Apocalypse Tamer 2: A LitRPG Adventure, page 47
part #2 of Apocalypse Tamer Series
The last sentence was said with such earnestness, such candidness, that it left Basil speechless. The young man felt something warm in his eyes, which he couldn’t suppress this time.
Before he knew it, Basil had closed the gap between them and dropped his halberd. His arms closed around René and held him tightly. The Old Man gasped in surprise at the hug, but quickly returned it.
“Fuck,” Basil muttered. The Old Man felt so warm to the touch, so solid and real. “Fuck.”
“I’m sorry,” René apologized. “I’m sorry I can’t follow you further. I wish I did, but…I guess that’s what de Gaulle meant when said that old age is a shipwreck. My time is done, but you can still swim to shore.”
“I’m…” It was a herculean struggle for Basil to let René go, but he did; slowly, gently. “I wish I could stay here longer. I truly do.”
“I understand,” René replied with a sad chuckle. “Don’t be sorry, Basil. Every man and woman has his own wars to fight. I’m lucky I could see you again at all.”
“Mister Bohen, Mister Plato?” Aya joined her hands shyly. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” Basil whispered. He couldn’t deny a last request.
“If you meet my cat, Misha, can you give her a message? She’s golden and small and adorable and lived with me in Tunis, you can’t miss her.”
She might as well have described millions of cats, but neither Basil nor Plato had the heart to point it out to her. “What message?” the Rakshasa Kitten asked quietly.
Aya looked down at her feet. “That it wasn’t her fault.”
Such a short sentence, and yet one that implied so much.
“We will tell her, if we meet her,” Plato promised with a paw on his belly. “I swear it on my stripes and feline pride.”
“I do, too,” Basil promised. “On my honor as a Bohen.”
“Thank you.” Aya smiled brightly. “I hope we’ll meet again someday. You’re rough outside, but nice inside.”
“I hope so, too,” Basil said, though he knew better. After one last glance at the Old Man, he recovered his halberd and turned to face the portal.
“It’ll be easier if we do it quickly,” the feline whispered to Basil as he joined him. Plato wasn’t one to cry, but his eyes were heavy with sorrow. “Without turning back.”
Basil nodded slowly and took a step forward.
“Go forth, young man, brave cat,” René said as Basil and Plato crossed the gate. “Show ‘em your mettle.”
He would.
For an old friend’s sake.
The first step was the hardest of them all; the second was easier, but only barely so. Basil and Plato crossed the painted veil into another world, into an endless beach of granular sand glittering under a pale white sun. A calm, soothing sea of blue paint expanded as far as the eye could see. Only silence and a gentle breeze welcomed the duo.
Benjamin Leroy’s daughter had perished in Tunisia during a terrorist attack. Basil wondered if it was the beach where she breathed her last, forever frozen in time.
“I do not understand you, Basil Bohen.”
Basil looked up, his hand tightening on his halberd. A shadowy form materialized in the sky, floating above the duo. Plato drew his blade and pointed it at the creature.
“Why did you leave?” Pluto, no, Benjamin Leroy asked. The confusion in his maddened eyes was only too human. “You’ll only find pain outside. You cannot save the world of man.”
“Can you?” Basil rasped.
“I already am,” Leroy replied with what could pass for enthusiasm. “I will absorb all souls into Naraka. The living, the dead, all will be united in a perfect world, a better world, without pain nor sorrow. No one will mourn, no one will grieve. All will be right on Heaven and Earth.”
Basil listened to his empty spiel. They sounded so familiar to him. He had invented many excuses to cover up an ugly truth, too.
“What are you hiding from?” Basil asked, his question as sharp as a sword.
“Hiding?” Leroy let out a light chuckle. “I am in front of you. Don’t you see me? Do your eyes deceive you?”
“This place, this pocket dimension, whatever you call…it’s a fantasy,” Basil pointed, his halberd raised at the godly shadow. “What’s a fantasy’s purpose but to escape reality? What are you running from?”
The answer became obvious the moment Basil’s words left his mouth. Benjamin Leroy had committed all his crimes to achieve a clear, simple goal. He wasn’t after power or wealth like his comrades. His atrocities had been committed in love’s name.
Basil remembered what Aya had told him, how the false god broke down after asking the same question over and over again. This false world was exactly what Basil had wanted once. A refuge to escape the most dreadful fear of them all.
Failure.
“You’ve failed, haven’t you?” Basil guessed. “You couldn’t bring her back.”
The false deity winced as if slapped in his shadowy face.
“You’ve made a deal with the Devil.” Basil failed to suppress a brief pang of sympathy for the madman before him. Having run away himself, he understood Leroy’s plight only too well. “And he shortchanged you.”
Leroy’s eyes were the only thing human about him, and they couldn’t lie. When Basil caught the brief flash of anger in them, he knew he had guessed correctly.
“You couldn’t own up to your fuck-ups,” Plato rasped, his voice dripping with disgust. “You created a fake paradise to soothe your own guilty conscience!”
“But it only made things worse, didn’t it?” Basil raised his halberd at Leroy. “Watching children like Aya, the spitting image of what you thought your revived daughter would look like, dead because of your actions…it must have been a slap in the face. You’ve ruined the world and killed millions of innocents…and you did it for nothing.”
A black eclipse obscured the sun, turning it black as sin. Streaks of crimson tainted the sky, and the painted sea started to boil. As for Leroy, the false deity’s eyes burned with an otherworldly, ferocious glow.
And most importantly, the painted portal vanished behind the Bohens.
“You just couldn’t bear the guilt. So you ran. You ran away from reality, from the truth, because it was the easy way out.” Basil sighed, both out of scorn and sympathy. “Madness is a coward’s last refuge, I suppose.”
Leroy snapped to action with fury by expanding his shadowy wings. Flames came alight within the darkness of his body like stars in the night sky.
“Phlegethon Flame!” the false god snarled.
Fiery stars fell to earth, scorching the sand to glass and sounding the horn of battle.
CHAPTER 34
WOMAN VS SWORD
The undead Great Sphinx of Tanit collapsed, the hole in its chest bleeding ice spikes all over the marble floor.
Vasi allowed herself a breath of relief. The remains of a mummy warlock burned against a dark stone wall close to her, the smell of roasted flesh and smoke rushing to her nose. “I think it’s over,” she said. “Good shot, Shellgirl.”
“That was a close one,” Shellgirl admitted as she emerged from behind a stone sarcophagus. Her last ice bomb, thrown from behind her cover, had slain the sphinx before he could finish charging up his beam attack. “Are you okay, Bugsy?”
“I’m fine, thank you for asking,” the centimagma replied atop a mountain of dead scorpions, each of them the size of a pony. His entire body was covered in sting wounds, though his innate resistance to Ailments had spared him from poison. “I wouldn’t mind a healing potion though.”
“I’ve asked Neria to send some through the Guild Inventory,” Vasi replied before examining the sphinx’s corpse. It was the second time they had killed the creature. First, it attacked them as a living statue, and then in the shape of a monstrous undead seconds after they slew it. Same with the scorpions. “Just in case…”
It cost her some of her precious SP, but Vasi incinerated the sphinx’s corpse to ensure it would never rise again. This time a message appeared to confirm the battle’s final end.
Your party earned 200,000 EXP (20,000 for you).
So many deaths, and it didn’t even earn them a level.
Dismaker Labs wishes you a happy apocalypse!
Vasi was starting to understand her boyfriend’s frustration with the System’s customer service.
“Here, Bugsy,” Shellgirl said as she poured a potion down the centimagma’s throat, healing his wounds. “Ready to continue?”
“Yes.” Bugsy nodded and pointed at a hieroglyph-covered wall with his antennae. “I sense stairs behind it.”
Yet another secret passage? Vasi was growing tired of them. Her group had entered the pyramid after leaving the UNESCO HQ, ascending one floor after another; it started well, with the Reception Hall being a strangely peaceful sanctuary guarded by weak monsters easy to dispatch.
The situation worsened as they climbed farther. Although the Louvre Pyramid held surprisingly few defenders—Vasi assumed most were fighting the Apocalypse Force outside the dungeon’s walls—she couldn’t say the same for the traps and puzzles. Poisoned darts fired inside corridors, hidden pits full of spikes, dead end tunnels, hidden passageways, and of course, the ever-popular rolling boulder…Vasi thought she had seen it all.
The witch had been almost elated to be confronted by an actual sphinx when they reached the Egyptian wing instead of yet another contraption. At least she could hit monsters back.
“Let me check,” Vasi said as she examined the walls. The hieroglyphs on the surface formed a nine-per-nine series of tiles and flipped when touched, revealing different symbols underneath. However, they returned to normal whenever she touched two at once. “These signs form a sequence somehow.”
“Oh, let me try!” Shellgirl started flipping the tiles, and Vasi started to see a pattern in the symbols. “Some of them are identical!”
“I believe we must memorize the location of each symbol, and then pair them up,” Vasi guessed. She usually loved riddle games, but they were too pressed for time to enjoy this one. “Perhaps we can force our way in like with the previous puzzles.”
“Can we avoid it, if possible?” Bugsy pleaded. “Skipping the last puzzle almost caused the ceiling to fall on top of us!”
Unfortunately, it seemed dungeon designers didn’t take visitors breaking through closed doors well. “We can try,” Vasi said with a shrug. “This one doesn’t look too hard—”
The sensation of new power infusing her bones, and a worrying System notification, interrupted her.
[All for One] applied [Mirage] and [Death’s Banner] to you.
All for One? A glance at her allies confirmed to Vasi that they were all affected. She opened the status screen in alarm and checked Basil’s stats.
His HP bar was no longer full.
“They’re fighting,” Vasi realized in panic. “Basil and Plato are fighting.”
“Must be Pluto,” Shellgirl voiced the most likely possibility. “Big B finally pissed him off.”
Worry seized Vasi’s heart as she stared at the wall. She briefly considered completing the puzzles in quick succession, before realizing that she didn’t have the patience for it. “Bugsy, please break the wall,” she all but ordered. “We do not have time for puzzles anymore.”
“Ugh, okay…for the boss.” Bugsy groaned. The centimagma pushed dead scorpions out of his path, took his distance, and gathered momentum. “Step aside, girls! Agility Up!”
Vasi and Shellgirl moved out of the way as the centimagma charged through the hieroglyph puzzle, shattering stones and uncovering a hidden staircase beyond it. The ceiling trembled in response, but the trio rushed through the steps before it could collapse on them and ascended to the next level.
The floor above the Egyptian exposition began with a crossroad leading to two different wings of the dungeon. The room, unlike the tomb-like levels the group had struggled with before, espoused a medieval theme familiar to Vasi. Fortified walls of stone bricks and chiseled pillars held the gray ceiling over a floor of polished wood.
Rows of wondrous items occupied the room, each of them encased in shells of glass. Golden statues of saints and holy virgins stood next to silver chalices, ancient swords, enchanted tapestries, great armors of steel, and kingly crowns of jewels. Each of these items exuded magic, to the point Vasi couldn’t resist examining a few. These century-old relics radiated power, almost as much as the legendary weapons in Walter’s exhibit.
One of them, however, inspired awe and wonder above all others: a sword with a golden pommel stood in the middle of the exhibit, its blade radiating like the sun itself. The sheath was encrusted in jewels each more precious than the last.
Joyeuse, Sword of Charlemagne
Family: Weapon Artifact (Sword).
Quality: S.
Power: +15 SKI.
Crit: +20%
Accuracy: 100%
Effect 1: [Royal Privilege]: Joyeuse can only be wielded by an individual with royal blood. Joyeuse will strike down unwelcome wielders with holy wrath.
Effect 2: [Sacred Sword]: Inflicts an additional 30% [Light] damage piercing through Resistance.
Effect 3: [Dragonslayer]: Inflicts Dragonslayer super effective damage against the [Dragon] Type (x3 damage).
Effect 4: [Longinus]: Inflicts the [Brand] ailment on a successful hit, preventing the victim from recovering HP until the ailment is removed.
Effect 5: [Song of Roland]: when Joyeuse lands a killing blow, it sings for one minute; the wielder and his allies inflict 50% additional damage so long as they can hear the song. Each killing blow renews the song’s duration. The song’s duration is increased if Joyeuse is within ten meters of [Durandal, Sword of Roland] and/or [Curtana, Sword of Ogier].
The mythical sword of Emperor Charlemagne, who truly needed humor in his life. Paraded by French Kings and used in the famous Song of Roland to slay Baligant, Emir of Babylon and dragon of the east, Joyeuse has unhappily gathered dust for the last several centuries. Somebody gives this murder weapon a hug!
Charlemagne? The name sounded like the Holy Kingdom of Gardemagne, a mighty nation of Vasi’s world once ruled by a paladin god. Did this artifact come from her homeworld?
“Who is this Charlemagne?” Bugsy whispered in awe as he joined Vasi, utterly entranced by the sword’s radiance. “Was he the boss of this place before Pluto?”
“I’ve heard of him,” Shellgirl said. The merchant was more well-versed in the lore of this world than her friends. “He was a great paladin king who ruled the continent of Europe in ancient times.”
“So, a superboss?” Bugsy guessed.
The story felt familiar to Vasi. She had heard Earth and Outremonde were mirrors in many ways, and this sword reminded her of representations of All-Sun, the sword of the light god Mithras. She wondered how good Basil would look with a weapon such as this.
Shellgirl shattered the glass protecting the sword without warning, startling Vasi. “Shellgirl, what are you doing?” she asked. “We don’t have time to grab everything shiny!”
“Are you kidding?” Shellgirl replied with a grin, her hand greedily grabbing Joyeuse’s pommel. “We’re going to fight a living shadow and a holy blade falls in our lap! It’s the perfect sign— AHH!”
Shellgirl let out a scream of pain as the sword burst with light, burning her hand. The mimic dropped Joyeuse in pain and Vasi, acting on instinct, caught the sword before it hit the ground.
Vasi realized the danger only after her fingers closed around the pommel. Her fear, however, quickly turned to surprise. The gold felt warm to the touch, like a gentle hearth’s fire. Her fingers didn’t burst into fire as Shellgirl’s did. She raised the one-handed sword as easily as a feather.
“Ouch,” Shellgirl complained as she massaged her sticky fingers. “Vasi, be careful!”
“I’m fine.” Much to her own surprise, in fact. “How strange. Why am I not affected?”
“Could you be…” Bugsy held his breath. “A princess?”
“Of course not,” Vasi replied with a shrug. “I’m a witch, not a noble brat in her tower.”
But Bugsy, always the innocent mind, wouldn’t let the idea go. “Maybe you’re a king’s secret bastard, hidden at birth for your own safety because of an ancient prophecy!”
“Or not to split the inheritance!” Shellgirl suggested with a pained grin, a suggestion which Vasi thought equally unbelievable.
“Well, they do call my mother the Queen of Witches…” Vasi mused. She imagined bequeathing the sword to Basil, like a lady with her knight. That would be amusing.
A green glow surrounded the group, wiping away their fatigue and healing Shellgirl’s wounds.
[Monster Cure II] healed you!
“Oh, nice!” Shellgirl rejoiced. “Looks like Basil sent us help!”
Vasi didn’t share her friend’s joy. Basil should have no way of knowing how his allies were faring, so the only target for his spell should be his cat.
“Basil is healing Plato,” Vasi guessed in alarm. “Which means whatever is fighting them is a credible threat to both.”
With time working against them, Vasi examined signs on the walls pointing at various wings. The one on the left was called European Paintings, and the one on the right was titled European Arts. The group moved toward the former, with Bugsy scouting at the front.
As per the sign, this wing of the pyramid contained a gallery sprawling as far as the eye could see. The exhibit showcased countless paintings on white walls, under a dusty ceiling of hardened multicolor glass. Each picture looked more twisted than the last; the frames grew roots into the walls like parasitic trees, while the painted works’ lines were ever-shifting like troubled waters. First came images of wars and tragedies, then foul beasts and demons. Others were drawn in an abstract style, showcasing maddened, bent figures screaming in silence.
