Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 17: Monster from the Swamp

“NOBODY LEAVE!” Isaac roared, voice cold as liquid nitrogen. It was not a tone he used often, but when he did, people listened. He’d only rarely led other people, preferring to only take as much authority as was needed to be able to order other people so they would stop doing something stupid, but he had. And when he had, he’d learned to speak with authority, in a tone that brooked no argument. He was by no means a master in this skill, any first day drill sergeant was better than him by miles, but he was good enough. Especially for a group whose minds had been dulled by alcohol.

And it had worked. People froze as they heard him, looking in his direction with a mix of fear and expectation.

“Whenever the person who charged a summoning circle gets a certain distance away from it, it automatically activates, so stay the fuck here! By the way, monsters have an instinctual sense of where their summoner is, so all running will do is paint a target on your back.” Isaac announced, doing basically the only thing he could that might prevent the summoner from running away and dumping a very powerful monster in his lap.

Reflexively, Isaac reached for his kabar, but it wasn’t in its usual place at his belt. Of all the times to not have a weapon …

He turned and looked at the gathering crowd, spotting someone wearing the traditional sash of a pledge.

“You! Get me a knife from the kitchen!” he ordered the young man, who jumped into action immediately. After all, Isaac looked like someone who was in charge and that guy wasn’t in a position to have met every member of this frat.

Unfortunately, Isaac had only been in the rooms that were used during parties, so he had no idea where the kitchen was and he was utterly unwilling to go look for that while this runic circle could spit out a powerful monster at any moment.

Thankfully, there was at least a slightly decent alternative available. The bucket people placed broken glass in. It was by no means a proper substitute for his kabar, but the two shards of a shattered beer bottle he pulled out of it were better than nothing.

“And could someone please call the police and tell them we have an active Tier 4 summoning circle here, so they’d better bring heavy weapons. Tell them to bring the 'Sondereinsatzkommando'.”

People began to nervously move away from him while the pledge he’d given an order to ran off. A few of them even began to pull out their phones.

“Hey, I can help.” Sam told him, having just arrived in the doorway. He wasn’t quite slurring his words just yet, but he was clearly far more drunk than Isaac was. And even if it hadn’t been visible, Isaac had drunk just as much as his friend while repeatedly activating [Hydra’s Regeneration] to keep his level of intoxication at a slight buzz.

Another burst of [Hydra’s Regeneration] cleared the rest of the alcohol out of his system, just so he could be certain he was going at this with all his mental faculties intact.

Just maybe, this would go well … at least that’s what he thought until the circle flashed, a silhouette rising from it, with said silhouette filling out rapidly.

At first glance, the monster looked like a normal human, with the only real difference being that it had green skin.

But then, the weirdness became all the more apparent. A round, bald head with large eyes and an oversized mouth filled with triangular, sharp teeth, attached to the torso with a neck so short it might as well not have been there. Long, muscular arms that made it look like it was about to start knuckle walking at any moment. Overall, it looked like a kindergarten age child that didn’t know what a human was meant to look like had tried to draw one and created some strange hybrid of a frog, gorilla and yes, a human, then dumped green paint all over the whole thing. In other words, a godsdamned Swamp Knight.

Suddenly, Sam was standing next to Isaac with a rapier in his hands. Sort of. What he’d grabbed was in no way suited for combat.

“You do realize that that’s a wall decoration, right?” he hissed, not taking his eyes of the still forming monster.

“Still enough of a rapier for me to use my [Skills] with.” Sam shrugged. Isaac just rolled his eyes while internally using swearwords that could peel paint of the walls.

“Just be really fucking careful.” he hissed. A Tier 4 circle meant that the summoned creature was between Levels 10 and 15. Seeing as this was a Swamp Knight they were dealing with, it was probably on the lower end of that spectrum, but that still put it at least eight Levels above Isaac.

Thanks to his origin, he might be used to punching above his weight class, but not by this fucking much!

The instant the Swamp Knight had fully materialized, its head snapped over towards the wall and it began to take a menacing step towards it.

Isaac internally swore at every deity he could name and even sent a few curses specifically at those he couldn’t. In theory, whoever had summoned this fucking thing had put literally everyone else in danger and absolutely deserved to serve as a distraction while everyone else escaped. In practice, however, things simply did not work like that. It would charge at its summoner but right now, no one knew that it would zero in on its summoner and panic, possibly even hitting it and drawing agro in the process.

Even if no one interrupted its mission to kill its summoner, no one knew to get the f away from the summoner and therefore, they’d all be in incredible danger the instant the summoner was dead.

As tempting as the thought of removing the utter idiot who’d decided to summon one of the strongest monsters that anyone could summon right now from the population was, Isaac knew it was the wrong one. At a minimum, he’d get a whole lot of innocents killed in the process. At worst, this thing would actually get away.

“Hey, fuckhead! Isaac roared as he charged. Hardly his most creative insult, but this thing was dumb as a bag of hammers, it couldn’t really understand his words. But it could interpret his tone, which should let it catch the gist of his shout just fine.

And while a mere shout would never dissuade any summon from murdering its summoner, that was hardly all Isaac had planned.

He charged, wielding the two glass shards as if they were actual, proper weapons. It wouldn’t be the first time he fought a monster with an improvised weapon, though he normally had other advantages.

[Piercing Strike] covered the shard in his right hand in yellow light as he stabbed it into the Knight’s neck. He struck true, but it exploded in his hand as he did so. Razor sharp slivers of glass stuck in his hand, but that was something he could survive. Meanwhile, the Swamp Knight was bleeding from a large, gaping hole in its neck as well as countless smaller holes that surrounded it.

Unfortunately, things wouldn’t be that easy. That wound would be painful, yes, but not final.

A fist was thrown at his face, whistling through the air with enough force to turn his head into a cloud of blood and bone fragments, but a mere thought triggered [Spectral Shift]. Isaac stepped through the Knight and whirled, lashing out with the other shard. It was essentially the bottom half of a beer bottle with a single particularly long, pointy bit erupting upwards. That made it much more sturdy and a hell of a lot less likely to shred his hand when he struck the damn monster.

It surged forward, wreathed in the red glow of [Power Strike] and smashed into the Swamp Knight’s back. it shattered nonetheless, but the vast majority of the shards ended up embedded in its back, which had to make every movement particularly painful.

“[Lunge]!” Sam bellowed, attacking in an unnatural looking movement as his rapier seemed to drag him forward.

Oh great, he was a [Skill] shouter.

Isaac just rolled his eyes, then narrowed them as he realized what was about to happen. A brief burst of [Spectral Shift] carried him through the Swamp Knight’s body.

“What the-“ was all Sam had time to say before Isaac slammed both palms across his chest, flinging him away. A split second later, another activation of the phasing [Skill] saw Isaac outright ignore the pair of incredibly powerful arms that swished through the space his friend had occupied a split second ago, the space his own body was currently standing in.

And there went another five points of mana, vanishing into the void. They might have been a mere twenty-fourth of his mana pool, but those small expenditures were starting to add up. Given how he intended to focus on mana regeneration of Magic Power, he’d soon have a level of regeneration that could be properly calculated on a per second basis. But sadly, he wasn’t there just yet.

Yet even though this should have been a bad situation, standing up right in front of this things face, weaponless, it also offered an opportunity. It wasn’t one he would have taken normally, but he was running out of mana. There was no way he could keep this up for long, so he had to take the opportunities where they presented themselves, even if they weren’t perfect.

He drove his thumbs into the creature’s eyes, feeling them deform under his fingers, but not squish just yet. Damn Tier 4 monsters and their high Fortitude. But that wouldn’t be enough to save its eyesight.

Crimson light flared around his thumbs and pushed them forward with extraordinary force as Isaac activated [Power Strike] not once, but twice. Warm, gooey jelly spilled across his hands to create a truly disgusting feeling but he kept pushing forward, hitting the bone of the skull at the far end of the eye socket and breaking that too.

Unfortunately, that [Skill] had never meant to be used directly on one’s flesh, much less a single digit. The version a [Pugilist] got was, but not a [Rogue’s].

Isaac gritted his teeth against the pain as the bones in his thumbs cracked, ligaments tore and bolts of agony tore through him.

It was a terrible feeling, debilitating to anyone not used to pain, but Isaac bore it stoically. Besides, he’d hardly caught the worse end of that exchange.

Roaring in pain and agony, the Swamp Knight reared backwards, bringing its arms back to its chest to crush the annoying insect that had dared hurt it such.

Activating [Spectral Shift] and [Hydra’s Regeneration] simultaneously, he phased back out of the crushing, lethal embrace while also knitting the flesh of his most important fingers back together.

Unfortunately, a quick glance at his mana revealed that he was down to his last 19 points, and he only regenerated five every minute. While he had some, he could heal smaller injuries in moments, making things like his fractured fingers a trivial annoyance. But that wasn’t free and he couldn’t keep it up for long, especially once he started taking heavier hits.

Even blind as it was, the Swamp Knight was sadly not helpless, or too stupid to have realized how Isaac had escaped. It lashed out with a furious blow and this time, Isaac just wasn’t fast enough. He turned to avoid the blow, hoping to save the use of [Spectral Shift] and thereby not almost completely deplete his mana and he almost made it.

The fist only grazed the side of his ribcage, but the sheer amount of strength behind it sent him flying, the area hit feeling like it had been tenderized.

Groaning, he pushed himself to his feet, the feeling of razorblades shifting beneath his skin making him wince. At least a couple of his ribs had, at the very least, cracked, but he feared it was worse.

A quick glance at his Health Status confirmed that fear. Internal Bleeding, broken ribs, punctured lung. Yikes.

[Hydra’s Regeneration] activated once again and this time, he kept it active until it failed due to lack of mana.

The Swamp Knight charged, having clearly heard the impact of Isaac hitting the wall, but he flung himself to the side as his battered body screamed in protest.

He landed in a roll, rising smoothly and silently, then turned to regard the Knight. It was trying to determine where he’d gone to, but it couldn’t.

[Sneak] was a part of Isaac’s powerset he’d largely ignored thus far. After all his usual engagements of ‘summon monster, stab monster, watch monster keel over dead’ hadn’t required a whole lot of sneakiness. Generally, it wasn’t that useful against monsters you’d summoned yourself.

But in the other timeline, it had been a core part of his move set, especially when it came to killing monsters that roamed freely.

He could see Sam rising to his feet unsteadily out of the corner of his eye and made harried ‘stop’ movements, trying to wave his friend off. Sam glanced at him, nodded, and slunk out through the door. If it hadn’t been for the crowd, the monster would have easily zeroed in on him, but at least a hundred panicked people made for a significant degree of background noise.

Isaac coughed wetly despite himself, trying in vain to stifle the sound with his hand. When he dropped it back to his waist, his palm came away red. His regeneration had fixed the injury, but his lungs had clearly been damaged by the strike, leaving blood inside them even as they healed.

As the Swamp Knight continued to shift as though trying to find the right direction to point its ears, Isaac walked over to the bucket full of broken glass to grab another pair of large shards. The crunch of the mess inside shifting was loud enough to catch the attention of the monster, however. After all, it was at least Level 10 and while the way a monster’s stats scaled with their Level didn’t quite match how it worked with humans, its Level meant that it almost certainly had supernatural senses.

It charged, roaring in pain and anger as its empty eye sockets wept bloody tears, but Isaac was already gone, having silently taken a few steps to the side. And that was that.

He darted in, pointy bits of glass skittering off its tough skin and was gone again by the time the return blow begun, the heavy fist swishing past harmlessly.

Normally, this would have been it. It was blind and its other senses weren’t up to the task of catching him. Checkmate.

Normally, he’d have been alone, well clear of anyone who could have become collateral damage.

If he just stood there, walking silently around this Swamp Knight, it would simply stop looking for him and go after its summoner, with all the collateral damage that would involve. And that was only if the summoner wasn’t out of range it didn’t start massacring random people. Neither of those were outcomes he wanted to become reality.

Even as the Swamp Knight turned towards the open door that lead into the entrance and bar room, Isaac charged once more, glass shards slashing. They still did very little damage, given that he didn’t have the [Skills] or Stats to bypass its Fortitude, but they had to be annoying.

Another fist flashed past Isaac by less than a meter, but he’d comfortably avoided the attack thanks to a combination of its blindness and his own sneakiness. Once again, his glass shards left shallow cuts in the beast’s hide but didn’t do any appreciable damage.

The Swamp Knight whirled and tried to strike him, but missed. Over and over, Isaac slashed at the summoned monster without doing appreciable damage, avoiding the return blow with casual ease. Neither of them was doing anything to the other, the only thing that was changing was Isaac’s mana pool. Even so, it was only ticking up by a hair over five points every minute, and it was still nowhere near high enough for him to do anything with it.

Unfortunately, at some point, the Swamp Knight just got fed up with trying to hit Isaac and stopped trying. It turned towards the door and started walking, not even bothering to turn when his glass blades tore across where the carotid would have been on a human. It didn’t care.

A few moments later, it had already reached the entrance room and was heading outside, much to the horror of the idiots who’d been standing there and watching the fight as if it had been some kind of entertainment.

Now, they’d finally realized in just how much danger their unwillingness to run had put them in.

Isaac just internally rolled his eyes, surprised it had taken this long for the screaming to begin. He knew people couldn’t have possibly already internalized the reality of the new world they found themselves in, a world of terrible dangers and horrible deaths, but would it have killed them to have a little self-preservation?

The Swamp Knight continued to march towards the door that lead outside, ignoring the scratches he was inflicting. A single glance at his mana bar revealed that he had a mere thirteen points of mana remaining, enough to cast either [Piercing Strike], [Power Strike] or [Sundering Strike], but none of those would individually be enough to save him here. None of his strikes were garnering any attention anymore and with the destruction of its eyes, there weren’t really any major weakpoints left for him to strike at anymore. Isaac supposed the beast’s unmentionables technically qualified, but he knew from unfortunate experience that a Swamp Knight’s were nowhere near as vulnerable as a human’s.

If he’d had a knife, he could have actually done something, even a single [Piercing Strike] empowered strike able to pierce its skull and damage its brain. That being said, a Level 10 monster’s Fortitude would likely allow it to survive even a little after taking brain damage.

He’d have loved to go looking for a knife, but he was only familiar with the layout of the public part of this house and there were none located there.

Isaac cast his eyes around the room, looking for anything that might be useful, until his gaze fell upon a rather unusual object. It would hardly have been his first choice, but then a series of seemingly unrelated random facts began to arise from his memory when he spotted just what he needed. Dropping the glass shards, he grasped it.

Someone had died from bathing in alcohol, as seen in one of those ‘stupid people do stupid shit’ TV shows.

A Daily Show Clip about how dangerous the act of ‘butt chugging’ was due to how quickly alcohol was absorbed by a mucus membrane.

And lastly, the fact that Amphibians were quite prone to absorbing things through their skin, basically being all mucus membrane.

Keeping all of that in mind, Isaac reached over the bar to grab a bottle of Stroh 80, a particularly strong liquor. 80 % pure alcohol, so strong one really shouldn’t drink it as was, in fact that was strongly discouraged. The only way anyone was supposed to use this was in baking or a cocktail. A cocktail you lit on fire to reduce the alcohol content.

“[Power Strike]!” Isaac bellowed, breaking his moratorium on shouting [Skill] names just this once.

The bottle slammed down on the Swamp Knight’s back and burst apart in a spray of glass shards and alcohol. Fragments of the bottle cut the skin of the monster, cuts that were immediately flooded with some of the most concentrated alcohol sold on the open market. And as anyone who’d ever gotten disinfectant into an open wound knew, that shit burned.

A disgusting smell wafted up, bringing up memories of kneeling in front of a trash can, vomiting, of the single worst hangover he’d ever had, making his gorge rise. He’d felt a living being’s eyeballs squish beneath his thumbs and this was what got him to throw up? Hell no! With admitted difficulty, Isaac swallowed and ignored the nausea.

Screaming what could only be interpreted as agony out into the world, the Swamp Knight whirled and charged. But it was still blind and Isaac was as silent as a shadow thank to his experience and [Sneaking] [Skill].

The bar shattered beneath its fists even as Isaac casually grabbed another bottle of Stroh 80 and broke it over the Knight’s back.

It whirled, missing him by several inches and he smashed the final bottle available over its head.

Screaming its pain and anger out into the world at a volume that hurt to listen to, the Swamp Knight kept swinging, kept lashing out, trying to reduce the pesky fly that had hurt it so to paste.

Needless to say, it failed.

Unfortunately, it didn’t need Isaac to have a target to take its anger out on. Instead, it charged at the crowd outside, already stumbling as its skin began to absorb the high concentration alcohol it was covered with. It began to stumble, its already unsteady movements becoming even less graceful. But with its power, facing opponents as weak as regular, baseline humans, even a clumsy and poorly aimed blow could and would kill.

Isaac ran after it, strike after strike landing, only to be ignored. Only when it had almost reached the line of fleeing humans it whirled, to his utter surprise. He was still able to avoid the first hit, but the second smashed his arm aside and grazed his ribs. Survivable, but incredibly painful.

Apparently satisfied with having landed a hit, the Swamp Knight charged the crowd … and ignited.