Apocalypse: Regression

“So what’s the plan, boss?” Captain Eizo asked. “You going to pay us a standard rate to defend this portal, or do you want us to deliver a message back to the other side?”

“You know, we still have fourteen essences,” Seo-ah noted. “You could upgrade that drone bay once, get it level 2, and still have four essences left over. It’d have six drones then. That’d be enough to handle more monsters than we could take with the group we have here on our own.”

“Yeah,” Captain Eizo nodded. “With the drone bay, we can at least fend off any minor threats without any effort. You could go to the other side, rally your guild, and get the squads moving so we can get enough people to handle major stuff.”

“Or you could put some of those essences into a mess hall . . .” Landry suggested, pointing to the menu option for quarters. “Gotta be something in the quarters section.”

“If you need to cook the meat, then here . . .” Nick instinctively reached for his backpack, only to remember that he had come with the suit seo-ah had given him but none of his usual supplies. He had committed the greatest of errors in life: he had traveled without a backpack. Though he had traveled without one once or twice since he returned to the past, this was definitely the moment he realized his failure the most.

How have I allowed myself to change this much? He cursed under his breath as he looked to his companions for help, wondering if any of them had a cooking kit on them.

Elizabeth, producing a backpack of her own, tossed it over to Nick. “This is what you want, yes?” she asked.

“Yeah, I really needed mine. Thanks,” he said as he pulled out the standard cooking kit—canister-top camping stove, fuel, ultra-light stackable cookware, and a few minor items—and handed it to Landry.

“Don’t mention it. I’ll be sure to educate you properly with the medicine ball until your mind is healed of its forgetfulness,” Elizabeth said with a perfectly lovely smile that sent a very real chill down Nick’s spine, as he could only imagine the torturous “exercises” she would exact upon him as punishment for his mistake.

Landry and the others all seemed to have the same “I don’t want to find out” look as they heard Elizabeth’s chipper promise to Nick, who avoided the subject and began to go through the information about the drones, setting them to gun down any non human that entered the hundred-foot-radius zone of the base. “Alright, with the level 2 drone bay, we can start looking into hunting more monsters and—”

“Nick,” Seo-ah interjected, putting an arm on his shoulder.

“What?” Nick asked.

“Nick, we need to go back, and you know it. Those walls aren’t going to build themselves. We need to get supplies, and we won’t be able to sleep here with shelter unless we get good material or spend the entire day trying to put together a few log cabins,” Seo-ah answered, looking a little worried.

“We could just kill enough monsters and get the walls built that way?” Lou suggested. “Would be nice to see what type of wall the system builds.”

“Leave it to ‘fireball isn’t friendly fire; it’s fun fire’ to think that there are somehow an infinite number of opponents in our surroundings,” Arnold remarked, frowning at Lou’s suggestion. “Brother, you know that we’re in the tundra, right? This is an arctic wasteland. The fact we had two willing foes throw themselves at us so fast was a godsend, but that doesn’t mean it’ll happen again. It is more likely that they’ll form up into an army and hit us much harder next time, potentially overwhelming us if we don’t have the wall, the manpower, and the energy needed to defend ourselves.”

“Arnold is right,” Mr. Walters agreed. “I am a bit hurt, but I can hold my own here. Especially with the drone support. Nick, you need to go back.”

Nick’s expression soured as he heard the incredibly reasonable, well-laid-out arguments for why they needed to return. In his head though, he didn’t want to. All he wanted to do was stay and hunt, build the base, and make a difference here. This place was where he felt he belonged. It was like the apocalypse of the old timeline, only this time he was winning, he had the best girl he could ever ask for by his side, he had a system that was helping him create amazing new facilities he never would have dreamed of in his past life, and the air even tasted sweeter.

This was where he wanted to be, but they were right, he had to go back. As he turned around and saw the rift behind him, he at least took comfort in the fact that he knew he wouldn’t be gone forever.

“Alright, fine. Thanks, Mr. Walters, for taking care of things here. I promise I’ll be back as soon as possible,” Nick said as he took out a piece of paper from the backpack and scribbled out a note. Then he threw the message to the other side to notify those guarding the portal that he was coming back through.

“What about us? How much you offering for us to stay and defend the portal?” Captain Eizo asked as he, Landry, and Akiko looked at Nick expectantly.

Nick thought for a minute, stalling out as he gave time for whoever was on the other side to collect the note and read the letter he sent, and then, with a mischievous grin, he said, “We’ll talk about your pay when I get back.”

“What?!” Captain Eizo exclaimed.

“See ya!” Nick said with a laugh, feeling a little better after the disappointment of having to leave as he turned and jumped through the rift with as much leg strength as he could muster before the mercs could protest any further.

The journey back was as painful as it had been coming through the first time. The universe seemed to split him into his constituent parts amidst a swirling vortex of streaming cosmic energy.

When he finally reappeared on the other side, he hoped the momentum of his jump would carry him past the large pit trap in front of the rift, but then his face smooshed into a large black net. A moment later, he fell ten feet only to be caught by a similar net like a trapeze artist that had failed to make the jump.

Well, that’s better than ending up in the pit, Nick thought as he hung there, dangling above the deadly vines that Jason from the Branches of Yggdrasil had created in the trap below. He did his best to stabilize and stand up, only to be crushed by a falling Topaz, who landed right on top of him, and then Seo-ah right after. The strength of the net was put to the test with the two girls pressing Nick so hard into the rope that he was certain that, when he finally got free, he’d have square indentations across his body like he’d been crushed in a waffle press.

“Nick! Give us a minute, and we’ll get you out of there! Just don’t have anyone else come through, if that net breaks you might end up dying to those spikes!” a man’s voice yelled out from above, but Nick couldn’t tell who it was. His vision was completely blocked by Topaz’s thigh pressing into his face as he turned to orient himself.

Yeah, like I have a choice about that from here, Nick complained to himself. Then the net moved and the weight on top of him lessened until Topaz shifted and he could see several members of his guild helping Topaz and Seo-ah climb out of the net onto solid ground. Nick followed suit, and when his feet were on solid ground he saw that he was surrounded by more people than he’d left. Not only were his guild members and the mercenaries there, but there was also a small army of men wearing tactical gear and sporting the Dungeon Oversight Association’s logo.

“We’re sorry about the netting situation, Mr. Gallows,” one of the members of the DOA, standing out thanks to the blue stripe up and down his outfit, said as he extended a hand for Nick to shake. “It’s just—you must understand—we weren’t certain who or what would come through the new dungeon portal. It’s still an anomaly to us, you see.”

“Yeah . . . of course,” Nick replied, shaking the DOA agent’s hand, only for the man to grip so tightly that Nick couldn’t free his hand once the handshake began.

“Which is why,” the DOA member continued, still clutching Nick’s hand in a vise-like squeeze, “I’m sure you can understand our reason for temporarily seizing this new portal.”

“What do you mean by seizing it?” Nick asked, doing his best to yank his hand free, wishing he had Arnold or Mr. Walter’s strength as he struggled for a minute to pull his digits from the man in front of him. “It’s a portal, and we went through it first, and we established the base on the other side. If I’m not mistaken, that means we have rights to it. Isn’t that how it always is?”

“Mmm, that may be the case for normal dungeon portals, but as this is an anomaly and not a standard dungeon portal, how can we possibly use standard procedure to decide who gets rights to the dungeon?” the agent answered with an unchanging, emotionless face as he stared straight into Nick’s eyes.

“Tch, since when did the DOA get the right to take people’s dungeons from them? I don’t remember that being in your charter,” Topaz griped as she dusted herself off after getting free of the net.

“Our charter is to maintain order, stability, and safety for the people. This dungeon clearly let loose monsters that threatened the entire city, and because it poses an existential threat to those around it, we have a duty to seize it, study it, and bar people from recklessly entering it and getting killed.”

As Nick listened to the man talk, all he could hear was that one line, “barring people from recklessly entering it,” repeat in his head over and over again. He had come back to this side to get reinforcements. He was hoping to hire contractors to build the wall on the other side, get supplies for eating, get his guild members to set up defense perimeters and then organize parties to go out and start hunting for monsters to harvest essence shards.

He had a lot of clear, concrete goals in mind, none of which could be done if the DOA locked down the portal and stopped people from going through. Even if he was already thinking about tricks and techniques he could pull to go through himself, he knew he wouldn’t be able to do that en masse for the others he needed to get to the other side.

This meant, no matter how hard it was going to be, he needed to get them to play ball with him, only he had no real experience with that, even from his years of dealing with bureaucracy. In his last life, he had even let Isabelle’s CPA do his taxes just because he hated the paperwork.

“This sounds like an overreach,” Topaz stated defiantly.

“One I don’t think you could defend under legal scrutiny,” Seo-ah quickly added, speaking for Nick, the two women handling the conversation as he silently tried to figure out what his next move was.

“It may sound like that to you, but you must understand that we have discretion to act as we see fit when there are no existing laws to cover the situation. It’s part of the Dungeon Chevron Doctrine,” the DOA agent explained. “Which is also why I believe that I, Agent Sheridan, on behalf of the DOA, also have the authority to invite Mr. Gallows and you two young ladies back to the office to talk about your role in this situation and what you saw on the other side.”

“I don’t think you actually do though,” Malcolm, the man that Nick had only met in passing earlier, interjected as he pushed himself into the conversation. “I mean, if it’s just an invitation, I’m sure you certainly have the right to do that. We all do. However, if you’re going to insist that you can compel him to join you, then I think you’ll find Mr. Gallows’ attorneys would disagree.”

“Ahh . . . Mr. Rothman,” the man paused, freezing for a moment as he gulped audibly. “I don’t understand why you’re getting in the way of our investigation.”

“I’m not getting in the way of any such action. I’m just trying to help a young man out of what appears to be a tough situation,” Malcolm said with a big, friendly smile plastered across his face. “After all, I’ve more than once seen your kind casually whisk people away to talk, only for them to find their words used against them in court or twisted to fit a predetermined narrative to justify unlawful arrests.”

“That’s . . . That’s not at all what’s going on here, Malcolm,” Agent Sheridan insisted, seeming both nervous and perturbed as his expressions shifted more than once while looking at Malcolm. “What you’re describing is only true if there is no probable cause or reason to bring an individual in for investigation. But we have solid evidence that this young man is Daedalus and that Daedalus has had insider knowledge on multiple cataclysmic events that have caused the deaths of many people across the country and has been present at the breaks of too many dungeons globally to be considered coincidence.”

As he spoke, Agent Sheridan’s words grew more and more confident. It wasn’t because he was more certain on the subject than before, but because more and more of his agents had made it to the scene to back him up. Now, Agent Sheridan wasn’t facing off against trained dungeon divers alone. He had the backup of at least ten of his peers.

“Then you must know that he still has a right to legal defense, so I’ll be going with him until he secures his own,” Malcolm insisted. “He’s a patron of a close friend of mine after all.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Darleen, Grandfather’s old secretary, said as she interjected herself into the conversation, putting a hand on Nick’s shoulder as if to stop him from even taking a single step forward with Agent Sheridan. “Instead, I think you should answer the call you’re about to get.”

“What? What are you . . .” Agent Sheridan looked a little startled because he hadn’t even finished his question before his phone rang. “Yes, this is Sheridan. Yes, I’m with . . . But . . . But you can’t . . . But, sir!” Sheridan’s frustration with whoever was on the other side of that call seemed to grow, but it was evident he couldn’t do anything about whatever unpleasant news he’d just been given. “Fine, but don’t expect us to drop our investigation. This matter is too large. The people are going to demand . . . Yes, sir.”

Looking rather smug as she regained her breath, Darleen exchanged a single glance with Nick as if to say, “Look how awesome I am,” before turning back to the agent. “I think you have your marching orders then, little boy. So run along now,” Darleen shooed Sheridan away in the most condescending tone he’d ever heard out of the woman, adding in a dismissive hand gesture to go with her words as she purposefully riled up and humiliated the man.

Nick shook his head as he watched Sheridan and his cohorts walk off angrily. “That wasn’t necessary. Now he’s going to really hold a grudge against me.”

“He was going to that to begin with,” Darleen explained. “Men like him, you need to break them early, or else they’ll bite their owner’s hand at every opportunity. They mistake ambition for a virtue and rebelliousness for spirit.”

“Is that something my grandfather taught you?” Nick asked, the last sentence in particular definitely sounding like something he’d have heard from the old man.

“Indeed.” Darleen nodded, looking happy to oblige. “But if you have something that you need to do with that portal, you’ll either need to take over this whole city, or you’ll need to get it done quickly. It won’t be long until he finds a backer with a financial incentive to take you down, especially with how rich you are. ‘A fallen giant feeds a thousand families,’ after all. Another saying from your grandfather.”

“Given how your reputation keeps getting dragged through the mud by people you’re trying to save,” Seo-ah grumbled, “I guess we need to act quick. But . . . can we put everything together that fast?”

“I can assist,” Darleen offered. “What would you like me to begin with first?”

“Well, we need to get a defensive wall built on the other side of that portal, and it needs to be fast. I don’t know how much time we have left until an actual army tries to break it,” Nick explained to Darleen. He didn’t know if he could trust her or not, as she had been loyal to his grandfather, not him, but he didn’t have a lot of options. She had proven useful more than once, and useful was something that he valued enough to overlook his suspicions.