Chapter 262: Flames of Destruction
Seven and a half months of things finally going smoothly, of problems that were solved using local resources even when [Raid Bosses] were involved.
A TV show that raked in huge rakings while still managing to scare people off [Raid Bosses], having built its popularity on Schadenfreude alone.
A research department that was capable of slaughtering even Tier 8s with impunity.
And a group of students who’d had a full epic run from the first Evolution to the third, in less than eight months, and gained that rarity of [Class] in an entirely artificial environment.
He’d have loved to imagine that this would be the new normal, a slow, gentle, calm growth to the peak, and then he could relax on a beach for the rest of eternity.
But something had kicked off, and now he’d try to help deal with it.
The alert had a location for the incident, the French city of Lorient. Unfortunately, he’d never been anywhere near there, so he’d had to teleport to Paris first, then run the rest of the way.
As he ran, he sent a message about what should be done with his trainees to the base network. They needed to be added to the situation carefully.
Isaac was, despite all his power, a grunt, someone who could be easily slotted into any given group of combatants. Trying to do the same with a whole bunch of shot callers would cause more chaos than a direct intervention from Loki.
[Continent Strider] went to work, rapidly increasing the speed of his run, but it wouldn’t help much over this short distance. Traveling almost five hundred kilometers in barely ten minutes would have been an insane feat even a year ago, but ten minutes were a lifetime in combat.
To his surprise, he wasn’t the only one who was traveling by using his feet. He was closing in on an eclectic collection of ten people running towards the site of the action, and judging by their Stats, they had to be at least twenty Levels into the fourth Evolution. Far too powerful to be mere civilians, and all but the dumbest civilians wouldn’t be running towards a literal warzone. Well, reporters might, but these people had combat [Classes]. And the alert/reinforcement request had been pretty explicit about how even powerful people should stay away to let the absolute peak of strength, as well as the professionals, deal with the situation.
What really cinched the issue with whether or not these guys were cult members was the fact that they attacked him as he passed.
If they’d done a better job of concealing their allegiance, they might have even been able to hurt him. The original appearance of this chapter can be found at Ñøv€lß1n.
A lance of stone the size of a pillar flew towards his head at hypersonic speeds while the air seemed to turn into sirup as a time-slowing effect tried to turn him into a sitting duck. It might have worked if he’d still been in place when the field activated, but he’d already been dodging, [The Meaning of the Name] revealing not only the current state of the world but several potential futures.
Two long strides took him out of the temporal field, even at one-quarter speed no one could land a clean hit on him. Any attacks that got close were also affected by the field, something that theoretically should have left him with too little time to dodge. Theoretically.
A stream of water that could have blown down several houses tried to push him back inside the field, but missed.
A titanic fireball broke apart on Balmung, the flames harmlessly washing off his armor.
And then, he was in range of the nearest enemy. The woman was mid-transformation, clearly burning one of her cooldown [Skills] in an attempt to counter him, but it wasn’t going to be enough.
[Form of Horror] activated while he was in the middle of a slash, doubling his reach without warning. With five stacks each of [Piercing Strike] and [Power Strike] combined into a single [Legendary Blow], even transforming into a living tree wasn’t going to block his strike.
The second closest man had turned into some kind of knight, smoke rising from the gaps in the armor while coals glowed in the eyesockets. But Isaac could tell there was a secondary level of armor beneath every chink, gap, and weak spot, perfectly guarding against his normal anti-armor tactics.
He flipped over Balmung in his hand, grabbed it by the blade, and hammered it into the side of the man’s head in a full-power Mordhau. The move’s name translated into “murder strike”, which was rather appropriate given its lethality even against armored foes.
[Legendary Blow] glowed like a star, the red energy wreathing the hilt and pommel of Isaac’s sword promising nothing but death.
Upon initially getting access to a whole lot of standard combat [Skills] at Level 30 without threshold bonuses as a reward for getting [Legacy of a True Warrior], he’d been a little skeptical. Being able to teach them would be great, but it had seemed lacking for personal use as a lot of power did come from those threshold bonuses.
That was the kind of power he’d just stolen.
It also came with a hefty price tag of over two thousand mana per second even after the discount from [Fire Soul], enough to drain his pool dry in little over two seconds of use. Barely useable in any kind of extended conflict. The original user of this weapon had to have most of his build dedicated to just being able to use that stuff.
But for right now, the biggest gain here was the fact that these incredibly destructive flames could now no longer touch him, no matter what.
This pyrokinetic might be a god on the battlefield, a shadowy figure illuminated in flames as the people around him burned to death. But to Isaac, he might as well have been a puppy. Physical stats in the toilet, physical combat [Skills] practically nonexistent, that fucker was so screwed it wasn’t even funny.
... weeeeell, it was a little funny. This guy was laughing as he burned people trying to make their lives a better place to death, and now, he was about to suddenly come face to face with someone who outclassed him to an even greater degree than he did the soldiers.
A massive gout of flame erased a dozen buildings behind Isaac as the pyrokinetic finally realized he was coming. Isaac was just fine.
The ground detonated in front of him, the kinetic force of the shockwave almost succeeding in throwing him off his feet, but Isaac had seen it coming with his [Aura] and jumped before he’d have taken the full force of the blast.
That particular futile attempt was followed up by a wall of fire, compressed enough that even plasma was sufficiently dense that Isaac couldn’t just run through it. So he jumped into it, canceled out his mass, and let the updraft of the flames carry him skywards.
A single burst of flame behind him once he was above the barrier, flinging him across it, and then his full weight returned to send him plummeting towards his enemy.
One of the massive swords that manifested with [Form of Horror] plunged clean through the top of the man’s chest, cleaving through most of the vital organs, the bottom of the spine, and finally a full meter of the ground beneath.
A solid hit to pin his foe in place so he could bring the second sword around to decapitate him. But before he could follow through a massive blast of fire flung him away. No real heat behind it, just a thick stream of condensed flame unleashed more for the force behind it than its other properties.
It was enough to delay him for several vital seconds, during which [Form of Horror] ran out. Suddenly a few hundred kilograms lighter, Isaac was flung off, skidding over the ground until he managed to drive a sword into the ground and hold onto its hilt.
Through the flames, he could see his foe standing there, a burning mask of volcanic rock looking dispassionate even as his lifeblood drenched the surrounding area.
Around him spread out a puddle of blood and whatever innards had fallen out through the terrible wound clean through his torso, the only thing keeping him standing being [Moment of Immortality]. It wouldn’t have saved him if Isaac had managed to decapitate him, but that hadn’t happened.
Problem.
An even bigger issue was the fact that the blade keeping him pinned had been conjured by [Form of Horror] and dissipated when the [Skill] had ended, freeing the pyrokinetic. No longer a sitting duck.
But the man didn’t retreat, didn’t try to get away, he just kept unleashing the flame.
Isaac swore internally. Phasing was out of the question, the mana in the flames could still be dangerous, [Phantom Step] and [Wave Charge] wouldn’t let him close the full distance and he’d be blown away again once they ended. Using [I Am The Sword] here would be a huge waste of a once-an-hour [Skill], but he couldn’t even properly utilize it as its effect was based on his momentum, which was nonexistent.
With his sensory [Aura] he could tell that the land behind him was being devastated for over a kilometer, buildings vaporized, all vegetation within a few hundred meters of the gout of fire ignited, and the ground turning into lava. The ground under his sword grew progressively softer until the blade slid through what was basically jello at this point and Isaac went flying. Thankfully, this new state didn’t last long.
A full twenty seconds after the flames started, they shut off as their wielder collapsed onto one knee, coughing blood. He straightened again after a split second, a second activation of [Moment of Immortality] propping him back up. But that brief second between activations had been long enough to cross the distance. Balmung flashed through the air as Isaac sped past, [Implements of True Death] ensuring that no matter what, the man in the volcano mask would not be getting back up. Having your skull and brain cleaved in half would have been lethal in ninety-nine point nine nine percent of people, but not being able to heal for ten seconds afterwards ensured that even the most insanely survivability builds wouldn’t be able to keep going.
The kill notification blinked in the corner of his eye, telling him that he’d definitely finished this fight.
Sighs of relief abounded from the soldiers around him, several even letting themselves fall to the ground, finally able to give in to their exhaustion. Others still began to express their gratitude to Isaac.
But he ignored them and started running. The sickle wielder was probably not going to last much longer against Schultz, one of Greece’s S-Rankers, Lena Zeneli, and France’s plant mage. Meanwhile, the Kitsune was being chased around by Sun, throwing up illusion after illusion while constantly retreating.
The sound mage, meanwhile, hadn’t used a single cooldown [Skill] where anyone could see and was dueling some of France’s best and looking perfect unbothered by the whole situation. Time for a fight on equal terms.
