Apocalypse Redux

The next morning, Derek was once again in a dungeon, fighting a “starter monster” and finding it to be a considerably larger pain in the ass than he’d been led to believe.

Another neon-green pseudopod swished through the air in front of his nose as he jerked his head back, then swiped his rapier through the base of the limb, only for the severed mass to get absorbed straight back into the slime the moment it fell down.

What a pain in the ass.

Drawing his rapier back, Derek was about to try to skewer the core once more, only to realize that a second slime had found its way behind him. Somehow.

A quick bolt of hellfire turned it into a bonfire, the creature igniting like dry tinder despite being something like ninety-five percent water, and after a quick moment of indecision, he jumped through the flames, while the critter in front of him lunged after him.

He was immune to his own flames. It very much was not.

Okay, once again: he was wasting mana. But, at the very least, he was learning to get as much use out of it as possible.

Behind him, he could hear Ye-in cursing, her forcefields turning out to be functionally against infinitely maleable enemies, and trying to hit the core amidst the sticky mess that was their torso turned out to be a pain in the ass.

Because while slimes weren’t overly dangerous, at least not this variety, they were still tricky to kill with mundane weapons alone.

Derek’s rapier flashed out, the tip spearing the core of yet another slime, only his second “proper” kill, as he didn’t count the ones he’d had to resort to hellfire to deal with. It wasn’t like practicing with it wasn’t important, because it very much was, in fact, in many ways, it was more important than his martial training, but overall, any time he resorted to it in situations he was supposed to be able to handle by strength of arms felt like a personal failure. Not to mention that he could barely use it, and the only reason he could repeatedly do so was that the monsters he was facing were so weak, so he could finish them off with incredibly brief bursts of flame.

There was a loud splattering sound, followed by Wyatt swearing, but that seemed to be the last of the slimes in the room.

“Mana break,” Derek called out, while looking to make sure that his fellow student wasn’t injured. He wasn’t, but there were several new stains on his pants, consequences of having hit a slime just a little too hard.

“Incoming,” Ye-in warned, pointing towards the door to the next room, where a dark brown slime was oozing out of.

“Oh, please don’t be sewage …” Derek muttered under his breath as he readied his rapier, hearing someone snigger behind him.

He began to stab out in a way he knew was patently ridiculous, more like how someone with arachnophobia tries to squish a spider with a stick while staying as far from the eight-legged horror as physically possible, than an actual fighter.

Because it made a perverse kind of sense that there would be sewage slimes in here. They’d be disgusting, but not overly so compared to what they might face elsewhere, so it would be a comparatively “safe” way to introduce students to the grosser side of things.

But still … ew.

Thankfully, this particular variant seemed to be comparatively slow, and after his fourth half-hearted stab, the slime collapsed into a brown puddle, core popped, splattering everywhere.

“Shit!” Derek yelped and jumped back. And then he smelled it.

“Wait … is that Coke?”

Another snigger behind him, leaving him ninety percent certain that it was the teacher laughing at him.

“Dungeons can have variants on monsters, and the dean managed to figure out how to trick them into making cola slimes a few months into the age of the [System]. She gets a kick out of seeding a few in the training dungeons,” he explained without prompting.

Derek nodded slowly. That was interesting … but he was mostly just glad he was presently dripping soda rather than shitwater.

“Alright, now can we have a mana break?” he finally asked.

There was a chorus of yeses, and they settled down for a few minutes, then proceeded into the next room, which was still a stone cavern, but one that was shaped and painted to look like the walls and floor were made from wooden boards instead.

As for the slimes, they were both more numerous and varied in color, not a single neon-green “standard” variant in sight, but absolutely chock-full of more interesting variants, including several white ones, a mint-green one, three ones that looked like amber if amber had the consistency of jelly, and finally almost a dozen dark red ones that were just a little bit too clear to be blood.

And then they lunged forward.

“What. The. Fuck,” Derek muttered, readying his rapier.

The damn things were fast, far faster than the others, moving more like the cola slime from earlier, more fluid, more flexible …

Shit.

Derek threw himself to the side as a green one launched itself at his chest, rapier splashing through it while entirely missing the core. Though it still felt far easier to cut through than the ones in the first room.

Fast but fragile, yet still immune to any damage that failed to strike the core.

The slime lunged for Derek once again, the rapier once again only succeeding in splattering more dark green liquid across the floor, rather than inflicting meaningful damage.

Oh, hell …

Derek began to stab at it more frantically, rapier flashing forward half a dozen times in barely two seconds, easily punching through the liquid shell until the creature fell apart. He had no idea which strike had managed to land, but clearly, one had, because the slime fell apart while releasing a minty-alcoholic smell he couldn’t quite identify but seemed oddly familiar.

“Are all of these booze?” Ye-in asked, Derek, looking up to catch her looking like she’d just murdered someone, red liquid practically drenching her up to her chest, though based on her comment, that was probably just wine.

Evidently, someone had had a lot of fun guiding the development of this dungeon’s core.

Then, something whipped across his arm, tearing his jacket and leaving a thin cut in his arm that began to sting something fierce.

Whirling, he was greeted with an extra-large slime that seemed to have a massive shard of glass at the end of its pseudopod …

With a soft curse, Derek flung a bolt of hellfire at the amber-colored slime … big mistake. Because it exploded into a massive ball of black flame that washed over his face, briefly blinding him.

Fuuuuuuuuck. That thing had probably been made of whisky or something.

Well, no one had been in range to get hit, and he was immune, but that had still been stupid … and then he heard Ye-in giggle behind him.

Derek sighed, turning to see a room practically drenched in various colored liquids, the smell of several kinds of alcohol mixing into a highly unpleasant melange, but clear of surviving monsters, leaving him free to engage in this conversation.

“What?”

“You have mad scientist hair,” she sniggered, causing him to reach up to try and tame his now frizzy mop of hair that had been blown into a truly ridiculous hairdo.

“So I do,” Derek muttered as he looked around to once again make sure the area was clear, then worked to get it into something at least somewhat “proper” while his mana regenerated.

“Can I try to light the next room on fire before we go in?” he asked once he was done. His response was a chorus of shrugs, so he asked, “Does that mean ‘yes’?”

“Sure, go for it,” Ye-in said after a brief silence. “But do you have enough mana for that?”

“I don’t need to,” Derek replied with a broad grin and began to pull some gadgets out of the storage ring.

Well, “gadgets” was stretching it by a significant amount.

What he was actually holding were large lead weights that were meant to be used in fishing, to carry the hook towards the bottom, smeared in homemade napalm, which was basically just gasoline thickened by a gelling agent, with the basic idea being that the napalm would carry his hellfire, while the metal would provide the mass needed to allow it to actually fly a significant distance.

Carefully, he prowled forward, a fistfull of slimy metal clutched in each hand, then, the instant he saw the next room over, he pulled his right hand back and threw it forward in his best approximation of a baseball pitch, sending a burst of hellfire shooting from his palm at the last possible moment, then passed the weights from his left hand into his right and threw those, another flaming shotgun blast of metal flying into the room beyond before he legged it.

Just in time. He didn’t see what exploded, but it had definitely been bigger than the whisky slime from earlier and was quickly followed by two more, to the point where he actually felt the familiar sensation of regeneration touch his ears, indicating he’d actually managed to inflict some hearing damage upon himself.

When he walked back over, all he saw was an inferno. Not one a slime could have survived, but also not something he could see through … Derek sighed and decided to swallow his pride.

“Uh, was that the last room?” he asked the teacher.

“It was. But you won’t have someone to give you information like that normally, so you shouldn’t get used to that.”

Derek nodded, then looked around at the others. “So, see you next time? I gotta take a shower.”

Because for some goodforsaken reason, even though he was entirely immune to his own fire, and heavily resistant to many others, and capable of pretty much ignoring radiated heat, he still sweated when things were too hot, so with how much hellfire he’d thrown around, the entire damn dungeon was slowly becoming an oven, leaving him sweaty and gross.

Thank God for living near campus.

***

The second class of the day turned out to be a bit of a drag, very much the opposite of what he’d expected a class on magic to be.

Oh, Derek had little doubt that magic would be truly fascinating once he could use it, but right now, it was entirely theoretical, heavy on information that just plain needed to be memorized yet lacked an immediate use.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

So basically, it had started with a short recap of “you need to buy spells with [Skill] points until you’re familiar enough with them to the point where you can start learning them from books or make your own” and then a glut of stuff that presently only served as “filler” in his brain.

Important … but Derek had a feeling it would swiftly become his least favorite class.

***

After lunch, he found himself back in the main hall, beneath the dome, which was now entirely black, reminding Derek of an old-school planetarium, while the floor was formed into a handful of scattered chairs.

Just how early was he? There were exactly four other people here, despite the fact that … he checked his phone. Jup, it was literally less than a minute until class started, and he doubted a group of significant size would march in during those last few seconds.

And yes, one more person did enter, but he didn’t look like a student.

A middle-aged Korean man entered from the main door, slowly walking towards the center of the room, seemingly the very first teacher who did not need to make a big production out of their entrance, though the fact that he had a rather large pitbull walking beside him as he scratched it behind the ears was unique in its own right.

He stopped in the dead center of the room, where a standing table was waiting for him, and waved them all over, waiting for the students to do so before beginning to speak.

“They say that those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.

“I wish that were true, because if it were, it would be very easy to make the world a better place and keep it that way.

“Instead, it is as Mark Twain said, ‘history does not repeat, but it sure does rhyme.’ There are patterns, but not ones that are easy to identify or disrupt, let alone stop.

“But if you’re here, that’s not going to prevent you from trying.”

It was at this point that Derek realized he recognized the teacher despite the man not having introduced himself.

A second of Korea’s S-Rankers, Dr. Han Junu, whose powers were … well, they were weird, in the grandest sense. Where most people in his position had somewhat coherent powersets that could be described in a few words, a full sentence at most, his abilities were …