looked like her face was going to split in half.

Traveling to the gardens via subway would take forever, and just like Seoul, London frowned on the airspace getting cluttered up by a bunch of flying people, which meant he had to “walk” the whole way.

Having someone run through the streets of the city like a bat out of hell, occasionally leaping over streets when the streetlights stayed red for too long,wasn’t exactly less disruptive, but that was what the lawmakers demanded.

He was about to get moving when his phone buzzed.

“Hold on, I have to check about that,” Isaac said and pulled out the offending hunk of circuity. A [Raid Boss], a Dragon to be more specific, summoned in Texas. Under most circumstances, it would have gotten a nuke dropped on it in a heartbeat, but there’d been a group of marines nearby and they’d engaged with enough force to have a good shot at winning.

A day without radiation blanketing the land in a deadly miasma was a good day.

He could also hardly jump over there to help at the drop of a hat. The treaty of Seoul had some exceptions for people coming to help, but when it came to people improperly crossing the border, the United States tended to be a little … testy.

Not something his help was needed for, and his [Continent Strider] charges were getting low. More than enough for emergencies, but not so he could go jetting around the globe every time something mildly concerning happened.

“It’s nothing, let’s g- …”

The damn phone buzzed again. This time, it was reporting on a new arrival, a powerful physical fighter with a giant, size-changing staff and … a tail?

Oh. Oh no. That … shit. Godsdamnit. He could get to the battlefield in a matter of seconds, but he’d have to come back the old-fashioned way. Even if the situation was resolved in a matter of seconds, he’d still be leaving the twins alone in a strange city for hours. Nope, he couldn’t leave just yet. Hopefully, he wouldn’t have to make too many calls.

Thankfully, Arthur picked up the phone before the second ring.

“Let me guess, the dragon’s a problem?”

“I need someone to look after my little sisters. Can I get a portal to the north exit for the Borough Market in London?” Isaac asked, and the hole in reality opened a few seconds after he’d finished talking.

The three practically jumped through it, leaving them in Camelot’s great hall, with a whole lot of people staring at them.

Arthur slid to a halt in the hall a moment later, looking worried. Isaac accepted his friend’s party invite immediately.

“How bad is it?”

“The dragon’s not a problem, but the new arrival could be seriously bad, and I can’t abandon my sisters alone in the middle of London.” Isaac told him “Do you have someone to take care of them?”

“I’ll work it out, don’t worry about it,” Arthur said.

“Thank you.”

Isaac turned around and crouched in front of the twins “That’s my good friend, Arthur, he’s going to watch after you for a bit because I have to work a little.”

“Have fun!” Tanja said and ran past him, coming to a stop in front of Arthur a brief second later “Isaac always says that parents are supposed to parent, but older siblings, grandparents, and family friends are supposed to spoil. Is that true?”

Isaac chuckled softly. He didn’t even have to see her face to know she was wearing an expression like the butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

Viktoria hurried to catch up to her sister and he paused for another second before using [Continent Strider].

In a helpful twist of fate, the closest place to the incident he’d ever been was the airport in Houston, which meant that he could even avoid trouble for teleporting into the country improperly.

He appeared just in front of passport control, pulling out both his passport and the up-to-date Travel Authorization paperwork.

“I have a passport, I have authorization to enter the country, and I’m here to help with the [Raid Boss]. I have no intention of committing acts of terror against this nation, nor violate its laws.” He rattled off, slamming both pieces of paperwork onto the officer’s desk.

If this took more than five seconds, he’d run past the desk, consequences be damned, but if he could avoid them, that was a damn good thing. The US really got quite mad about people illegally teleporting onto their soil.

But the officer took one look at him, then glanced at the paperwork, the magical polygraph and just mutely nodded, waving Isaac past him.

Isaac tore off through the airport at ludicrous speed, keeping just below the point where the wind generated by his movement would have gotten dangerous.

As long as the fight continued, the situation was safe, because that meant the blasted monkey had a target to go after.

But when that dragon dropped, anything could happen.

Especially as there was no way in hell that the monkey had entered the country the proper way, meaning that no one would have known about the Chinese S-Ranker being around before now. That alone could cause trouble aplenty, and the argument about the loot could easily spiral into something awful.

After all, this was the spiritual successor to the being who’d picked a fight with the heavens themselves over a title.

The [Heir] of the Monkey King, regardless of its precise name, was quite possibly the single most powerful [Class] in existence. In fact, Isaac suspected that there was a real Sun Wukong out there, the original, ascended to the heavens, who’d directly created it.

After all, the original would probably have ended up as a neutral deity, not concerned with good or evil, but whatever it was he found interesting this time around.

If he’d had a choice, he’d have picked that particular [Class] in a heartbeat. Immense physical power, nigh-complete immunity to pretty much any attack, with a defense that could only be pierced by attacks specifically crafted to exploit one of its few weak points or through an ungodly amount of luck.

Throw in mobility [Skills] that could both fling him around like a bouncy rubber ball in combat and help him travel the world at great speed, and it would have been pretty perfect.

Sure, with that [Class], his path would have been a bit different, with less teaching and more direct action, but with the sheer amount of power it offered, it should have been fine.

But there was no way to get that power, not for him.

[Heir-Classes] had a certain mindset requirement. The Monkey King was carefree to the point where it could almost be called idiotic, and there were no boundaries he wasn’t willing to cross if he felt like it.

Sure, Isaac was willing to color outside the lines as the situation demanded, eternally mindful that the means he used changed the result he ended up with.

But that was a far cry from what was needed to inherit the powers of someone who’d devour every invaluable peach he was supposed to look after, then wander through the heavens, running off with the entirety of a feast for the gods and finally ransacking the laboratory of Laozi.

There were still a few questions that needed to be asked. For example, was the Monkey King a Chinese citizen who’d stormed off in a huff when being asked to do something he didn’t like, or was he just someone who really liked the myths?

Or had he stormed off in a huff and been rewarded the [Class] for that display of resistance?

But the fact that he’d managed to stay out of the public eye so far did say quite a lot.

A monkey person walking around would have ended up on social media in a matter of seconds in most nations.

So why was he suddenly here? If he was a Chinese citizen, he was in possession of a class that meant the government would bend over backwards to keep him happy. But he was in the US, stirring up trouble.

Isaac would have bet his company that he felt he’d been insulted by something and run away, fully convinced that it was everyone else who was the problem.

Not bad, not actively malicious, and with too low a mana pool to summon anything problematic, Sun Wukong was still a titanic pain in the ass and a walking force of chaos.

That damn primate would definitely be useful when a monster of cataclysmic power showed up, but once there were enough people with the needed power, Isaac would probably do his damndest to get him banished from the planet.

A powerful individual, even one who wasn’t the biggest fan of rules, could be useful if they behaved themselves. A powerful individual who did whatever the fuck they wanted regardless of the consequences … nope.

Until then, however, having him around and not an international fugitive after fighting an entire company of Marines should be good.

The dragon’s body finally came into view, a great golden heap amidst clouds of dust.

Magical barriers, many of them barely intact or even outright broken, ringed the battlefield.

A surprising number of civilians were also present, but the main attraction was Kade, standing there with the shield he’d lost about six months before the other timeline had ended, about to absolutely blow his top on the simian interloper.

So, this wasn’t going to get too chaotic then, Kade had a good head on his shoulders, the situation was unlikely to esc- …

Oh. Oh hell. Kade!

Well, wasn’t this going to be awkward?

Isaac wished he could have given a good excuse for why he’d stayed away, why he hadn’t contacted him, but the truth … honestly, he could try to rationalize the explanation at a later date. Right this minute was the wrong time for this!

A single [Phantom Step] carried him the rest of the way, almost directly between the two.

“How about we all calm down, figure out where the dragon came from, if there’s going to be another one, and once we know shit isn’t going to hit the fan, we can deal with the loot,” Isaac suggested, hoping to buy a little time so he could get back into a good headspace.

“We know where the dragon came from.” Kade said, jerking his thumb towards the group of civilians “This was an attempt at a commercial summon. They set up a bunch of barriers to keep the Dragon contained, but my company was nearby and arrived before they were tested. And then he showed up.”

The last sentence was punctuated by a finger-point at the monkey king.

“Yeah, and I kicked that dragon’s ass.” Sun proclaimed “So, what part of the loot am I getting?”

Yep, now that he was paying attention to the monkey, rather than Kade, it was clear that this was the same Sun ”zero-attention-span” Wukong Isaac knew from the other timeline. Not just someone with the same [Class], but the same person. Well, that made things easier down the line.

Isaac didn’t know his original, legal, name, but he was aware of the fact that this guy was still human under all that fur and stony skin. Still impulsive beyond all sanity and even the twins had him beat in terms of attention span, but at least there were tricks to dealing with him.

“Did you manage to figure out what the Dragon’s special loot is?” Isaac asked “It could be literally anything. I’ve heard stories about gemstones in their chest or skull, blood that hardens skin into armor, and so on …”

And off was the Monkey King, leaving behind a plume of dust as he sprinted towards the corpse.

Despite all appearances, Sun wasn’t stupid, but he did have quite a few big and exploitable weaknesses.

“Are you the real one?” Kade asked, eyeing Isaac suspiciously.

“Real what?”

In the tone of someone reciting a speech for the billionth time from memory, Kade said “Are you, the person standing in front of me, currently impersonating someone, using magic, [Skills] or other means to disguise your form to the point where you cannot be identified as yourself or could be mistaken for someone else?”

Ah, first a Dragon got dumped in his lap, then the Monkey King showed up and finally, a famous researcher jetted across continents. He probably felt like he was being punked.

“No.” Isaac said, paused long enough to leave that standing as an individual statement, and added “I’m Dr. Isaac Thoma. I heard about the situation and wanted to see both the Dragon and the Monkey King and intervene in case shit hit the fan.”

Kade glanced down at a small gemstone, which he’d pulled from a belt pouch. It continued to glow a calm blue.

“Good enough.”

A middle-aged man in an outfit that just screamed “pencil pusher” finally made his way past the Marines and marched up to Kade “Hey, are you in charge of this mess? What gives you the right to swipe our monster’s loot?”

“Did you properly register your intention to summon this monster? Did the summoning area get inspected ahead of time? If we hadn’t shown up, you’d have had a nuke dropped on your head, not to mention what would have happened if that thing had gotten out.” Kade pointed out.

“Bah, we put up a hefty barrier.” The jackass complained “We took all the proper precautions, and we’d have seen how thorough our preparations were if you hadn’t messed everything up. Regulations are all well and good, but at some point, they just stifle advancement.”

“That barrier was meant to hold a [Raid Boss]?” Sun asked, having returned in a flash now that he sensed the opportunity for some mischief. Jingu Bang swished through the air and the barrier shattered like glass faster than the manager could see.

“You … you’re too strong, that’s not a fair comparison!” the man spluttered.

“But I’m not, I’m a speed-based fighter.” Isaac said, “Mind if I try?”

He stepped over to the closest intact barrier and rapped his knuckles on it, pressed his hand against the surface, and experimentally tapped on it a couple of times with his index finger.

“Of course I do!” the man snapped.

“I wasn’t asking you,” Isaac said, pointedly looking at Kade.

“Go ahead.”

When Isaac drove his fist into the magical barrier, it shattered like glass, making it look incredibly fragile.

In reality, there was a chance that the whole setup might even have worked, but he didn’t want to encourage people to make preparations based on what might work, but what was guaranteed to not end in a catastrophe.

The trick had been simple. Unlike [Power Strike], the various other [Strikes], and even [True Cut], [Compounded Impact] didn’t have a visible indicator of it being activated.

And every time he’d touched the barrier, no matter how lightly, he’d activated the [Skill], timing the contact so that when he wanted to destroy the barrier, he had the exact right amount of power prepared.

“So, ‘all the proper precautions’, huh?” Kade asked acidly.

The conversation continued in that vein for a while. Sun tried to figure out what was the important part of the dragon, popping back whenever he saw the opportunity for a little fun.

And Kade was developing a dangerous-looking throb at his temple.

Isaac had hoped the situation would remain that “calm”, but he hadn’t truly believed that.

He spent his time pretending to look over the dragon while more and more officials arrived. Now that the situation wasn’t immediately going to blow up, he was feeling a little lost but wasn’t yet willing to run off.

Instead, he stuck around, sneaking the occasional glance at Kade. What. A. Mess.

But how should he have approached the situation? Hey, we used to be friends in another timeline, I know you’re a very different person now and I didn’t meet you at this point last time around, but how about we become friends?

His sisters might be living reincarnations of hyperactivity at the moment, very different from the women he’d known near the end of the other timeline, but he’d known them like this before and he knew that given enough time, their relationship should return to what it had been

With Kade … not so much. What the hell should he do?

Once again, he forced himself to drag his vision away from his friend, staring down at the dragon’s remains. Former friend? Potential friend? Ex-friend? Timey-wimey strangeness-disassociated acquaintance? What words even described this mess?

Around him, the Monkey King moved, chased by an official. Every time the poor bastard got close enough to hold a conversation, Sun would move so quickly he all but vanished from view, appearing maybe a hundred meters away from where he’d started.

Perhaps Isaac had been wrong when he’d assumed this would end in immediate disaster? Still, perhaps he should wait and see how the mess ended, and someone still had to figure out what the primary loot from the dragon was.

Scales, flesh, blood leaking out from cracks in its hide, it was a mess, a fact not helped by the number of people poking and prodding at it.

The secret of the “special loot” for this [Raid Boss] lay hidden deep in a specific version of the song of the Nibelungs, where Sigfried gained his invulnerable skin by melting dragon scales and covering himself in the stuff, where they hardened once more, turning into a biological suit of armor.

And that was what you could do with it in real life too, melt the scales and bathe in them, bonding them to your skin to strengthen your defenses, and once it was on, it was functionally impossible to get off again. It wouldn’t melt, it would regenerate when you were injured, and so on.

But that would probably take quite a while for someone to figure out. After all, who tried to use fire against a fire dragon, especially when it was already dead?

Of course, as a paper-thin covering, the dragon scales didn’t do much of a difference unless the person using them was very fragile. The [Raid Boss] was durable as hell, sure, but its scales were almost half a centimeter thick.

That was why you had to melt them, then distill the liquid down and then use that for armor, though that carried with it its own set of issues, namely, you could only bond so much highly-magical material to your body before it started causing issues, specifically, around a fifth of a square meter could be armored in nigh-indestructible armor.

There were a few hundred schools of thought as to how one should distribute the dragon scale to use it to its greatest effect. Some people used it to cover their vitals, armoring their skulls and even their eyeballs and eardrums, cutting off access to their brains.

That was one option. Others created armored gorgets to protect their necks and throats.

Then there were those who felt that a pair of plates both in front of and behind their heart was a good investment.

Or one could armor up a specific body part, like a forearm or shin to use as a weapon/shield. Hell, he’d even heard of martial artists creating a thin line along the edge of their palm to enhance the striking power when hitting with the edge of one’s hand.

The correct answer really depended on your build.

For example, protecting the weak points of his skull or his heart was the wrong choice for Isaac. Those kinds of attacks required precision, which was hard to achieve on someone as fast as him. Also, wasted, considering how comparatively fragile he was.

Protecting your brain was viable for someone like Bailey, a healer who could fix literally anything wrong in short order. Well, Bailey, specifically, didn’t need that due to his [Skills], but the point still stood.

Which was why he was just going the boring route and using the same pattern he’d used the last time.

Thin protective bands that wrapped around his body.

The best way to catch someone like him out was AOE spells and sweeping strikes. The bands wouldn’t do much against the former, but they’d be highly effective against the latter. If they withstood the attack, they’d prevent him from being cut in half and make it so that all the energy left in the blow would instead send him flying, opening the distance and giving him the chance to either retaliate or skedaddle.

Or, perhaps …

Dirt crunched under Kade’s boots as the Marine walked straight towards Isaac. He did not look happy.

“You’ve been throwing me the side-eye ever since you got here? Do we have a problem?” he asked in a tone of voice that showed he was expecting trouble.

… Thinking back on it, maybe a German guy showing up out of the blue, steamrolling the person in charge, and then constantly throwing hard-to-interpret glances at the black guy who’d been leading before then? That could be interpreted as the newcomer being a wee bit racist. At the very least, it certainly looked off.

But Isaac did have a perfect response, and one that would be confirmed by Kade’s truth-telling artifact.

“I’m sorry about that,” He said, awkwardly scratching at his neck “You’re a dead-ring- … you look just like an old friend of mine, you could literally be twins, you even have the exact same voice.”

Kade raised an eyebrow.

“He died two and a half years ago, I never really dealt with the aftermath, and now, and I didn’t expect to run into his doppelgänger here. I’m sorry I made you uncomfortable.”

And that was the end of that. Dead friends, the perfect way to bring any conversation to a screeching halt. Kade looked like he was about to apologize, but Isaac held up a hand to stop him.

“I’m really sorry for acting weird, this is completely on me. I hope the rest of your day goes better.”

“Thank you,” Kade said and retreated back to deal with something else.

That could have gone a lot better, but it was over. Now, he could think about how to properly get to know Kade at some point later. But damn if it wasn’t awkward.

And thankfully, the universe provided a distraction to get his mind off the situation.

His phone buzzed with a text from Arthur, which said “need to talk, usual place, soon”.

Innocuous enough, but in reality, it was a relatively unsophisticated code that basically boiled down to “someone wants to talk to you via the [Round Table]”.

That particular [Skill] had recently hit Level twenty and evolved, thanks to how many high-Level people were drawing on it at any given moment, gaining two new aspects in the process.

Firstly, it now contained a pocket dimension that one could physically enter from the position of any member, but so long as someone was within, their original entry portal had to stay open. That being said, there was nothing preventing another person from entering from a different location and both people leaving through the new portal, making it a highly energy-efficient, if clunky, fast travel system … that only thirteen people on planet Earth could use.

Secondly, the way “meetings” worked had changed. Where formerly, anyone wishing to attend had to either be asleep or in what amounted to deep meditation, now, just one person had to be projecting themselves into the [Round Table], and they could talk to anyone who devoted a little bit of their attention to listening.

The voice seemed to come from far away, as though the speaker were standing at the far end of a long tunnel, or at the bottom of a deep well, but it was both perfectly understandable and familiar.

Polizeirat Franz Habicht was someone Isaac had only met in this timeline, but they’d worked together well when they’d first met, and that had expanded into a very fruitful partnership.

“I wanted to give you a heads-up, the foreign minister is about to call you to ask you to get the Monkey King to visit Germany, possibly even broker some kind of agreement.”

“Oh, hell,” Isaac muttered, making sure to keep the statement entirely in his head and directed into the [Round Table].

“What’s the problem?” Habicht asked.

“The Monkey King is stupidly powerful, entirely combat-focussed, and has the attention span of a gnat, not to mention he can be a bit of a diva when he feels he’s being treated like an idiot. He doesn’t exactly have a temper, but he can still lose his cool when things are pushed too far, and when you consider how powerful he is, that could be catastrophic.”

“Could you take him?” Habicht asked.

Isaac almost shrugged but kept still, not wanting to outwardly show that he was having a mental conversation “Given a week to prepare and enough resources to give all the beancounters in the German government a collective heart attack, maybe.”

“Shit. And you might have to?” Habicht asked.

“Maybe. I’m not saying that it’s guaranteed or even likely that the situation will go that badly, but it might. Inviting him back home could go well, just having someone create a copy of his staff could be invaluable, but it could go badly.”

“Assuming you do manage to invite him over and he has to be dealt with, how would we do that?” Habicht asked.

“Varied attacks.” Isaac said “He has multiple nigh-absolute damage immunities, but he can’t simultaneously use them at full power and they change automatically. Hit him with bullets and they’ll bounce off, hit him with fireballs and they’ll fizzle out. Hit him with flaming bullets and he’ll take half-damage from each. The switch is instantaneous, so you have to pack all effects into a single attack or have part of them as an ongoing attack like a stream of fire while you shoot him.

“The immunities I know of are physical, elemental, and magical damage, curses and other debuffs, mental manipulation, and apparently, vitality-draining effects don’t count as curses, his immunity to that exists separately.”

“So, rifles with bullets made from metals that cause elemental effects, enhanced by [Skills] that add some manner of magical damage, all the while people try to make curses stick to him, and his immunity to that has to be constantly active. Maybe add some kind of vampiric effect to the weapons.” Habicht mused, and Isaac could practically imagine him thoughtfully stroking his chin.

“In theory, that should work, but all that’ll do is let the damage go through, you’d still be dealing with a stupidly fast, strong, and durable enemy,” Isaac said.

“I’ll still see if we can develop weapons like that, and how far I can backdate the request so it doesn’t look like we’re preparing to go after him.” Habicht said “And now …”

“My phone’s ringing, thanks for the warning,” Isaac said and withdrew his mind from the round table.

So yeah, inviting the Monkey King over to Germany could go badly, but what if he managed to talk the minister into taking responsibility for the end result? If he didn’t catch the flack for the failed negotiations, he might be able to draw a huge advantage out of this.