Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 21: All to myself

‘Yep, that’s the first and last time I leave the house without my knife.’ Isaac mentally grumbled as he returned to his apartment after a way too long stay at the hospital.

He reattached the sheath to his belt, feeling the familiar weight settle at his waist. Not bringing it had truly been a mistake of gigantic proportions. It wouldn’t have turned the fight into a complete curb stomp, but it would certainly have made it a hell of a lot easier.

Part of the reason he’d felt so comfortable leaving it behind was that he hadn’t heard about this incident the first time around and assumed that it would have been a very big thing, at least on the local news.

And merely switching on the TV proved that he’d been right, the ‘demon summoning frat’ having been mentioned several times.

Therefore, he could be pretty certain that this little ‘incident’ hadn’t happened in the original timeline, so he’d caused this. Somehow.

Sam had claimed that the idiot who’d summoned it had taken their little talk about the dangers of drunk summoning as a challenge, but Isaac wasn’t entirely sure if he believed that. How could someone possibly be this stupid?

Taking down a Tier 4 in the current state of the world would have been almost impossible without heavy ordinance, the kind that one really shouldn’t be using in urban areas. Or maybe heavy armor piercing weaponry, which would have taken a while to get to the place they were needed.

Isaac could feel his faith in humanity reach an all-time low, something he hadn’t thought possible after witnessing human stupidity literally end the world.

Literally the only saving grace was that for every idiot or malicious asshole, there was someone there who would stand up to tyranny or clean up the mess, whatever was required. In this case, that person had been Isaac.

This was his life now, he supposed. One of the strongest people in the world, cleaning up after everyone.

He probably could take on most people right now if things like equipment were equal, having a literal decade of experience fighting within the confines of the [System] on them and he was almost certainly one of the strongest in terms of pure combat power, but not the strongest.

Surprisingly enough, that honor didn’t fall to people like Calise, or anyone else in a position of true authority, at least not if they wanted to keep their organization running. It was simply that they’d need to spend a lot of time on organizational and bureaucratic matters.

Nor was it the people who’d likely end up fighting monsters, like the police. They needed to be in a position to respond to incidents, something that was hard to do when they were constantly training and grinding.

No, it was the people who had literally done nothing but train since initialization, and there were likely several of those, who’d be the strongest. The people who maximized their time, had the resources to summon nonstop, whose seemingly only goal was to get stronger.

Isaac had thought about going that route but decided against it. If things went as they had in the original timeline, then humanity would go extinct, that was just a plain fact. Another fact was that literally the only thing that was different this time around was him and his memories. If things were going to go differently, then he was the one who needed to make that happen.

But one person, no matter how powerful, would never be able to beat everything that the [System] had thrown their way. If nothing else, he could only be in one place at once. That was why he was working with Bailey, giving him prompts for new avenues of research without making it obvious what he was doing. Information like that would lead to new discoveries, new tricks, reveal pitfalls that needed to be avoided, overall just improve the power and safety of humanity.

He was still working on getting stronger, of course, but that wasn’t his primary focus, empowering others was.

Once he’d showered and gotten dressed in new clothes, Isaac left for the university. He was going to be summoning anyway, he might as well be doing so where the bodies would be useful and on someone else’s dime.

The university building was fuller than it had been the last few days, not as full as it should have been during normal operations, but it was still noticeably different.

Walking down into the bowels of the building felt weirdly normal by now. He’d only worked here for two days, but this, all of this, already seemed familiar. The normal, grey walls, the pipes and cables covering the ceiling as he walked through small corridors … it was weird how something so mundane could be so comforting.

One final door opened and he was walking into the corridor that held Professor Bailey’s department. Four normal doors, two on each side, and the heavy steel slab that served to close the bunker.

The mess that the frat party had turned into had only been a few hours ago and taken all of ten minutes to happen, but it had seemed so long. It loomed in his memories like a stormfront, something that seemed so incredibly vast and blotted out everything else. So now, while it had only been fourteen hours since he’d last been here, that felt like a lifetime ago.

There was a certain alure to having a place to yourself like this, Isaac mused. It was a little like the first time one’s parents left you at home over the weekend, knowing you could do whatever you wanted just as long as the mess was gone before they got home. Being the only person in your place of work, it was silly, it was childish, it was somehow thrilling.

Once he’d made himself some tea, Isaac sat in one of the chairs in the meeting room and put his feet up on the table. No one here to comment, after all.

Was it silly? Absolutely. But that didn’t mean he’d refrain from doing so.

Isaac finished his tea, reading the news on his phone as he did so. Thankfully, no names had been published, just that belonging to the frat, but that could still change. He had a shape changing [Skill] in [Hundred Faces], but he’d prefer to not use that too extensively in his civilian identity.

Finally, he set the cup down on the table and went over to the intercom connected to the inside of the bunker and plugged in his phone. The tunes of Gloryhammer began to faintly echo through the walls and he grinned.

“Let’s go.”

There was still a mostly intact Tier 1 circle on the floor of the bunker from where he’d been fighting all those Acid Slimes yesterday, so all he had to do was fix a few tiny flaws and put in a few dead flies to activate it.

Would you like to activate the summoning circle and summon [Giant Bullfrog]?

“Yes please.” Isaac said and a truly gigantic frog appeared in the circle, large enough to swallow half a cat in one gulp. The most basic of the Amphibian summons, but he was currently working his way through all of them. He had to start somewhere.

It gave him an angry croak and leaped straight at his face, a long tongue lashing out to try and wrap around his throat, but it didn’t worry him in the slightest. He sidestepped the tongue, grabbed it and pulled. The frog went flying into the wall with a loud splat, leaving it to slump to the ground, dazed.

One [Piercing Strike] later saw his knife embedded in its skull. And done.

A simple Tier 1 monster, hardly a challenge to even a Level 0 human. But it was good enough to warm up with.

Giant Bullfrog (Lv. 1) has been slain. 2 XP gained

Isaac put some wood ash into the circle and charged it, then stored the Bullfrog while his mana recharged. He put it into one of the refrigerated boxes from the storage room, then properly and thoroughly labeled it with the monster’s name, date of summoning and death, then finished it off with his name. Then there was a whole other form to fill out about what he was doing for his research team and why he was working with others instead of trying to do his own research, essentially.

People had managed to get funding for stuff like that in the past even without a science background, but trying to go that route would have resulted in such a titanic amount of paperwork as to be unfeasible, so Isaac had decided against it.

Once he was done with all the necessary paperwork, Isaac walked back into the bunker and activated the circle, making a Devil’s Salamander appear within it.

Much like the Swamp Knight he’d fought a few hours ago, a Devil’s Salamander was a combination of several other creatures, though not quite in such an extreme sense.

The base for the Devil’s Salamander was another salamander, a giant version from China that was so aggressive its English name was literally ‘Hellbender’. Another very obvious feature was its coloration, the distinctive black and yellow spotted form of a fire salamander.

Then, someone had infused those two newts with the razor sharp teeth of a shark and the bite strength of an alligator, creating a horrific amalgamation that could theoretically occur in nature, but was unlikely to come into existence naturally. And the few members of this particular species that had gotten out … let’s just say that there was a very good reason even Isaac had heard about the ecological damage a Tier 1 monster had inflicted.

But none of that helped it in its fight against a seasoned expert. Isaac used [Spectral Shift] and it flew straight through him with enough force to literally splat against the wall. Isaac whirled and impaled its brain before it could even start to slide down the wall. Aaaaaaand done.

Tier 1 monsters simply weren’t a threat to him, in any situation. They had a maximum Level of 2 and while that wasn’t quite equivalent to a Level 2 human in terms of stats, that still made them quite a bit stronger than a baseline human.

Yet despite all that, anything that came out of a Tier 1 circle could be taken down by an ordinary person as long as their powers didn’t counter standard weapons the same as Ephemeral beings did.

And just like that, an incredibly dangerous and aggressive monster had turned into no more of an issue than the paperwork its killing prompted.

The Devil’s Salamander went straight into another box and that was that.

Isaac took this moment as a chance to look inside the boxes that contained the remains of yesterday’s Acid Slimes as well as a miscellaneous collection of mundane materials. Nothing particularly interesting had happened, some things had dissolved and others hadn’t, but regardless, Bailey was well on his way to writing his next paper.

Now that he’d summoned the grand total of the two creatures in the Amphibian section that could be summoned with a Tier 1 circle, Isaac decided to switch over to other categories. While there might be hundreds of those, Isaac decided to finish up the ones which Bailey’s research group had already summoned some out of.

Next up were some Earth creatures. Isaac assumed he could use the engine hoist in the next room over to move them out of the summoning room, but even if he couldn’t, there was always the option of just leaving them lying on the ground in here. Them getting trashed wasn’t really a problem, after all, he could just summon and kill some more.

He decided to skip the weakest Earth type summon, one of the Slate Golems he’d been trashing casually since the beginning of the [System], instead calling upon a Lesser Earth Elemental.

The creature manifested in a swirl of dirt, creating something akin to a slimy blob that was also completely made out of pure dirt, and attacked in an instant. All very much the Standard Operating Procedure for a summoned monster.

Isaac lashed out, his kabar covered in the yellow light of [Piercing Strike]. He pitied the poor bastard who had to conduct the necropsy on that thing, well aware of the fact that he’d just destroyed the only actual organ that thing had. In essence, a necropsy on a dead Earth Elemental of any type would involve digging though several kilograms of dirt over and over again until one gave up and accused the person who’d brought the body of getting the specimen at a garden center.

He was still at it when his music cut off, only to be replaced with a familiar voice.

“Hey Isaac, where is everyone?”

“Didn’t Bailey text you?”

“Er … maybe?”

“Ok, point is, there was an incident involving a drunk idiot summoning a monster and Professor Bailey was up all night conducting a necropsy, so he won’t be here till noon. I’m just getting us a few more bodies to examine.” Isaac told Patrick.

“… oops.”

“Anyway, I’ve got a nice and fancy salamander body over in the warehouse, why don’t you check that out?” Isaac suggested “Bailey will be here soon enough.”

“Which crate?”

“The labeled one.” Isaac sighed. Clearly, Patrick didn’t truly see him as a normal scientist who did all the normal stuff, such as properly labelling everything.

“Thanks.”

Patrick’s voice rang out from the speaker, then cut out. Isaac’s music didn’t return.

“Hey, could you turn the music back on?” he called out, receiving no answer. It seemed like Patrick wasn’t in the meeting room anymore and someone had wisely removed the option to open the door from inside the bunker.

Isaac just sighed and left by the simple expedience of phasing through the door and visiting Patrick in the storage room.

“Thank you for the bodies.” Patrick commented, not even bothering to turn around to look at Isaac, he was that focused on the Giant Bullfrog in front of him.

“Did you know that normal frogs don’t have teeth? But this thing does, so it can’t be a frog, at least not a normal one. These things are just plain weird …”

Isaac supposed that was the only answer he’d get, so he returned to the summoning room with a handful of ceramic shards and a sharpie, then summoned an Animated Garden Gnome.

The monster seemed to explode from the ground, turning from a mass of ceramic fragments into a demonic, hellish version of the stereotypical lawn ornament. It lunged, swinging a massive garden trowel. Isaac dodged the blow, then smashed a [Power Strike] into its chest, sending a network of cracks shooting across its chest.

It counterattacked, but he dodged once again and kept hitting it until it finally came apart.

Over and over again, Isaac tore his way through countless weak monsters, gaining small amounts of XP until eventually, Bailey finally graced them with his presence.