Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 239: Interlude Yoo-jin

“… As such, we propose all Korean citizens who reach A-Ranker status with significant government or Guild support have to become members of the military reserves.” The bureaucrat finished her lengthy proposal.

Yoo-jin sighed “Define ‘significant help’. It’s a good idea in theory, but this is ultimately a government project and I can guarantee that if we see differently on a number of points. You’re free to let us do everything we can on our end without guidance, but I can guarantee the end result won’t be what you envisioned.”

The government wanted something like that, they could have it, but there was no way he’d do everything twice just because a certain format was required to make things work. He’d fallen into that trap before. Once. Never again. If they wanted something from him, they’d have to give him precise instructions on what they wanted, and if someone changed their mind later, then they could deal with it.

“Alright, in that case …”

“Don’t tell me, send it to me by email.” Yoo-jin interrupted. That way, the whole thing was on the record, no “I thought I told you” or “you just misunderstood what I meant” chicanery.

Whatever the functionary was going to say next was drowned out by a thundering alarm.

“Could you kindly shut that off, and in general, keep it shut off during meetings?”

“Anything that I can shut off, is shut off. This is an emergency.” Yoo-jin replied calmly. The emergency beacons and the receivers, such as the one in his pocket, were functionally impossible to disrupt, they could send alerts even from the depths of Dungeons or through military-grade jamming, both of the mechanical and [Skill]-based variety. Therefore, they’d be the first thing triggered in case of an emergency, and as the Guildmaster, he could never afford to leave his behind or store it in his storage.

But what the hell had gone wrong this time? Most of the messes that would warrant an emergency message to him were pretty hard to miss. No volcano had erupted, he hadn’t received any [Raid Boss] summoning messages if a magical plague had been released, some screams would have probably been audible, and so on.

Which meant that the mess was either far away, or it involved an S-Ranker, those messes always ended up on his plate.

When he got his receiver out of his pocket and looked at it, he sighed in relief. That should probably be over in a flash, although the paperwork would be significant. Isaac was asking for a higher-up for help with something in the Draconic Abyss. There was only one possible reason for that kind of request. He thought the Dungeon needed to be destroyed, and chances were, he was correct in that.

“We’ll have to table this for later,” Yoo-jin announced as he stood up and ran from the room, pulling out his cell phone as he did so. He sent a few texts as he ran towards the Dungeon like a bat out of hell.

The guards at the Dungeon were already on the verge of panic, having also received the alert but being in no position to do anything about it.

“Guildmaster, I …” one began, but was cut off in an instant.

“I’m going inside, tell that to any S-Ranker who come later. Make sure that anyone who isn’t a primarily physical fighter doesn’t go in alone.” Yoo-jin ordered, adding them both to the party before he charged in.

He’d briefly considered waiting for others but decided against it. Isaac could take care of himself, and he’d asked for authority, not a rescue. Yoo-jin was under no delusions about being stronger than Isaac, but he was a tank, with a far higher chance of surviving unexpected messes than a speed-based fighter.

Everything was fine in the entrance corridor, so a violation of the “no traps in the entrance rule” wasn’t the issue. Then again, that could probably have been discussed in the guildhall.

And then he almost ran into a wall of ice where the first room should have been. Ah, there was the problem.

The solid wall of liquid water was wiped away in a split second as he activated [Springtime], leaving him standing in knee-deep water. It was a simple [Skill] that could undo the effects of cold-type spells for fairly little mana.

… As long as they’d either been cast a damn long time ago, were already well on their way to failing on their own, or he had the tacit consent of the caster.

He’d been presented with the [Skill] tome as a “gift” after the latest Spring Event, so he could now “clean up after his battles”. Yoo-jin had graciously accepted and promptly spent his next several free days figuring out how to use this new ability of his in a way that made it utterly broken. And he’d even found one.

The room, now clear of ice, looked like he’d expected it to look after someone had fought their way through, with the bodies of the dragonoids who’d guarded this place lying where they’d been cut down.

He hurried deeper inside, seeing that the exit corridor had been “mined” with countless acid pools and other inconveniences. Someone had thoroughly blocked the exit, and if that someone was the Dungeon, then they had a serious problem.

And when he reached the main room, that worry that he might have to order the destruction of a very lucrative Dungeon morphed into resignation. This place was breaking all the rules, and becoming way too dangerous. He briefly used the party to contact the guards up top, telling them to trigger the emergency protocols. When the Core was destroyed, the massive cavern it had carved out under Seoul would collapse in time, and that needed to be prevented.

The sentry the Dungeon had placed at the entrance of the main room was a gigantic dragon, the size of a commercial airplane, that spat a plume of fire straight at him.

Yoo-jin [Skate]ed to the side, ice forming under his feet as he flung himself sideways. As he lurched away, he flung a sword made entirely of ice at the creature. It shattered on its scales and a simple application [Stormwielder] summoned a miniature blizzard to hammer the shards into several places on its hide and hold them there.

He paused briefly to activate the anchoring enchantment on his boots, tying himself to the floor and triggered [Heart of Winter].

The chunks of the frozen blade currently pressed up against the pitiful monster’s scales suddenly grew vastly colder, freezing solid against the dragon’s flesh in under a millisecond, and the cold began to sap the vital heat from its flesh a moment later. But the process didn’t stop there. After maybe two milliseconds, the air around the blade chunks began to liquefy. First oxygen, then nitrogen, then everything else.

By the time a full second had passed, the dragon was already falling through the air, dead, cells shredded from the ice shards that had formed as all its vital fluids froze. Liquid, and in places, frozen solid, air hung around it like a funeral shroud.

Suddenly having that much air condense into a liquid created a vacuum, and the air rushing in to replace it would have flung him into the void if it hadn’t been for his boots. He’d learned his lesson on using cold magic in enclosed spaces a long while ago.

But that little trick had a second stage to it. Several smaller dragons were making their way towards him, ready to attack.

And then, he activated [Springtime]. An explosion was nothing more than gasses getting hot and rapidly expanding, creating a shockwave. Air that used to fill several million cubic meters of space had been condensed to a few hundred liters when it had become liquid and when he used his [Skill], it expanded back to its original volume in a matter of nanoseconds, slapping the incoming creatures like the palm of an angry god, sending their broken bodies tumbling off into the void.

With that done, he hurried further down the stairs. For the first fifty meters or so, he made sure to avoid stepping into acid puddles and other hazards on the floor but when he realized that there was dangerous stuff everywhere and that it was slowing him down too much. He kicked off his boots and continued heedless of the light burns accumulating on his bare feet.

Yoo-jin had been fighting practically since the [System] had initialized, usually in fights he’d picked, be they in Dungeons or the summoning circle, but all too often, they hadn’t been ones he was responsible for.

In other words, he’d seen a lot of carnage in his life. But this … he’d only seen the like a handful of times before, if ever.

Dragon corpses littered the ground like latex fragments after a water balloon fight, except the rocky floor was slippery with blood and guts, rather than anything more benign.

The further away from the central pillar, the less fall-damaged the bodies were. Initially, the fighting had clearly occurred near the stairs, but as Isaac had made his way down, the creatures had apparently stayed away and attempted to win with long-range bombardment, only to get taken out regardless.

And then, there were bodies that only bore injuries from the blows that had killed them, not a fall. So Isaac had definitely managed to make it down here.

Actually, most of these bodies were neither burned nor cut, so Isaac probably wasn’t responsible for those. Who was down here with him? Only one beacon had been triggered, so it probably wasn’t someone local … but it wasn’t like it really mattered who specifically was in here as well. End of the day, they were clearly an ally, and the problem here was the Dungeon. He’d briefly check on Isaac and his mystery companion, then go straight for the core.

The sense-warping field of the Dungeon meant that Yoo-jin could only see a dome of darkness, 500 meters away from him in every direction, and the sounds of battle were coming from everywhere, impossible to locate. And the trail of blood and carnage was wildly scattered all over the place, not exactly easy to follow.

So he just picked the densest patch of corpses and marched towards it. A few scattered dragons decided that now was the best time to go after them, but they didn’t life to regret it. Up on the staircase, they’d been staying out of the range of his [Aura], but down here, he could easily close the distance without risking a fatal fall, freezing the blood in their veins and shattering them seconds later.

After a few seconds, a veritable lake of blood came into view, but no Isaac. Once again, he picked the largest concentration of carnage and ran in that direction, taking out another pair of dragons along the way.

And this time, he found both Isaac and Amy, looking rather awful. Well, for their standards, anyway. Isaac usually either came out of fights with a few drops of blood on him at most, or he returned looking like he was going to die if anyone looked at him wrong, such as the state he’d been in after fighting the Demon Lord. His current state was something in between the two, not heavily injured, but his armor was slowly falling apart from scratches, claw strikes, and acid strikes, and several spots of exposed skin were raw and covered in chemical burns.

Amy wasn’t injured, but both her robes and the corner of her mouth had the characteristic blue stain of someone having bitten down on a mana potion capsule without having their mouth properly clamped shut.

He added the two of them to the party the instant he saw him and joined in the fight.

[Legion of Winter] generated a fresh layer of ice armor for everyone in his party, constantly regenerating and extremely durable while any damage they inflicted would be enhanced by the power of cold. Even the merest touch would cause significant frost burn, and a cut would fill the target’s bloodstream with razor-sharp chunks of ice. And with magic, it strongly depended on the exact type of spells used, but it was almost always going to be useful.

Of course, that effect was more than a little lackluster for a fourth Evolution cooldown [Skill], but then again, it was meant to be cast upon an army, affecting thousands, not a group of just three. Well, five, if you counted the guards up above, but those two weren’t really in any position to help.

Isaac’s face shifted from an expression of extreme concentration to a savage grin as he caught sight of Yoo-jin, a grin that grew outright even wider when [Legion of Winter] hit. His transformation [Skill] activated next, the already unsettling expression on his face growing outright terrifying when stretched across blade-like teeth, set in the middle of a serpentine face.

“We’re breaking the Dungeon,” Yoo-jin announced via the party “I know where the Core should be, but with everything that’s gone wrong so far, it might have moved. Let’s go clear out the boss first.”

And then, the three of them settled into a familiar formation. Amy at the center, casting large-scale or otherwise powerful spells that would have left her vulnerable if she’d been alone, Yoo-jin keeping the dragons off her while using his ice to supplement her crowd control. And Isaac was just running all over the place, taking great care to not run into one of their attacks.

They were all used to utilizing the party system to its greatest possible extent and using Isaac’s teaching abilities, they’d essentially had the exact same core training, the taught [Veteran’s Wisdom] meaning that there was a shared understanding.

Three more S-Rankers entered a minute later, all three from the University of Seoul. Professor Kim, her assistant, and Patrick Lerch, one of Isaac’s colleagues. Yoo-jin had only briefly met the latter, but his impression had been that he was a competent mage with a stick up his behind, with enough power that he might qualify as a walking WMD. Professor Kim had clearly agreed, considering that the meeting where he’d met Patrick had been about how to best ensure that any “accidents” in their experiments didn’t trigger major alarms.

The guards up above might have warned Yoo-jin of the imminent reinforcements, but he still needed to add the three to the party.

Yoo-jin, Amy, and Isaac returned to the base of the stairs to wait for the newcomers, and once they arrived, the newly expanded group resumed the search for the Dungeon Boss.

The Draconic Abyss’ perception-altering field meant that finding it was very difficult and right now, the going theory was that the biggest dragon was in hiding. Simply because they knew it had to be out there, they had to stay together and be careful. Once it was dead, they could break up into smaller groups and hunt down that bloody core.

Their current formation was relatively simple, the four spellcasters together, Yoo-jin playing tank, Isaac running off wherever. It was simple, but it worked.

The remaining dragons fell like scythe before the reaper … all ten of them. Regardless of how endless the hordes of the Dungeons might have seemed when you could only see five hundred meters in every direction, there was an end to the enemy forces.

“So, time to find the Core?” Amy asked.

Yoo-jin nodded “Yes, but we’re staying together until the Boss is found and killed.”

“And then everyone goes off on their own? Have you never seen a horror movie?” she responded.

“We can split up into groups of three, two magic users and one melee fighter each,” he corrected.

They didn’t find the dragon, it found them, two minutes later. Jumbo-jet-sized, a prismatic spray coming from its mouth that seemed to contain all the various breath weapons this Dungeon had handed out to its creatures. It looked like the creature was vomiting up a rainbow, except instead of making a huge mess, it caused nothing but destruction when it struck the ground where Isaac had been a split-second before.

Every splotch of color in the stream detonated into a different elemental burst, fire, acid, lighting, sound, noxious gasses, crystalline shrapnel, and things Yoo-jin didn’t even have a name for exploded from the point of impact, then mixed and usually exploded again.

The dragon swept its head around, the beam of elemental annihilation creating a wall of chaotic forces between itself and the main group, briefly shut its mouth as it retargeted, and finally resumed its attack on Isaac.

Both Yoo-jin and Isaac had begun coordinating their response in the same millisecond they’d first caught sight of the creature, only for Professor Kim to ask them to keep it busy for five seconds. Two seconds after that announcement, Amy told him not to move and warned Isaac to “hit the deck”.

Apparently, they’d worked together long enough that Isaac knew that meant “run like all the demons of hell are chasing you”.

What followed was something that would go down in the tactical and strategic manuals as a “prime example of why you ask cooperating mages what they’re planning before you let them do anything”.

It was a bolt of magic the size of a beer keg, gleaming a bright blue, with a scintillating rainbow similar to the monster’s breath attack contained within. The projectile passed through the wall of energy without wavering even slightly, hit the dragon, and utterly obliterated it.

First, it punched through the monster’s hide as if it were armored in tissue paper, and fractured.

Second, the dark energy contained within tore through the dragon’s body, shredding organs and shattering bone, light shining through the gaps in its scales, as though the creature had swallowed a flashlight.

And finally, it exploded, energy spilling out and consuming everything within almost two hundred meters.

“Impressive,” Yoo-jin noted.

“Wait a second before judging, it gets better,” Amy told him.

When the explosion of light and exotic energies finally faded, the last few scales and large bone fragments slid into place, leaving a huge mound of valuable materials in the middle of the fresh crater.

“A little more warning next time, maybe?” Isaac commented, “And someone please make sure we know how to replicate that.”

“Give us a few hours, after we’re finished with the Dungeon,” Professor Kim’s assistant promised.

They found the core a few minutes later, Yoo-jin crushed it in his hand and they headed out while a swarm of [Miners], [Structural Engineers], and [Geomancers] filed into the Dungeon alongside several bodyguards. The Dungeon would be stabilized, cleared of the remaining loot and minerals, and eventually repurposed.

And on the subject of loot, to add insult to injury, there was none. The remains of the dragons, the scales and bone fragments of the Dungeon boss, and the ore that could be pried out of the ground and walls were valuable, sure, but nothing like proper Dungeon-generated equipment or potions.

“What do you think happened?” Yoo-jin asked Isaac in private, via the party “This is not normal.”

“I have a lot of ideas, each worse than the next,” Isaac responded.

Yoo-jin winced “We’ll use the [Round Table] to borrow Polizeirat Habicht’s investigative [Skills], maybe Mister North has something, and I think we might be able to find something in the records now that we know the Dungeon is unusual …”