Outrage of the Ancients

Ogier

“There are undead in the caves.”

Oh, that … that was bad.

Ogier didn’t even bother holding back on the swearing as he stormed out of his previous assigned position, a so-called “pillbox” on the far side of the mountain from the throne room. There were multiple caves in the Untersberg, ones that weren’t connected to the fortress. But if they were filled with undead, they might be able to dig into places they weren’t supposed to go from there.

But sheer urgency wasn’t the only reason he’d taken off like a bat out of hell. The “safety” of his previous position might have protected him, but it also limited him to an absurd degree.

Though “Absurd” was a good way to describe everything that had happened in the last five days, starting with his own powers and ending with the monsters he fought. However, it was his abilities that were tripping him up the most. Before, any skill he acquired was one he gained through training and could therefore understand.

Nowadays … he had to read the description of something he could do, he needed someone to explain his own abilities to him, and half the time, he still needed to test out several things to make sure everything worked.

But work things did. He wanted to find out what was behind the System at some point, and until that happened, he’d gladly use the powers it provided to crush its minions.

It only took him a couple of minutes to reach the spot his emperor had indicated, though the full path description hadn’t been needed, the sound of countless hands scratching and clawing at the stone was unmissable and utterly terrifying.

“Wait for them to come to me or breach the wall to meet them in there?” Ogier asked into the empty air. Normally, helping the enemy break in was a terrible idea, but right now, it should let him control where the enemy breached.

“Meet them, but stop your advance once you run into a split and wait until Dietrich von Bern can replace you as a guard,” his emperor responded.

Communications had mostly been kept to modern intercoms to lighten the load on the emperor’s mind and automatically keep everyone in the loop without his having to directly inform others, but there were situations where taking full advantage of magical communications was necessary. Like the current one.

Ogier drew back his fist and punched the stone, causing cracks to radiate out from the point of impact. Normally, this would be the point where the people on the other side reacted, froze up, or at the very least, paused.

Instead, the scratching and clawing kept up as a steady, horrifying, metronome.

So he punched the wall again and again, until he finally spun, took a few steps back, and charged at the spot he’d been hammering away at, triggering [Shockwave Impact] as he struck it. Instead of inadvertently kissing stone as he smacked into the rock, he came to a dead stop while all the force of his body passed into his target, which was promptly blasted away, pulverizing the lesser enemies behind it.

It was terrifying to see how much of the wall had already been torn out, and Ogier realized that if the monsters beyond hadn’t suddenly gained an entrance, they’d have ripped open a ten-meter-wide breach into the fortress, instead of the one-meter gap that he’d made. And on the other side of that gap sat a massive melted-looking skeleton that had to stand at least three meters tall and was already moving to go after him with its emotionless motions, not even having paused for a single second.

These things were just plain wrong.

Ogier had had many different hair-raising encounters, seen plenty of strange behaviors, but be it self-destructive zealotry or cold, reptilian, calculation, they’d been human emotions.

This thing, on the other hand just … it just did what it was supposed to, based on instructions from an entity beyond mortal understanding, to such an absurd degree that it could hardly even be called obedience anymore.

Abomination this massive fusion of several lesser skeletons might be, however, it was weak.

A single strike with Ogier’s shield shattered the field boss against the far wall of the cave and he stepped into the narrow channel carved through the mountain by water or some other natural force. Then, he just started smashing undead on either side of him with wide swings, until the flood of monsters dried up from his left, where a dead end lay. At that point, he just right and triggered [Indomitable Momentum].

That was a fun Skill. Simply put, if an impact would not have been enough to slow him appreciably normally, it didn’t slow him at all while under the influence of this ability.

And skeletons weighed far less than an adult human before one considered just how massive Ogier was all on his own, let alone when he was wrapped in Skill-enhanced armor that likely weighed as much as he did by this point.

In other words, not once did he have to slow down or turn around because he’d knocked down an enemy without destroying their skull, he just plowed right through them, leaving greasy smears on the ground and bone powder floating in the air … until he reached a larger cavern and ran straight into the strangest zombie he’d ever seen. It was not only rotten, it was dripping, bits and pieces half-melting and dragging along the floor or connecting it to similarly disgusting fellows, all of whom seemed to be in the exact same state.

He’d have been able to guess that this was yet another of those strangely unified mobs of monsters that shared their power in some way even without the nameplate.

Liquefied Horde (raised humans), Level 35 Raid Boss

Wonderful. At least he was mostly immune to disease according to this Skill because this was easily going to be the most disgusting thing he’d ever done, and that was including the time he’d chased a murderer through the sewers after the local guard had all been too squeamish to do so.

The horde began to shuffle around to face him even as the strings of decay that connected the individual beasts seemed to harden and become physically powerful, lashing onto parts of the wall or lifting individuals out of the mass, hovering above the rest, seemingly ready to drop down onto him.

Ogier stepped back, seizing the head of the monster he’d run into and yanking it back, severing its connection to the rest with Cortain.

The strings snapped and the monster stopped moving for a brief second before it went feral, scratching and clawing at his arm with the strength and ferocity of a rabid animal.

So while he decapitated the next-closest zombie, he crushed his captive’s head with a single clench of his fist. In an instant, it stopped moving, limbs hanging limply. He dropped it and turned to face the rest, only to see black ribbons of liquid snap past him in the direction of the monster that he’d thought dead, while the decapitated corpse in front of him rose to its feet, headless, its skull nowhere to be seen.

Ogier whirled around to see the corpse there in the exact same state, “dead” but puppeted by the strings of liquefied flesh. So he slashed through those strings and the zombie dropped to the ground but the connection was already reestablishing itself.

He swore internally, not willing to open his mouth in the slightest with all this filth in the air, and charged into the mass of shambling, dripping, corpses, [Titanic Presence] burning at full power, ensuring that even with him no longer guarding the entrance that led to the breach, any undead that entered the cavern would be going for him.

And if this enemy required him to crush every single skull in this mass of foes, he would.

[Indomitable Momentum] carried him deep into the mass until he felt himself slowing down, then [Shockwave Impact] sent everything in front of him sprawling.

Ogier spun, swinging Cortain in a wide arc, [Cleave] bisecting half the undead there. Even if it wouldn’t stop any of them, it would definitely slow them. So while the swarm animated those and the back lines charged over the sea of their barely mobile fellows, he returned to the entrance, making sure to stomp on every skull he found before their bearers could get back up.

And from there, he waded right back into the mass. There were undead flung at him from above, but those splattered off his armor like bugs on a rider’s helmet.

Ogier’s skin began to burn both with revulsion and literal pain as the liquid connecting the undead dripped through the gaps in his protection. It would have been worse without his sheer toughness, but it was still plenty horrifying with it, on every conceivable level.

He. Didn’t. Care.

Any chance he got, Cortain hacked through an undead limb or torso, his left arm flashed out to knock back or crush anything he could reach, and whenever he stomped over a downed enemy, a skull exploded into bone shards, and the last vestiges of brains that were yet to drip out of the bottom.

Eventually, Ogier found himself standing on a pile of dead … that were still moving. But he didn’t spot a single strike head that was still intact enough to animate everything … what the fuck?

Another [Cleave] brought the tallest enemies back down, buying him the time to look around. Was that thing buried beneath the rest … no, there was yet another string leading off into a dark corner of the cavern. He stormed over and severed it, and the slowly rising mass fell back down into a pile.

Of course, yet another strand began to wiggle out of the corner, trying to animate the rest. That was where the skull from the first monster he’d decapitated had gone. With the string leading him, it was easy enough to find the skull and stomp it into paste. Instantly, everything stopped moving. Finally.

“So, you guard the cavern, I clean out the branching corridors until we can advance, rinse and repeat until we’re outside?” Dietrich von Bern asked from the fortress-facing entrance.

Ogier nodded grimly.

“Watch your step,” he warned, gesturing at the mess.

Dietrich just grimaced and carefully picked his way through the piles of rot and dead bodies, into one of the branching corridors.

So that was how they advanced. Clearing corridors until they came to a fork, then the emperor told them which led outside and which was a branch that could be cleared, then one would hold the fork and the other would make sure they wouldn’t be leaving behind anything as they advanced towards the exit.

***

Mia

“Can you hold the position here?” Dietrich asked and barely gave her enough time to nod before he whirled around and ran deeper into the mountain to follow the alert the emperor had sent out.

Thankfully, the remaining Raid Bosses were staying back, waiting their turn, otherwise, it would not have been fine. But the Field Bosses she could handle with ease. If she could land a single hit on her target’s skull, or, at the very least, the skull animating everything, she could take them down.

But Raid Bosses seemed to exist on an entirely different level. There was only one still out there, the “Fractal Skeleton”, the giant skeleton made up of smaller skeletons, but she had no idea how she’d deal with that thing once it attacked. Hopefully, someone else would be around to deal with that. Though she had to admit, there was an undeniable temptation to try to take it down herself.

Find another facet of her abilities, be they acquired or System-given, and figure out a way to hurt an enemy who should be beyond her in every respect. To grow to match the challenge before her and surpass it.

She knew it was a bad idea, but it was nevertheless what she wanted to do. Once she could.

Down below, the pile of dead bodies was building back up, the fires burning low as the gasoline ran out or the flames were smothered by more bodies covering them. Somehow, the horde outside had shrunk massively, part of it having bled away to a new battlefield, but that still left way too many of them.

In the distance, two more Field Bosses lurched into motion. One was a bunch of bones smashed together into a roughly humanoid shape, and the other was an undead giant. Literally. A giant that had died at some point, been mummified by one natural process or other, and was now moving once again, having risen under the power of the System.

Mia put down the bow she’d borrowed to make herself useful while her Skill was on cooldown and whipped out Balmung.

[Sword Art: A Blade Across Time and Space] triggered with the familiar sensation of space-time shifting beneath her sword, reality itself twisting and warping as though it were mere aluminum foil being carved apart by an infinitely harder and more well-forged tool of war.

Anyone else saw a mesmerizing display of weirdness, but she saw something truly beautiful. A blade that could cut anything, even the most fundamental building blocks of this world, the highest form of swordsmanship she could imagine, carving through space and time under her own power … right now, it might only be something she could do while this Skill was active, but it also was a glimpse into the heights that could be reached.

The heights she strove to reach.

Her sword was in her hands, not even long enough for the tip to reach outside the fortress, and yet, it reached the enemy, all the way out there, past all the armor her target had. And the fused-together collection of bones was ninety-nine percent armor, with the only thing the Skill would strike being the skull that animated the whole thing.

At first, she’d needed Dietrich to point out the locations of that weak point, but at some point in the fight, something had just one click, and she’d started to uncover her target simply based on how her target held itself.

Or maybe, it was just the [Experience] Skill she’d gained around that time, she hadn’t had a chance to look up what it actually did, but it seemed to accelerate her learning.

Her shimmering blade passed through the massive skeleton and in an instant, it stiffened up, stopped, and keeled over. Dead.

[Legend’s Squire Lv. 18 -> Legend’s Squire Lv. 19]

[Skill gained: Preternatural Pericognition]

Thankfully, the System considered her current place to be “out of combat”. That way, she could gain Levels even in the middle of a fight.

But the second Field Boss had trampled over all the smaller critters and was now hammering away at the doors, the cracking and grinding sounds that had accompanied the entire fight growing ever louder.

Fuck!

Mia took off for the stairs.

“Get reinforcements to the main gate, throw every bit of gasoline outside the door, and use all the grenades. I’ll handle the boss!” she snapped.

Charlemagne said something at that, one of his Skills allowing her and, presumably, everyone else to her his orders. It basically boiled down to “do that, hold back the zombie giant, Dietrich and Ogier will sweep up the rest from the rear.”

Where they’d be coming from wasn’t mentioned, but honestly, Mia trusted the elderly emperor. If he said they’d handle the rest, they’d handle the rest.

A few days ago, trying to run down the stairs would have gone well for maybe a couple of seconds, then she’d have inevitably tripped and wound up at the bottom with a concussion.

The Mia of a few days ago was not the Mia of today.

She left the bottom of the stairs at such speeds that she didn’t even have to keep running, she just planted her feet and slid into the center of the corridor, and drew Balmung, which she’d sheathed while running.

And then, she stood there, listening to the groans of the abused gate and the loud booming impacts of the giant’s fists striking stone, all the while watching the numbers dictating the period until her strongest Skill would become available again spiraling ever closer to zero.

Would she have to face that thing without her Sword Art? Possibly.

But then again, that was just a chance to evolve her [Second Blank Sword Art] into a Sword Art she could actually use.

The stone above her cracked, a large sheet of rock breaking off and shattering across the ground below, adding to the carpet of shards that had already been there.

An empty, dead in more than one sense, eye stared out through the hole, and a distant part of her mind, one trained on action movies and cliches, warned her that it was about to reach through the hole and grab her, but nothing of the sort happened. The zombie just kept punching while she retreated several steps back, in case the door flew further than expected when it was finally battered down.

In fact, it was a bonafide miracle that it was still intact. Metal, when subjected to external force, bent. You had to subject it to ridiculous amounts of force to actually get it to break. Rock, like what the gate was made up of, might be tough but once it broke, it broke. That gate … well, it was about as magic as everything else about this place, which was to say, very.

There were some very interesting things she could probably do with a material like that if she were allowed to play with it. People usually thought of Tristan as the smart one, but that wasn’t entirely true. He knew a lot more randomly useful facts than she did, but the depth of her knowledge in her chosen profession of engineering was considerable. Even if she was mostly a swordfighter nowadays, she had other skills and interests … which had precisely no place in the current situation.

Her Sword Art came off cooldown as she stared at her enemy, who was still battering away at the gate, which was now so badly thrashed that she could see the sea of flames behind it. It seemed like she really would be able to fight that thing on its own.

It would still be a problem. This thing didn’t have a single regular human skull buried deep within itself she could destroy, just one massive lump of giant’s bone that she’d have to somehow destroy, all without being able to rely on her armor-bypassing prowess.

[Sword Art: A Blade Across Time and Space] whipped out, her sword once again carving through the world and striking the top of the giant’s head … and stuck fast. Sure, it had carved almost thirty centimeters deep, but that was nowhere close to being able to split a skull that huge.

What it did manage to do was get the damn thing mad. No, mad was the wrong word. Undead didn’t get mad. They saw something that had managed to hurt them, and then, they prioritized.

The giant ceased its unflinching advance, turned to glare at her, and lashed out with a massive fist.

Mia threw herself to the side and was still pelted with small stones as the ground at the point of impact exploded under the strike.

Rolling to her feet, she lashed out with Balmung, cutting its wrist down to the bone and a little beyond that, but it wasn’t enough to hinder it in any appreciable way.

The monster rose back to its feet and closed the distance but Mia flung herself past it, carving through its left ankle. It spun and lashed out, but once again, she dodged and the massive fist went straight through the door she’d been standing before and the giant found itself stuck briefly. Just long enough for Mia to jump behind it and go after its tendons there.

It was undead, and skeletons could move without any flesh, but hopefully, zombies could be crippled. Or at the very least, slowed.

Balmung flashed, carving into undead flesh and she just kept slashing, ducked under the monster’s backhand as it freed its arm, and went right back to attacking. Tendons didn’t seem to be a weak points, but spots where bones met were, so she started stabbing and hacking, until the voice of the System rang out in her ear, barely reaching her through the fog she found herself under. But the meaning was nevertheless clear.

Her [Second Blank Sword Art] had evolved and she could feel that it had become something perfectly suited to her current foe. So Mia triggered it and felt the world dissolve around her, images of her foe from every angle flashing through her mind before she suddenly found herself back at her original spot, but staring at a very different image.

The monster was still “alive” but slashed to ribbons, every single spot she would have targeted having been ripped apart in less than a second.

As though it were aware of the fact that she hadn’t heard it properly the first time, the System repeated itself.

[Skill Evolution: Second Blank Sword Art -> Sword Art: Crows Peck the Eagle]

The monster was still alive, so she didn’t look at the description, but it was in such a horrible shape that finishing it off was easy. All she had to do was walk around it and start hacking away at its head until it was split in two and the creature finally stilled.

Sword Art: Crows Peck the Eagle

When fighting against a superior enemy, trigger this Sword Art to strike at every single weakpoint you can reach simultaneously. Strikes do not have significant armor penetration potential. Can be used every ten minutes.

So, basically, one-woman wolfpack tactics. Mia grinned briefly before turning to face the entrance, readying herself for the next enemy.

Instead, she came face to face with Dietrich, who’d just finished carving his way through the undead there … and then, she gagged.

The stench of the undead might have been bad, but she’d grown blind to it pretty quickly. But whatever unholy abomination of a substance had wound up on Dietrich’s armor, it smelled a hundred thousand times worse.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

“Fine, I’ll clean up in here,” she shouted back, gesturing at the area around herself. Because even wild horses wouldn’t be enough to get her to go anywhere near the ancient king.

***

Dietrich

It was wrong, he knew it was wrong, but he was nevertheless relieved to hear that he had a task that involved him personally engaging an enemy, rather than being stuck behind an arrowslit. Mia was more than qualified to handle his previous job.

He ran through the narrow corridors of the mountain until he reached the breach. Though it looked strange. Not enough rubble inside the corridor, too much rubble in the cave. Had someone broken the wall from the fortress, not from the cave?

But all became clear when he stepped into the cave properly, and saw how much had been torn apart from the other end, it made sense.

Dietrich turned right, as Charlemagne had instructed, and hurried that way, feeling the corpses underfoot squelch wetly. Clearly, Ogier had already done quite a lot of work here. He followed the trail until he met up with the other man in a cavern that stunk to high heaven, and they proceeded to rip through everything else in the caves until they found themselves outside.

He blinked up into the slowly darkening evening sky, then returned his gaze to the ground. It was covered in dead bodies, but very few of them were still moving.

“I’ll guard the entrance,” Ogier announced.

“Thank you,” Dietrich replied and started running towards the main entrance, hoping things hadn’t gone badly while he’d been gone. The handful of monsters still standing weren’t able to slow him in the least, they literally provided so little resistance to Mimung that he couldn’t tell whether it was cutting flesh or being waved through empty air.

And then, the entrance came into view, engulfed in fire, with the doors beyond having been smashed in. And beyond that was a giant zombie fighting … something. He couldn’t see.

But his main concern was the Fractal Skeleton, which had already lurched into motion and was making its way towards the entrance. The people still there simply weren’t set up to fight something like that.

So he charged, and before he even struck it, the monster turned to face him, hollow eye sockets staring at him.

If it had been a piece of art, it would have been a masterpiece, a perfectly replicated human skeleton made up of smaller sculptures of regular-sized bones, each carved in intricate detail. But it wasn’t art, just a sick joke from an inhuman system.

[Sword Art: Giantsplitter]

A simple power, but a good one. Mimung came in low and swept high, unleashing a wave of energy to bisect the monster in one swift move. The monster fell apart in two halves, both of which hit the ground with a loud clatter, never to rise again. Being able to see the animating skull made this far too easy.

But, this being a so-called “Raid Boss”, this monster wasn’t nearly so easy to put down.

Creaking and clattering, the two pieces began to rebuild themselves into smaller parts while the random assortment of bones spread about the place began to form seemingly random collections of odds and ends that somehow managed to keep moving even though there was no skull to move them.

[Slayer of Myths] activated, helpfully highlighting that these enemies weren’t actually animated themselves, but existed as an extension of the entire Fractal Skeleton, and would keep moving as long as any part of the Boss was still alive.

Dietrich glared at the mess, then threw himself at the closer enemy while summoning a copy of Balmung using [A Sword Borrowed] to hurl at the other one. It carved clean through the monster and, more importantly, the animating skull while he fell upon his main target, leaping at it and hammering Mimung through its chest, riding it to the ground as it collapsed, and began to hack, slash, and stomp on any skull that might potentially become the animation core of the next iteration of this monster.

Until his target was down, and broke apart into countless smaller minions.

[A Brush With Death] triggered right on cue, the world around him slowing to a crawl while everything around him became illuminated in stark relief even though most of it was outside his line of sight, granting him all the time he needed to plan and all the information he needed to make said plan a good one.

So he took full advantage, feeling his plans settle into his muscles and bones, preparing to perfectly carry out his intentions, before reality snapped back into place.

Dietrich bent out of the way of the giant monster’s fist like a willow in a storm, bringing up Mimung in an arc to hack off a limb he couldn’t even see, then continued that move into a leap onto a nearby rock off which he then kicked off. A [Titan Strike] boosted the force and he hammered into the monster’s chest with enough force to send it to the ground. And then, he began to hack it apart until it stopped animating itself.

[King of Adventure Lv. 51 -> King of Adventure Lv. 53]

[Skill Boost gained]

[Skill gained: Furious Power]

So that was what that looked like.

Dietrich rose to his feet, scanned the area around him for immediate concerns, and then hurried towards the entrance. The zombie giant was gone, but that didn’t necessarily mean that things were fine.

But as it turned out, he needn’t have worried. Mia had ripped that thing to pieces.

Though it looked like she needed to get a stronger stomach, she was looking a little green … though then why was she looking at him like that? And telling him to stay outside?

Dietrich glanced down at himself and sniffed. Phew. Yeah, he couldn’t blame her, he wouldn’t want to be around himself either. That horde in the cave had been re-pug-nant.

***

Tristan

I turned to Reinhart and asked “Can you contact your direct superiors and ask about the current state of affairs? And if they need help, tell them to contact me.”

“What’ll you be doing?” he asked.

“Getting my ducks in a row for when I need to act as an ambassador,” I replied, gesturing to the papers scattered across the picnic table I’d had brought in since the main table was currently in use by Charlemagne.

“Good luck with that,” Reinhart snorted. “Better you than me.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Any jokes you’ve ever heard or made about the German bureaucracy, it’s a thousand times worse when you’re actually interacting with the government on its own level.”

I groaned. I’d rather clean up the rotting flesh outside with my bare hands than put myself through that. But that wasn’t my job and, quite frankly, even if it were, [Restoration of the Old] would clean more in a minute than I could in a week if I used my hands.

Anyway, I needed to find out who was still good to go, hopefully, Dietrich, Mia, and Ogier would still be ready and then, they could hopefully go help the Bundeswehr punch out a few of the nastier enemies.

And I also needed to do a ton of other stuff.

I was in the middle of trying to figure out the best place to put the mass grave we’d be burying the re-killed undead in when my phone rang.

“Yes?” I answered, my standard reply for when the number calling was neither in my contacts nor one I recognized. No sense in giving potential scammers information they didn’t already have.

“This is Polizeidirektor Hoffmann, Mr. Vogt.”

… Or maybe, someone I knew was calling me from a different number.

“Right, what do you need?” I asked.

“We’ve still got undead in most of Germany and that includes a Raid Boss in the middle of Cologne we can’t really go after with heavy weaponry. Mr. Reinhart said you offered to help?”

“I can offer you Dietrich von Bern, Ogier Danske, and Mia Vogt in terms of help, most of us are either recovering or cleaning up down here,” I replied. “But is that the only Raid Boss you know about?”

“Yes?”

“There’s probably at least one more. We had three at the mountain, and we’re pulling from an area slightly larger than Germany, of which we barely cover a third. Chances are, we grabbed one from your area of responsibility, leaving two.”

“And we’re missing one,” Hofmann sighed. “Any tips for finding it?”

“Look at anything really big, or any unusually cohesive swarms. Checking the nameplate is the only way to be certain,” I said. “So, do you want reinforcements, and if yes, when can you send a helicopter to pick them up?”

“Ten minutes.”

That was … short. Had the chopper already been on the way? Either way, that was enough time to wrangle the “reinforcements” I’d promised.

***

Charlemagne

As things calmed down, the voice of the System spoke into his mind, awarding him the just rewards for the entire mess.

[Emperor of Order Lv. 49 -> Emperor of Order Lv. 50]

[Class Evolution: Emperor of Order Lv. 50 -> Legendary Emperor of Renaissance Lv. 51]

[Ascendant Capstone Skill gained: Soul of the Empire]

[Skill gained: Nexus of Knowledge]

Karl der Große grinned as he read the description of this “Ascendant Capstone.”

Ascendant Capstone: Soul of the Empire

The Soul of the Empire cannot be slain by anything other than a direct, face-to-face confrontation. However, the Soul cannot survive for very long without an empire to be bound to. They do not need to be in charge, and they can switch between empires, but they do need to be bound to one in more ways than merely being a citizen.

His life might be bound to his empire, but his empire would last for a thousand years.