Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 221: Moon Shot

Chapter 221: Moon Shot

The spire rose from the summoning circle like a hellish spear aiming to pierce the sky, the diameter of its base widening with every passing second as more and more of the titanic structure revealed itself, sending the warriors eagerly waiting to claim it stumbling back.

When the immense structure finally settled, it was almost five hundred meters tall and perhaps a hundred across at the base, while its peak was concealed in the clouds.

The very instant it was clear that there would be no further movement, the warriors charged and the spire trembled before them.

Countless beasts barred their way, yet they fell to a one.

Spells rent the air asunder, blows so powerful they could only be used once every few hours or even a day brought low the mightiest of foes until the conquerors emerged victorious, the spire’s core lying shattered behind them.

This would have been a reason for celebration, had it not been for the message blinking in each of their visions

Spire Conquest: 1/6

Current reserve monster population: 7,798 (individual monster strength variable)

Time remaining until Spire collapse: 4:39:17

***

“And you’re seriously not going up there?” Arthur asked incredulously “This is the moon we’re talking about, they’re literally building a colony on the moon! How can you not want to go up there?”

Amy laughed “You’ve never been on an airplane with Isaac, have you? It takes, what, twelve hours to get to the moon? He’d drive everyone crazy before you’re even halfway there. He paces and paces and he might even wear a hole in the floor.”

She then dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper “Considering you’re going to be in a spaceship, holes are a really bad thing.”

Isaac shot her a look that promised retaliation.

“You’re afraid of flying?” Elena asked incredulously from the other side of the table “There is literally nothing about it that could even scratch you, and are you seriously trying to tell me that you haven’t figured out a way to make yourself immune to the dangers of a vacuum yet?”

Isaac shook his head “It’s not the danger, it’s being unable to do anything productive. Getting locked in a metal can for hours on end, without even the space to walk around without bothering the other passengers … nah, I’m just going to fly up there myself one of these days. I could already do it now, but I need a few more Levels before I can do it quickly enough.”

“We’ll have figured out a way to create a permanent portal by then.” Patrick assured him “Between me and Karl, how hard could it be?”

“Very hard.” Raul threw in “Portals rip space in a way that the natural order of things balances out very quickly, so they require a lot of power to stay open. Throw in the fact that the distance between a given point on the moon and a target destination on Earth is never static and … good luck with that, I’m glad I don’t have to be involved in that.”

He grinned as he reached up and stroked the Microraptor sitting on his shoulder “I’ll be setting up the biodomes keeping us all alive and fed.”

Isaac looked at the trio of future moon colonizers with pride in his eyes. When the proposal had started floating around in the UN a few months ago, he’d started reaching out to his contacts until eventually, Bailey had gotten a highly official request if maybe, just maybe, he could spare three of his subordinates for the mission.

Raul Mina, who’d evolved into one of the most unique [Classes] Isaac had ever seen after experiencing the horrors of R’lyeh.

[Sentinel of Nature, Life, and Reality] let him sustain life and entire ecosystems no matter their surroundings, their environment, and outright no-selling almost any conceivable negative unnatural influences.

If Isaac were forced to pick a replacement for him, he’d have to go with the twenty people behind him in terms of suitability, as that was what it would have taken to do the same work Raul was capable of.

Patrick Lerch, [Sage of Arcana], S-Rank magic user, creator of more custom spells than even Isaac could accurately guess, shatterer of [Raid Bosses] and someone who could wrap up a colony in enough protective wards that even a nuclear strike would have trouble inflicting serious damage.

Karl Siegel, the man with more tools than many a gadget-loving superhero, ranging from simple contraptions to runic cannons fuelled by the blood of Demon Lords and Isaac was pretty sure there was a mech hidden away somewhere in the former [Engineer’s] personal storage [Skill].

Given the right support and resources [Arcane Technomancer] would create a futuristic metropolis to rival the most out-there sci-fi stories.

Those three would be sorely missed down on good old terra firma while they were up in the sky, but they’d be building up a safe space for humanity, and the value of that couldn’t be overstated.

In the other timeline, that had, of course, been tried as well. It had failed. Miserably.

Creating a working, long-term off-Earth colony was a lot easier with the [System’s] help, but it was hardly easy.

In general, you needed someone to generate air, to fast-grow crops and livestock, someone to build the structures and possibly a separate person to handle the infrastructure, be it technology or enchantment-based, and for them to be able to do that in the very long term, they needed to be at the third Evolution. At least. This was something that needed to be kept up for decades or even centuries, after all.

Gaining resources via summoning monsters was an option, of course, but the things needed to summon creatures would, eventually, run out. Personal spatial pockets, spatial rings, storage [Skills], all of that would extend the time a colony could be supported by summoned monsters.

But eventually, a colony would have to support itself in other ways.

Then there was the small issue of how fragile constructs in space were.

Aspects for becoming immune to the vacuum were high Tier and hard to come by, which meant that those precious pockets of air were rather important.

And no matter how quickly humanity’s power to build things grew, its ability to destroy them, even by accident, grew even faster.

Hell, summoning most creatures up there was a huge no-no precisely because of how easily even small amounts of damage to the wrong piece of equipment could spell utter disaster.

They’d lost contact with the few attempted colonies a bit before humanity’s population had dipped below the one million mark, and by the time he’d gone back in time, they had to have died for sure, otherwise, he wouldn’t have been the last human on Earth and therefore been ineligeble for … Isaac’s train of thought stuttered to an abrupt halt.

Last human on Earth.

“Isaac, are you ok?” Elena asked immediately. Apparently, his face had revealed a little of what was going on in his mind.

“Have you even just been thinking, alone in the privacy of your head, following a single train of thought to its eventual conclusion and then realize all you want to do is scream into a pillow?” Isaac asked, glad they’d set up anti-eavesdropping measures when they’d sat down.

“That bad?”

“That bad.” He confirmed.

“So, what do we do?”

“… It’s not that kind of problem.” He shook his head “Unpleasant personal realization.”

Time travel ... it was a terrifying concept. Removing everything between the time you started your journey and the one you ended up in, destroying the people who’d have existed if it hadn’t been for your actions, thoroughly erasing them in a way that not even death could.

And he’d just realized he might have done that to however many people had managed to escape Earth. Not just removed them, but outright erased them, without even an afterlife to receive them. Fuck!

They’d been dead anyway, eventually, the Elementals, spirits and other creatures capable of space travel would have reached the colonies and killed everyone there.

But at least there’d have been an afterlife for them if they’d been killed by monsters.

Damnit! He’d been successfully ignoring that little ethical rabbit hole for years. He’d gotten a handle on that issue, really, but now, it had escaped its mental prison in the depths of his mind, but now, it had gotten out.

In an ideal scenario, he’d have run off to fight something, summoned a monster to challenge him and lost himself in the flow of battle, until the issue returned to its prison simply by virtue of him no longer thinking about it. Not like there was anything he could do to change it.

Unless something catastrophic happened, he couldn’t run off yet. Not when history was being made right in front of his face.

Then, he noticed that Amy was about to take a drink and decided to take a little payback for the earlier comments.

“Anyway, like I said, I’ve been to the moon before. It’s a pain in the ass, moving around in lowered gravity, which is why I learned the ancient art of cracking rocks by falling into them, face first. And let me tell you, that took some doing while only weighing a sixth of what I normally do.”

Amy glared at him amid her coughing fit as her wine went down the wrong pipe. Of course, her magic let her contain the spray and prevented her from dousing the table in fermented grape juice, but she managed to cast a spell that would allow her to breathe liquid in time to prevent doing a spit take.

“Jokes aside, make sure you control yourselves in low gravity. I know I’ve told you guys this a million times before, but it’s important.

“When you try to handle increased stats, you’ve usually got a million memories about how to properly handle yourself in your daily life. So you don’t have many problems unless you double a Stat in a single action.

“But you don’t know how to handle yourself in low gravity, you don’t have much experience, and we couldn’t squeeze in nearly as much practice in magically reduced gravity as we should have.”

“We know.” Raul said, “I’ll end up restoring the atmosphere a million times before people learn, Karl is going to have to keep fixing the impressions people’s faces leave in the walls and ceiling, and Patrick has to create a billion wards to save the base from human clumsiness.”

“So, have fun, we’ll visit once you’re done with the chaos.” Amy gave them a little wave.

Isaac was about to take a drink of his own wine when he realized it had mysteriously been transformed into vinegar when he hadn’t been looking. Hmm, whatever could have caused that? Sure, he might not be able to find a monster to fight, but messing around a little couldn’t hurt, could it?

***

The launch itself was both an occasion of momentous importance and boring as hell.

People had given speeches once the wining and schmoozing was done with, the tables had been cleared from the tarmac with a wave of the organizer’s hand and the people moved behind a magical barrier that granted full view of the spaceship and that was it. Ready for launch!

The spaceship itself was reminiscent of a standard space shuttle without external fuel tanks and booster rockets, but larger.

All the fuel was stored in extradimensional spaces that fit easily in the shuttle’s engines, while multiple additional enchantments messed with the mass of the shuttle, reducing it so the amount of thrust generated resulted in vastly greater acceleration than it would have in a purely physics-ruled universe.

The whole affair was also significantly bigger than a regular shuttle, about the size of a large passenger plane. It didn’t need to provide space for luggage, everyone had that in their personal storage devices, it just needed to be big enough for people to spend a long while inside without getting on each other’s nerves.

People went on board, the bottom end of the shuttle belched fire and they were off. Less spectacular the second time around, and less exciting than a big monster fight.

… perhaps part of the issue was that Isaac was currently in a rather foul mood, he could admit that. But couldn’t the world throw him a bone here, an emergency serious enough that he could pretend he had to deal with it ASAP without it being dangerous?

But no, he had to put on a brave face and chat and discuss potential ideas for how to explore and/or exploit space.

Asteroid mining, tourism, perhaps even terraforming. He’d heard it all before, seen it, even done it in some cases. It wasn’t interesting, and it failed to serve as a distraction from his current state of grumpiness.

And then it eventually, finally, mercifully, ended, letting them leave without looking like party poopers.

Once they were out of sight of the rest of the homeward-bound crowd, they let their hair down. Isaac had taught each of them his clothing and armor re-equipping [Skill], which made switching to something less formal a cinch.

They said their goodbyes and were about to use various means of long-range travel to head off when their phones all rang.

The desired catastrophe … several hours too late.

Comfortable T-shirts and pants were replaced with combat attire in an instant, ranging from heavy armor to enchanted robes.

“Shit, this is something we have to deal with?” Bailey asked, already pulling out his phone “Give me a second, I have to call Gabriel and cancel our date …”

“No worries.” Isaac told him, gesturing to the others “We can handle this. Go have fun.”

While Bailey used his phone to arrange for one of the [Portal] users back at the university to come get him, Amy used hers to drop the four of them as close to the problem as possible.

“So, what are we dealing with?” Elena asked.

“The Spire is an annoying structure-type summon designed to burn through cooldown [Skills] by adapting their bosses to the [Skills] used while people are fighting their way to the boss. You have to clear it several times in a row to fully beat it, but you only get loot the first time around. Every time you clear it, you reduce the monster wave that’ll get spat out six hours after the first summoning. But the strength of the monsters that come out is variable, and if you only clear the Spire once, you won’t have to deal with well-adapted monsters.

Which means you can either take the chance to only clear it once while using all your [Skills], or you can clear it six times but you won’t always have your cooldown [Skills] available, which is very risky.

“In the end, a lot of people ended up taking a chance on being able to take the wave, which works out most of the time …”

“But when it fails, it fails big. Except they don’t know any of that, so they’re panicking and using the app to call for help from anyone who might listen.” Elena finished for him.

The alert app was an evolution of the various ones that had already been available, merged into one.

It had about a bazillion features, such as Rank verification so you’d only be messaged by stuff relevant to you or several versions of the emergency alert ranging from “apocalypse imminent” to “some help sometime in the next hour would be great”.

In this case, the summoners in question had shared their current woes and now, people all over the world would know about the issue.

Isaac’s phone dinged again as he got the same alert through official channels. And another one.

… And a third one. He was on all sorts of messaging lists to avoid missing an issue, but when something like the Spire issue happened, it did tend to lead to an overabundance of alerts.

And why the hell couldn’t this have happened a few hours earlier and gotten him out of the gala?

As it turned out, Amy had been near the Spire’s summoning site before so she’d dropped them off so close it had taken them just a few minutes to reach it.

They were some of the first “reinforcements” there, only those who’d already been in the area could have gotten here faster.

But it was already a shitshow. The original conquerors of the Spire were spread around the entrance, slumped on the ground, dead on their feet, generally radiating utter exhaustion, fear, and resignation.

Yet they were still arguing with several newcomers, not about the strategy going forward, but how the spoils were going to be shared.

The discussion basically boiled down to “we paid for the summoning materials, we get the lion’s share” vs “You fucked it up, we rushed over here, you deserve nothing”.

“Isaac, if I stay here to handle the idiot brigade, can you three deal with the Spire?” Elena asked, making sure to use the party’s communication channel to avoid insulting people where they could hear.

“We can definitely do one run, maybe two, but let’s pretend we’re just scouting out the place because we’re not supposed to know it’s doable,” Isaac replied.

And two minutes later, Isaac had found someone who could create illusions and had [Skills] for bookkeeping and added him to the party. That way, Isaac could constantly provide information to the people outside and have it written down.

But even those two minutes were too long for him. He hadn’t done a Spire run in so long, and he desperately needed to be doing something productive that wasn’t dealing with people he’d rather forget even existed.

At least he managed to suppress his grin until he was out of sight.