Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 211: The Eldritch City

Chapter 211: The Eldritch City

The city had gone by many names in its lifetime.

R’lyeh, after a certain story from the pen of HP Lovecraft, had been its original name.

Atlantis had been what the media dubbed it, and it had stuck as a nickname

The City was another moniker it had earned, purely out of respect, as some people regarded it as being thecity, better than all others.

Others referred to it in less than complimentary terms, such as Tortuga. After all, plenty of frowned-upon services were also available for purchase.

And now, it was here.

Isaac had waited almost two years for this thing to finally come to pass, and now, it had done so.

Was it a good thing? Maybe, maybe not, but this was his chance to figure it out.

When an incredibly strange-looking city had risen from the ocean at the South Pacific’s pole of inaccessibility in the other timeline, people would have freaked out if it hadn’t been for the public announcement that this very thing was about to happen. There’d still been quite a bit of chaos, obviously, but it had been largely mitigated.

And then, the city had just sat there. R’lyeh, named after the city from HP Lovecraft’s story, Call of Cthulhu, in all its non-Euclidian glory, though that really just meant there wasn’t a straight line to be found anywhere in the place. On the outside, at least. The insides of the buildings were properly designed for functionality, rather than being a nightmare of curvilinear architecture. People lived there, after all, and its founders weren’t willing to go quite that far for the sake of the reference.

In the other timeline, R’lyeh had been a neutral party, a place for peaceful exchange of goods and services, open to all save the most heinous of criminals. It being positioned as far away from any landmass as was physically possible without leaving the planet certainly helped give the impression that it was above the normal squabbles of humanity.

Simply raising an island from the ocean floor in international waters and declaring yourself a sovereign nation was more than a little iffy from a legal standpoint, but then again, lately, laws were being written, re-written, and discarded on a daily basis, lately. Something about how the magic that now infused everything was seriously changing things?

So even though raising a huge stink about the situation would have been perfectly possible and legal, it didn’t really happen. Enough people in power at least accepted that the city was there to stay that it did so nearly unmolested. And those who did throw a temper tantrum were simply banned from doing business there, even through intermediaries.

On the surface, the city’s appearance had been a good thing. It had also been a complete and utter surprise to everyone, even though such a massive project should have involved so many people that the chance of everyone keeping their mouths shut bordered on the impossible.

And wasn’t there some other kind of ghostly organization that was practically impossible to detect?

Simply put, the existence of R’lyeh in the other timeline was something that had been nagging at Isaac ever since he’d found the cult in this one. Sure, R’lyeh hadn’t caused any trouble, but it was also not something he could investigate given that he didn’t know who’d been behind it. Hell, as far as he knew, his existence could have butterflied the whole thing away and it was doomed to forever remain a mystery. He hadn’t even known enough to put Zambon on the case.

The people who’d been put in charge of the place weren’t the ones who’d founded it, things hadn’t been that easy. Someone had built it and then found the right people among the S-Rankers of the world to lead it. From a practical standpoint, it had worked, but it had also concealed the driving forces behind everything.

So why would someone go through all the trouble to raise an island in a location where the ocean had an average depth of over 4 kilometers, going as deep as 7 kilometers in some places? What was the benefit?

As it turned out, there were two.

First, the city was a place for people to leave behind the old world, to live in a place that worked with the [System], rather than desperately trying to function in the changed situation.

And secondly, R’lyeh was a place of trade, for anything. The only thing that was banned were trades for the purpose of funding terrorists activities. A smattering of trade embargoes was also honored, but most were ignored.

So, had someone decided to create a place to make trades that weren’t possible elsewhere, but hadn’t wanted that information bandied around? That had been one of the going theories in the other timeline.

But now, Isaac had a different theory. What if the strange city had been a holdover from the time of magic? He’d checked the location where it would rise and hadn’t found anything, but if this really was an ancient piece of magic, it was entirely possible he’d just missed it due to not knowing what to look for.

R’lyeh was a weird place, really.

Aside from common sense rules, such as “don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t cheat, and rapists get castrated”, there really weren’t too many laws.

But those laws were efficiently and thoroughly enforced. They there was very little crime there, but if someone accused you of something, there was very little privacy either. Of course, deliberately making false accusations would land you in a world of trouble. But until the facts of the matter sunk in, the situation was going to be … messy.

However, all of that applied to the other timeline’s R’lyeh. The one that looked normal-ish, had been announced ahead of time to avoid alarming the whole bloody world when the ocean suddenly boiled and spat out a nightmarish construct.

This city, on the other hand, looked like something out of a fever dream, and even more alarming, it was early. It should have taken far longer for the city to be created, yet it was here already.

Isaac sent his focus back into the round table and told everyone about the situation, then took off.

Fetch his assistants, Raul and Patrick from the university, [Continent Strider’s] portal to Seoul, five minutes of negotiation to borrow several more [Portal Mages], and some extra personnel, a second [Continent Strider] had burned most of his remaining stored use time but taken them all the way to New Zeeland, and then, a portal chain from the [Mages] brought them across the ocean to reach the city.

All in all, it had taken him less than ten minutes to cover almost twenty-thousand kilometers, and now he was standing on an ice floe Patrick had conjured, right in front of the city of legend.

With him were four other S-Rankers, his two assistants, Dr. Han, and five “borrowed” [Portal Mages], though he sent the various spatial magic users back through the chain of portals, all the way back to New Zeeland. They would have been in a lot of danger if this didn’t go peacefully. And if the group who stayed had to run, they didn’t need to escape all the way to the nearest landmass, they just had to get away. If shit hit the fan, both Patrick and Raul knew [Portal], though they lacked a [Portal Mage’s] full set of range-boosting [Skills].

The group wasn’t quite at the level he’d wanted it at, but Bailey and Amy had been away on a conference, and Karl was off with the rest of the mad scientists experimenting with something that couldn’t safely be tested near people.

Fetching Arthur and Elena would have taken too long and Yoo-jin had gotten caught up in the political arguments about how to respond and was unable to come himself, though he’d sent two of South Korea’s S-Rankers along with Isaac and promised to show up with a full raid party if the situation didn’t resolve soon.

So that left him, Raul, Patrick, Dr. Han and his magically empowered Pitbull, Yi Yushin, the S-Rank [Wielder of Mythos] and Hak Jae-Hwan, a [System Researcher] from Seoul university Isaac had met a while ago.

All in all, unless they found themselves face to face with a Tier 8 [Raid Boss], things should be fine, emphasis on the should.

Isaac lead the way, his sensory [Aura] sweeping through every inch of the place, Balmung already summoned and ready to chop apart anything that showed its face.

Patrick, meanwhile, was in the rear, using his own [Aura] to ensure nothing was sneaking up on them.

Raul’s two pets, Birsa the Microraptor and the Solar Dragon Aurelian, were circling overhead while Han’s Pitbull had grown to the size of draft horse and was circling the group protectively.

Patrick and Hak were both casting protective spell after protective spell, wrapping the group in a shell that would have stood off anything short of a nuclear blast, and even that might be survivable as long as they weren’t at ground zero.

Yi, meanwhile was just behind Isaac, arrow already on his bow as he critically examined everything in sight. He didn’t have a sensory [Aura], which meant his detection was line of sight only, but he had Perception and perception-boosting [Skills] to rival Isaac.

As a group, they were very heavily invested into ranged and magical combat, but nothing would be able to sneak up on them undetected and the sheer amount of firepower at their fingertips would shred anything that attacked before it got too close.

“And you said that this isn’t like the city you knew?” Han asked, using a party chat that didn’t include Hak and Yi. The pair hadn’t exactly been happy about being kept out of the loop, but the Guildmaster had apparently told them that there were factors in play that needed to stay secret and that they just needed to accept that.

“No.” Isaac said, never ceasing his scanning for even a second “It looked a lot like this, but it was a place you could live in. And it was created by people, it didn’t appear from nowhere.”

“Did you ever see proof of how it was made?” Han pressed and if the situation hadn’t been so serious, Isaac would have facepalmed. It was useful to have someone just as suspicious as himself around.

“You think they found this place, renovated it to the point where it looked manmade, and then used that as a base?” Isaac asked. Han nodded.

As a hypothesis, it explained the some of the weirdness, but it threw up a million more questions.

Just looking around was enough to make anyone’s skin crawl. Shadows were not supposed to move like that, nor should they exist without anything to, you know, throw a shadow.

When the [System] had arrived, it had made it so that such a phenomenon was easily explainable by magic, except there was no magic in play here.

“Dead end, we’re turning around,” Isaac said as they reached the end of an alleyway after turning a left corner.

But when they headed back, the corner was, once more, a leftturn. But it should have become a right turn, now that they were passing it from the opposite side.

“I swear, I kept my eyes on that thing the whole time.” Patrick said “It didn’t move.”

“I believe you.” Isaac assured him “There’s one more thing we’re going to try, then we’re going to leave this place and take a break.”

He very deliberately did not take note of the others’ sighs of relief.

“Dr. Han, please use your [Skills].”

The man nodded and whispered “[All See] the [Kingdom Come].”

Two [Skills] to break tyrannical governments. One to reveal hidden things, dangerous and disruptive secrets that would trigger a revolution. A second to lead the way to a better future.

Yi let loose a string of profanity a second later and Han swiftly excluded him from both [Skills’] effects.

“Do you have a mental fortitude [Skill]?” Isaac asked and Yi shook his head miserably.

“I can handle the normal things, barely. If I have that much more information to deal with …”

Isaac nodded “I understand. You won’t have to come back in with us.”

He was pretty certain that Han had some kind of mental protection [Skill], in fact, it was almost guaranteed that he had one, given his background.

Isaac himself had one in [Undying Focus].

And the other three had had [System Researcher] as their first Evolution and he knew for a fact that it had a general mental shielding ability.

Which left the poor archer the most vulnerable to their current circumstances.

But now that the issue with the pair of mental boosting [Skills] was done, they could focus on getting the most out of them.

The city still looked like a fever dream, but now, the state of things was visible. To be entirely honest, that made things even worse. The weird corner they’d did, in fact, turn both left and right at the same time. The shadows were being thrown by things, except these things hadn’t existed for them until now. In fact, Isaac thought that maybe it was the shadows themselves that were making the objects creating shade exist, not the other way around.

So even though the weirdness factor had now doubled, this place was now navigable. Combine that with the fact that [Kingdom Come] was leading the way, and they were able to reach the center of the city in short order.

“I recognize this place.” Isaac told those in the know “it’s R’lyeh’s central plaza. The registration office was on the left side of the street on the opposite end of the square, the central spire was the administrative center and that series of holes there had food stalls. What the heck changed?”

As informative as this had already been, [Kingdom Come] wasn’t quite done with them. A hole that Isaac hadn’t known was there was located under what would have become the stairway to the admin center, leading into the guts of the city.

Isaac tool a moment to peer over the edge and extended his [Aura] into it. There wasn’t anything to see there, really. Just dying plant life and tunnels. So many tunnels.

“We’re coming back here after we’ve rested and recovered.” He decided. Now that he’d been here, he was pretty sure he could find his way back here, spatial fuckery be damned.

As they left, he kept thinking about Han’s idea. Why would someone want to go through all the trouble of using this place? Sure, raising a city from the seafloor wasn’t easy, but neither was turning this eldritch hellscape into something that wasn’t just inhabitable, but didn’t reveal to anyone that the base city was, in fact, ancient.

But was this place even ancient? Was it possible that it had been built like this initially, then made livable?

He’d seen several spots that looked almost brand new amidst the algae-covered streets and buildings, but considering how screwy everything about this place was, how much stock could he really put in that? And algae grew quickly, who could tell if the slick muck covering almost every surface had been there for months, or millennia? For that matter, did algae grow normally in this place?

And so on, and so forth. The usual mess when dealing with the Eldritch.

Eventually, a different thought began to creep in, intrusively worming its way into the forefront of his thoughts.

What if this place was both the things he knew it to be? The city from the other timeline, built by human hands, and the Eldritch hellscape he was currently trudging through?

What if the entire city had been a well disguised trap, a place built upon a foundation that took the very concept of logic and broke it over its knee? The various consequences of living in such a place would have been greatly diminished if you couldn’t see the darkness lurking underneath, but it didn’t have to be at full power. Not when people spent so much more time in a supposedly safe, independent city.

But then what was the end goal? Slowly drive people crazy and be done with it? What was the bloody point?

People came here to get away from their old homes, the suffocating rules and regulations. Often, these were legitimate grievances, but you also had your fair share of kooks who felt that rules like “no building high explosives in your garage” were tyrannical.

Take people from the latter group, put them in a place that slowly strips away whatever sanity they have left, and you end up with a collection of individuals primed to wreak havoc upon the very foundation of society.

But that was a bit of a reach, wasn’t it? Was he normally this paranoid? If yes, how the hell was he still functioning after all this time?

Isaac decided that perhaps, he was being a bit crazy about the situation. Then again, thinking back … his self-control slipped as he muttered several nasty curses under his breath. Paranoia was, per definition, irrational. Isaac, on the other hand, had several very real and very concerning things he needed to be wary of, which meant he was not paranoid, thankfully.

A minute after that, they reached the edge of the city and straight into utter chaos.

The sea outside the city had become considerably more crowded since they’d last seen it. Ships of all shapes and sizes awaited them, ranging from several military vessels that Isaac recognized as belonging to one of the United States’ Marine Expeditionary Units. Then, there were various speedboats, a couple of yachts, and even an ancient Greek trireme.

Precisely none of them could have already arrived without the help of powerful [Skills]. Either the new arrivals or their backers had to be capable. For example, the Marine Expeditionary Units had to have been propelled forwards by a strategic relocation [Skill] akin to, well, [Strategic Relocation], which had a cooldown of around a year. No one here was pulling any punches, and no one here was lacking in power.

Patrick waved his hand and turned a chunk of ocean into an ice floe that was large enough to be stable, with a rough surface to prevent it from being slippery and they all stepped on.

Reaching into his storage space, Isaac pulled out a series of folding chairs and a table out of his storage ring. He’d gotten one for stuff he used often but could afford to lose and didn’t want cluttering up his true storage space.

“Well, that happened.” Raul finally broke the silence after all the various privacy abilities had been used.

“How long until we go back?” Yi asked nervously. He was a very capable fighter and overall one of the most exemplary members of the human race, but fighting to preserve one’s sanity in the face of utter unreality was something entirely unlike what he’d faced so far.

“Like I said, you don’t have to.” Isaac reassured him “We’ll find someone with [Skills] better suited to the situation.”

“And what do we do now?” Han asked, “That place needs to be explored, there are just too many things that could become a threat.”

“We’re going to explore that hole once everyone’s had a chance to recover,” Isaac said “We’ve swept the surface well enough to know there are no big monsters or extremely nasty traps present there, we can leave that to the newcomers.”

Then, Raul, Patrick and Hak began to discuss how long the city must have been underwater for.

It certainly hadn’t slowly risen through the waves, that would have altered the currents and been noticeable, which meant that any construction work would have had to happen at the bottom of the ocean, several kilometers beneath the surface.

Which threw up another problem. Algae didn’t grow that deep underwater, so where the heck had all the plants covering the city come from?

Considering they’d just established that it couldn’t possibly have come from the surface slowly enough for the growth to occur during that time.

Literally nothing made sense here. Not the reason for this place existing, everything about its physical presence was utterly illogical. Sure, its floorplan was the worst offender, but everything else was hardly any better.

What. A. Mess.

The only place that might hold the true secret was the hole that was currently begging to be explored.

Isaac started to draw up a plan for that but broke off as he saw a military landing craft head towards their “boat”.

Isaac stepped out of the privacy field to greet the new visitors.

“Gentlemen, what can I do you for? If you’re looking for a map, we’re in the process of making one and will be making it available.”

That caught the marine by surprise, though he hid it well.

“Actually, Colonel Fairfield was hoping to get your perspective on the city.”

“Give me five minutes,” Isaac said, turning around and finishing the conversation with the others.

Once that was done, he joined the Marines on the small boat as it headed towards the aircraft carrier in the center of the formation. Behind him, countless landing vessels drove towards the city. Patrick and Hak had used magic to print several hundred maps and passed those out, deliberately being less detailed in the center of the town. That hole seemed too dangerous to lead people there, so they’d pointed out each and every interesting thing that could be found anywhere but the center.

That way, it should take a while for people to get there. It wasn’t like anyone could stop them short of force. Plenty of people had pointed out how dangerous the city was, if someone was willing to ignore those warnings, that was that. They’d live or die.

The aircraft carrier was, well, an aircraft carrier. A navy vessel in a state of barely controlled chaos, with people rushing every which way, preparing to land in the strange city.

Of course, there was a proper logic to everything, it was decidedly not chaotic, but damn did it look unorganized to the untrained eye.

The Colonel himself had an office that was easily reachable from the deck, and surprisingly spacious for something located on a warship. Isaac had had the misfortune of traveling on one for a few days and his cabin had been so small that if it hadn’t been for his enhanced Fortitude, he’d have given himself a concussion on at least three different occasions.

“Good afternoon, Dr. Thoma, thank you for coming. Please, take a seat.” The colonel invited him “I’m Colonel Fairfield, commander of the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, and I’d like to ask you about your experiences in the city.”

Isaac took a seat and began to explain.

“That place is one of the most awful places I’ve ever been. Nothing makes sense, and that’s if you only look at things with your eyes. Thankfully, most of us had mental resistance [Skills], but the one member without one suffered badly. In addition, investigative [Skills] and others that allow their user to perceive more of the world make the effect worse.”

Fairfield winced at that.

“Unless I miss my guess, the [Marine] [Class] should have some options for combatting such issues, though those are more than likely geared more towards combatting PTSD and the horrors of the battlefield, not memetic issues.”

Fairfield nodded “That seems about right. Are you suggesting I get the people with the highest Level in those [Skills]?”

“That would be one option.” Isaac said “But there is another option. Do you have a psychiatrist or chaplain who hold the appropriate [Class] in your force? They might be able to help mitigate the impact of being in the city.”

“I’ll take that under advisement.” Fairfield told him “However, would you be open to exploring the city jointly? Your team is clearly very capable, but small.”

Isaac hastily shook his head “I’m afraid that would be a recipe for a disaster. Properly integrating our groups in a way that will hold up under combat conditions would be difficult at the best of times. In a place that messes with the senses, I wouldn’t trust us to assemble Ikea furniture together.”

Fairfield nodded as if he’d already expected this answer “What kind of opposition can we expect?”

“I don’t know.” Isaac shrugged “We turned back after identifying multiple sites that might hold important information, but at that point, we were all getting overwhelmed by the surroundings.”

“How bad was it, really?” Fairfield asked.

“If it weren’t for the risk of destroying vital information or something in that place reacting badly, I’d be campaigning to drop a nuclear warhead on it,” Isaac said bluntly “There are some places people shouldn’t go, and that place is one of them. It’s just that staying away isn’t possible. Once we know more, I’ll make sure to share the information. And be ready to face a monster horde. There could be anything down there.”

They continued to trade suggestions for a bit longer until Isaac left and was escorted out onto the deck. However, he swam back to his team’s “base” as that was faster.

Planning for their return to the city was tricky. Their first party had been comprised mostly of random people who’d been available, but they didn’t have the right people available to improve its composition here.

Isaac had a ton of healing beans available and Han could heal some due to having an Aspect of the Caladrius, but they didn’t have a real healer with them.

Bailey would have been ideal, but the good professor had gotten ensnared in paperwork issues. He was fantastic when he was available, but that was so rarely the case.

And Isaac really did not want to grab a random person to help now that he knew what was awaiting him.

Han would, sadly, have to do, with some support from the healing spells copied by the [System Researchers] and the [Healing] [Skill] that Isaac had received from eating the Lindwyrm.

Overall, they had enough healing power, but not having a dedicated healer made properly applying it troublesome.

They were also lacking another frontliner, but as it turned out, they didn’t have to look far.

Striding across the waves, the ocean freezing over wherever his boots touched, Fenrir Olgeirsson joined them.

“Hey, Doc.” He greeted Isaac, then saw Han coming out of the tent that had been erected while Isaac had been on the aircraft carrier and corrected “Hello, Docs.”

“Hi Fenrir, what are you doing here?” Isaac asked.

“You didn’t think I’d let a mess like this exist in my backyard and not do anything, did you?” the big man asked as if walking thousands of kilometers across the ocean was no big deal “I figured you could use another axe.”

“How are you as a tank?” Isaac asked. In truth, he knew that Fenrir made for an excellent tank despite having a very offensive build, but the role didn’t come naturally to him, he had to be specifically asked to stand back and guard the squishier people.

“I can do that.” Fenrir nodded, his [Aura of Primal Power] leaking slightly as he looked around the group “If anything wants to reach you, it’ll have to do so over my dead body, I swear it!”

Said [Aura] was one of the nastiest close combat [Auras] that Isaac knew about, including his own. It lent its wielder immense strength, allowed them to apply said strength even when the rules of physics should have made that difficult, and turned their every limb into a deadly weapon when needed. Lastly, any equipment worn by an enemy would slowly be destroyed by the [Aura], with the rate of decay accelerating the longer they fought Fenrir. In other words, he was a very dangerous opponent based on his [Aura] alone.

“Everyone, this is Fenrir Olgerisson, a stalwart ally of mine. He’s been an S-Ranker ever since the ranking system was introduced, and under his tutelage, three of his subordinates have risen to S-Rank. Even if we searched the whole world, and we’d only find people who could match him, but none would exceed him.” Isaac introduced the man.

He looked around the group. Raul and his pets. Patrick and Hak, mages of incomparable flexibility. Dr. Han Junu, a highly capable researcher and all-round one of the most impressive people Isaac had ever met, alongside the world’s strongest yet also cutest Pitbull.

With the addition of Fenrir, they should be able to weather almost any storm down in that pit. Sure, they could still enhance their party, but that would result in not-insignificant delays. Delays that could possibly result in much bigger problems.

“So, gentlemen, shall we?” Isaac asked, gesturing towards the city.