The Discarded, Half-Eaten Apple Core New Life

The Apocalypse after the Apocalypse, the one your Four Horsemen wished your Armageddon smelled like.

The mega volcano was still erupting even months after the bubble vanished. The smoke clouds had almost covered the entire world, dooming Earth to a new "Little Ice Age". At least that's how a NASA white paper called the phenomenon. We were flying over Brazil's central plateau. Around us, a stretch of sky roughly eight miles wide and twenty miles long remained thankfully clear of smoke. It was the area I could influence using my Domain beacons from the land train (no longer land, really) and the dirigibles (everything was a dirigible).

I stopped along the way to pick up people. With the loss of sunlight also came the loss of the means of subsistence. The Infernali hunted people, people couldn't eat the Infernali, people couldn't grow crops, animals didn't have grass to graze on (normal grass, please).

People got desperate. When our shiny steel train floated down from the sky riding on a sunbeam caused by the smoke-less patch of sky I made, they quickly sworn their souls and their firstborn children to me in exchange for a ticket to Speranza. The City of Hole (wait, that was a typo. The city of Hole was the previous one). I mean, the City of Hope was never more deserving of its moniker.

So Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and other cities became deserted as the survivors living there all joined us. Another year passed. Another five levels deferred.

> To evolve your species, you need to rescue 4,000,000 humans and keep them safe from harm for 1 year. No time limit.

> Current tally: 1,532,112 / 4,000,000

We had rescued only sixty thousand people in Brazil. But they counted once before the passing of the new year and once more after the new year. It was the year of our Lord 2089 now. Year six of the World Tree.

Speaking of the damn oar-shaped ash tree seed, its sprout was breaking ground now. Hooray! Some tiny scrawny roots were poking out of the seed too only 194 more years to go. Hope we don't find any flying world boss that had a taste for metal. Like a rust monster on steroids and wings.

Oh, boy. I had to jinx it.

Anyway. The population of Speranza had reached more than half a million people, and I had about twenty thousand living on the land... flying train. Floating train.

Speranza had changed a lot in these two years since I transformed it into my Inner World. It had 615.7 square miles at the start (the area of a circle with 14 miles of radius), and the presence of Valhalla and Flkvangr doubled that. This would then increase by 1% every year. 1231 square miles at year zero, then I gained 12 square miles at the first birthday, and now 13 extra square miles. This extra area grew outside the city walls, stretching the boundary of the Demiplane and creating new land out of whole cloth. We had now almost 500 yards of land all around the city and the fantastic locations.

I had not bothered leaving eyes behind in North America. My bases there were either destroyed or out of range of the DCSC. It was just the 115 wagons of the blimp train and the six Hugging Mommas escorting us.

The smoke cloud settled at about eight thousand feet above the ground. Above that, the sun shone strong. Stronger even. To add insult to injury, volcanic ash is harmful to the ozone layer. The mega volcano did more than a billion old refrigerators could ever do and fucked with that too. UV radiation from the Sun bathed the Earth or not, given that the smoke was blocking it unchallenged.

And just like a TV infomercial, the thing didn't stop shouting "but there's more!". If you end your world now, we will also throw in a magnetic field shift!

Yeah. The big-ass hole the big asshole of a jellyfish demon created in North America disturbed the magma flows of the planet so much it hindered the spin of the Earth's molten metal core. We were flying over Sao Paulo, Brazil and I could see dazzling auroras in the sky as hyper charged cosmic particles crashed into our atmosphere.

Compasses were all but useless now. The magnetic field had more swirls than a DUI driver trying to create Latte Art.

> To evolve your species, you need to rescue 4,000,000 humans and keep them safe from harm for 1 year. No time limit.

> Current tally: 2,093,342 / 4,000,000

Another year passed. It was 2090 now. North America didn't exist anymore. We had Northeastern America and Northwestern America now, instead. A channel linked the Arctic ocean to the Caribbean Sea, going around the caldera of the mega volcano.

A supernova's radiation blasted Earth. NASA files had predicted it, it was the star V Sagittate. It didn't make things much worse but some of my computers on the floating train needed to be Replicated and replaced. I had backups of the data in the inner World so no loss but time.

Magma flowing down from the volcano sped up the movement of the North American Tectonic plate (which was now split in two), making California move toward Japan at a breakneck (for a tectonic plate) speed of ten inches per year, while the east coast (with the volcano) remained in place. The pacific plate was subsuming underneath the fast-moving plate, causing all sorts of Earthquakes.

The people of California (if any survived this far) were finally seeing their insurance premiums becoming unpayable because of the number of earthquake claims should be filed.

Meanwhile, I really hope Florida Man could Unite the Lost on his own. Whenever I took my floating train above the cloud coverage, I saw massive swirls above the Caribbean and Florida. Not to mention the rivers of lava that were attempting to bridge the pond and reunite the USA with the British motherland. Or what was left of Europe after the tsunamis (yes, plural) hit. The Netherlands dams finally gave up and no boy could plug that kind of hole.

Speaking of Europe, some Icelandic volcanos and Mt. Vesuvius also joined in the merry "God said he wouldn't flood this shit with water anymore, let's fuck Earth with lava then" party.

We reached Argentina with the country almost underwater, collected another 20k people in the southern triangle countries including Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay, and moved to Africa. Oh, wait. No. Let's hit Antarctica and grab ourselves some Emperor penguins.

*

*

I got my penguins, hundreds of them along with several families of seals but at a horrible cost. They now lived in a deck of the flying train turned terrarium.

South Africa, the country, was underwater. While the volcanic ash would eventually cool the world, all the heat the magma brought from the surface actually heated the world by a dozen degrees, with the ash doing its best to greenhouse the shit out of it. Antarctica's millennia-old glaciers had thawed and raised the ocean levels by a few yards.

The Amazon rainforest didn't die from a lack of sunlight. Before that could happen, it died instead because the rising ocean levels put thousands of square miles underwater with each foot it rose. Turns out the rainforest basin was very, very low in altitude all the way. The city of Manaus, for example, was only 300 feet above sea level despite being 1,000 miles from the mouth of the Amazonas river. Most of the rainforest died of water salinity as the rising ocean levels fucked the ecosystem.

We went north across Africa, keeping the train steady and slow along the middle and sending Hugging Mommas (with some relay blimps to keep DCSC connectivity) to search and rescue people. I got a few thousand on the southern part of the continent, mostly isolated tribal people whose warrior cultures allowed them to adapt fast to the marauding Infernali. Then, ahead of the train, Mount Nyiragongo decided it didn't want to be left out in the great volcano "fuck Earth" party. It erupted like the whiny potty-mouthed bitch it was, spilling lava all over the place. I ended up going right and over Madagascar.

Middle East was a wasteland. I mean, it was a wasteland even before Pitsmouth was founded. People here had killed each other out or died to the Infernali decades ago.

September came and a massive solar eclipse hit Europe. The UK became completely dark. Not that it made much difference with the massive smoke clouds covering the whole planet.

I flew over eastern Europe, searching for people.

One day, I was over Ukraine, I think, Rta gave me a warning.

"Lord, do not go further north. I sense the aura of a great enemy."

"Another world boss?"

"No. Not one of the Infernali. Jormungandr. I sense the foul aura of the Midgard Serpent. It encircles the area you know as the British Isles. It is dormant but I fear it might awaken if it senses your divine aura."

Jormungandr, Valhalla, World Trees, the last Valkyrie. I was sensing a theme here. "Rta, how did this world end? Was it Ragnark?"

"I'm afraid so. Asgard has fallen and Yggdrasil was finally devoured by Niddhogg. Without the world tree, the Nine Realms are adrift. Jormungandr is dying, I can tell. Thor must've dealt it a deadly blow. I do not know where the Aesir are. I'm afraid they are gone."

Damn.

"Okay, Rta. I won't go to Europe."

I instead set course for Asia. Unknown to me, the British Isles suffered less than the rest of the world exactly because of Jormungandr's presence.

*

*

I had to avoid Russia altogether, instead going through Pakistan and India. The reason was simple. The increased volcanic activity revived the famous Siberian Traps of the early Triassic period, turning the Russian territory a major hotpot of volcanic activity. The tectonic fissures at the northern Eurasian continent cooked most of the Russian territory and all of northern China.

2091 started, the last decade in the century.

> To evolve your species, you need to rescue 4,000,000 humans and keep them safe from harm for 1 year. No time limit.

> Current tally: 2,631,942 / 4,000,000

Just another three years. Three years at this pace and I would be free to gain levels again.

I found only scarce tribes hiding from the Infernali in the highlands. The weird weather dialed the monsoon season up to eleven, and the lowlands of the Indian subcontinent were uninhabitable. From Afghanistan to Bangladesh, including India, I only rescued twenty thousand people out of almost two billion living in this region before Ragnark ripped the local multiverse a new one.

Temperatures were plummeting fast. The volcanoes were still very active and the magnetic field was a mess. We were experiencing a full climate catastrophe, a mass extinction event.

Southeast Asia was no better. The region looked nothing like the maps of the early XXI century. Almost everything was underwater and what was not had been bashed so fiercely by the monsoons and the volcanic ash nothing survived there. Indonesia and the Philippines were a sparse pinprick of mountains and tall hills that poked out of the ocean. Not even the Infernali lived there.

I followed the new coast of China, aiming at getting any Chinese survivors and reaching the Korean peninsula and Japan though I didn't expect to find any Japanese survivors. Mt. Fuji didn't rest still and it had erupted along several other volcanoes in the archipelago.

I had to stop over the island of Taiwan. Who owned it was no longer an issue because the current answer was "nobody". But that was not what made me stop. It was the fact one of the runaway Armagellykulls had crossed around the Pacific and was now floating above Korea. North or south? That was irrelevant too.

I couldn't engage it. I couldn't risk creating another massive hole in the world. For all I knew, it was the same humongous Jellyfish monster I fought before.

No. Like the coward I was, I decided to do something I should've done years ago.

I moved the whole land train to my Inner World and moved to a new dirigible, an upgrade to the Hugging Momma blimp. I also scrapped the Hugging Mommas.

I named my new creation "Wool word dark". It was three times faster and more maneuverable than the Hugging Momma, while having the same living space as a wagon and a copy of my ring of Green Energy trees. It could transform into a giant robot.

> For creating level 120 (Epic) Fast Rescue Habitat Mecha "World Ark", you gained 1 Experience point.

Then I set sail to the last continent I had yet to visit on Earth, the land down under. Oceania.