Apocalypse Redux

Prologue

“Well, at least the end is somewhat ironic.” Isaac commented as he gazed out across the swarming mass of beasts below. “Even in a world of monsters and demons, it was humanity that did itself in.”

“I’m glad that you can see the humor in this.” a voice rang out from behind him “Not. Seriously, the world is ending and you’re cracking jokes?”

“The world already ended. If nothing else, because the only two humans left in the world are us two men. When we die, so does humanity.” Isaac replied, sword jumping from his sheath for an instant so brief that a pre-[System] human wouldn’t have even been able to see him move, then re-sheathed it just as quickly.

An arc of power had burst from the sword during that single swing and hit the countless beasts milling around below like divine judgement, shearing through a countless number them.

Yet there were so many more, assailing the last bastion of mankind. A vast castle wrought from the stone below, reinforced by the powers of countless [Architects], [Geomancers], and more. Once, it had been used as the command and control center for all of Europe. But then humanity had begun losing and losing hard. Now, there were just the two of them left here, and perhaps one or two others somewhere on the planet, though they hadn’t heard anything from them.

“And that means you get to laugh about this?” Kade asked, stepping up next to Isaac.

“When else am I going to look back on my life and laugh at all the mistakes, other than right before its end? This isn’t funny in the slightest, but I refuse to go to my death depressed if I can help it.” he replied, another flick of the sword annihilating the beginnings of a living rampart that threatened to spill into the inner courtyard.

None of these weaklings could truly threaten either of them, but they weren’t the problem. They hadn’t been for half a decade. That dubious honor went to the champions, the commanders, [Demon Lords] and [World Bosses].

Yet if too many of those things got in, even this place would finally fall, even though it had done so for all practical intents and purposes.

“[Final Bastion].” Kade said, laying his hand on one of the crenelations “There, that should hold them for a bit.”

“Still won’t drop the habit of saying your [Skills] out loud when stealth isn’t required?” Isaac teased even as every beast currently touching the walls was knocked away with enough force to turn them into paste.

Kade’s reply was just a flat stare.

“Anyway, about what’s so funny. For one, the Karen’s were right. DnD and all that truly was the devils work, what with the whole ‘world turns into a video game and suddenly everyone is summoning monsters to fight’ thing.” Isaac shook his head “But we made it to the top, didn’t we? Took their power, summoned primordial beasts only for them to die moments later, until we reached the peak of what was possible. If only everyone else had been as careful …”

That had been the truly insidious part of the [System]. A couple of years after Initialization, an entire genre of books had become truly popular, one that involved Systems descending on the planet and bringing countless monsters, turning the world into a hellhole.

But theirs hadn’t, it had merely provided the means of creating them.

Initially, people had been careful, generally only summoning what they could handle. And the few times the creatures had been too powerful, everyone nearby with any measure of combat power had dogpiled on the beast until it was gone.

Nations had experimented with the stronger beasts, but they’d also taken adequate precautions, at least for the most part. At least fifty [Raid Bosses] had apparently been nuked in the Nevada desert by the US army once it was determined that they were too powerful to beat directly. It had ruined any chance of gaining XP from them, but it also succeeded at stopping them cold.

Eventually, however, people grew too strong for the weaker beast to push them further, and stronger ones had been summoned. And stronger ones still, more and more escaping until eventually they congregated and made summonings of their own. From there on, humanity had been crushed under an ever-escalating tide of monsters.

“Humans aren’t cautious. Never have been, at least not as a whole. We’re the monkeys who left the safety of the trees for the ground and never looked back. We created sharpened metal to stab each other with, gunpowder, and eventually even lit off a nuke to see what would happen despite one of the possible outcomes being lighting the atmosphere on fire and killing us all.” Kade informed him, hints of pride and sorrow swinging in his tone.

“Ha, too true.” Isaac barked a laugh.

“… your humor is too fucking dark.” Kade sighed “I worry about you, sometimes.”

“Eh, what other kind is there? Come on, live a little. The last two peo- …” Isaac started, but was interrupted.

“Three.”

They both whirled around to see a third man standing there in incredibly dirty clothing that might have once been one of the [Mage’s] robes that had come into style three years after the Initialization.

“Mark?” Kade was the first to ask.

“Who else?” Mark shrugged as he walked over to them.

“Where the hell have you been? We thought you died last week, during the fall of Rome?” Isaac exclaimed.

“Making my way here. I'm the last one, everyone else died. Everywhere. [Scry] shows that the three of us are all that remains of mankind. Anyway, I’m not staying long. There’s a [Demon Lord] a few kilometers to the west and I’m off to kick it in the unmentionables. There is literally no point in protecting this place anymore.” he said fatalistically.

“The world’s ended, you can say ‘balls’.” Isaac informed him in a mock-serious tone.

“Fine, fine, I want to kick a [Demon Lord] in the balls before I die, alright?” Mark shot him a dark smile.

“I think that is something we’d all have liked to do.” Kade nodded.

“So what do you say, old friends? Shall we show those demonic bastards just what humanity is capable of, one final time?” Isaac asked, feeling the dying embers inside him reignite a little.

Standing here on these battlements for the last month, defending a lifeless fortress and cracking dark jokes had been the most depressing of his life. This, right here, was how he’d now decided to go out. Not finally being swamped by the hordes of fodder below, suicide, or maybe overeating by devouring all the food still left in the stores below.

“Oh, what the hell. All for one, one for all, everyone gets a pound of flesh from the bastard.” Kade grumbled, heaving himself over the wall. He fell like a literal meteor, not only utterly pulverizing the demonic beasts he landed on, but unleashing a shockwave that destroyed hundreds more.

Isaac took a more graceful method of descent, likewise jumping over the edge but activating [Featherfall] a split second before the impact to land lightly on the head of a hellhound. Two swings of his sword unleashed two immense crescents of energy and cleared the space around himself with contemptuous ease.

“Alright you lily-livered, yellow bellied, craven snotbags. C’mere. [Nexus of Conflict]” Kade bellowed, his voice echoing across the battlefield like the crack of thunder. The taunting [Skill] drew the attention of every beast within a kilometer of him.

An immense thunderstorm brewed in a matter of seconds as Mark, the [Archmage of the Tempest] used his own power and began to lash out at the mass below.

Isaac, meanwhile, just charged through the ranks, swinging his sword in halfmoon arcs, unleashing crescent waves of energy whenever his mana topped up, tearing through them like a reaper through wheat.

Out in the distance, a figure loomed. Deep crimson skin, bull’s horns reaching towards the sky, claws of solid obsidian extending from powerful digits. A champion, a [Raid Boss] at the very least.

[Spectral Charge], [Extended Blade], [Sacrificial Strike]

A single heartbeat later, Isaac turned into a ghost that flashed forwards, blade perpendicular to the motion and extended almost a hundred meters as it passed cleanly through the bodies.

For a second or so, it seemed like nothing had happened, but then a cut began to appear in slow motion on every creature struck, as if an invisible sword was slowly cleaving them in twain along the line where the spectral sword had passed through.

Isaac raised the blade in hand and pointed it at the looming champion.

[Blade Javelin], [Sacrificial Empowerment]

Angry red runes streamed from the unnatural cuts on his victims as the slow motion wounds suddenly completed in one heartbeat. The next, they flew towards his sword that had already been enveloped by the grey sheen of the other [Skill] and merged with it.

A basic, mana based [Skill] to throw a sword, boosted to insane heights by the deaths of countless monsters sent the weapon hurtling forward as if flung by a titan of old and struck the Demon’s chest like the fist of an angry god.

Not even that kind of beast could survive having half its torso simply vanish.

All it took to get his weapon back was a thought, the soulbound weapon vanishing and rematerializing in his right hand three seconds later.

Even bare handed, Isaac killed hundreds of enemies in that time with his bare fists. Punches shattered skulls with such force that the bone fragments shredded their allies behind them, limbs flew and tripped up those who still had the guts to charge …

The carnage continued on in that vein for hours, the three of them continuing to fight their way through the horde. Two more [Raid Bosses] appeared and two more [Raid Bosses] were felled, too weak to put up much of a resistance.

If this kind of strength had been held by mankind’s champions just a mere couple of years ago, they might have been able to beat back the encroaching hordes.

As the final [Raid Boss] fell, the teeming mass of monsters fell away and returned to the castle. With the controlling intelligences dead and the humans no longer near the target they’d been ordered to attack, they chose to go for the building.

They crested the final hill a minute later to see the monstrous [Demon Lord] before them, over a thousand attendants between them and him.

“Hey, ugly!” Mark called “Eat voltage!”

A bolt of lightning as thick as the trunk of a giant redwood slammed into the chest of the [Demon Lord] and sent him stumbling backwards, roaring in pain.

“Let’s go!” Kade bellowed and charged.

Isaac just melted into the shadows and popped up next to their foe’s foot a moment later, hamstringing him with a quick cut.

A fist the size of a compact car slammed down with earth shaking force a moment later, but Isaac wasn’t there anymore, having vanished into the crowd of attendants.

His heart sang as he soared between them, marking them with [Sacrificial Strike] in preparation for unleashing a devastating attack. For all the seriousness, for all the finality of this fight, it felt good to cut loose against a worthy target again. To fight the good fight even if all they could achieve was one final fuck you to the monsters that had ended humanity.

They fought the beast for hours on end, until eventually, disaster struck.

A hurled boulder the size of a tank smashed Mark out of the air and the demon was there to crush him an instant later.

Even with that small victory, however, things weren’t looking good for it. One arm hung limply, most of the flesh at the shoulder just plain gone, it limped from where Isaac had hamstrung it at the beginning of the fight and it was utterly covered in second and third degree burns.

Kade arrived to pummel it, but was grabbed for the first time since combat started. Hellfire pooled in the palm of the hand that held him and began to burn.

But even with every iota of energy and attention devoted to the task, even a [Demon Lord] couldn’t kill the world’s greatest tank so quickly.

Ten seconds was all it took. Now that he wasn’t forced to constantly dodge or readjust his aim as the demon did, Isaac could land devastating strikes that annihilated vital organs and crippled its movement.

The great beast fell, the first of its kind to be defeated by human hands. But he barely cared about that anymore as he scrambled over to the hand that had held his friend.

A stench like burning pork wafted up from a charred black mass that lay in the demon’s palm.

“Hey Kade, we did it.” Isaac whispered as he caught sight of the person who’d been with him for the last four years “We got one.”

There was no response.

Blade held loosely in his hand, Isaac turned back to the place the demon had stood at the beginning, where a portal now hung.

“You know what, old friend?” he whispered, his voice breaking “I’m going see how much damage I can do to their world. Real scientific, real slow, bit by fucking bit.”

The mask of levity dropped off his face as he walked closer. It had been his shield for so long, taking him through issues even before the Initialization. As the state of the world had grown darker, so had his humor.

But now, there was no one left. No one but him. No one to perform for, no one to cheer up, no one to laugh with him.

“[Manifold Blade Empowerment], [Piercing Strike], [Sweeping Strike], [Power Strike], [Sundering Strike], [Strike of Desolation], [Curse of Ruination].” he whispered “This is for you, Kade. I’m going to make them hurt.”

“Ahem, you are, of course, free to do that. But perhaps, might I offer an alternative?” a cultured voice called out from behind him, causing Isaac to whirl around, ready to bisect the speaker with the manifold [Skills] layered onto the blade.

When he saw who’d said that, however, he froze. “Janus?”

The god of doorways was one of the mere handful of deities that humans knew for a fact were real as they actually contacted humanity directly on a handful of occasions.

“In the flesh.” the god gestured at himself. He wore a perfectly normal toga, appearing like an ordinary human from neck down. His head, on the other hand, had two faces, one over each shoulder and facing off to the side, though he could likely still see what was in front of his body.

“How much do you know about the rules of deities meddling in the affairs of mortals?” Janus asked, jumping straight into whatever topic he wanted to talk about.

“Any meddling will allow the other side to meddle to an equal degree, continued meddling without the other side having balanced the scales with interventions of their own becomes exponentially harder.” Isaac quoted from memory.

That explanation had been given countless times when people had demanded help from the ostensible “good” gods. Whatever they did to improve humanity’s lot, the “dark” gods would be given the chance to turn it into a monkey’s paw.

Supposedly, that had been what had happened with the [System]. One side had created it to allow humanity to grow while the other had added the monster summoning power that had created this whole mess.

“So, you’re willing to try to interfere again?” Isaac asked, extremely skeptical. He wasn’t sure if things could somehow get worse than mankind’s extinction, but it they could …

“Yes. Though in this case, our meddling happened a long time ago, you’re just reaping the rewards. The dark gods nudged things ever so slightly towards the apocalypse by screwing with a handful of key people, so we made our own alterations, similarly minute. Those portals right there, they allow a single person to jump back to the beginning a single time, if the guardian had been defeated and they are the last human on the planet. With their changes so minute, ours couldn’t be any bigger and adding a bunch of prerequisites was a good way to make that happen.” Janus explained.

Isaac’s sword slipped from a nerveless hand, which he then raised to point at the god.

“You … you’re … you have to be … that can’t be true.” he laughed bitterly, though the sound contained a hint of insanity that sent shivers down his spine “If you could time travel, then how could you let any of this happen?”

“And what do you think would happen if even one enemy god survived past such an attack? They’d have free rein to travel themselves. It is far too risky. Even sending a mortal might be devastating. Yet this specific situation, a tiny tweak that gives you a final chance in the remote possibility that someone fulfilled the requirements, that is doable. So, Isaac Thoma, will you do your damndest to save the world?” Janus asked.

“I … I still think you’re crazy. But what the hell, what do I have to lose?” Isaac said, half to himself, half to the god.

Janus clapped his hands and the portal shifted, turning from a wall of white mist into a solid sheet of blue light.

“Now, walk through the portal.”

Every step Isaac took felt like he was walking to his own execution, yet he never stopped. A chance to redo everything, try to save everyone, even if he wasn’t sure this whole thing wasn’t the world’s cruelest prank.

A final step took him through the portal, which felt like falling into a freezing lake.

‘Ding!

Isaac woke with a start, sitting bolt upright in his bed, a blue box hovering in front of him.

Greetings, Isaac Thoma. Welcome to the System. Would you like to select [Office Drone] as your class?