Apocalypse Redux - Chapter 248: Arena

“Just to make sure everyone is on the same page, we’re doing this just for fun, Mr. Stein is not saving the video he’s streaming to the TV over there anywhere, we’re doing it like that so we can watch without being inside my training space,” Isaac explained while Stein worked was putting together a drone that could transmit out of the pocket space.

Suddenly, Mac Liam had an old-fashioned scroll in his hand, which he thrust in Stein’s face, “This here is a contract to that effect. You will not save that video anywhere, you will only display that video here, you will not recreate the video files based on your own memories …”

In theory, it was a good idea. In practice … Isaac might not have known enough about computers to understand everything about the ensuing argument, but it was clear that there were several issues with how the data had to be temporarily saved somewhere so the video could be transmitted/displayed and so on.

What had initially been a fairly simple contract quickly became absurdly complicated and eventually scuppered entirely as it had become utterly unfeasible. No one wanted to sign a Fae contract so complicated, especially when it devolved into technobabble that the person writing the contract clearly didn’t understand.

“Most of us are fairly public figures anyway,” Marides finally stepped in, “One fight outside and most of our standard abilities will become common knowledge. This is a battle for bragging rights, if anyone reveals their secret techniques for that, any trouble is their own stupid fault.”

Then, he turned to Isaac, clearly struggling to keep his eagerness off his face “Can we get started now?”

***

First up to the plate was, of course, Stergio Marides. He dipped into the bathroom briefly to change into his armor and returned to the main room in barely thirty seconds.

His combat outfit was clearly inspired by Ancient Greek armor, but still decidedly modern, with a lion motif and several bronze highlights. And over his shoulder, he’d lain a club that looked like he’d just uprooted a small tree and roughly chopped off branches and roots. But despite its basic appearance, it was a powerful weapon that practically hummed with potential.

“Are you ready?” Isaac asked, handing him the drone. Marides nodded, and promptly vanished, only a purple glowing crack in reality showing where he’d been.

At the same time, the gigantic screen on the wall flickered to life to show the little machine’s video feed.

Isaac gave the pair a few seconds to get into position and unleashed the weakest of his slain [Raid Bosses].

Fifty meters tall, fifty-three if you counted its bull-like horns, a crown of spikes ringing its head … that was one ugly motherfucker.

Its ugly yellow eyes focussed on the little man standing in front of it, only to explode as arrows blasted through them near-simultaneously. Not only that, but the green-black shafts dissolved into a liquid that burned its skin, and judging by the look of the surrounding flesh, that stuff was toxic to boot.

Good, go for the eyes first, then dodge the counterattack, hamper its mobility, find a blindspot, then go for the vital organs. That was how you fought this thing, and Marides was doing just that.

His bow, which had been an intricate creation made from serpent scales, with the string formed of dangerous-looking liquid that dripped from the bow’s top end before solidifying while the arrows grew out of even more liquid as Marides had gotten ready to shoot.

But by the time he was within striking range of the Demon Lord, the weapon had transformed right back into the tree-trunk club and broke the monster’s ankle with a single [Powerful Blow].

As it fell, the [Raid Boss] unleashed another wave of hellfire, which was promptly dodged with ease.

Aaaaaannnd there went the other ankle.

The Demon collapsed forward onto its arms, and that was the end of it. Marides was right on top of it, his weapon having once again changed shape. This time, it had transformed into a pair of brass knuckles, each with a trio of lion claws covering the front. Every punch tore through the monster’s flesh with ease, larger, spectral copies of the weapons causing horrific wounds.

To all outside appearances, Isaac was observing the interaction with interest, but on the inside, he was kicking himself for miss-estimating the man. He had raw power, tons of it, but he was a lot faster and more flexible than Isaac had given him credit for.

The real kicker was that Isaac had known about how Hercules being all about raw strength was the modern version. The original versions had had plenty of power, true, but he’d also been a skilled archer, creative problem solver, and overall, far more than a brute. It was just that, until now, Marides never really showed much more than raw power. At least not somewhere Isaac had seen.

How had he missed tha- … oh, hell. The whole “related to Hercules” thing was very, very public, stemming from Marides himself. And anyone who looked at him tried to analyze him, would see the obvious abilities related to their preconceived notions of him, not his real status.

In other words, they’d see another brute, albeit one who stood head and shoulders above the rest.

Or maybe Isaac was massively misreading things, and the weapon had just been made by an incredibly talented craftsman and wasn’t related to Marides’ [Class] at all. He’d have to analyze the man again once he left the pocket dimension.

The Demon Lord expired soon after and Marides returned, grinning from ear to ear.

Isaac immediately analyzed him and this time, he could see several aspects to his build that hadn’t been visible before. Oh, that sneaky little … honestly, Isaac respected him all the more now. A for effort, but seeing him with the bow had reminded Isaac about the original myths and that had been the end of that.

“Hey, can you put me in there all the way from over there?” Sandoval asked. He was currently upside-down on an armchair, feet up on the headrest while his head hung off the other end.

Sneaky, sneaky. Just how long had he been sitting there?

Thinking back on it, had he moved at all? He’d telekinetically called over some food and eaten it, but that had been it. How strong would his attacks be after he’d stayed still for so long? Enough to wipe a Tier 6 [Raid Boss] from existence, probably.

“Sure,” Isaac said, tossed him the camera drone, and sent him off into the dimension of murder and pain.

“I bet he obliterates it in a few hits, maybe even a single one,” Isaac commented as another Demon Lord appeared.

His words soon proved prophetic as the monster was hurled off its feet in a blast of light. A second blew off its left arm alongside most of its torso, and the third obliterated its chest so thoroughly that even a [Raid Boss] couldn’t recover.

“Good prediction,” Braun grunted, then walked back towards the buffet table.

“I’d love to see what Germany’s hidden ace can do,” Mac Liam called after him. Braun ignored him.

“Hey, come on, don’t be like that!”

Braun just kept on walking. The first few people were telling Mac Liam to knock it off, but he ignored them.

“What, are you a pussy? Come on!”

This time, Braun choked on the drink he’d just taken, and the tension in the room ratcheted skywards. Isaac’s hand instinctively twitched, closing around where he normally summon his sword.

But by the time he’d cleared the liquid from where it didn’t belong, it was very clear that he was laughing as he reached back and ran his hand over the twin black cat ears standing up from his hair.

“Why yes, I am a cat, thank you for noticing. Took you long enough to notice,” he flashed Mac Liam a brief Cheshire cat grin.

Then, he turned back towards the food and ignored any further communication attempts while Mac Liam silently fumed.

It had looked funny, but Isaac’s hackles were up. Yes, Braun was one of the most secretive S-Rankers who wasn’t a complete unknown. However, Mac Liam was being pretty pushy. Unnaturally pushy. Was he gathering the information for himself, his government, or someone else?

“You guys know what?” Isaac asked, “We should probably stop now. This was meant to be fun, not something to challenge other people over.”

That put a serious damper on things, but the whole matter blew over eventually. People arranged to fight in Isaac’s arena on their own, without an audience, and almost everyone threw Mac Liam the stink eye.

Seriously, what the actual fuck had that man been thinking? Had he really disliked Braun for some reason, or was this a case of temporary insanity?

Or maybe, hm, he was one of the Fae, with the ability to craft contracts. Had he signed a contract to the effect of “I’ll give my best effort to figure out what Alexander Braun’s deal is”?

It would certainly explain why he’d pushed things so far in the end. No real Fae would make the mistake of talking in absolutes in contracts, they’d be too careful for that. But trying, failing, and then making a further attempt that precluded similar attempts in the future was a possible theory.

Isaac certainly couldn’t blame anyone for being curious. As Mac Liam had said, Braun was Germany’s hidden ace, an S-Ranker who’d managed to keep their powerset almost completely secret.

Of course, Isaac had hidden almost as much about himself and his capabilities, but the difference was that people thought they knew most of his build. Braun’s entire public-facing persona was “enigma”.

He’d inspected the man just like he did to everyone he met, and he’d gotten basically nothing. His [Hunter’s Gaze] went through functionally all upgrades of [Privacy] like a hot knife through butter, at the cost of accuracy.

But Braun gave him the smallest amount of information he’d ever gotten. A vague sensation of being in a forest, a sharp edge, and that was all. Even less than he’d known before he’d met the man.

On a trip to the bathroom, Isaac briefly meditated to access the [Round Table] and left a note on the table that someone should look into Mac Liam. That could have been harmless, but it also very much could not have been, and letting that crap go could end oh so badly.

Eventually, Isaac found himself back at the bar, where Ardouin joined him. He’d been standing ramrod straight all evening, and that didn’t change as he sat down next to Isaac.

A powerful anti-eavesdropping [Skill] slammed into place around them before the general began to speak.

Isaac internally flinched at that. He’d seen all manner of tricks to ensure privacy, from magic items to the ones taken from various Illusion-type Aspects. Those effects ranged from being barely noticeable to making it seem as though the rest of the world were underwater.

However, this one felt downright mean. As though merely trying to look past it would burn out your corneas, trying to eavesdrop would end with your eardrums being torn to shreds inside your skull, and actually walking through it would be the equivalent of fighting your way through a bramble thicket without any defensive abilities and one’s physical abilities set to the baseline.

In fact, Isaac would not have been surprised to learn that that was exactly what would happen to anyone who genuinely pushed it. A high-ranking military officer would have [Skills] that didn’t just work to prevent espionage, but actively penalized it. Throw in the magic bent of Ardouin’s [Skills] and this particular [Skill] could easily be just as menacing as it felt.

“Have you thought about how things will go in the future with S-ranked intervention?” Ardouin asked, pointedly looking around the room, “Take a look at everyone. Whenever disaster strikes, true disaster, they’ll be the ones who have to fix it.”

“You want to know if I see the same problem you do,” Isaac responded, “If you mean the fact that they’re not exactly going to play together, I agree.”

The Braun-Mac Liam argument was still fresh in both their minds, after all.

“That’s a part of it,” Ardouin agreed, “But my real worry is them working together with the local authorities.”

“How exactly do you want to help with that?” Isaac asked, “I have an excellent working relationship with both German law enforcement and military based on mutual respect and cooperation, but that took time to build.”

Ardouin raised an eyebrow, “So you’re suggesting that we don’t do anything, that we ‘let the chips fall as they may’ and if something goes wrong, that’s the way it was supposed to be?”

Isaac shook his head, “Of course not, I’m just saying that there are plenty of ways to write regulations the wrong way. We Germans have a reputation for extreme regulation and I have to admit that it’s absolutely deserved. You throw an encyclopedia’s worth of rules at these people, and they’re either either going to completely ignore it, or decide that helping is not worth it anymore. Overregulation will hurt us here.”

“Rules aren’t there to stifle the maybe one percent of people who’d do better with complete freedom, they exist to make sure the other ninety-nine percent of humanity don’t do something cataclysmically stupid,” Ardouin told him.

“Someone I respect a lot once told me ‘a good police officer must be as yielding as steel’. Normally, almost always, the rules hold weight and should be obeyed. But not always. On some rare occasions, you run into something that isn’t covered by the rules or an instance where they’re just plain wrong. That’s when you have to use your head.”

“It’s an interesting point, but if you tell that to people, they’ll automatically assume that every situation that gets on their nerves is one of those times and put themselves above the rules,” Ardouin countered, “I’m not seeing what you’re getting at.”

“My point is the ‘yielding as steel’ bit. As tough as steel is, it’s got a tiny bit of give to it, otherwise, it would shatter like glass the moment something hit it. If you try to chain S-Rankers, ‘shatter like glass’ is a good way to describe what’s going to happen to any semblance of control you might have once had.”

“And your plan is to do what, let them play superhero, give in to their every demand, and hope they don’t ask for something you can’t provide, just like what your government does with the Monkey King? I hear that was your suggestion,” Ardouin pointed out, clearly forcing himself to stay calm.

… Aaaaannd there went any chance of them working well together in this timeline either.

“First of all, I didn’t tell anyone to do that with the Monkey King. I was asked how to get him to agree to a sit down and what they should offer him and I made my suggestions, but I also told them that I thought it was a bad idea.

“And secondly, he isn’t really all that troublesome. He’s got a mountain that wasn’t in use before, he eats a lot of food, drinks a lot of booze, and he’s generally pretty happy with that. It’s certainly cheaper than your nuclear weapons program,” Isaac pointed out, “But you can’t just make plans about an entire group based on its most problematic member.”

“You constantly go haring off all over the planet to do what needs to be done and it’s gone fairly well for you so far, hasn’t it?” Ardouin asked.

“I’ve had my hand cut off, been burned by hellfire, and seen things that forced my therapist to seek help, only for his therapist to then also go seeking professional support, and that kept going until a grand total of six of them were helping each other deal with everything.” Isaac pointed out, “Like you said, these are things that need to be done, and I do it, complying with both international and local laws as best I can.”

“As best you can?” Ardouin asked.

“The Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea is not a place a random foreigner should be charging into with a drawn sword, ready to throw down. I don’t know the exact number of laws and treaties that broke, but it was probably a lot. In my defense, however, there was a Demon Lord about to go rampaging through a city of millions, an attack against a peaceful nation was currently underway, and there was already military present in the DMZ.

“Legally, I should have stayed out of the matter and waited for a whole lot of complicated legal nonsense to be resolved. But like I said, sometimes the law is just plain wrong. So I charged in and held that thing off for as long as I could, even though I broke so many laws, rules, regulations and what have you.”

“So you’re the gold standard for how an S-Ranker should behave when dealing with international issues?”

Oh, how the general had tried to keep the sarcasm out of his voice, the scorn. A valiant effort, one worthy of praise and song, truly, but he still failed.

Isaac shrugged “I’m saying how I do things works. Respect, honesty and helpfulness get you far, and desperation is one hell of a motivator for cooperation. And if people really do keep me from a situation and can’t handle it themselves, that’s not on me anymore. I’ll have done my part. But I hope that if my help is needed in the future, it gets accepted.”

Isaac paused for a long moment, staring off into the distance, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we’re never needed again? If we could just sit at home, twiddling our thumbs, and the world keeps spinning no matter what?”

“Any smart soldier hopes that they’ll never need their training,” Ardouin agreed.

Whatever he was going to say next was cut off by Isaac’s phone dinging.

“The Monkey King has decided to head over here, I don’t think we’re going to get much done here.”

“Not that much trouble, eh?” Ardouin asked.

“We’ll pick this up later,” Isaac sighed.

***

“Hey everyone!” Sun called out from the ledge outside the window, “Can someone let me in?”

Isaac sighed, looked around, and when he realized that everyone else was just staring, resigned himself to open the window before it got broken.

“You see that building on the other side of the street?” Isaac asked, “The one with your bootprint in its facade? I’m pretty sure it’s got landmark status.”

“Oh, oops. Can’t that be fixed?” he asked, then frowned as he looked around, “Where is everyone?”

“It sort of naturally ended when the food ran out, everyone is heading off into their own little meetings,” Isaac explained.

“There’s some food right there,” Sun pointed towards a solitary slice of pizza that people had been too polite to take as it was the last one.

“That’s the last bit of food in the building,” Isaac said. They’d actually arranged it like that, where the kitchen only brought up enough food for there to be a little of everything on the buffet, and they only had enough ingredients for that amount. Whenever it was time for another batch to be made, they had to fetch it from elsewhere. That way, when a certain bottomless stomach showed up, the available food would quickly dry up, or even already be gone in its entirety.

“Aw, shit,” Sun grumbled.

“You were invited,” Isaac pointed out, “You snooze, you lose.”

“Eh, do you know where the best restaurants are here?” Sun asked.

“Sorry, I’ve never eaten here before, maybe ask around?” Isaac suggested.

“I’ll do that,” Sun said happily and went off to do that.

In the meanwhile, Isaac made sure to make appointments for all necessary meetings and then headed off to continue his conversation with Ardouin.