Apocalypse Redux - Chapter 303: Interlude Jason

Why was it always warehouses? Why not a mansion, with some nice booze in the wine cabinet he could pilfer and drink while walking in on the bad guy, who’d obviously be in some kind of compromising situation that he could comment on while rattling off all the various crimes that would be fucking him over.

He’d had an excuse to break into a mansion, once. This had been early on, before he’d ever met Isaac or the Round Table, back when he’d been just a [Rogue] who’d grown aware of the cult and decided to muck things up a little.

One of the people he’d found had been a businessman who’d done all the usual scummy crap, polluting the environment, being terrible to his workers, all that crap. It had gotten a hell of a lot worse when the [System] had arrived and he’d joined the cult, believing that the world would end in ten years at the outside.

And Jason had done all the usual stuff. Broke in, drank half a tumbler of the most expensive whisky he could find while rifling through files, and finally gone to confront the man himself to tease him a little and distract him while the cops showed up to arrest him for all the really nasty crap the files had revealed.

… Except he’d run into the guy while he was suspended from the roof of his bedroom in what had likely supposed to be some form of shibari, except the person responsible had been an amateur, leaving the scumbag hopelessly tangled while they’d run off.

Jason had laughed so hard he’d almost failed to run before the cops got out.

Now that had been fun.

But no, dingy warehouse it was. A whole bunch of defenses didn’t do fuck all to “level up” the wow factor.

[Entry Plan] to scan and plan, [Pefected Strike] to punch a hole in the wall, a nice trickshot with [Ricochet Blade] to break the lock on the inside while his [Skills] suppressed the noise, and finally pull open the door and slip in, all under the effect of both [Man of a Thousand Faces] and [Ghost in the Night], utterly unidentifiable and almost impossible to spot.

The first room of the warehouse was just a little entry hall with a narrow metal staircase that led into what had to be the office.

But that wall shouldn’t be there, right? Warehouses were normally wide open spaces?

But there was an unalarmed door in that wall, so he opened it and when he saw what was on the other side, his jaw dropped.

It was a huge cavern, at least four times the size of the building he’d observed from the outside, with countless gantries and walkways running through the open air, experiments placed on platforms next to them, but despite the fact that it should have been a mess, it was perfectly ordered, well organized, not looking jury-rigged in the slightest even though that could not have been built officially.

Hell, the mere sight of this stuff would have been enough to make a safety inspector’s head explode.

But was he here to inspect the mess here and complain about potential dangers?

Nope.

In the distance, something was moving, shoes clattering across the floor, metal scraping over metal. Liquid dripped onto a different metal surface, and something gently tore, like cloth being pulled apart by a metal edge pressing into it.

This was the only significant source of noise, though. The occasional creak of metal, rumbling of flowing liquids in pipes, some bubbling in one of the cryo tanks, but nothing that originated from a person.

A gentle leap placed Jason on the gantry above him, a second one via a tank with a monster carcass suspended within took him to the next one and one final jump left him right underneath the roof. He began to creep across that gantry, glancing left and right at the various experiments stored there.

Some were actually prepared in a way that museum-suitable, specimens carved open, preserved, and labeled. Then there were shrunken scenes, various setups from operating rooms to sacrificial altars shrunken down to the size of a backpack and placed upon plain plinths, seemingly waiting for him to return and tear into.

But others were just plain weird. Odd metal spirals covered in runes that were functionally unidentifiable, what appeared to be ice cream of all things, and random blood spatters that reminded Jason of all those stories of modern art accidentally being “cleaned” up by unsuspecting janitors.

No, seriously, what the fuck was up with this asshole?

There was freaky shit everywhere he turned, but there was a difference between this weirdness, and, well, hiring mercenaries to hunt someone down.

That’s when he reached the human experimentation part of the warehouse. Some might have even been normal research on donated cadavers.

Others … others made Jason contemplate the most painful way to castrate someone.

Pained expressions, no, agonized expressions on the dead’s faces, people who’d obviously died in incredible pain, even children.

There was an entire section of people who’d bled out over various diamonds, with the label making it rather apparent what they’d been all about. “Diamonds drenched in the blood of innocents” were blood diamonds, Isaac had mentioned that a while ago, but this guy clearly didn’t know that.

So he’d gone after the elderly, young women who, judging by the promise rings on their fingers, had been virgins, even children.

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A seriously weird part was a group of children who’d had their throats slashed open but utterly stank of beer, with the surroundings of the shrunken scene soaked in a mixture of booze and blood.

What a sicko.

Hold on … Jason remembered something when he identified traces of white powder scattered around the place. As a kid, he’d once been to a museum about the Incan civilization, and one of the exhibits had explained how their child sacrifices worked. Get the children high on maize beer and coca, then, you know …

Yeah, someone was going to suffer for this. Suffer.

Just as Jason had expected, the person responsible was one Doctor Ian Menton, who was currently the only person in the warehouse, other than him.

Oh, sure, the bastard had to have taken some precautions, but no matter they were, what effort had been put into keep him safe, it wouldn’t do shit against Jason. Not now, not ever.

Reaching into his storage space, he pulled out several cursed knives drawn from the Round Table’s armory, various poisons, enchanted restraints … not even Houdini would be able to escape any one of his devices, let alone all of them.

[Flickering Dodge] to close the distance, a dagger cursed with Arcane Suppression and covered in a nasty, painful, poison that made it hard to concentrate, straight through the spine below the ribcage and Menton’s legs collapsed out from under him before he could even blink.

The man managed to roll around, pushing himself onto his back with his arms while Jason’s dagger flashed again and again, not just carving flesh but also puncturing the man’s mana pool, a soft glow emanating from the wounds. Coupled with the disorientation from the poison and the pain, that should be the end of any potential spellcasting.

“Ah, I did think that the Milan operation was handled badly, but I didn’t think that you’d come to see me so quickly,” Menton grinned, completely ignoring his injuries, “Mr. Rieper. It’s certainly better than just calling you ‘The Ghost’, though I’m guessing that’s an alias? Or are you young enough that your parents chose to name you after a video game character?

“Anyway, I was very impressed with how you managed to share your potion recipes, though I have to say, your branding hasn’t been on point since then. Insight was impressive, the guy who always knows shit the plebs don’t. The Ghost is awesome. But you should have just stuck to either, not switched.

“You know, they still haven’t found the bodies from the potion experiments, I …”

What the hell was that guy on about? No, scratch that, what was he on, period.

He was currently paralyzed from the waist down, bleeding both lifeblood and mana from a dozen injuries, with a terrifying enigma standing over him with murder in his eyes, and this chucklefuck was … chatting?

“I never did human experiments,” Jason stated. And even if human experimentation had been involved in their creation, the consequences had been erased alongside the timeline Isaac was from.

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Menton laughed, still seemingly ignorant of his current state, “You managed to come up with a series of fully mature, world-changing, potion recipes and didn’t test them before releasing them? I mean they obviously works, do you seriously expect me to believe they got that way without tests? Or that you released them without knowing how effective they were?”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Jason said, “WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?”

Another dagger manifested in his hand, which he hurled into the ground with enough force to have it slide into the metal up to the hilt. Right in front of the child sacrifice experiment.

“What the hell is this about? Why? What could you possibly have achieved?”

Somehow, getting yelled at seemed to hurt Menton more than getting stabbed had, “I want to leave behind a legacy. Science should be done without limits, without hesitation, because it will change the fucking world. You know those researchers in Germany? They’ve gotten a lot done, but even they have topics they haven’t even touched because they’re cowards!

“I’ve been researching things for years, and when I release my research, I’ll be immortal, living as long as humanity lives.”

Menton grinned.

“You know the Hague executes people nowadays, right?” Jason asked.

“Have you ever heard of Dr. Joseph Mengele?”

Jason shook his head, glancing around to make sure there was no trap imminent. There wasn’t, but why the fuck where they were still arguing about this?

“He was a Nazi war criminal who conducted ‘inhuman’ research on prisoners in concentration camps. And if they’d caught him, they’d have executed him. ‘cept he got away, you know.

“But they still use his research because it was useful. And that’s what I’ll become, the guy who got all the answers everyone else was too scared to do. Even if you throw a moralistic little fit and kill me here and now, you’re a man who wants to keep the world spinning. This research is incredible. It could save lives. It will save lives. You’ll release this research.

“And then, every time this stuff gets used, they’ll quote my research, they’ll mention my name. Like I said, I’ll never die, no matter what you do to me.”

Jesus fucking Christ on a pogo stick, what was wrong with this asshole! Was he ever going to stop bloody talking? Was this some elaborate “suicide by cop” thing? What the actual fuck?

There were plenty of things he could do here, plenty of ideas, places to stab, things to chop off, poisons that could cause incredible pain but not kill Menton after the antidotes were applied.

Hack and slash, unleash every dark thought he’d ever had upon who was likely one of the most deserving people in the world. Make him suffer until he died.

But at the end of the day, Jason didn’t want to carve this guy up like a Christmas turkey. Not if it didn’t happen naturally in the middle of a fight.

He had a full set of healing potions, from the green ones meant for scrapes to the ones used for absolute emergencies, the black kind. As the tagline for them went, if you were intact enough to drink one, you were intact enough to be kept alive.

But if you had to resort to this, you were guaranteed to not enjoy the experience as it glued together whatever still remained in any way conducive to survival, not comfort.

Whatever “I have no mouth but I must scream” mess that remained afterwards would definitely need the help of someone like Bailey to have any quality of life in the long term.

So, that was an option. One that turned his stomach.

There had to be a better way to do this, but he couldn’t think of something truly suitable.

Was the research even worth using? Could he just destroy it, knowing that God only knew how many people had suffered and died to create that knowledge, thereby throwing away the tiniest sliver of good their fate might have brought?

Or was it his job, his duty to ensure that such horrible deed never had any positive results, that anyone who ever contemplated stepping into Menton’s footsteps knew what they were doing would never end with anything good, that all they’d be doing was being awful people?

And would any pain he inflicted upon Menton ever matter, one way or the other?

What the fuck was he supposed to do?

It would have been a shitty choice even if the world hadn’t been ending.

So he took the easy way out, he kicked the matter upstairs. Let the others figure out what to do with the research, and come up with something suitably nasty end for Menton.

Also, when it came to punishment and just deserts, Arthur, Amy, and Isaac could be pretty creative when they wanted to be, downright evil when necessary. There would be a fitting and suitably creative solution out there, there just had to.

After making sure that the asshole was still tied up, he pulled out his phone.