Apocalypse Tamer 2: A LitRPG Adventure, page 55
part #2 of Apocalypse Tamer Series
No more reinforcement would come either. Neria’s troops had managed to reform the encirclement around the portal with a copious amount of artillery. Army choppers blew up fliers around the energy pillar, stopping Apollyon’s monsters from rushing to their leader’s side.
The Horseman faced his death alone.
“I will not fall…here!” Apollyon let out a roar of desperation. “Rampage!”
The Horseman’s body trembled with rage and his corpselike skin turned red.
Apollyon has gone [Berserk]!
Apollyon snapped to action with unnatural speed and strength for his size. He attempted to punch Vasi out of the sky, with the witch barely dodging by flying upward at full speed.
Apollyon’s sudden jerking movement threw Basil off his face, halberd included. He fell and fell from many stories high, the ground calling him.
“Basil!” Vasi dived down in a desperate attempt to catch him, only for Apollyon to relentlessly target her. The witch was forced to move to the side to avoid the Horseman’s snapping mandibles, her boyfriend continuing his fall. “Basil!”
Basil landed earlier and more softly than he expected. His body hit a soft cushion of feathers rather than sandy ground, and a melodious song echoed all around him. For a brief second, he thought he had perished and ascended to heaven, but the music sounded too Hippie-like for his taste.
[Irradiated] ailment negated Kalki’s [Song of Healing]!
“Sorry for being late,” a friendly voice said in between notes. “I had to fly around to heal the wounded.”
Basil realized he had landed on the back of Kalki’s avian mount, right behind the bard himself. The music offered no reprieve from the pain, but at least he would live for a scant few minutes.
Having traded his sanity for strength as Basil once did, Apollyon rampaged around the crater like a wild animal. He desperately attempted to bite and claw at Vasi, but the witch flew too fast for his slow-moving hand to catch up; he might have well been a giant trying to swat a fly. On the ground, Bugsy and Shellgirl had to run away in frantic terror to avoid being trampled to death.
A light at the edge of the crater attracted Basil’s attention, and that of the maddened Apollyon. An invisible shape became noticeable as a layer of dust covered its reptilian body. The head glowed like the sun as it gathered power.
“Sneaky toe attack!” Rosemarine shouted with pride as she finally announced her presence. Apollyon snarled back and raised his feet to trample her to death.
He wasn’t fast enough.
Rosemarine fired her beam first.
The ray of golden sunlight crossed the distance between the tropidrake and Apollyon in an instant before hitting the latter’s chest. Without his exoskeleton to reduce the damage, the light pierced one end of the body and came out of the other. The super effective sunfire burned through Apollyon’s flesh and bones alike, leaving nothing but a smoking hole where the heart should have been.
Apollyon, whose foot was up in the air, never brought it down to the ground. Instead, sanity returned to his remaining eyes as his gigantic body stumbled. He fell to his back, first slowly, then suddenly. The Horseman of Famine collapsed like a mountain laid low by an earthquake with just as much power. Shellgirl and Bugsy barely managed to avoid being crushed as he hit the ground in a cataclysmic shockwave. The edge of the crater was flattened under Apollyon’s weight, with tons of sand and dust propelled in the air.
The aftershock could be felt from Basil’s position in the sky. Apollyon’s fall affected all remaining bug monsters in the area; the few surviving wasps fled in animalistic panic, while the rest of the swarm fell into chaos. The unified buzzing sound that followed Apollyon’s army collapsed into a cacophony of maddened screeches. The Horseman’s hold over his troops was broken in an instant, never to return.
Rosemarine let out a victorious roar. She had avenged centuries of plant oppression by insects and was proud of it. Basil’s allies echoed the victory with cheers of their own.
“You have raised magnificent friends, Basil,” Kalki said with a smile.
“No,” Basil replied with a chuckle, coughing blood. “They raised themselves.”
Kalki had his bird land right next to Apollyon’s colossal head. He summoned a greenish potion from his inventory and poured it down Basil’s throat. “I hope this will work,” the bard said with a look of concern. The words ‘Heavenly or Guaranteed’ were written on his beverage’s flask. “I do not trust your angel’s credentials.”
[Irradiated] ailment lifted! You gained immunity to [Irradiated] for five minutes! You recovered 500 HP!
Green light swallowed Basil, healing his wounds. His vision returned to normal. His broken arm fell back into place. When Kalki dismounted from his bird, he helped Basil do the same. Vasi and Plato landed near the group while Shellgirl, Bugsy, and Rosemarine flocked to them.
“I did it, Mister!” Rosemarine said in triumph. “I roasted the bug!”
“That was amazing,” Shellgirl agreed. “You nailed him right in the squishy parts.”
“And you’ll get to eat him for dinner, Rosemarine,” Basil thanked his beloved tropidrake. He couldn’t think of a more appropriate fate for the Horseman of Famine.
“To end…like this?” The group turned to face Apollyon. Light flickered in the monster’s two remaining eyes, struggling not to fade away into the darkness of death. “Beaten by…vermin? I was…so close to greatness…”
“I’ll admit this could have gone either way,” Basil said. Apollyon had been the meanest, most powerful foe they had ever faced. Without the neutron bomb, they wouldn’t have been able to stop him at all. “But that’s what you get for underestimating us. You can only blame your arrogance for your defeat.”
“Arrogance…” Apollyon scoffed as his life slipped away. “I am the weakest…the gatekeeper. Before you were nothing, Bohen…but now that you have broken me…you will come to my master’s attention.”
“I don’t fear him,” Basil replied.
“You should…” Apollyon let out a heavy breath. “In the Apocalypse Force…you join or you die. The other Horsemen…will come for you. To recruit…or to slay.”
“Good,” Basil replied. The rest of his group nodded in assent and determination. “It will spare us the trouble of hunting them down ourselves.”
The System echoed his sentiment with a new quest.
New Main Quest: Apocalypse Not
Recommended Level: 80+
On four horses they came, under six feet they must go! You have declared war on the Apocalypse Force, and now it’s time to show them who’s the real one-man Armageddon! Defeat the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Force!
Reward: 24,000,000 + Holy Grail artifact.
“You have barely beaten me…and I am nothing but a worm…in the Maleking’s shadow…” Apollyon let out one last chuckle, before coughing sick purple blood. “He will burn this planet to the ground…I wish I could have seen that…Armageddon.”
Apollyon, Horseman of Famine, eternal foe of the Homeowners Revenge Association and bane of the House of Bohen, breathed his last. The light in his remaining eyes switched off and piles of treasures appeared atop his smoking corpse.
Your party earned 4,000,000 Exp and 2,000,000 Incursion Bonus EXP (total 6,000,000, with 1,000,000 for you). You earned a whooping 9 levels (total 52).
The house, at long last, had been avenged.
It filled Basil with an immeasurable amount of satisfaction. Although they had lost friends and suffered greatly to reach this point, Apollyon would never again threaten anyone else. That was the real reward, beyond the petty joy of revenge.
“The portal isn’t closing,” Vasi noted. While the bug swarm had fallen into chaos with Apollyon’s death, Basil’s monster allies struggled to keep them contained. Many drones retreated, but far more kept trying to break through the encirclement and infest Earth. “Why is it still open?”
“Wasn’t the Incursion meant to last a week?” Shellgirl asked with a sigh. “We aren’t paid enough for clean-up duties.”
“This is good,” Rosemarine rejoiced while licking her petal lips. “More food for us!”
“You’ve heard her, the job is not yet done.” Basil pointed his halberd at the rift. “Let’s throw these locusts back into the hole from which they came from!”
His friends and allies cheered all at once. For they understood that although they had a few days of containment ahead of them, the worst was behind them.
The Battle for Paris, no, for all of France, was won.
CHAPTER 41
MAN VS RESPEC
They spent the week helping the army secure Paris.
It was a long, tedious process. Apollyon’s death had spelled the Apocalypse Force’s defeat on this front, but not all of his thralls were willing to accept it. For every bug that retreated back into the rift, two more attempted to break through the security perimeter. A few slipped through in the early hours of the Incursion, but each new day brought its lot of new soldiers, choppers, and tanks. By the event’s end, any monster was shot from a distance before it could walk ten meters past the rift.
The strangest of the invaders had been a giant panda riding a thundercloud, of all things. Basil had paused long enough in confusion to let the monster escape confinement, and then decided to take a look at the world beyond the rift out of curiosity. What he saw filled him with dread.
The world beyond the rift was a wasteland; a gray, barren desert stripped of its very grass by Apollyon’s brood. When they failed to enter Earth, the weaker monsters had turned on each other in a cannibalistic frenzy. Basil wondered if the panda creature had been a desperate survivor escaping its homeworld’s destruction.
That was the future the Apocalypse Force wanted for Earth, a spiral of destruction that only ended when everyone was dead.
Basil swore never to let that happen.
Halfway through the Incursion, he sat at the edge of his bed in the depths of the Steamobile; the vehicle had suffered heavy damage during the invasion, but the army’s crafters graciously helped repair it. They had even improved on the design until it offered the same comfort as a true campervan.
Basil stared at the lotus in his palm. The flower felt so light and warm to the touch; its petals were immaculate like snow. They held the seed of potential, or rebirth.
“You’ve made your decision?” Vasi asked softly at his side, covering her nakedness with a bed sheet. The whole bed still reeked of sex. “About time.”
“Yeah,” Basil agreed. “About time.”
It was bound to happen at some point. The couple had been together for a month now, and Apollyon’s defeat had left them in the mood to celebrate. Vasi simply showed up in Basil’s room one night with her stuff and settled there permanently afterward.
It was…good. There was no other word for it. Making love to his girlfriend for the first time had been sweet, and natural. So they did it again the next night, and then the one afterward. Plato even interrupted a session midway through to complain about the noise. As for Bugsy, he simply cried in joy. Basil had caught him working on a cradle one morning.
Inquisitors might have burned him at the stake for making love to a demonic witch, but as far as Basil was concerned, it felt positively saintly.
“Sorry for the delay,” Basil apologized. “I know more levels would help with containment, but I truly wanted to think it over.”
“It’s fine, Basil.” Vasi rested her head on his shoulder. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Rushing it would be a poor decision.”
Basil smiled. “How would you feel about dating a Dragonknight?”
“I’m dating a knight,” she replied with a chuckle. “I’m dating you. That wouldn’t change even if you took on a Vagrant class.”
And that was why he loved her.
Basil decided to assign his nine new levels before using the lotus. He at first considered completing Deathknight of the Sepulchre but changed his mind at the last second. There was another class he had been considering for a while and according to the information provided by Hagen, it would make Berserker redundant and help him let go of it. Basil needed to confirm if the Perk progression fitted his ally’s intel.
Having made his choice, Basil assigned his new levels to the Dragonknight class.
A wave of pleasure almost as intense as the thrill of sex coursed through his body. The magic of the System empowered his muscles, strengthened his bones, and sharpened his mind. His new class’ power filled every inch of his body.
Dragonknight Level 1 to 9 Stat Gains: +9 STR, +9 AGI, +5 VIT, +7 SKI, +4 MAG, +2 INT, +7 CHA, +5 LCK. You earned 300 HP and 90 SP.
Dragoon I (Passive): You gain advanced proficiency with Swords, Spears, and Shields (x2 damage, +10% Crit).
Dragon Rider I (Passive): You gain advanced proficiency in riding creatures, but only those with the [Dragon] Type (+10% damage to attacks when mounted, you cannot be dismounted by force unless you suffer a Critical Hit or Super effective attack, and you can both direct your mount and attack without splitting your attention).
Dragonbane I (Passive): All your attacks with weapons in which you have a Medium, Advanced or Perfect proficiency will inflict Dragonslayer damage super effective against [Dragon] types (x3 damage).
Double Jump I (Passive): Not only is the distance of your jumps increased, but you can leap a second time while airborne. Additionally, the damage of your Spear weapons is doubled while in the air.
Dragonbreath I (Active): Select an element in which you have a strong affinity. You gain a weak breath attack (60 base damage) of that element which you can use at will; the breath will also pierce through Resistance.
Basil selected Corrosion as his chosen breathing attack. His halberd and elemental orb already covered most elements anyway, so the choice mattered little to him.
“I think you’ve grown new abs, Handsome,” Vasi noted with appreciation. Her soft fingers trailed over Basil’s chest and thighs. “You should start naming them at this rate.”
“I’ll let you pick the nicknames,” Basil teased her back. “But only after I get rid of the Berserker muscle pains.”
“Are you sure you want to fully get rid of it?”
“Yes, I am.” His halberd counted both as a spear and as an axe. With his new Dragonknight Perks, he could let go of Berserker and keep his proficiency. The Runic spellcasting loss would be compensated with an investment in Runesmith. “I don’t regret taking the class. It saved my life more than I can count in the early days.”
“But you’ve outgrown it,” Vasi whispered softly.
“I did,” Basil confirmed.
Once, it was anger that carried the weight of his fight. Not anymore. He looked at his girlfriend and lightly kissed her on the lips. A warm feeling coursed through his cheeks, pleasing and comforting.
That was the thing that spurred him on now. He wanted to protect Vasi, Plato, Rosemarine, Shellgirl, Bugsy, and all the people he had come to care about since the world’s end. Monsters like Apollyon needed to go; not to help Basil feel better about himself, but for the sake of everyone’s safety and happiness.
“Goodbye, Berserker,” Basil whispered as he activated the Lotus of Wisdom. “You will always be a part of me, one way or another.”
The lotus dissipated into nothingness and a screen appeared before Basil; one showcasing both his current classes and those he could access, but never invested in. A series of ‘+’ and ‘-’ allowed him to reassign his levels among them.
Basil had considered his choice of builds for a while. His strength was that of his team, so he intended to focus on support classes like Runesmith and Alchemist in tandem with more martial options like Deathknight of the Sepulchre. He would empower his allies and protect them with the strength of his arm.
Berserker, Gardener, and Fisherman would go. The former was a good class, but one better fit for an antisocial grumpy bear than a team player; the other two had been useful when Basil lived in the wilderness but were now all but useless. He reassigned his levels and confirmed his choice.
You have exchanged your 5 [Berserker] levels, 3 [Gardener] levels, and 1 [Fisherman] level for 1 [Deathknight of the Sepulchre] level and 8 [Runesmith] Levels.
You have lost the following Perks: [Slaughterer I], [Fishing I], [Warp Spasm I], [Jardin Secret I],
[Greenhand I]. [Runic II] remains unchanged; the loss of [Berserker]’s [Runic II] is compensated by the gain in [Runesmith] [Runic II] tier earned at level 9.
Lost Perks have been replaced with the following:
Runestorm I (Active): [Support] 10 SP. You can empower any melee weapon you wield (such as swords, axes, or daggers) with an elemental infusion for five minutes, changing the damage Type to the chosen element. Available elements: [Fire], [Wind], [Earth], [Water], [Frost], and [Lightning].
Runecraft (Passive): You can now incorporate runes into all of your crafting processes, permanently empowering your equipment with their additional effects.
Magic-Eater I (Active): When you have Runestorm active on a weapon, you can redirect any spell of the channeled element within twenty meters to your weapon, absorb them, and regain an amount of SP proportional to the spell’s power. You can only redirect Spells, and not Active Perks or standard attacks.
