Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 54: Solstice

Chapter 54: Solstice

The rattling of the train under his ass made sleeping a bit more difficult than it was normally, but he still somehow managed and it didn’t take very long for him to stave off sleep until evening … on the day after this one. He’d spend the rest of the day and night summoning once he was back home, then go to work in the morning.

Once he’d managed to snatch a few minutes of sleep, Isaac opened the case file and began to study it. He’d made sure to sit somewhere the cameras couldn’t see over his shoulder and Calise had actually given him a different cover so it looked less like your stereotypical police file. All in all, it shouldn’t look too weird, especially given that he was still wearing a face other than the one he’d been born with, thanks to hundred faces.

The file was very useful and it would have been great to have earlier, but getting it had posed a few problems. Stealing it would have been easy, but if he got caught, there’d have been hell to pay. Talking his way onto the investigation might have also been possible, but it might have looked damn suspicious. The whole ‘serial killer inserts themselves into the investigation’ might have been a trope for the most part, but he didn’t have any obvious skills that would have benefited the investigation, given that his tracking abilities needed an actual specific person to track.

Of course, Isaac hadn’t sat idle until he’d gotten his hands on this thing, but that didn’t mean he’d really gotten anywhere. He’d looked into the current whereabouts of Arianne Krebs, the killer from the other timeline, but it hadn’t been easy, given that she lived in northern Germany, far from him, and he didn’t really have the ability to track people via things like credit card purchases. Asking law enforcement to track one specific person would have been the single most suspicious thing he could have possibly done.

Also, she’d dropped off the face of the Earth, something that might have been suspicious, if her husband hadn’t recently died to an irresponsibly summoned ghost and the apartment building she lived in destroyed by someone who tried to blow it up using a gas stove. Well, Isaac had said recently, but this had happened right after Initialization, something that made it supremely unlikely that it would have been changed by his existence as a time traveler.

There had been a suspicious death after that, a friend of the original summoner had said he’d summon and kill a Ghost in the honor of the dumbass who’d gotten so many people killed, once it had become common knowledge that Ephemeral foes were vulnerable to mana based attacks. Someone had smashed in idiot number two’s skull with a rock. While that looked pretty damning, there was an entire building full of people who might have also been the culprits.

Isaac had left an anonymous tip with a voice changed by shortening his vocal cords using [Hundred Faces], saying he’d just remembered seeing a person matching Mrs. Krebs’ description right before the guy had been killed, but that was all. As far as he’d been able to tell, she didn’t have any kind of home address other than the burned down building and if she was actually the culprit, she had no reason to come back. Instead, she was travelling all over Europe to murder stupid summoners and Isaac wasn’t in a position to drop everything to track her down.

Regardless of if it was her or someone else, the [System] was still the biggest problem and the one he needed to focus on. Right now, the only public and obvious summoners were dumbass posers, influencers, and people like Polizeirätin Eisenberg who were leading large scale, organized summoning programs, and he’d never gone after the latter.

Sure, going after a high ranking member of the police force would have been terminally stupid, but there were people who weren’t cops and still creating properly organized summoning groups. Firefighters, military, even a couple of civilian organizations. All had gone untouched. Clearly, the issue wasn’t summoning itself, but unorganized summoning without precautions.

But somehow, the killer was identifying summoners even when they didn’t have a public persona as one. Clearly, some manner of [Skill] was being employed. Isaac strongly suspected that the killer was first travelling to a given location in search of a public summoner, killed them, and then went after a whole bunch of other people identified as summoners by whatever [Skill] they possessed.

And that [Skill] would probably ping off of Isaac and the rest of the team as well. A killer going after the summoners so willing to take risks that a google search would identify them as such, those who encouraged others to summon wantonly without reminding them of proper precautions, they were a problem and while Isaac wasn’t about to kill them, he did hate them. There was an argument to be made to go after this killer as a matter of general human decency, but the same one could be made for every other serial killer in the world.

Everyone else, however, they might be the future powerhouses of humanity or someone who summoned as a part of one of the aforementioned summoning groups, people who weren’t the problem. Like the team. People were only fame-adjacent, so they might not be ‘safe’. And that elevated the killer from a general problem for humanity in general to a specific threat to his loved ones.

Yet even then, he couldn’t take off a few weeks or even months to hunt an elusive killer all over Europe, if it even was her. There were plenty of other people who might be it, hell, it could be someone he’d never hear off. And while this killer was a problem, the [System] research couldn’t afford to slow down a single bit.

Isaac shook his head and cursed under his breath, then proceeded to look over the victim’s autopsy reports. Wounds that looked just like they’d been caused by [System] creatures, except with man made tools. Blades instead of claws, blowtorches instead of fire magic, all of it had been done using perfect precision, though the autopsy report claimed that injuries suffered concurrently with the time of death had been caused by the victim thrashing around. Some kind of absurd precision [Skill], possibly even one that allowed for supernaturally skilled handling of any tool the killer picked up. If that was useable in actual combat, rather than being restricted to executions, that might actually be trouble. Of course, that only held true if the killer was anywhere close to him in level, but regardless, it was a bad sign.

As he read further and further through the file, Isaac became more and more certain that the killer was Mrs. Krebs. Now all he needed was a shot at her. Still, this certainty meant that he could go straight for her if he ever caught a whiff of her presence anywhere, and at that point, a single [Hunter’s Gaze] would give him certainty.

And until then, he could go ahead and send the police her way using any method he could think up.

All he needed was an opening. Then again, Amy was about to learn [Portal] and would then be able to drop him off throughout most of Germany at the drop of a hat. If a summoner vanished within her range, she could drop him off with the local police department to help track.

A while ago, while looking up Krebs, he’d also found a short video clip of her yelling about ‘bastard summoners’, as well as a trail directly leading to the apartment building massacre and subsequent fire. He could then claim to ‘recognize her’ from a past sleuthing session. Not his best excuse, but when her [Class] was identified as something related to murder, that success would likely bury the issue.

Perhaps, a simple assassination would work better, but that would require him to know someone had vanished before they were killed and she moved on, which would be hard without police help. And getting there without a portal would also be a pain in the ass.

Besides, he’d love to see this entire mess dragged out in front of a court of law and therefore into the light, because then, the summoning affair would have a face. A grief-stricken widow, and a parade of idiots who put others in danger and might even have gotten them killed. Sure, the grief-stricken widow was a serial killer and all, but her lawyer would probably try to play up the sob story. And then, that might hammer home the idea that summoners needed to be fricking careful. At least that was what he hoped would happen. If he was even right about the killer’s identity in the first place.

Isaac just sighed and leaned back in his seat, swearing internally. All of this was so goddamn complicated. But the roof for his summoning area had finally been completed, so he could finally summon monsters that would land him in a world of trouble if they were caught on satellite. After all, these things were Tier 5 and visible as hell. Well, the Poltergeist was the only one at Tier 5, but one of the others was an electric elemental, and those were very much a no-no summon, given the whole ‘nearly lost a city of millions’ incident.

The train clattered along the tracks, taking him back to where he wanted to be. Three hours to go. Isaac sighed again and pulled up his Status screen to look it over. In the last few weeks, he’d gotten quite a bit stronger. He’d wasted quite a bit of time on the experience front murdering Lesser Space Elementals even after he’d exceeded his XP limit for them, but gained plenty of cores in exchange.

Then quite a bit of time had gone into summoning and then keeping occupied monsters that held interesting powers that the others to copy. Then there’d been the three days stuck at the police station fixing the titanic mess that the summoning program had turned into after the bureaucratical overlords had misunderstood something and decided the whole thing was too dangerous and he’d been asked to present a professional opinion. Five friggin times. But in the end, it had worked and the program had even gotten a bit more funding. Overall, things had gone pretty well on every front other than personal improvement.

Still, multiple weeks of improvement were multiple weeks, so he had gotten stronger and it showed in the Status.

Name: Isaac Thoma

Class: Undying Wraith

Species: Human

Level: 16

XP: 34,916/3,400

Health Status: Healthy

Mana: 300/300

Stats

Fortitude

45

Perception

45

Strength

30

Agility

50

Magic Power

30

Magic Regeneration

50

Free Points: 0 Stat, 3 Skill

Central Skills

Form of Horror XIII

The Chosen Weapon XVI

Skills

Hundred Faces XIV

Stealth XIV

Power Strike XXII

Piercing Strike XXIV

Sundering Strike XXII

Blades XXIII

Sneak XVII

Sweeping Strike IX

Far Strike XVII

Manifold Strike XV

Hunter’s Gaze XVII

Phantom Step XIII

Unknown Fear IX

Bestial Regeneration IX

Undying Focus IV

Tools of Terror VIII

General Skills

Gralloch IX

Alchemy VII

Aspects

Aspect Skills

Specter

Spectral Shift

Hydra (2 stack)

Hydra’s Regeneration

Redundant Organs

Dunkleosteus

Gills

He’d managed to get multiple [Skills] above a threshold, the latest being [Hundred Faces], though all that did was increase the area that could be manipulated to his entire body. Full body shapeshifting was an awesome ability, but also a titanic pain in the ass to use properly. Still, he had the practice to use it, even if no one else had already gained it.

The others though … there was a reason Level 20 was a big deal, and it was extremely interesting how it interpreted his fighting style when assigning bonuses.

Sundering Strike (common, Level XX)

User’s next strike will weaken the targets armor around the point of impact. This damage is permanent until it is fixed/healed. This effect can be stacked until the armor is destroyed.

This Skill can also be toggled to be almost undetectable, destroying any nerves or creature specific equivalent upon impact, or cause maximum pain by directly irritating whatever pain receptors a being might have.

After countless battles where this Skill was used to tear apart the user’s foes, shredding them on a fundamental level until their own movements tore them apart, it has evolved to destroy them, rather than merely weakening them. For an additional 18 mana, this Skill will now inject a weakening, magic-based poison that rots an enemy’s flesh and corrodes their defenses until nothing but soup remains.

Cost: 12 mana per strike, 30 mana per poisoning Strike

That one had been kinda obvious in hindsight, though. Pulsing that [Skill] until his opponent fell to pieces would obviously then result in a destructive, poison like evolution, rather than anything more mundane.

Power Strike (common, Level XX)

User’s next blow will strike with as much force as though the user’s strength stat were 50%+2n% where n equals skill level higher.

This Skill may now also be safely used on fists and legs and has a reduced backlash on the user’s body.

After countless battles where this Skill has been used to drive a piercing blade into an enemy’s flesh, it has evolved to ignore the concept of an equal and opposite reaction, driving the cutting edge into the foe while pushing them with vastly reduced strength, massively improving armor penetration.

Cost: 12 mana per strike

[Power Strike], on the other hand, was a very pleasant surprise. After all, he used it over and over again in conjunction with [Piercing Strike], and now it had part of the other [Skill’s] effect as a matter of course? Perfect!

But the clear winner was [Blades].

Blades (common, Level XX)

Grants user basic knowledge of using knives, including throwing and non-combat applications.

In addition, the user may repair any bladed weapons in their possession through the application of mana. Any such weapons are also more durable in the user’s hands and if they are not a traditional knife, they will slowly adjust their form to suit such a tool.

After countless battles where the user has obliterated his foes using a soulbound Blade able to gain new abilities from power foes while making extensive use of Aspects, it has gained the ability to infuse the weapon, Old Reliable, with the power of said Aspects to give it new forms.

In theory, Old Reliable could gain new abilities by fighting powerful enemies, but in practice, that meant either a [Raid Boss] or punching above his weight class to a truly insane degree. But with this [Skill] upgrade, he’d now gained three new weapon abilities just from the Aspects he held. Besides, he’d soon be grabbing some more for himself.

Aspect Infusion: This gives Old Reliable a variation on each form based on the user’s Aspects (Hydra: Venomsteel, Dunkleosteus: Boneblade, Specter: Astral Piercer). This costs 15 mana each time a new Aspect is infused, and 10 mana per minute of keeping it active. Only one Aspect can be active at a time.

The weapon ability didn’t look that impressive, but going deeper into the explanations revealed how good the upgrade was. Or at least, it would have, if Isaac hadn’t already known all of that from the other timeline.

Venomsteel was what it said on the tin, a basic weapon envenomed with the blood of a Hydra, even if the name was likely incorrect. After all, Hydra blood was a poison, not a venom. The difference? ‘Venom is a problem when it bites you, poison is a problem when you bite it’

Isaac chuckled softly at the memory of a marine drill sergeant shouting that in some poor kid’s face after he’d asked a poorly timed question.

The bone version wasn’t that powerful, but if Isaac Thoma never used it, it would let him freely use his soulbound weapon in combat while using another identity.

And then there was the Astral Piercer, a nasty piece of work that directly attacked the spirit of anyone stabbed with it. Ephemeral beings would take immense amounts of damage, almost as much as if he’d used a blood enchantment, while more corporeal foes and humans would take direct damage to their ability to use magic. Stab them enough times and their mana would directly flow out of them without any input from them until the wound healed. And being a spiritual injury, most normal methods wouldn’t really work.

In most situations, it would be easier to just stab his opponents with a corporeal and far more immediately lethal weapon, but he could see quite a few uses for it, especially against [Raid Bosses]. Damaging the parts they used to unleash their strongest wepons, for example, could change the course of a battle in a flash.

Well, that had kept him occupied for all of ten minutes on the outside, what to do for the rest of the hour long drive?

… needless to say, Isaac was practically bouncing off the walls by the time the train pulled into the home station and he tore off like a bat out of hell the instant doing so wouldn’t scare the hell out of a bunch of passer’s by.

Soon, his new and improved home came into view. Three more containers had been added and properly connected to the others in such a way that he did not need to go outside to go between them, but that practically went unnoticed when compared to the other new addition.

A fifty by fifty meter area was now covered by a ten meter tall metal roof that brought to mind one of those old school convention halls, though it was far sturdier than its looks might suggest. Both Stagmer and Karl had applied every reinforcing [Skill] they had to this place and soon enough, Isaac would hopefully figure out a way to make basic enchantments known to the world in a non-suspicious way.

Isaac took a moment to put away his stuff, then put away everything loose around the center of the summoning area, and then drew the Tier 5 circle out in chalk, placed in the materials, and then charged it. While his mana regenerated, he stripped naked and put his clothes away as well, until the only thing not nailed down within his line of sight was Old Reliable.

The weapon shifted into its Kriegsmesser configuration, then he drew it across his left palm and placed it down on the ground in front of him. He dipped his right index finger in the blood and began to draw out the best blood enchantment for fighting intangible foes while applied to an Astral Piercer weapon.

And then, the Poltergeist erupted from the summoning circle the instant his mana was full after the Kriegsmesser had been transformed into something that looked like pale blue and translucent crystal. An immense pressure wave washed out from it, trying to grasp the weapon and stab him with it, but it was a part of him. The roof groaned as it was exposed to forces it was not meant to be exposed to, but only for a brief moment as Isaac crossed the distance in a heartbeat and drove the deadly weapon into the monster’s gut, red blood flowing from the wound in his right palm as the enchantment flared.

Blood enchants were powerful, but while they were in use, the wounds from which the blood for them had been drawn couldn’t be healed and also bled the more power they needed.

The Poltergeist continued to try and find something to hurl at him, but everything here was nailed down and the ground was one solid piece of rock. A Poltergeist could barely directly affect living beings and Isaac wasn’t even wearing clothes that might be manipulated. That thing was fucked.

A wave of power hammered into him directly as his foe came to that very conclusion and attacked him directly. The move was only a fraction as effective as it should have been, but it still forced him to his knees, insides feeling like they were being crushed in a giant vice.

But its powers sucked against living beings. It was able to keep him at a distance and inflict mild damage, but it was dying all the while. Isaac had known all of this ahead of time, and figured out that he’d have survived the ordeal with mild internal injuries even without the upgraded weapon. As it was, the Poltergeist fell apart more quickly than his initial calculations would have indicated and the fight was over and all his wounds healed, save the injury to his palm. He left that because he still needed the blood enchant for the next one.

It too died rather quickly, to the exact same method. That just went to show that if you could figure out how to properly counter a foe, beating them could be pretty easy. A storm of every movable object within ten meters trying to shove itself through your heart was a tough, nearly impossible flight. But take those objects away …

Well, not easy, Isaac grumbled, rubbing at his injured side, but rather simple. It was inevitably painful, but a guaranteed success. And this time, he’d even gotten the Aspect.

Aspect of the Poltergeist:

This is the distilled essence of what makes a Poltergeist a Poltergeist. Walking through walls as if there were nothing there, a rather loose relationship with gravity, the power to hunt the living with ease and toss around cars as if they were mere Legos.

Requirements for Activation:

2,000 XP

Open Aspect Slot

Grants:

+10 Magic Power

One of the following Skills:

Poltergeist’s Flight

Poltergeist Shift

Hunt of the Damned

Telekinetic Domain

The choice was simple. Upgrade [Spectral Shift] to [Poltergeist’s Shift], then grab the misleadingly named [Poltergeist’s Flight]. [Telekinetic Domain] was awesome, but it was a mana hog of titanic proportions, making its use the privilege of magic users.

Poltergeist’s Flight (rare)

Gravity, what’s that? Something a user of this Skill doesn’t have to worry about, that’s for certain.

Activating Poltergeist’s Flight will nullify the effect of gravity on the user and for an increased mana cost, it will also prevent the user from being affected by the wind.

Cost: 1 mana per second of use, 3 mana per two seconds of use if wind is nullified

The [Skill] should probably have been called [Poltergeist’s Floatation], but then again, it did let you fly like a Poltergeist. That being said, there were tricks to turning a basic immunity to gravity and the winds into true flight, it just required a few other [Skills] … which he already had. But before he indulged in that, he had something else to do. Get himself a proper generator for this place. Also, he should probably take a look at his other new [Skill].

Poltergeist Shift (rare)

Allows the user to shift into an Ethereal form, allowing them to pass through all non-mana-infused objects and non-Skill-enhanced attacks. Mana passing through the User’s body will inflict small injuries both on the surface and the inside. Avoiding powerful attacks without a regeneration Skill is recommended.

The user may also manipulate light objects without making their hands corporeal.

Cost: 10 mana for activation, 2 mana per second of upkeep

Basically, the upkeep cost was a little cheaper and he could affect the physical world more easily. Nice, but the real winner had obviously been [Poltergeist’s Flight].

Isaac called an odd looking contraption out of the spatial storage and placed it on the ground. It was a sphere made from metal plates, covered in basic runic script with some technical doodads attached in a couple of places. These were one of the basic survival things almost everyone had memorized the building instructions for. A way to convert mana to electricity. Some basic enchantments, a transformer to turn the electricity flowing off the Elemental Core stuck inside into useable electricity, and some other stuff to make sure nothing there blew up in his face or fried the things he hooked up to it. Now for the part he really didn’t like.

While the Tier 3 circle already charged and ready to summon a Lighting Elemental, Isaac cut both of his palms and drew blood enchants on the back off his hands and along both forearms. If it weren’t for [Hydra’s Regeneration] constantly draining mana to replenish his blood, this would have been really dangerous. As it was, this was merely incredibly uncomfortable.

Once he was done, the monster manifested, lunged at him … and was sucked into the space between his palms. The blood sizzled, his skin crisped, then blackened and burned as arcs of electricity hit it, but slowly, it condensed. And then his hands slapped together, cupping a spherical space in between them as if he had a butterfly in there or something.

Lightning Elemental has died to Environmental Hazard [Blood Magic Field] and has been transformed into Lighting Elemental Core

Isaac finally pulled his hands back apart and there was an orb of living electricity lying in his right palm, continuing to burn his skin, so he hastily tossed it into the awaiting magical generator. Getting a magical generator was damn easy, so everyone who could survive the process had learned how to, but there was a reason most people preferred to only use it at a higher Level. Still, he’d known he could survive it, so he’d done it and now had a proper source of electricity. He could lay his hand on it, feed mana into the glyphs on the outside, which would then agitate the core, causing it to throw sparks that would then be absorbed by the surrounding metal and fed through the transformers to power whatever this thing was hooked up to. The method was incredibly inefficient, a single discharge of his current mana pool only able to power a normal, single family house for perhaps a day, when one could throw lightning for a mere two hundred or so mana points.

Still, now all there was to do was take the generator and hide it somewhere, then add a normal generator as a cover for where he was really getting his energy from. And given that he was in range of his dimensional storage, he could not only move it using that, he could also banish it in case anyone ever came snooping, putting it firmly out of sight.

Isaac sighed and went to put his clothes back on, noting that it was nearly 1 pm. Oh, how time flew when you were trying to avoid having your face ripped off by monsters.

Now, though, he could try his hand at fl- …

Welcome, one and all, to the Summer Solstice EVENT!

(As this is the first event in the history of the [System], there will be a short explanation given for the entire concept. Events give all users access to temporary summons until the end of the event, many of which give new and unique rewards.)

Are you ready for the heat? For today and only today, you may summon monsters that burn with the fury of a proper summer solstice bonfire, like the Solar Giant, Mare of Helios, or defeat foes that threaten the very sun itself, like the [Raid Boss] Apothis (see full list?).

But that isn’t all, we …

Isaac stopped reading at that point, frozen solid in shock. That hadn’t happened in the other timeline, this was new. And it employed a very basic marketing trick by making something only available for a limited time, FOMO prompting overly rash buying, or in this case, summoning, something that the hype only encouraged. Also, a quick check revealed that no one would be able to summon Apothis by now, the sheer cost far too much, which would inspire people who’d wished to fight him but missed their chance to do so to rush their levelling so they could grab the next unique boss.

And he knew exactly who to blame for this. Isaac jumped upwards, phasing through the roof and landing on it, and then shouted his rage up towards the sky.

“GO SHOVE A RED HOT POKER UP YOUR COLLECTIVE ASS, YOU FUCKERS!”

Suddenly, the gently blowing wind disappeared, the movement of the branches all around him stopped … actually, everything seemed to have slowed down. And then, the world began to take on a slight purple sheen. Ruh-roh.