Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 146: Interlude Demons run when a good Man goes to War

Ten minutes previously

Paperwork was the bane of all civilized societies.

Paperwork could never completely be done because there was always more to do just around the corner.

Paperwork was a foe not even magic could beat.

And yet, paperwork was a necessary, nay, vital part of modern life, something you could not ignore. You just had to suck it up, do it, and then do it all over again as more accumulated, until the day you shuffled off this mortal coil.

Bailey reminded him of that fact for what felt like the millionth time in the last three hours. That was how long he’d been working on filling out the paperwork for the Winter Solstice Event that was expected to take place in little over a week.

He longed to be out there, actually doing the experiments, but the idea of professors personally conducting experiments instead of being forced to have their assistants do them sadly only existed in the realm of fiction.

At least with most of his team gone, they weren’t adding to his already massive pile of paperwork. Isaac was in Camelot, Amy was in New York, Raul had a family thing and Patrick and Karl had decided to take this as an opportunity to get a little vacation in. After all, with half their colleagues gone, there weren’t any big cooperative projects they were needed for and the Winter Event looming on the horizon, now was a good time for that.

In fact, once he was done with this pile, Bailey was also going to go out for a little self-care. Visit the huge local waterpark and the attached spa with his husband, followed by a nice dinner at a fancy restaurant, then they could see where the evening went.

Maybe he could even pick up a good bottle of wine on the way ba- … he paused for a moment, looking around in alarm.

What had just happened?

Nothing had.

But something had tipped him off. Something was off. He’d incorporated sensory organs from countless different creatures into his body, even gaining a part of that ‘sixth sense’ that animals seemed to have with regards to natural disasters, among other things.

There had to have been an incident that had prompted his hypervigilance, even if his conscious mind failed to perceive it.

He strained his senses as much as he could, but there was nothing there. There were no weird sounds, no smells, nothing setting off his electroception and mana sight, nothing.

Perhaps it really was time to take a break, given that he was jumping at shadows? Shaking his head, Bailey went back to doing paperwork … for about thirty seconds before something else happened, passing just under the level he could consciously perceive.

There was a problem here, but what?

He pushed himself to his feet, straining his senses to the utmost as he made to leave his office.

Sound? Nothing out of the ordinary. Footsteps, muttered conversations, people fighting in the summoning rooms, and so on, and so forth.

Sight? Well, he was in the basement and only saw a small corridor from his position, so obviously nothing.

Smell? Nothing, except for the realization that they desperately needed to deep clean this place one of these days.

He continued to slowly move down the corridor, trying to pay attention to everything. Everything. Barely ten seconds in, he was already getting a headache, but if this turned out to be nothing in the end, he’d be glad, because it meant that there wasn’t a problem he needed to deal with.

And then he finally figured out what was wrong. The vibrations from footsteps moving around the building. Sure, there were plenty of those to go around, but these didn’t have the sound that normally accompanied them. And even those footsteps were muffled, like the person walking was the weight of a child, but that wasn’t possible, given how far each footfall was from the previous one. Now that he was paying attention to them and morphing more and more of his senses to be able to detect subtle vibrations, even these tiny details were perceptible.

It was weird as all get out.

Now, there were some people who did walk similar to that, Isaac for example. He naturally walked softly even when not trying to sneak around. This, on the other hand, was someone actively suppressing the sound of their footfalls, and even dampening the vibrations of their feet striking the ground. People were sneaking around here, and that was a really bad sign. There were innocent explanations for this, at least in theory, but in practice? He just wasn’t willing to take that kind of chance, especially with so many vulnerable students around.

Bailey pulled out his phone and snapped off a message to Polizeirätin Eisenberg, his team’s police contact. Normally, texts took a while to be read, but he knew she practically lived next to her phone, and even had a [Skill] to automatically read any and all incoming texts. She’d get the message in a timely fashion and send in the professionals.

It might have been a tad premature, he wasn’t even sure if there was a problem yet, but he was willing to take the chance of calling a full alarm over nothing.

Slipping his phone back into his pocket, he realized the soundless footsteps were converging into one location. Sadly, he realized just what was going on, as said location told him what the mysterious visitors, no, intruders, were after. The vaults.

As their material resources had grown greater and greater as they continued to kill monsters, their extradimensional storage spaces had proven insufficient to store it all.

Thankfully, adding another, smaller subterranean level hadn’t been that hard. The biggest hurdle had been cracking open the heavily reinforced floor to add stairs so they could actually get at the bottom of the building, but even that had been as simple as asking Isaac to it, then retreating to a safe distance. Then, a massive vault had been added, one that most likely put Fort Knox to shame, with the same going for the door that led into the stairs. It had seemed like overkill for a good long while, but then Isaac had showed up with the one-of-a-kind material that was Demon Lord’s Blood.

And just outside that door, the phantom footsteps had converged.

Bailey changed the direction of his movement to the area, doing everything he could do to not change his walk from slow, yet normal walk he’d employed thus far. Nothing would be more suspicious than someone trying to sneak around because there was no way in hell they wouldn’t hear him.

As he approached the last corner, he switched from focusing on sensing vibrations to sensing air currents. Sure, there were absolutely no noises coming from the corridor, it was as silent as the cold vacuum of space, clearly a [Skill] at work, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t anything to detect. The powdered concrete hanging in the air, the sudden shivers in the air as though someone were banging on a hard surface, though the absence of sound was making it hard to determine what precisely was going on. Regardless, all of the odd footsteps were now there, and the only way out was past Bailey.

Not only that, but he was now also absolutely certain that the people in there were going to be a problem. Stretching his arm, he slapped the ‘emergency alert’ button on the wall, the one that told everyone to get the hell out of the building, setting off a screeching alarm. He had no doubt that the people around that corner had noticed he was there and were about to jump him.

Hopefully, between the alarm and him telling him the cops had already been called, he could convince them to leave. These were almost certainly thieves, not vicious killers, and if there was no way for them to get their loot, they’d likely just leave, choosing not to throw good money after bad.

The air shuddered again as someone suddenly appeared in front of him, a half-magical, half technological thing with electricity crackling around it.

Even before the person had rounded the corner, Bailey had activated both [Physical Boost] and [Neural Overclock], both [Skills] massively boosting him, increasing his thinking speed, perception, strength and celerity.

It was like every pre-[System] stimulant had been injected straight into his brain at levels that would have ended any pre-[System] human a hundred times over. Heart thudding like a jackhammer, veins straining to explode from the sheer force of the beats, neurons pushed to the brink of outright burning up, but it would be fine. They were something he’d had to adjust and mold his body to be able to withstand every time the [Skills] levelled, but he’d managed just fine.

“Look, the police are already on their way, just get out of here and you can probably get away.” Bailey said, hand raised up to his chest, empty palms facing outwards. Defensive, showing he was unarmed, but not the complete surrender that raising his hands over his head would have been. Hopefully, this guy would just run past him and leave, and that would have been that.

Instead, the guy raised what he was pretty sure was a massively souped up taser, something that would have been incredibly dangerous if not fatal to anyone under Level 40. Oh dear.

Bailey’s standard form was a rubber man with massively flexible, well, everything, interwoven with demonic flesh for its resistance to fire and pockets of Acid Slime substance to absorb and thereby block corrosive substances to ensure that nothing cauterized potential injuries.

The bouncy, malleable flesh made him functionally immune to blunt impacts while a series of small armor plates under his skin worked to ensure that cutting or piercing impacts would push him away rather than tearing into him.

Overall, it was a great standard form to take and resist surprise attacks, but it wasn’t that great in a fight.

However, ‘not that great’ wasn’t the same thing as ‘utterly useless.

His right hand snapped forwards, stretching like something straight out of a cartoon, surprising the intruder, but not to such a degree that he forgot about the weapon he was holding. Both prongs leaped onwards, slamming into the fist and discharging enough electricity to act as an impromptu arc welder … and was sucked into the fist like the contents of a beer can vanishing into the belly of a frat boy. The fist continued, smashing the “taser” to bits, them slamming into the wielder’s chest and discharging enough energy to almost kill them. Almost.

Bailey’s analysis didn’t quite allow him to outright see Stats, but he could perfectly analyze people’s metabolism and had [Healer] as a starter [Class], so using a carefully measured, non-lethal amount of electricity was easy enough.

Even as his first enemy fell to the ground in a heap, unconscious, Bailey stood forwards and rounded the corner, cracking his knuckles, strengthened by his self-biokinesis to echo like a gunshot, the intimidation effect further amplified that in those handful of steps it had taken to step into view, he’d bulked up to an inhuman degree, now standing so tall his head nearly scraped the ceiling, and knuckles grew nasty bone spikes. His clothes, meanwhile, stretched out thanks to a [Skill] he’d grabbed to ensure he didn’t go broke every time there was an incident while he wore one of good suits, but even so, there were limits to said [Skill], the shirt stretching to the point where it looked like his buttons were about to turn into supersonic projectiles from the strain.

“Now, get out. Cops are on the way, and I won’t stop you if you just leave.” Bailey rumbled, his voice sounding as if it were coming from the depths of the underworld itself. Hopefully, that would get them out of here. They could even take their buddy with them, so long as there wasn’t a fight in a building that still wasn’t evacuated.

Regardless, there were very few things that would make him raise his fists in anger, and Isaac dealt with most of those things without him needing any help.

But Isaac wasn’t here, nor were any of the other heavy hitters who usually worked here, no one except him. If these guys turned this into a fight, then he’d teach them that waiting until the best publicly known fighter on the team wasn’t there wouldn’t help them one iota.

The would-be thieves glanced back at him, standing in front of a half demolished armored door, somehow looking like children caught with their hands in the cookie jar despite the seriousness of the situation.

He gazed out at them, analyzing them, and they returned the favor. Metabolic rate, physical [Skills], some estimation as to their Aspects and favorite elements to use, all of that his eyes saw.

As for them, they gained far less. His own [Adaptive Information Defense] started out massively effective, but grew weaker and weaker the more his opponent knew about him. On anyone else on the team, it would have been worse than useless. They all had rather static ability sets that only grew in scopes, but didn’t change all that much. Not so for him. He was constantly changing, evolving his powers, incorporating every new trick and biological sample he found, for he was the [Embodiment of Evolution], always shifting, always growing, never static.

Overhead, the sound of feet hammering into the ground started to quiet down slightly as people started to leave the building.

As Bailey glanced up, the first of the thieves attacked. Short range teleport, temporary movement speed increase, [Powerful-Piercing-Sundering Strike] … and a massive combat knife was sticking out of his chest, stabbed all the way into his heart.

The man was experienced enough to know that that sucker punch wasn’t necessarily instantly fatal and was leaping backwards to avoid any last-ditch counterattacks. What he clearly hadn’t expected was for his foe to be utterly unfazed, though.

Bailey slapped him with a hand the size of a wheelbarrow, growing nasty spikes through his palm. These subsequently hammered through the thief and pierced into the wall behind the man, the spikes slightly adjusting turn into a copy of a burrowing monster’s, allowing them to shred the concrete with casual ease, then remaining firmly stuck as they turned back to solid bone. The end result left the man nailed to the wall like a butterfly, large bony plated forming on the spikes’ ends as they detached from his palm, ensuring his foes couldn’t just slide their friend off to free him. He’d live, but he was unlikely to be happy about it.

Sadly though, it seemed that was the end of the easy victories. The four remaining thieves had seen what he was capable of, that he was willing to fight, and that he was perfectly able to tank a hit that would be lethal on anyone without a series blood vessels turned tube-hearts, a design ruthlessly stolen from wasps and their relatives, as well as countless interconnections able to bypass potentially damaged vital organs which he could close at will. A knife to the heart was hardly fun, but not exactly dangerous.

They began to run, leaping past him and sprinting off into the distance. A suddenly appearing tail caught the last one, wrapping around him and hammering him into the ground with bone-cracking force, but the thief phased out of the hold and ran, scrambling after the rest.

Bailey took off, hurrying after them at a measured pace. Enough to keep up the pressure, but not enough to potentially force them to take hostages.

… that’s when an nearly-dead body entered the range of his [Aura]. Heart stopped, electrical burns radiating out from two small stab wounds in the chest of the … was that a STUDENT?

Nearly killing anyone was bad enough, but this was a clear case of someone having used that overpowered taser on a person who in no way warranted such a measure, and an innocent kid at that. A kid that would have been dead for good pre-[System], as well as in the hands of most post-[System] medical professionals.

Thankfully, and damned lucky for the kid, he wasn’t just any person. Even though he wasn’t a medical professional, he could heal. With no brain death, and the heart having barely stopped for two minutes, he could fix that with just his [Aura]. Especially as the injury itself had left the almost-corpse with comparatively little damage. All he had to do was restart the heart and nervous [System], a simple get-better energy being sent through his [Aura] was enough as Bailey sped up massively, body changing to grow faster and more optimized for speed.

He was willing to let them all go, the people who’d actually attacked him were out for the count. But hurting his students … nope. Not happening. NOT HAPPENING!

“All students evacuate!” he bellowed, loud enough to make the floor shake even two floors up “Armed and dangerous criminals on the premises!”

He exploded into the lobby mere meters after the last thief, turning his left arm back into rubber before throwing it after the furthest man and grabbing his collar. The man immediately leaped behind a column, dragging the arm behind himself, then wrapped the limb around the concrete pillar in a cartoonish fashion. Normally, it would have been a problem, but Bailey just dislodged the limb, turning into a flailing tentacle covered in glue and nasty contact poisons.

Being detached from his body, he couldn’t control it, but there was a way around that. Lizards could detach their tails to distract predators, and make them flop around for a while. And he’d engineered his body to be a hell of a lot more capable than a mere lizard’s tail.

The victim of the suddenly wildly flailing limb managed to escape, but still looked sick from the poison that now flowed through his veins.

A hail of spells and bullets slammed into Bailey’s chest, flinging him backwards and to the ground.

Even more mana went down the drain as he shifted again, his entire lower body turning into a series of octopus limbs, each covered with the cling pads of a magically empowered gecko, anchoring him to the floor and ceiling as he flew backwards. As they reached the maximum amount they could normally stretch, he turned them to rubber as well. He continued to fly backwards, but his limbs began to stretch like a rubber band, flinging him at his foes like a rock fired out of a slingshot.

They closest man turned to look at him, horror visible even through the eye-slits of the mask as the one-ton octopus-rock-giant hybrid came down on top of him, another bone spike subsequently nailing him to the ground.

Sadly, it was so dusty out here that octopus body parts didn’t really work, so he switched back to normal legs, clothes likewise reconstituting themselves.

And then everything above the diaphram vanished as a pair of guns flashed far more brightly than they ever should have been able to, twin cooldown skills hammering near-hypersonic rounds through him, the shockwaves alone shattering many of the windows in sight.

The rest of his body sat down, hard, landing on its ass.

Well. That happened.

Bailey swore internally as he pushed more and more flesh out of the pocket dimension that held his surplus mass, as well as his brain, reconstitution his body. Sadly, his brain was connected to his outside body near the skull, as having the brain close to the sensory organs was important for processing speed, so he had lost control over his physical form when his skull had been obliterated.

That had been … way to close. Having everything that was “him” in the real world destroyed would kill him, and the same went for him being forced to keep drawing on surplus flesh until his brain was back in the real world and then getting shot in the head.

But he was still here, and he would rain hellfire upon these fuckers for that.

He surged onwards after them the instant his head has regrown, a series of quill-like spikes growing out of already tense muscle tissue, then being launched like a series of javelins as he flexed his forearm. As they left his flesh, they grew a series of fins and a single sensory organ similar to an eye, allowing them to steer themselves straight at their target like a heat-seeking missile. This was his only active core [Skill], one that allowed him to use a single major shift using mana from the [Skill’s] pool and not having to even pay attention to what he was doing.

One man dodged, phasing into the ground. The next took an arrow to the gluteus maximus and stumbled but circled around to get into an advantageous position.

And the last was practically riddled with quills and fell to the ground, unmoving. Bailey was painfully aware of the fact that he’d feel utterly awful about that later, but that was later.

Now was, well, now. And now was time to make sure everyone knew that running around nearly killing students was well so far beyond the pale that he couldn’t even think of a metaphor that adequately described his rage.

He lunged at the spot where number one emerged from the ground once again but dodged, not that that lasted him very long.

Bailey’s legs melted together into the tail of a massive serpent, wrapping around the man and squeezing hard enough to turn his ribcage into a loose collection of splinters. A slight application of his [Aura] pulled one of the shards free from the man’s heart, then fixed the hole, but everything else was something this bastard would just have to live with.

Still keeping a hold of the foe he’d caught, he turned, using the tail to raise his torso several meters above the ground as black fire began to drip from his outstretched hands.

The whole world knew that the Demon Lord slain in Korea had dropped three Aspects.

The first had gone to Guildmaster Seon.

The second had gone to General Park of the South Korean military.

And the third had been used by Isaac, but he hadn’t actually used it where others could so, so no one knew what he’d done with it.

So, when black flames dripped from the hands of the terrifying snake man that loomed over the final member of the thieves … no robbery crew was more appropriate, Bailey now realized, the man all but shat his pants and surrendered without a second thought.

Sirens began to close in, and Bailey shifted back into a smaller form, still excellent for combat but one that no longer risked him being mistaken for a monster and attacked. It was also great for using without having to constantly spend mana to optimize his form mid-fight. After all, his mana pool was almost empty. He couldn’t afford to run empty, not when there might be more of these assholes around.

Also, there were many, many cell phone cameras being pointed at him, standing there in torn clothing, covered in dust and blood spatters.

The instant the police had taken custody of the robbers, he’d call his husband because if Gabriel found out about this from bloody TikTok or the news instead of him, Bailey was going to be in the doghouse for the rest of the year. Then, he’d call back everyone to ensure that any follow-up stunts would fail and think of something to prevent something like that from ever happening again. Also, he desperately needed to directly check up on the student who’d gotten tased and stuffed in a broom closet. But first, to give these utter monsters over to people who weren’t tempted to wring their necks.