Apocalypse Redux - Chapter 317: Final Round

Four days. Four bloody days. That was how long they’d been at this.

Isaac stumbled, planting Balmung’s tip in the ship’s deck and leaning on its hilt to keep standing. He was dead on his feet, the short bursts of sleep that should theoretically have sufficed being nowhere near enough. And there were very few people here who were in any better shape.

Most big trump cards had been spent in the opening hours, long cooldown [Skills], expensive expendable weapons, and more besides.

Alchemical weapons stockpiles that had taken years to build up, created by Professor Chandler, GSG-13’s Division S, which had been loaded up with all the finest Aspects and carefully managed builds utterly stuffed with high-power, long-cooldown [Skills], all in a scant few minutes. But they’d blown open all four of the beast’s eyes and filled the resulting holes with all manner of chemical weaponry.

Sadly, all members of that group had to sit out the entirety of the remaining fight.

Of all the S-Rankers present, only around a hundred were in a position to do anything to tank, slow, or otherwise lock down the Leviathan, and of those, there were quite a few that relied on a singular ability that couldn’t be rapidly used.

They’d lost eleven of the seventeen they’d started with, three carriers, and half their initial aircraft, but they were getting new fighters all the time.

And almost a hundred S-Rankers had died. There’d be hell to pay for that, later, their home nations would be out for blood, and some of those people had been the only thing keeping their region stable.

The whole thing had really been a weird game of chicken, where they’d had to have someone close enough to draw the snake’s attention, lest it target a population center or an auxiliary force, but not so close to be accidentally splattered. It was a game they lost. Too often.

But the monster wasn’t looking much better.

Countless holes covered its body, gashes cut into skin that had now become almost indestructible, and beneath those, the muscles had been shredded.

It might have taken a while, longer than anyone had expected, but they’d finally reached the point where they were regenerating so slowly that they’d been “regrowing but still non-functional” for over a day, now. It had just taken a grand total of nine kills on each eye to achieve that.

All around it, the sea was stained crimson, with the monster’s blood not just creating dark clouds, but actually transforming the water for kilometers around a deep, dark, red. A normal monster or human would have already bled out by now, but the Leviathan was continuously regenerating new blood, for some reason, it sure as shit could have survived completely exsanguinated.

There’d been an attempt to cut it in half, but that hadn’t worked either, as to their horror, they’d realized that the toughening field also worked on individual body segments. The closer they were to bisecting it, the tougher the area around the cut would become. Working together, Amy, Patrick, and Karl had managed to expose the spinal cord in one place, burned out the nerve bundle there, and then worked together to shove multiple nukes into the channel in the vertebra where it had been.

The damage had been horrendous, and the last three-quarters of the Leviathan’s body was almost immobile when compared to its previous fluidity, but the monster was not paralyzed, the way one might have hoped.

They’d chased and been chased all around the Pacific, trying to kill that damn thing, especially once it decided that something other than their ships needed to die. Some people had been stubborn about evacuating and apparently, a not-insignificant number of people being concentrated in one spot was enough to draw the monster’s ire.

Once all this was done, maps would have to be redrawn on a global scale.

The worst part was that this thing wasn’t even all that … well-endowed? in terms of powers. Most [Raid Bosses] had massive amounts of magic and general reality fuckery at their disposal, capable of unleashing various arcane abilities on a large scale.

This thing, on the other hand, just made the water actively hate living beings, breathed fire, and, oh yeah, it was huge. It had killed a few people directly, but everything else, from the countless ships it had literally rolled over to those killed by tidal waves, had been mostly accidental.

A regular Demon Lord with its standard powerset blown up to anything close to the size of Leviathan, or even just four or five kilometers in height with the same physical proportions as the standard one, could have scorched an area the size of Australia clean by now.

And if, gods forbid, it had been one like Iammax?

Leviathan was a demon, of course, specifically, the Prince of Envy, but thankfully limited in magical ability.

The other Deadly Sins were also around, but only the Princes of Pride, Wrath, and Greed were [World Bosses], those of Gluttony, Sloth and Lust were “merely” Tier 10 [Raid Bosses], comparable to Iammax in power.

Of course, the power of different [World Bosses] was likely more concentrated, while the Leviathan had the mother of all wide-range powers.

Oceania, as in, the entirety of the islands referred to by that name, was gone, just plain gone. Australia’s shape had been altered, large chunks of its northern coast washed away, but evacuations there had been thankfully easy, its population had simply headed a hundred kilometers inland.

China had also been hit hard from day 3 onwards, when the Philipines had been effectively reduced to nothing. Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and Vietnam had come under fire at the same time, and even India, Russia, the US, and Canada, as well as the South American and African coastlines, had caught some flack.

The only place that had survived relatively unscathed had been Singapore, which had laid the groundwork for a citywide shield a while ago, and had thankfully agreed to serve as a safe staging ground/dry dock for the duration of the conflict.

A more power that functioned in the more immediate area might have been a bigger threat to the people attempting to kill the [World Boss], but it sure as hell wouldn’t have caused that kind of widespread destruction.

Not to mention that another nine new volcanoes had grown out of the sea floor. Knocking those down was easy, shearing off enough of its top for water to flood the lava channels and plugging them, but there was one small extra issue with this. The damn things grew back. The pressure of the magma would crack the solid rock in the channels, push up, solidify once more, a little higher this time, over and over again until the volcano erupted. Again.

And they still hadn’t seen how hard it would be to finish off the current bastard.

A loud, metallic, tearing noise followed by a loud crunch drew Isaac’s attention, causing him to turn to look at the Ting Juan, one of the two Chinese battleships.

It had fired what, for some reason, was almost a one-to-one copy of the English Eschaton shells, straight into the Leviathan’s mouth. It had done decent damage, but the recoil had torn the entire turret off its mounting and since the Ting Yuan had been facing the monster bow-on, the thing behind it, the thing it smashed into, was the bridge. Oof, that had been a mistake.

The ship had also drawn the blinded beast’s ire.

Turning hard to starboard allowed all guns to draw a bead on the titan as it bore down on the comparatively small vessel, and an entire salvo of Eschaton shells destroyed every heavy weapon that remained the Ting Yuan, but tore the fuck out of their foe.

And then, the ship was gone, crushed under the monster’s bulk.

“Are we ready for the orbital bombardment?” Isaac pressed again. There was a hard rule against putting weapons able to target the planet in orbit, but just like all the other regulations, they’d gone out the window once the true danger of the Leviathan had become clear.

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Setting that up properly wasn’t a quick process, though. In theory, it should have been done by simply flying stuff up to orbit and dropping it, but it wasn’t quite that simple. Proper targeting, something to prevent the projectiles from burning up in the atmosphere, a way to make the damn snake sit still long enough for the attack to hit, and overall, it was a hell of a lot more complicated than Isaac had ever imagined.

“Not yet,” one of the engineers responsible for the creation of that weapons system replied, his tone making it clear that he was doing so through gritted teeth.

Isaac sighed and hauled himself back onto his feet, standing straight while Balmung left behind a massive gash in the deck of the ship in the process.

Oops … blame the snake, somehow, maybe?

He jumped over the side of the ship, took one, two, three stumbling steps across the air, and finally withdrew the massive, somewhat sharp, slab of steel he’d been given from a storage ring. It was about as large as it could have been without snapping like a twig from him accelerating, around twenty meters in total.

He charged at the monster, triggered [I Am The Sword], blew clean through the monster, and then let himself drop onto the nearest ship to rest for another five minutes. Five minutes of rest, five minutes of not having to run straight at a planet-wrecking beast, five bloody min- …

Isaac awoke with a start as his head bounced off the deck. Falling asleep on his feet … that wasn’t exactly great. One more attack run, that would take him in the direction of Singapore, and then he’d find a bed to collapse into.

For a brief moment, he considered waiting until his mana had filled up entirely, but then again, he was utterly shattered at the moment. So he turned, blew back through the monster, and then limp-flew through the skies, stumbling through Singapore’s shield half an hour later.

The space immediately behind the shield was a scene straight out of a horror movie, covered in hastily errected shelters, medical tents, and all sorts of other constructions, but also, well, everyone who was no longer able to stand in the line of fire. Some were simply exhausted, just like him, while others, others had been all but torn to shreds.

Modern medicine was a wonderous thing, with most standard injuries being healable with a mere potion, and anything that would have previously landed a person in the hospital could be fixed by a wave of a doctor’s hand.

But the [System] had also brought with it countless ways to be injured in ways that would never have been possible before, not to mention that it let people remain alive with damage that would have killed a standard person a hundred times over, in agony that no one should endure.

And hellfire, well, it excelled in doing both those things.

Isaac barely managed to find himself a cot that wasn’t needed before he collapsed, for good this time.

***

After sleeping for longer than he had in years, Isaac didn’t even wake up on his own, he got prodded awake via the party. Apparently, things were ready on multiple fronts.

Stagmer had moved to Singapore for the duration of this fight, and he’d finished preparing some stuff, and the preparations for the orbital bombardment had apparently also been finalized.

He dipped into the blacksmith shop, thanked the master, and headed up into orbit atop a pillar of flame, carrying a handful of what seemed like chopsticks in his hands, whatever guilt he’d been feeling at not using [I Am The Sword] at every opportunity washing away. All of his tiredness had melted away during his rest, and compared to just a few hours ago, it felt almost as though [Final Defiance] were flowing through his body once more.

Up above, several massive metal gantries had been slapped together with a whole bunch of vacuum-resistant tech, blinking lights, and computer screens, with several metal rods suspended in their centers by a magnetic field.

“We’re ready,” one of the engineers reported to General Gibbs, a piece of information that was automatically disseminated to everyone else who needed to know.

Isaac gazed down at the mess below, the immense snake writhing in the ocean, visible from literal outer space. Time to finish that thing off. Hopefully.

Tying down the monster fell to an entire battalion of mages, plus Arthur and Yoo-jin who provided the window of opportunity. Massive ice palace dropped on the beast’s head, giant sword summoned to pin it down, again, and that was when the binding magic was applied.

They’d burned enough mana, [Skills], and materials to hold the snake back for close to half a day, this would have to work or they’d be up shit creek without a paddle.

“Fire.”

The order came while Isaac was still contemplating the situation, and the first gantry came apart as it unleashed its payload. Then the next one, and the next, with the latter ones using a wider pattern to catch the snake even if it should dodge.

He also joined in, throwing the entire handful of “needles” he’d collected from Stagmer.

They weren’t needles, obviously, but no one would ever have expected them to be what they actually were. Copies of Jingu Bang. Vastly inferior copies, obviously, unstable, less durable, unable to ever shrink back down if they ever increased in size, and so on.

But they’d hold long enough to slap that overgrown reptile around a little.

The first salvo impacted with the force of a meteor, which the kinetic projectiles, also known as “rods from god”, technically were.

Boom, you fucker!

Hit after hit shook the Leviathan, flesh tearing and bone crunching, but the monster was still alive. The same went for the second one, the inferior staves, and the third one.

But by the time the fourth was on its final descent, the Leviathan had already broken free, twisted its head to face the sky, and unleashed a massive plume of fire that melted the projectiles right out of the sky. Obviously, the molten metal still hit, but it was vastly less damaging than it would have been in solid form.

Fuck. That. Thing.

However, the Leviathan wasn’t done, surging upwards, head going straight for the origin of the rods from god.

Regular snakes could rear up to a full third of their body off the ground, and with the Leviathan’s length, that would have allowed them to reach up to 150 kilometers into the sky. Or so Isaac’s estimate had been. As it turned out, if the Leviathan managed to wind its body around an underwater volcano or wedge itself in a canyon, down there, it could get considerably further.

It still didn’t get anywhere close to the full 300 kilometers it would have taken to physically snap up the launch platforms, but the plume of fire did.

Blue flames washed across the entire group, with only those lucky enough to be near Isaac being safe within a bubble the flames seemed to be bending around.

Oh … verdammt!

Isaac realized what was about to happen almost too late. If the snake let itself fall back down from that height, goodbye … a good third of humanity, probably.

“Leviathan is about to crash into the planet, I can stop it, but I need full cooperation!”

And then, he began barking orders, hoping, praying that he’d bought himself enough trust and goodwill to get the support he needed.

A portal flashed open high below him, showing the snake from below. He sped towards it and blew through it, phasing to avoid hitting the atmosphere and being slowed down by the air resistance, and moments later, he’d once again left the atmosphere, flew into another portal.

For a second time, he appeared near the surface of the ocean, giving him even more space to accelerate.

Then, the supporting [Skills] began to start landing.

Seven uses of [Instant Acceleration] granted an instantaneous boost to his speed, [Pinpoint Strike] helped him with his targeting, [Skillful Adhesion] would help him stick to the monster’s hide, and dozens more were stacked onto him.

Isaac aimed straight for the hole the crazy mages had carved into the Leviathan’s neck, around twenty kilometers below the head, and triggered [I Am The Sword] in its “pushing” configuration. The flesh around the hole was already practically indestructible, but between the durability, adhesion, and the [Skill] reducing his penetrative capacity, he knew he wouldn’t blast straight through.

This never would have worked if the monster had stayed on Earth, he wouldn’t have been able to get the right angle, and even if he had, he wouldn’t have tried flinging the monster into the void because it would have been too tricky and risky.

But with how far the monster had already extended itself, it had been the only option. Note to self, never lure the Leviathan towards the sky.

For 0.13 seconds, Isaac was immobile and immovable, even with the entire weight of the massive monster trying to pull him back down, and during that time, he managed to move almost a thousand kilometers skywards, tearing it completely out of the atmosphere and utterly shattering the underwater structures the monster had used to anchor itself.

He slowed down ever so slightly to separate from the monster, and yet another portal zapped him back to the planet’s surface, so he could accelerate again.

The Leviathan twisted to try and avoid a repeat performance, but it was too slow, with Isaac slamming into place like a meteor, far faster, this time.

Another one and a half thousand kilometers into the air, and Isaac had enough mana for one more use of his [Skill], and he was given yet another portal.

After the final impact, the Leviathan was left tumbling through space, but already slowing down as gravity began to exert its exorable pull. If they failed now … they were fucked.

But massive weavings of magic below began to counter the motion, reducing gravity and pushing at the snake, and hundreds of exhaust trails began to draw lines in the atmosphere.

“Have you ever heard of the Orion Drive?” Karl suddenly asked out of the blue, “I bet its designers never expected the first proper use of the concept to be used to throw a snake around.”

Blow after blow, they kept going, kept pushing the monster higher and higher, but Isaac had stopped really paying attention to the thing after barely a minute. It was no longer a problem, at least not one he could really help with. Or wanted to think about.

Karl talking about the history of spaceflight and the concept of detonating nuclear weaponry at an appropriate distance behind a spacecraft to provide acceleration was far more pleasant.

Eventually, they managed to push the thing to escape velocity whether they wanted to or not, but they kept the last few missiles in flight and took the time to steer them into existing holes in the beast’s hide.

Isaac had been so enraptured by watching the display that he’d practically missed the kill notification.