Apocalypse Redux

The next morning, Derek had made a decision: he’d be fighting the Ki-Lun as soon as possible, then buy an Aspect to stack it with.

All told, the monster wasn’t going to be a complete and utter cakewalk, but at the same time, he … well, calling himself a “hard counter” would be an exaggeration, more like he nullified the fact that it should have been a hard counter to him, but he still had a not-insignificant advantage here.

So he marched his ass down to the stall, slapped down his credit card, and asked to fight as many of the monsters as it took to earn his Aspect, and something he could stack this Aspect onto.

Since he’d gotten most of the questions out of the way already, they could start quite quickly, so he was quickly shown the way to a dark and dreary warehouse, with dark blue and green patterns that looked like someone had had “induce depression” as their foremost goal when designing the place.

Though a quick search of the database on his phone revealed that that was not, in fact, the case.

This place had been built to appear bombastic and induce a feeling of anticipation in the viewer. And it did … in Koinians, whose association of colors to emotions were vastly different from those of other sapient species. In fact, while the sample size might be tiny, it seemed like all species had widely diverging associations.

Though that was probably a statistical anomaly, due to the simple fact that there were only so many colors, only so many emotions, if one collected enough data about enough species, there’d doubtlessly be those with similar, or even identical, color preferences.

But Derek didn’t wind up having to wait long, as things were swiftly set up, he was asked to provide one final confirmation that he was, in fact, ready to fight, and then the summoning circle was triggered, leaving him in a large room, square, each wall almost a hundred meters long, with a spectral beast known as the bane of mages rising out of a balefully glowing summoning circle.

The Ki-Lun was bipedal, two arms, two legs, roughly proportioned like a Koinian … and that was where any semblance of normality ended, its shadowy body somehow both whispy and solid, scythe-like arms flickering from place to place yet never moving, two tendrils/antennae/horns coiling up above its head while an orange-golden gemstone-looking thing hovered in the center of its chest, gleaming in anticipation as it waited for him to make the mistake of hurling magic at it.

And then it threw itself at him, legs stretching like uncoiling springs to make it cross half the intervening distance in an instant, its right arm launched forward to cross the rest, sickle-blade about to land behind Derek, where it would carve him apart as it was pulled back into the main body, with him in between … A full third of his mana vanished in an instant as he warped space, stepping past the creature and, spinning, and hurling an [Anima Bolt] from each hand.

But these weren’t the original, acidic, partially phased rays of mana he’d been able to generate when he’d first gotten the [Skill]. Because, since then, he’d slotted all of the Aspects necessary to use [Alcubierre Bubble] and that had had consequences.

Namely, the ray of energy that tore across the intervening space was a force of entropy and crushing gravity, the black fire he knew to be wreathing it invisibly along with the rest of the magical strike, hidden by the power of his Illusion Aspect.

Though even if the monster had been able to see the attack, Derek strongly suspected it would not have dodged, anticipating being able to absorb the “spell.”

But in the end, it never wound up mattering. The first [Anima Bolt] took the Ki-Lun in the shoulder and sent it flying, one arm blown off, while the other slammed into its side in midair, hurling it further, flying oddly far, as though it weighed even less than one would have guessed based on its appearance, though that just bought him enough time to throw more energy beams after it.

A couple missed, the distance too long for perfect accuracy, but less than ten seconds later, the Ki-Lun disintegrated before it had even hit the ground, smoky body fading away into nothiness while the gemstone in its chest burst with a soft “pop.”

“Again, please,” Derek declared while swigging down a mana potion to top up his reserves. As long as he could conduct each fight with just his mana pool alone, without needing to regenerate, the regen penalty from potion use wasn’t going to matter unless he found himself doing this like twenty times in a row.

***

It only wound up taking him a grand total of five dead monsters to get the Aspect, and another ten of a suitable Tier 3 beast that went down even more easily to get something to stack onto, which left him with the following beauty:

Aspect of the Spellbreaker Phantom (translated)

This is the distilled essence of what makes a Spellbreaker Phantom a Spellbreaker Phantom. Destroy incoming spells, pre-cast your own within your very flesh, or devour the magic of your enemies to cast your own workings.

Requirements for Activation:

1,000 XP

Open Aspect Slot

Grants:

+10 Magic Regeneration

One of the following Skills:

Spellbreaker

Internal Grimoire

Mana Canibal

What [Skills] he’d take had been obvious, but the name of the Aspect was … well, it was odd. The “translated” tag explained it, but it was unexpected, and revealed as being “normal” by a quick search of his phone, though he did feel like it was odd that it hadn’t kept its original name.

On the other hand, it was a lot more self-explanatory, which was nice.

As for the [Skills] …

Spellbreaker (rare)

Hurl your own mana into enemy spells, destroying them upon perfect strikes, weakening them if not.

Cost: 100 mana

Internal Grimoire (rare)

Cast a single spell and hold it within your flesh, ready to be unleashed in an instant, with its formation impossible to prevent. Furthermore, it can be safely overcharged by up to fifty percent.

All told, both these [Skills] were powerful.

[Internal Grimoire] would allow him to precast spell separate from his ability to cast normally, capable of being prepared during a quiet moment and whipped out in the middle of combat without mana cost or casting time, regardless of what it was, while [Spellbreaker] was rather more crude form of counterspelling that was costly to boot … but it certainly was something to smack his fellow spellcasters in the face with.

Yet there was something else he was getting out of this. The Aspect itself, and the way it synergized with [Chimera], or rather, the way the additional benefits his [Class] extracted synergized with him.

Sure, [Anima Bolt] getting an anti-magic effect was nice, but once he was done buying [Aspect Integration], he wouldn’t just get the ability to internally store spells from [Internal Grimoire]. He’d be able to directly make it a part of his physiology.

Oh, and there were also a whole lot of other advantages that [Skill] would give him, but would he have been able to get his latest Aspect this quickly and easily without [Aspect Hunter]?

Actually, he also wouldn’t have been able to slot the alien Aspects without it either …

Derek sighed happily as he looked at his stat screen.

Name: Derek Ambrosius Thoma

Class: Student of Legendary Persistence -> Chimera

Species: High Human

Level: 10 -> 15

XP: 1,981/3,200

Health Status: Healthy

Mana: 377/1,550

Fortitude 55 -> 90

Perception 35 -> 60

Strength 25 -> 60

Agility 35 -> 80

Magic Power 90 -> 155

Magic Regeneration 150 -> 160

Free Points: 0 Stat, 3 Skill

General Skills

Aspect Hunter 1

Skills

Lightspeed Learning 9

Skill Fusion 7

Knowledge Conversion 1

Branching Capabilities 3

Anima Bolt 1

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

General Skills

Bloodline of the Hellborne Survivor

Stellar Mental Maths 7

Spellcasting 9 (103 spells known)

Variable Weapon Empowerment 6

Phantom Armor 3

Knightly Discipline 1

Starship Upkeep 1

Scholar of War 1

Veteran’s Knowledge 1

Inspect 1

Aspect

Aspect Skills

Hydra

Regeneration, Redundant Organs

Poltergeist

Ephemeral Form, Spectral Flight

Least Demon Lord

Grand Hellflame, Moment of Immortality

Lord of Time and Space

True Spatial Warp, Cosmos Soul, True Spatial Affinity, And I Shall Not Be Moved

Caladrius

Healing Light, Inner Light

Fata Morgana

Hologram, Perception Block

Cosmic Leviathan

Charging to Infinity, Cosmic Gaze, Stellar Travel, Omnidimensional Maneuvering

Void Dragon

Wings of the Void, Scales of the Void, Star’s Heart, Infinite Mind

Magebreaker Specter

Internal Grimoire, Spellbreaker

Yep. That was excellent.

But normally, once this stuff was done, Derek had been feeling exhausted, energy spent, probably even overdrawn.

Right now, on the other hand?

Right now, he felt more than ready to go into another fight, and he had people here who were more than willing to summon monsters for him to farm.

Monsters belonging to summoning categories that were the very definition of inhuman, full of new monsters whose XP limits he hadn’t touched yet.

Derek paused, spun on his heels to march back towards the arena, stopped once more, and turned towards the elevators, quickly heading up towards the shop that sold alien Aspects up top in the human section, quickly taking note of the most valuable ones he actually had a chance at earning, then headed through the gear market to see what those same Aspects sold for without the markup, then mentally knocked twenty-five percent off those prices, and wrote that down on his phone, to use that as a basis of how much to sell those for to the store up above.

The goal was to take full advantage of the increased Aspect drop rate from his [Class] to offset the cost of having someone else summon for him, letting him save his mana for monster-murdering, while minimizing the monetary cost to himself.

From there, he could keep going until he could buy his [Class’] other Central [Skill]. But not beyond that. Because he felt that persistently undercutting local suppliers would easily land him in trouble. But earning three Levels and selling the handful of Aspects he’d likely get in the process should be fine; there certainly weren’t any rules in it when he’d looked up the station’s regulations.

Then, he was finally back at the stall.

“So, I need enough XP to level three times,” he asked, handing over a list of monsters. “Here’s how I’d like to earn it.”

***

Aspect Integration (legendary)

They call you a Chimera. They aren’t wrong about that, per se, yet they are … premature.

For it is only through the use of Aspect Integration that you become a Chimera in truth, taking the power and physiology of monsters and making them a permanent part of yourself, though no major changes to body shape are possible.

The changes are free as long as they do not significantly in- or decrease your size, and this Skill has all the necessary built-in controls to ensure that the changes have no negative consequences, and can always be reversed if so desired, even decades or centuries after the fact.

This “reversal” includes not just returning to your original form, but also reverting to any alternate form you may have moved on from, as well as reverting any reversals you may have made.

However, using certain magical functions of your new body may still require mana.

Yep.

That was one hell of a [Skill], wasn’t it? And so damn spammable …

As per usual, the [System] was indulging in its terrible habit of burying the lead on the true power of this ability. Because the reversibility of this [Skill] effectively meant that he could jump to any “form” he’d ever made, at the drop of a hat, without any risk of accidentally overriding changes the way the “undo” and “redo” buttons sometimes did when using his computers.

Of course, this [Skill] would also require a metric shitton of study and experimentation to make useful, but if there was anything Derek was good at, it was learning.

But this was not something he should be playing around with here, out in the open, so he quickly returned towards the Dragonfly, into the infirmary, and let himself flounce into the chair that would have belonged to the chief medical officer on a navy ship.

Though as it stood, the ship’s medical section had six beds, literally more than it had crew, because even though it had been designed for a small complement, individual sections had often been built up to navy standards.

At the end of the day, however, this place was mostly a place for the wounded to rest while they recovered, and to store potions, with the rest of the “fixing” done by the healing capabilities of the chief medical officer or the injured individuals’ own powers of recovery.

And all of them could heal themselves.

Even so, if something did go wrong, despite all the claims the [Skill]-description made, this was the best place to do this.

Then, finally, he sent a quick message to the others that he’d be using a biomancy [Skill] and to please check on him if they didn’t hear from him an hour or so.

And once that was done, Derek began, triggering [Aspect Integration] and turning his awareness inwards, the [Skill] quickly guiding him down the correct path, until he found himself standing in the void, staring forward, facing … well, facing himself, a nude simulacrum of his own body yet he could, somehow, see every level of it, the skin, a map of the musculature, a diagram of bloodvessels, a circuit board of his nerves …

It should have hit him with the mother of all information overloads. The fact that it didn’t left him quite glad.

Now, where to start?

Somewhere simple. With something hard to screw up. Proof of concept, and all that. And there was an obvious way to go about that.

You see, one could not directly increase one’s Stats via any kind of biomantic alteration. At best, one could give oneself something more capable of using said Stats. For example, human bones at fifty Fortitude were still nowhere near as durable as dragonbones at fifty Fortitude. So that was the first thing Derek changed. Replaced the osseous parts of his bones with those of a Void Dragon while leaving the marrow and blood vessels alone, with the [Skill] making the process almost automatic.

Then, Derek cancelled [Aspect Integration], opened his eyes, and stood up, stumbling slightly.

That felt … he felt heavy. Well, not heavy, heavier, not to the point of it being any kind of real issue, but still … something he’d have to learn to deal with, and adjust his muscle memory to match. In fact, he suddenly found himself greatly respecting any melee combatant with this [Class].

Though it only took a few minutes of walking in circles to mostly get used to it.

And with that done, Derek decided to try out the other thing that would let him at least somewhat increase his Stats. Namely, his Perception.

Now, he could not outright boost it, but much like with his bones, he could give himself something that worked better before the Stat boost came into play. After all, for example, birds of prey could see much better than humans without any kind of magic involved. The same also went for giving himself entirely new senses, though that did feel like a great way to give himself an aneurysm if done poorly or hastily.

Also, there was a limit as to how much extra sensory information the brain could process, according to a book on the topic he’d read years ago, though the mental enhancements that came with increasing the magic-related Stats would more than compensate for that as long as he did not go overboard.

But his attempts at using that portion of [Aspect Integration] were swiftly aborted, simply because they wound up far too weird, colors shifting and bleeding into each other, some vanishing, others appearing from nowhere, seemingly created wholesale from nothing …

Nearly an hour later, Derek decided to stop, having managed to improve his low-light vision via the Void Dragon and rendered him able to see even in the brightest of lights, even staring directly into a sun, by drawing upon his Caladrius Aspect.

Useful, all in all, though not quite as much as being able to use one of the more exotic forms of sight he theoretically had access to via the ghost or space elemental Aspects … but trying hadn’t worked. Perhaps there was a different way to go about that, but he was yet to figure out the trick.

But it did bring him to the final thing he really wanted to try today: recreate the Void Dragon’s and Cosmic Leviathan’s ability to use spacetime itself as something to push off of.

As such, he replicated the flesh of the leviathan’s tail onto the sole of his right foot. And waited.

Nothing happened, which was probably a good thing, in this situation. The sole of his foot didn’t somehow catch onto the fabric of reality and yank him into the wall because it tried to maintain his velocity and vector relative to a reference point other than the ship he was in.

However, he still needed to be able to trigger his ability, so he tried to scoot off the chair he’d once again planted himself upon, only to feel an odd sort of … of not-resistance against the transformed foot. It certainly did not stop him; it didn’t even inhibit his movement, but he could feel it was there; he just needed to figure out a way to engage with it … somehow.

Though, as it turned out, all it took was a mere thought, at the cost of a few points of mana, letting him anchor his foot there in midair, capable of pulling himself towards it, pushing himself away too, which just left one question: could he now walk on air?

Derek disconnected his foot from the air, stood up, and then planted the transformed foot on the empty air once again. Then, he tried to walk up the empty air as though it were an invisible staircase, transforming his other sole … except the moment he put his entire weight on the nothingness beneath his foot, he realized his foothold was a lot less stable than he’d thought, and suddenly he found himself pitching forward as the support beneath the front of his boot vanished, yet when he tried to catch himself, he found himself still anchored to the place he’d tried to stand on, the rather unique experience of rotating around a point in space that was empty air so distracting that he wound up bellyflopping onto the hard metal of the infirmary’s floor.

“So I checked on you … does this count as you ‘doing okay’?” Ye-in asked dryly from the doorway, apparently having realized that the only damage he’d taken had been to his pride.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Derek sighed, waving her off, rising to his feet with a groan. “I think I’m done with experimenting with changes, now I just need to learn to walk again.”

“Need help?”

“Nah, I’m good,” he told her. Though, for the most part, that just meant that there wasn’t very much she could do to help him here.

Derek undid the change to his feet, and began to walk up and down the length of the infirmary, trying to consciously remember that feeling, to fix it in his mind, then undid the undoing and tried to walk on the “air” again.

Once more, making the soles of his feet “catch” was easy. Lifting himself off the ground … well, that too.

Staying lifted, on the other hand, turned out to be functionally impossible, spacetime proving to be just about the single most unstable footing he’d ever even so much as heard about, and he found himself falling once more, though cancelling the effect so that he could land properly, rather than rotating around the point of contact and faceplanting, did make the experience less painful.

This felt impossible, walking across the empty air like this, although there was every chance that that was why both the Void Dragon and Cosmic Leviathan used much larger parts of their body to use this effect.

Wait a minute … why the hell was he only using the bottom of his feet? Why not transform a leg in its entirety?

… Because it was pointless. Because his weight was resting at the bottom of his foot. Because that was the only place where the effect had an, er, effect, so his activating or, as it were, not activating it elsewhere made no difference.

But he could do something else. Do the same to the palms of his hands, and use those to stabilize himself.

Maybe.

Once again, Derek stepped on the empty air, then slapped both palms down on it as well, and found himself stabilized, held firm in three points that were far enough apart to keep him in place. Four places, when he lifted his other leg.

Yep, he was standing on the empty air, solid, immovable. Both in regard to gravity and his own locomotion.

Oh, sure, he could walk, but needed to carefully and consciously move his hands along with his legs. Possible, but difficult. And slow. And very much impractical.

So … so why the hell was he using it on his feet in the first place? If the point of contact was above him, gravity would keep him stable, right?

Therefore, transform his hands, hold one above him, grasp onto the fabric of spacetime, pull, cancel the effect as he shot past …

Derek collided face-first with the far wall and slid down it with a groan. Well, it worked, it was just kinda hard. And could easily cause collateral damage in a place like this, full of (relatively) fragile medical equipment.

As such, he headed into the corridor outside and began to train there until the noise of him slamming into the wall finally brought Mimi out of the engineering section to see what was going on, who gave him a concerned look.

Derek shrugged, then decided that perhaps it was time to pack it in, for now.

***

It was only when he woke up the next morning that he realized that he’d forgotten to sell the seven spare Aspects he’d gotten while leveling. Oh, well, he could do that now. And he did, recouping the entirety of the money he’d spent on summoning.