Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 270: Interlude Istanbul

There were certain things that always elicited certain reactions.

Otters holding hands? Aw, so cute.

Someone kicking a puppy? That guy’s gonna be limping in a few seconds.

And when a hardened veteran of the most elite military units on planet Earth sported cat ears, jokes were made.

And some people even tried to pet him, though they tended to only try that once. The only people allowed to touch Alexander Braun’s head were his wife and four-year-old daughter.

But as silly as he might look, both cats and humans were, in their own way, apex predators. Being a fusion of a race of deadly ambush predators wielding powerful claws and a devastating bite combined with endurance predators that could run after prey for hours until said prey literally dropped dead from exhaustion made him a member of the most dangerous species in the world.

… albeit one that more than a few jokes had been made about. However, that didn’t matter. His job was to deal with criminals, terrorists, and if, God forbid, Germany was invaded, he’d be fighting on those lines as well. Everything else was secondary.

If everything had gone well, he could have remained hidden, only seeing the light of day when he was really needed, but some politician had fucked up and as a result, people knew he existed and that he was an S-Ranker, but everything else about him was hidden. And he waited, only going out on occasion to act in the shadows.

And then, today had come around, with this mess. His [Skill]set was uniquely suitable for dealing with this encampment in the middle of Istanbul, where there were too many people around for most other approaches. All with the blessing of the local government, of course, he was too noticeable to do this under the table and anything else would have been liable to cause an international incident.

“Launch operation ‘Clean Swe- …”

Alexander tuned out the orders as they were literally just “go do what we already discussed to death”.

A single kick hit the door of the apartment that contained the largest concentration of hostiles, reducing it to splinters as he charged inside, [Forest of Phantoms] already active, affecting every single one of the people he was here for. The longer these people remained within five hundred meters of him and the less they fought against the ability, the swifter they would be drawn into his domain. And anyone who tried to get completely outside of his range would die before they managed to attack.

[Instant Draw] pulled both of his long daggers straight into his hands without needing to cross the intervening space and he carved through the closest cultist with ease, fireball winking out like a tealight tossed out into a blizzard as its caster took a knife through both the heart and brain.

He briefly released one of his weapons, called a throwing knife into his hand and used [Flicker Throw] to nail a second mage through the eye. The [Skill] might not increase the actual kinetic energy of the hurled object, but its temporal manipulation meant that the target had vastly less time to react. And then his main weapon was right back in his hand.

The throwing knife was too far away for that to work, but he had hundreds of its kind hidden on his body, more than he could ever reasonably use.

The [System]-strength flashbangs he’d hurled through the walls into the neighboring units finally detonated, providing him the chance to [Blur] up to the final mage in the room and kill him.

Through his [Aura], he could see a couple of people running away, but these weren’t civilians as those wouldn’t have been highlighted in his rather aggressively named [Hitlist] that held information on all people he was ordered to go after, and allowed him to identify them at when he actually did sense them.

He leaped forward, kicked off the wall, and blasted out through the window, landing on a fleeing woman and driving a knife into the base of her skull, then cut down her male companion in a flash. Others might try to run as well, but they didn’t have long. The first trees were already starting to manifest.

Another jump took him back inside the building and the slaughter continued as he only went after the softest of targets, the mages. They were the ones he couldn’t allow to start blasting in the middle of a populated city. Thankfully, genocidal fucks they might be, they had the good sense to not randomly attack without knowing where he was.

Even so, it didn’t take long for the building to be on the verge of collapse and for seven mages to be flying above the building, ready to reduce him to a red smear on the ground the second he showed himself.

They really should have run when they had the chance. But they hadn’t. All those trees appearing around them as the sky darkened and mist flowed up from the ground really should have given them a hint, but no one who was quite right in the head signed up for a suicide mission.

And then, the second [Skill] that was an essential part of his toolkit was finally ready. [Endless Ambush] activated, locking everyone who’d been affected by [Forest of Phantoms] into the other dimension, no more able to leave than he was.

Being locked in a room with a wild animal was a problem. Being locked in a room with him was considerably worse.

Alexander dropped his perpetually active [Civilized Alternate Form] for the first time in months. He hunched over slightly, face growing longer, teeth becoming sharper and more pointed, his claws grew to the size of steak knives despite the fact that they could still be sheathed without issue, and the tail finally returned. Keeping his balance was perfectly possible without it, but whenever he took full advantage of the boost it could provide, he could barely imagine how he ever managed to stay upright without it.

It was time to hunt.

Guns went off and spells were hurled at nothing in the distance, brief images of an ancient battle playing tricks on their senses.

He waited for a brief moment, then exploded into motion, snatching up a single, heavily armored, individual who no one was looking at. He bowled the man over, his momentum carrying the pair of them away from the bulk of his enemies. Around him, the forest warped and shifted, placing both Alexander and his chosen victim a good mile from the others.

He rose from the body of the knight, claws, and daggers dripping with blood, getting in several more stabs before dodging backwards ahead of a wave of force that would have hurt … had it connected. The knight hadn’t expected to be attacked right on the heels of his [Skill] and he didn’t react in time when a blade punched through his visor into his brain. And then, he tried to stab Alexander.

[Moment of Immortality] very existence might be offensive to Alexander on a deeply personal level, what was dead should stay dead, but it didn’t pose too much trouble for him as a second dagger through the other eye reduced the knight’s overall senses significantly.

Avoid the clumsy attempt for a grab, sever the Achilles tendon, another dagger into the elbow, ah, there’s a good place to sever the spinal cord and abdominal aorta at the same time, and steal those two storage rings and inscribed spatial cores. No healing potions, and once that [Skill] ran out, he’d be dead.

Without their only tank, the last remaining enemies were done. They wouldn’t survive against him.

In this world, there existed incredibly dangerous people. The heir of an ancient king now walked the Earth, magic users could influence the very fabric of reality, beings of fiction like that gluttonous Monkey King came to life and people became the heirs of countless ancient heroes.

But there were other kinds of powers that drew upon the past. Such as his own [Class]. He hadn’t inherited the abilities and memories of a given soldier or myth, but rather the spirit of a battle, one that had brutally annihilated the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth Roman Legions, to the point where those names were never again used and Rome’s Germanic conquests ended for good.

That was his power, the ability to put his foes into the same kind of untenable position that Quinctilius Varus had found himself in and slaughter them.

One by one, his enemies fell beneath blades and claws, more or less mutilated depending on which and how many Aspects they held.

Until …

“[Absolute, Enforced Surrender],” one of the last three survivors called out, his companions echoing a moment later.

Alexander sighed as he sheathed his blades, then detached the sheathss from his belt and dropped them onto the ground behind him.

That [Skill]. That damn [Skill]. They always felt so smug when they whipped it out like a kid on the playground doing the time-out sign or pulling out a UNO reverse card for laughs. It was less of a “get out of jail free” card and more of a “guaranteed to get into jail alive” card, but it worked.

On one hand, it put all [Skills] on cooldown, emptied the mana pool to the point where only vital [Skills] such as healing could still be powered, made it impossible to hold weapons, and weakened attacks for several hours.

On the other hand, it let the person you were surrendering to know that you were serious, and should they still attack, both their superiors and every journalist, blogger, and general nuisance within a hundred kilometers would learn of it.

It really was a slap in the face that that [Skill] even existed. Someone could have been shooting at you mere milliseconds before but once it was triggered, they expected to be treated with kid gloves.

Too bad for them that this space was beyond the reach of all those pansies who thought that literal terrorists who’d been working to murder them all should be treated like the last members of an endangered species just because they had a [Skill] that let them “convincingly” surrender.

They’d even done him the courtesy of seriously relaxing when he’d put away his weapons. As if he didn’t have a blade just as lethal, just a little shorter, at each fingertip.

And they were lined up so nicely … by the time the first body hit the floor, he’d already torn the head off the last one.

A simple flick of the wrist sent all the blood flying off his fingers and sleeves, [Feline Cleanliness] making the post-fight cleanup a breeze. Contrary to its name, it did not require him to use his tongue to remove dirt.

The spectral recreation of the ancient Forest of Teutoburg faded around him along with all signs of battle, and the party interface returned.

“This Oberfähnrich Braun, the Istanbul group has been eliminated, you can call in the local LEOs and investigative teams. I need another target and transportation,” He reported.

And five minutes later, he was halfway around the world, ready for another battle.