Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 288: A Foe Most Annoying

The oddly named Nebula Avatar wielded a combination of cloud, lightning, and space-based magic.

Its name was either a weird pun on part of the Dungeon, or the [System] had been smoking something particularly strong at some point in the last few months.

Either way, that thing was the very definition of a pain in the ass. Lighting constantly arcing all over the place, space making approaching the thing a nightmare as it involved walking through what amounted to an invisible maze of twisted space where one could neither see the path nor the walls.

The cloud floor was suddenly also around them, above, below, and sideways, a complete mess in all ways. And they were moving.

Riley got smacked in the back by a floor tile and went flying, the warped space giving the whole affair a strange likeness to a pinball being blasted through the machine. But she had been still mostly fine even before Sang healed her.

Nan’s chains locked down the beast within seconds, and further chains whipping through the air to intercept lighting bolts that escaped the confined monster. At the same time, she was working on suppressing the spatial manipulation that made it unapproachable.

In the area around the beast was the first to stabilize, but due to how space had split, Isaac was the furthest from the monster, so Riley took the shot.

One hand held her sword’s scabbard stock-still, the other rested on its hilt for a brief moment before she whipped it out, its tip drawing a glittering arc in the air until it came to a stop, pointed straight at the monster.

“[Silver Bullet]!” she yelled as a glowing trail left the blade, a tiny diamond-shaped silver projectile racing through the air.

Oh great, someone who shouted their [Skills] out loud.

Once upon a time, before parties had become commonplace, a verbal warning to your teammates about when to hit the deck had been vital.

A simple “duck” or “fire wave incoming” had eventually shifted into simply using the name of the used [Skill].

After all, the names were usually somewhat self-explanatory, between that and people learning what specific attacks did after the first few times.

And then, as things so often did, the action was detached from the reason behind it, and there were certain people who started acting like they were in some damn anime. Not that there was anything wrong with anime, it was just that this was not an anime world they were living in.

Then again, it wasn’t particularly harmful, it just deeply offended Isaac’s sensibilities as a warrior on a fundamental level. But as long as they were just fighting monsters, it should be fine. He’d talk to her after this.

And being a little silly didn’t make the move any less dangerous.

The projectile tore through the air, wavering a little here or there where it flew through an area that hadn’t quite stabilized, but it stayed on target, mostly.

But at the last possible second, it was jerked to the side by a fresh spatial warp, failing to hit center mass, instead tearing off one of the monster’s left arm.

The world shuddered again and stabilized a little more, to the point where Nan could exert more force through her chains.

With a loud pop mixed with the sound of distant thunder, the Nebula Avatar crumbled into nothingness. And the loot, well, it disappeared between the clouds, so now, they could all play at being archeologists.

… This fucking Dungeon.

After another minute of randomly groping into the selectively tangible ground, Isaac pulled out a chunk of ore whose name proved that some people just should not be allowed to name stuff.

The [System] named some ores, but some new metals, and especially the alloys that could be made from them, didn’t have any names and were named once the first person worked them into an object important enough to receive a description. If the maker of that named the metal, all future crafts from it would be known as “X-metal so-and-so”.

But until someone named it, objects made from such a material were just called “Mystery metal so-and-so”.

And this material was one of those situations where a pre-selected name would have been preferable to the one humanity had logged into the [System].

“Phlebotinum” was the name of a material that was useful in various mana-manipulating devices due to its high conductivity, but was severely lacking in the mechanical department.

What drove Isaac up the wall about the name was that it was actually a synonym for “kontrivium” and “handwavium”, aka the mystery metals in stories that had the exact purposes the plot demanded. And someone had given that name to a very real, decidedly non-miraculous, material.

Still, they needed it, so they’d gather the bloody stuff.

Heading deeper into the Dungeon, it felt like they were walking in place. Because they were. Until they’d futilely walked a certain distance, there would be no advancing.

For. Fucks. Sake.

And outside of combat, wasting mana on movement or stabilizing [Skills] was, well, a waste, so there was a lot of stumbling and cursing going on.

The next Nebula Avatar had the misfortune of popping out right in front of Isaac and died in a matter of seconds as he roasted it.

Sure, they advanced more quickly, but the break in the monotony had been basically non-existent.

The third monster was once again taken care of by Riley, whose sword tip dipped into the ground in a 270-degree vertical slash, tearing back out amidst a wash of water.

“[Rising Tsunami]!”

That wash turned into a powerful wave that landed despite being somewhat refracted by the spatial twist crushing the monster into the ground. Space between the pair tore, and close to five kilometers might separate those two, but not even a Greater Space Elemental could keep up something like that and maintain its usual escheriaE defenses.

And the Nebula Avatar was certainly no Greater Space Elemental.

The monster fell to Isaac’s blade, and they continued into the next phase. The maze. A mess of spatial warps, nigh-undetectable portals that sent you back to the start, and the like.

They took a break and ate some food before going on, but it wasn’t fun considering how lumpy the ground was. Sang even managed to find a spot where he could sink in up to his neck. Sure, you could safely breathe through the clouds, but that didn’t exactly make an experience like that enjoyable.

Even Isaac was reluctant to get up and get to work afterwards, but he still did it. The poorly-named mineral was needed, the poorly-named mineral would be retrieved.

So they picked themselves back up, with annoyed grumbles being the politest comments made, and marched onwards.

They found almost a dozen Nebula Avatars in the maze, but they were torn apart in moments. With local space already twisted into a pretzel, their spatial manipulation didn’t function, and their lighting wasn’t enough to make them a serious threat on its own.

Yet they were still a pain as they could come from literally any direction.

But they fell, burned, crushed by chains, cut in twain, or torn apart by Sang’s telekinesis. Twelve more chunks of, urgh, phle-bo-ti-num, gained over the course of almost four hours.

“Found the exit,” Isaac sighed via the party, pointing at a seemingly ordinary patch of space, “According to the strategy guide, the boss chamber is right outside the maze, so let’s rest for a few minutes.”

… And then the exit began to disappear while they were pushed away from the far side of the portal, and back towards the entrance.

Fuuuuuuuuck!

“Let’s go,” Isaac announced, and they hurried through the exit, all making it out in time.

… The rate at which the exit vanished was probably designed to just allow people to escape by scrambling through, coming out the other end out of place and formation.

But they did have a formation meant to compensate for this mess. Nan had Sang tied to her with a couple of short chains to ensure that mere spatial fuckery wouldn’t separate the two while Isaac and Riley would be mostly fine on their own.

For a single second, the chamber beyond the maze was normal. Another cloud chamber, that was all.

And then, things went to hell. Isaac was suddenly on the far left of the room, at the outer edge of the cloud, Riley found herself on the opposite end of the entrance, and their support squad was all the way back at the maze, while a trio of monsters rose from the center. Two standard Nebula Avatars, and one Living Thunderhead. The big bad of the worst Dungeon in Seoul didn’t actually have the spatial manipulation that made this place so frustrating to fight through, that was what the minions were for, but rather, it possessed a ludicrous amount of firepower.

Isaac ducked under a bolt of lightning as thick as his torso, even the near miss causing every hair on his body to stand up.

With a shout of “[Thunderbird’s Wingbeat]” Riley intercepted the attack flying her way.

And Nan manifested a massive forest of chains around her and Sang, spatial manipulation shattering as a greater power began altering the local area.

So the monsters shrugged and adapted. Well, they didn’t exactly shrug, but they still didn’t miss a beat when dismissing both the crowd control specialist and healer as viable targets and isolating them by putting a few kilometers of distance between them and the battlefield.

Space kept shifting to deny Isaac and Riley the chance to get closer, fire and projected sword strikes taking small gouges out of the monsters without inflicting serious damage.

“Now!” Isaac yelled across the party when things were just right and Riley moved.

Sword held out at her side, parallel to the ground, she kicked off, seemingly sliding through space while her blade left behind a black crack in the world across the full breadth of the cloud.

“[Dimensional Sunder]!”

Anything that got into that mess would be torn to shreds by the shearing forces of the spatial turbulence which spread out around the slash, concepts like distance, gravity, and the connection between objects being thrown around like a leaf in a tornado.

After barely a second, space snapped back into place like a bungee cord returning to its original configuration, restoring the sundered area. And temporarily removing the Nebula Avatar’s spatial manipulation.

Riley might currently be leaning on the hilt of her sword breathing heavily, but Isaac had managed to position himself to tear apart one of the Avatars.

And as for the second one, well, he might not have been able to kill it before space got twisted again, but he’d managed to move around so that it was between him and the entrance. And, of course, the blades he’d dropped there.

Pulling soulbound weaponry towards him to impale enemies blocking the way was an old trick, and his preferred way of dealing with these nightmare foes.

The Nebula Avatar burst apart as a dozen swords and knives tore through it, and that was that for the monsters keeping the big one alive.

And at that point, the Thunderhead was screwed. Its lighting was dodgeable, Nan tied it down to make it an easy target, and the grand total of two hits it managed to land was healed in seconds.

They were granted a big chunk of phlebotinum for that, and an exit.

Fucking finally.

And there was no way in hell he was going back there.

A different group would likely take longer, but Isaac was perfectly willing to trade time for his sanity.

So, bribe some more people to go into the dungeon again, drop off the phlebotinum at Kim’s lab, get some food, and then, go bang his head into a wall a few dozen times.