Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 287: Temporary Team

In hindsight, Isaac really should have expected this many people to want to join him despite the fact that he was going to the Twisted Palace. That Dungeon was almost universally thought of as being supremely annoying, messy, and tended to ruin your gear.

But having an embarrassment of choices when it came to teammates was a good thing.

He ended up going with a party of four, one other S-Ranker, Level 160, and two people who didn’t have the power to be considered beyond the normal ranking system but were nonetheless at the peak of the fourth Evolution.

Given a little more effort, he might have been able to get an all S-Rank party, but as things stood, most local S-Rankers had already been taught his [Skills] as part of his deal with Yoo-jin.

But his group was merely “not the best in the world”, and that was just fine with him.

Nan Min-soo, “The Warden”. S-ranked former prison warden, wielder of chain-based crowd control magic, and current cornerstone of the South Korean strategy to take down [Raid Bosses]. Her debut on the national stage had gone more than a little badly due to how no one had known that Tier 8 and above [Raid Bosses] were resistant to crowd control effects, but both Isaac and Yoo-jin had taken every chance to point out that that little SNAFU hadn’t been anyone’s fault.

Sang Han-soo, holder of a rather unusual healing [Class] called [Spectral Restorer]. Equal parts healing and ephemeral-based abilities, he didn’t have the strongest raw healing for his Level, but he could play poltergeist to a sufficient degree to defend himself, and his healing’s quirks could make it a game-changer if properly used.

Instead of simply fixing injuries by regenerating flesh and reattaching limbs, it replaced any missing body pieces of spectral flesh. Instantly sealing cuts was just the start of what he could do.

Even chopped-off limbs would be fixed up, with a phantasmal prosthetic taking the place of the lost body part.

And after a few minutes, the phantasmal replacements would transform back into regular flesh.

The replacements might not be perfect, but they’d get you back into fighting shape a hell of a lot faster than anything else.

And last but not least, Elizabeth Riley, [Elemental Swordheart], currently visiting from the US. It was an interesting [Class], belonging to the “mystic swordsmanship” school of fighting. It was a broad category of abilities that roughly boiled down to “make magic stuff happen via swordsmanship instead of spells”. Projected sword slashes, sure, but that was only the start of it.

With the right [Class], Aspects, and other powers to back it, this kind of swordsmanship allowed for the short-lived summoning of all sorts of elemental attacks, phantom beasts that chomped down on one’s foes, and the like.

The advantages of this kind of fighting were obvious. It gave people access to easily and swiftly cast quasi-spells.

But at the same time, that was limiting. Those sword arts required specific movements that caused the magic to take effect, movements that didn’t necessarily fit into the natural flow of combat.

Riley had demonstrated one of her abilities for him when he’d been gathering his party. In essence, it was a single swift motion in which her blade was unsheathed, continuing to bring it forward until it was pointed straight ahead, firing a deadly lance of energy that anyone other than a 5th Evolution tank would have to dodge.

Powerful, yes, but using it required her to first sheathe her sword. Great for an opening shot, but tricky to pull off mid-combat.

By contrast, Isaac’s style of sword fighting allowed him to whip out his special abilities at literally any point in time, in any pose, with any weapon that could even remotely be called a blade. A category that now included his hands and feet.

There were advantages to both methods.

The final party should be able to do this quite well.

Isaac would scout, with him and Riley acting as damage dealers while Sang fixed them up, his particular flavor of restoration being perfect for putting swift fighters right back into the field. And Nan was one of the finest crowd-control specialists in the world. Even foes resistant to her abilities wouldn’t be able to get out before Isaac and Riley were on them.

After spending an hour getting familiar with each other, they headed out to the Twisted Palace dungeon.

The entrance was just a hole in the ground in an empty lot on the outskirts of town, leading into a dark hallway. So standard it couldn’t even be considered ominous. But deeper in, the real shit waited.

After a hundred meters or so, the tunnel began to grow lighter, the walls becoming less and less distinct until they entered a seemingly infinite cavern. In fact, someone with weaker senses than Isaac might have thought they’d somehow ended up high in the sky.

But no, they were just in the middle of a cavern with blue walls and a strangely fluffy floor, spatial magic stretching its size to the point where it was incredibly difficult to tell the walls were actually there.

Fucking Twisted Palace.

To start with, the disorientation of suddenly walking out into a seemingly open sky was weird.

Then there was the floor underfoot, strangely compressible with spots that were either soft as quicksand or hard as rock, almost impossible to differentiate until you put your foot on them. The potential for twisted ankles alone made this place hell, to say nothing of its inhabitants.

Between Isaac’s [Aura] and the fact that he could just magic up support underfoot with [Speed of Hait] where it failed, he could navigate fairly well, but the others weren’t having much fun.

With an annoyed grunt, Riley pushed herself out of where she’d fallen into the cloud, white mist clinging to her face for a few seconds before falling back down into the ground. She had movement [Skills] and could walk on air, among other things, but without monsters to fight, using them would be a waste of mana.

Nan had an easier time with it, ephemerally shimmering chains forming platforms under her feet.

And Sang was treating the whole affair like a minefield, carefully putting one foot in front of the other. As the healer, he shouldn’t be forced to run when shit hit the fan, but if he did, that wouldn’t be good. Isaac wished there’d been some kind of magical item to borrow at the guild, but as things stood, they’d just have to be very, very to ensure nothing got close to him.

Wait a second …

Isaac sighed, facepalmed, and switched out his dragon scale armor for his spare set, untied the boots, and handed them over.

“What are those?” Sang asked, eyeing them with a mix of distaste and curiosity.

“Those are Cloud Walking Boots, built to mimic Sun Wukong’s footwear,” Isaac explained. He didn’t need them anymore due to how they needed a certain amount of fog or cloud vapor underfoot to work and [Speed of Hati] was better in every respect, but he’d still incorporated them into his backup armor as they were rather sturdy.

“Do you have any spares?” Riley asked.

“Sorry,” Isaac said, “You’re going to have to rely on your own movement [Skills].”

In a perfect world, the swordswoman would have been given the movement shoes so she could walk normally without spending mana on her movement abilities, but that would leave their healer a sitting duck. Not worth the risk.

The first monster showed up five minutes after they’d walked onto the cloud, trying to get acclimated. That grace period for first-time delvers was the only thing that made it even remotely fair, and the only reason this place hadn’t been destroyed long ago.

A humanoid cloud rose from the ground, darkening and gaining a core of flickering lightning. And then, space fractured.