Furfur fell back to Earth behind Isaac, down a wing, burned, and covered in smoking acid.

He was still alive, and would be even after he hit the ground, but that wouldn’t last once everyone else passed.

Concentrated bursts of fire from whoever had proper coordination and synergy [Skills], powerful cooldown skills, and so on.

Furfur rose once more maybe thirty seconds after Isaac had passed, but that wasn’t anywhere near enough to keep him safe.

The demon lost another wing before he could even return to the air, then Elena tied it down with tendrils of water and Arthur decapitated it.

One monster down, done and dusted.

Isaac switched his [Auras] around, extending the [Aura of the Eternal Warrior] out as far as it would go to replace his standard sensory [Aura], which he’d cast around the island while no longer keeping it anywhere near his own body.

Mostly, he checked out the spots where the demons had been summoned while sending several more tendrils of perception towards where he suspected the main base to be.

He only found a single living soul, one Josef Goodman sitting in the center of a surprisingly large underground base, but a whole lot of … weirdness near the summoning circles. Neither of those was good.

A few quick orders dispatched people to check out the circles, something he probably should have done anyway, but the bulk of the group advanced towards the bunker.

There was something seriously off here.

Not only were most of the people he’d expected to see here gone, there was no sign of them having run off. Teleportation to and from this place had been shut down, sure, but was this really all there was to it? One guy?

Isaac couldn’t quite tell what the man was doing just yet, it might have been a summoning circle, or it might have been an enchantment, but if he was choosing to do that instead of fleeing, it had to be bad news. The kind of crap they needed to stop.

He highlighted the best path forward, with an optimal place to breach, a person with the right [Skill] to swiftly crack open the base, and the order in which they’d be going in.

[Breach] shattered a heavy starsteel door’s hinges like glass, blowing it outwards and sending it flying to the side, well clear of their path of entry.

That’s when things started to go wrong.

The figure deep inside the underground structure stopped moving and turned to glare in their direction.

“You guys are fast, aren’t you?”

The voice came seemingly from every direction, echoing up from … was he speaking through the shadows? Sure, it seemed to be limited to talking, but it was creepy.

“Or maybe, you’re just callous assholes, abandoning your ships like that. Now, I’m not someone who’d shed a tear for the jackboots, but still, leaving them to fight against Tier 9 and 10 [Raid Bosses], that’s ice cold.

“Still, I need a little more time, and I’ve always wanted to use this, so have fun.”

Isaac could practically hear the grin in Goodman’s voice and sped up.

“[Last March].”

And the world drowned in white mist.

Hundreds, no thousands, of ghostly images appeared all around the strike force, ranging from insubstantial beings with power equivalent to a Starter [Class] to a woman wielding a long staff that looked practically alive.

The [Horseman of Death] summoned the dead. Of course he had.

Goodman was ignoring them once more, though, going right back to messing with the diagram.

Deep inside Isaac’s chest, power bloomed. It stayed there, it didn’t do anything, it merely existed. Instinctively, he knew that was [Final Defiance] preparing to unleash. Now he really needed to stop the man.

“Dr. Thoma, what do you make of this?”

One of the teams he’d dispatched to check out the summoning circles finally contacted him, using a [Skill] to transmit images. Bloody smears covered the circle, and in the center, laid something that was barely recognizable as a human corpse, bluish smoke leaking from countless wounds while crimson runes twisted and slowly tore themselves apart, but on top of everything else, they weren’t really … there anymore.

Isaac knew exactly what had happened there. Hell, he’d caused the likes of it himself, in the other timeline. That was what happened when one used magic to tear out someone’s life force to power something. When he’d done it, using his [Ruinous Psychopomp] [Class], he’d created short-lived effects, powerful attacks or curses, to be specific, but this was something else. They’d somehow used the blood runes to power the summoning circles.

It wasn’t something that would be obvious to anyone else, thankfully, Isaac was more familiar with them than most, but the people who’d figured this out were the exact worst individuals to have this kind of capability.

And now, it was obvious why Josef Goodman was alone in the bunker. The others had sacrificed themselves to power the circles while under the effect of summoning blockers to give Goodman control over when the monsters appeared.

Also, the power of that ritual had to be linked to personal power, and Goodman was nearing Level 190. Who knew what he’d be able to summon? Was it a [World Boss]? He shouldn’t be able to do that yet according to the cult’s orders, but they could decide to ignore those. The gods could give orders they expected to be obeyed, sure, but human beings still had free will.

And the world part was that if he’d really decided to pull that stunt completely on his own, this wouldn’t even fall back on his patrons.

Well, that “worst part” assumed Isaac managed to stop Goodman from doing what he was going to do.

What he was making wasn’t a standard summoning circle, but [World Boss] circles were extra, extra complicated.

“Arthur, you take charge of the group out here, deal with the ghosts,” Isaac ordered, “I’m going straight for the big boss.”

He turned on his heels and exploded into motion, running from the bunker and taking to the sky the instant he was outside, then activated [Wisdom of the Simurgh] while scanning the bunker. Use this angle, with that speed, hold a sword like that, and then … [I AM THE SWORD].

***

Arthur cursed out the entire world as he was suddenly put in charge of the entire operation. He could deal with this shit, he had the necessary skill and [Skill], but it was a little sudden and he’d just been dropped into the hottest of hot seats.

“[Royal Order: Hold Fast!],” he snapped, power flooding into every person in the formation, stiffening their proverbial and literal backbones, allowing them to stand their ground.

“Focus on the highest-Level individuals first, anything below the Third Evolution is a target of opportunity,” he said, giving specific targeting orders to the strongest individuals in his group while taking off himself.

[Royal Wanderer] was there to make sure Camelot didn’t go to shit while he was off somewhere else, but it could do so much more, like letting him keep an eye on everyone else while he charged at what he was ninety percent certain was a group of every bearer of the [Aspirant for the Mantle of War] in history.

Power wreathed them as three overlapping casts of [Axis Mundi] began to spread out, the “pillar of annihilation” about to obliterate most of both armies.

Arthur grinned.

[Catastrophe’s Bane].

And the whole mess was wiped from existence.

Borrowing [Skills] from all members of the [Round Table] was broken as fuck, especially when it was crewed by experts.

The “Wars” began to rise into the sky, their strongest [Skills] blown.

And then, he borrowed Isaac’s signature ability, [Aspects of the End]. They normally tried to avoid using each other’s signature [Skills] to keep the whole “[Skill] sharing” ability under wraps, but that one had no visual tells if one stuck to one sub-[Skill] at once.

There was one big limit to the [Skill], he needed to use up all 100 seconds within the 10 minutes he could copy any given [Skill] for, but that just meant he didn’t have to bother being judicious in its application, didn’t it?

His speed suddenly quadrupled and he was able to run over empty air, reaching his targets far faster than they ever could have expected.

A blast of wind almost succeeded in throwing him back, but he just planted his feet behind him, treating the situation as though he were being pressed into the ground and just staring at the source of the attack, instead of hanging in midair.

The instant the wind died down, he began to slide down to Earth, but he was able to get his feet back under him and reached “Air War” before another blast of air that made a hurricane look like a fart in comparison could be unleashed.

Of course, there were two other incarnations of destruction around, but an attempt to force him to land by decupling the effect of gravity on him failed miserably, running straight into the iron wall of his physical strength, and while the vibrations rattling his armor and cracking his ribcage hurt, they were nowhere near enough to stop him.

Given a little more time, there’d likely be an attempt to combine their powers, which might work, but they didn’t have that time, now did they?

Excalibur flashed three times, carving apart the specters, which died as easily as a regular person would have.

They’d been tied for the title of “biggest threat on the battlefield” with the other being the only Fifth Evolution person there. The [Horseman of Famine], who’d looked practically alive. At least until Elena had trashed her in five seconds flat.

The final issue had been the other horsemen, the people wielding the power of disease. But he’d put the entirety of Isaac’s team on that.

Amy had done most of the work using fire, lots of it, supported by Raul’s familiars and Karl, who was also using various flamethrowers and energy projectors, while Bailey cured those afflicted. With a Level difference in the fifties, even the sheer lethality of disease magic wasn’t enough to cross the gap.

So the big guys were down, now they just had to deal with the rest. All several thousand of them. Each with two, three, or even four cooldown [Skills] to throw at Arthur’s forces.

Monsters constantly fought at the same level of strength, with the occasional burst of power being nowhere near a standard cooldown [Skill]. Fire breath, energy wave to buy a little breathing room, that sort of thing. But people were different. They could throw up a “Ha, I’m invincible” forcefield, drag themselves and others into separate dimensions, manifest nigh-unpassable firestorms, and whole lot of other shit that were incredibly difficult to get around with any method other than just waiting it out.

The strike team and Arthur would win, of course, and doing so with minimal or even no casualties was well within the realm of possibility, but it would take time.

Sure, the person who’d be fighting on their own until they won was Isaac, and he could handle himself, but the situation still wasn’t exactly great.

***

Isaac’s [Skill] punched him through the heavily reinforced walls of the bunker as if he were moving through paper, shredding metal and concrete with casual ease, blade reads to cleave Goodman in half.

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The cultist had noticed him, judging by the fact that he’d turned to face him, but it seemed someone was going to try and impale Isaac. Oh, big mistake.

Goodman’s scythe cut through the air with incredible speed, and would pass in front of his body in the precise instant Isaac did. Too bad he was still going to be invulnerable at that point.

Balmung’s tip dug into Goodman’s shoulder at the same time as the warscythe’s blade slammed into Isaac’s side.

And then, the world seemed to explode.

Isaac went flying to the side, hammering into the wall with enough force to crack concrete, while Goodman was flung the other way, hitting the wall there, though causing less damage since he’d had further to travel.

That slash had been an unstoppable attack, hadn’t it? Two of those clashing never really ended well.

Isaac’s side crackled and popped as his bones realigned, but the shallow cut in his side, where the scythe had cut him, just kept bleeding.

Fucking wonderful, now he’d have to keep regenerating blood for gods only knew how long. This fight was going to be a real pain in the ass, wasn’t it?

At least the chance of Goodman being able to whip out a literally unblockable attack more than once was somewhat minimal, but if this was any sign of how the rest of this fight would go, it would be tough going.

Isaac activated [Grave of Swords], pulling both of them into the strange otherworld, and removing Goodman from his work. All he had to do now was win.

[Champion of Mankind: The Cleansing Flame] activated a split-second later, flames washing across Isaac’s body to form armor reminiscent of an ancient Greek Hoplite, a deep crimson breastplate, bracers, greaves, and a Corinthian helmet atop his head, with his eyes glowing like coals in its depths.

And the area around Isaac shimmered in a heat haze, a promise of pain to come for anyone in range. A range that covered most of [Grave of Swords] even before Isaac charged at Goodman.

Goodman grinned, and waved his hand, causing the world to rumble, the bland soil filled with swords being replaced with something even more dead, like the soil found at ground zero of a nuclear blast, the boundaries of the space cracking and seemingly about to burst. And that was when Isaac was about to attack, thinking things had stopped changing, a whole series of chairs rose from the ground, surrounding a large conference table made from a single slab of black stone.

The arena had more than tripled in size as a result, leaving them ready to battle amidst the debris of a conference room and an ancient battlefield.

“Do you like it?” Goodman roared, his normal outfit melting and rearranging itself into a black toga that wrapped around him. It didn’t look durable but Isaac strongly suspected that would be enough to block any flames weaker than [Prometheus’ Wrath] and maybe [Samadhi Fire], as well as casual strikes with Balmung.

“This is the place you destroyed, all for the sake of eeking out a few more years of existence. And. It. Will. Be. Your. GRAVE!”

Clearly, their idea about how the cult had to be coordinating had been right on the money. Also, it was somewhat interesting to see what happened when two [Skills] that created pocket dimensions were cast on top of each other.

Goodman’s [Aura] had initially been a weak, ephemeral, thing of cold and stillness, but it roared to life with fury Isaac hadn’t expected.

[Burden of Power] and [Death’s Embrace] flooded Isaac’s secondary [Aura] to reinforce it while he dispersed his sensory [Aura] to make it much harder to destroy.

And then, they charged at each other.

White mist flooded off the [Horseman of Death], skull-shaped phantoms coalescing to the left and right of him, the area where the effect overlapped with Isaac’s flame flaring and flickering until it vanished, taking the fire with it.

The warscythe flashed out, dipping into a phantom and absorbing it, which Goodman then flicked straight at Isaac, unleashing a lance of what could only be described as pure death.

Isaac flung himself to the side using [Speed of Hati] and returned fire with a ball of [Prometheus’ Wrath].

Goodman just pulled a second whisp into the path of the attack, detonating it prematurely, then sent the rest hunting. Isaac didn’t get the same sense of danger from them as he had from the lance and charged, manifesting a series of kabars, igniting them, and hurling them into the whips.

But when the blades reached the Horseman, he twirled his scythe and knocked them away, all the way into the walls of their little pocket of the world.

Balmung was deflected to the side by the warscythe’s blade, but Isaac just spun along the axis of his blade’s new momentum and manifested another copy of his weapon in his other hand, and fully turned, landing a shallow cut across Goodman’s chest with a hefty combination of [Strikes] infused into a single [Legendary Blow].

Isaac leaped away, opening the range again as he let the copy of his sword vanish, just in case this prompted Goodman to whip out yet another cooldown [Skill]. Something to make him stronger as he got closer to death would fit an incarnation of, well, death just fine.

But Goodman merely dragged his fingers through the red lifeblood running down his front and stared at them, then raised his head to meet Isaac’s eyes. Of course it wasn’t healing, [Implements of True Death] had been active on that one.

“Tsk, now what did you do? It isn’t healing, you grabbed the Aspect of the Ankou, didn’t you? That’s what you were using to go space too, you little hyp- …”

Isaac was well aware of the fact that he looked like a massive hypocrite to anyone without full awareness of his circumstances, but he sure as shit wasn’t going to listen to this asshole lecture him, especially as it didn’t seem like there was anything nasty coming.

So he charged again, manifesting several more swords to simultaneously slash at Goodman, this time spending the mana to make them leave behind [Annihliating Trails]. The man didn’t notice the little present the blades left behind once he’d deflected them, and the look on his face when he blocked Isaac’s overhead chop, one infused with [Power of the Behemoth], no less, and was flung backwards, was priceless.

The trails left behind annoyingly shallow cuts, but they served to cause injuries nonetheless, and he really didn’t enjoy Isaac shoulder checking him after that, the burning armor leaving behind painful burns.

“GO TO HELL!” Goodman roared, a burst of mist erupting in every direction, briefly overwhelming Isaac’s heat and disrupting his armor, forcing him to retreat once more, all the while throwing blades and slashes at the man, all of which were either deflected or only left behind shallow scratches. And he didn’t even have the mana to make all those unhealable.

The cut across Isaac’s side was still bleeding, too shallow to cripple his muscles or cause any other serious damage, it just kept weeping blood he needed to regenerate and the overhealing pool in [Bestial Regeneration] wouldn’t last forever.

Under other circumstances, this whole affair might have been considered fun, though. Someone approximately on his Level, with similar [Class] rarities, and some Evolutions had been clearly spent on administrative and support [Classes], just like Isaac’s, which put them on even more of an even footing.

There weren’t even any moral issues to trip him up, he could just cut loose, and lose himself to the rush of battle.

Yes, it could have been fun, and having [Final Defiance] trigger and cut it short would have ruined that.

But this was no normal fight.

This was a fight for the sake of the world!

Having a [Skill] activate and end this for good would have been his best-case scenario.

But it wasn’t bloody triggering. It felt as though [Final Defiance] had taken up residence in his heart, generating a portal there that would flood him with power the instant it became necessary. And it was preparing to give him that boost, and this was the big fight which would decide whether or not an insanely powerful monster would emerge from that summoning circle, but as for it actually doing anything but exist … nothing. Crickets. Bupkis. Jack squat.

What. The. Hell.

They flashed back and forth amidst the ruins of the conference room and swords planted in the ground, blades clashing, phantoms flying, gouts of flame obliterating vast areas of the battlefield, and with every passing second, Isaac was getting more and more frustrated. If [Final Defiance] clearly wanted to do something, so it should just do that, or leave him alone, not this constant “hey, this fight is important, but I won’t help you in any way, shape, or form” bullshit.

He leaped at Goodman, Balmung scything at his foe’s neck, only to have to twist out of the way when the warscythe was thrust at his chest.

Isaac grabbed the weapon just below the hilt, feeling his palm instantly go numb from the cold. The combination of his grasp and the weapon’s motion pushed him back, opening up the range but he was bringing his foot around to try and kick his foe in the temple.

Goodman’s response was to lean backwards while pushing harder against the warscythe, ensuring that Isaac’s boot would whiff past his nose.

Isaac grinned.

He’d had a traction enchantment on his boots for literal years, but a few months ago, he’d upgraded to one that would allow him to walk up walls … or glue a blade to the sole of his shoe with enough strength to use it as a weapon.

Which he promptly did at the last possible second, the blade of the kabar slamming into the thinnest part of Goodman’s skull with more than enough force to penetrate.

Human beings could be ridiculously durable at times, even pre-[System], there’d been people who’d gone on to live long lives after having objects literally be rammed through parts of their brain, but a hit like that should slow him down at the very least … right?

But it didn’t even get that far, with the tip of the dagger hitting Goodman’s temple with a light “ping” before rebounding as though Isaac had tried to kick Neutronium. Or Sun Wukong’s skull.

WHAT?!?

Isaac released the warscythe and scrambled back, desperately trying to figure out what the actual fuck had just happened.

All around him, the weird otherworld their [Skills] had created shattered, dumping them back in the real world.

“Well, you beat me, I’m a big enough man to admit that. Too bad you’re still going to lose.”

Moving almost robotically, Goodman dropped his scythe and turned back to the summoning circle, one hand drawing a dagger from a storage ring to begin carving runes into his chest while the other grabbed a piece of chalk to draw with.

Isaac exploded back into motion and lashed out, driving Balmung at Goodman’s neck, where it bounced right back off. The blade blurred, with him alternating between using [Speed of Hati], [Power of the Behemoth], and both.

Flames rolled off both the asshole and the circle he was drawing, and trying to fire them into his nose just caused them to come right back out of his mouth.

Invulnerability combined with an inability to keep fighting, that was … quite the combination. Not to mention that his work shared the same protections. A [Skill] that allowed its bearer to take one final action after a situation that should have killed them. Presumably, that action needed to involve trying to end the world, considering who its user was.

[True Cut] should have worked, but it just drained all of Isaac’s mana the instant Balmung’s blade touched his foe’s skin and did bugger all. Down a mana potion and get straight back to it.

“Would you please stop that?” Goodman finally asked, sounding half-asleep, “It won’t do anything, but at this point, it’s getting weird. Seriously, who the hell shoves their fingers up someone else’s nose?”

“You know I can’t do that,” Isaac answered while taking a brief respite while he tried to come up with a new approach, “I can’t do that anymore than you can stop drawing that circle. It’s a [Skill], isn’t it? One final action after being beaten, and then you die?”

Goodman didn’t bother to dignify that with a response.

Isaac swore internally as he kept trying something, all the while calling out to the rest of the strike team so they could get their asses down here and try something.

It was futile, but he really could not stop trying.

[Final Defiance] was still the same as it’d been during the fight, but this time, Isaac knew why it was acting like that. It was preparing to fight whatever was going to come out of that circle, it hadn’t triggered because whatever was keeping Goodman going wasn’t going to be breached even by several million points of mana. Now wasn’t that a fun thought?

“Why are you doing all this?” Isaac asked, “Not the summoning right here and now, I mean all of this? What makes someone want to destroy the world and murder all of humanity?”

Goodman gave him the finger in a moment his hand wasn’t needed to work on the circle.

“Why the hell should I tell you?”

“Either you win and I die in five minutes, and it won’t matter, but if I win, what do you want the history books to say about you? Josef Goodman was an asshole and an idiot who tried to destroy the world over pessimism?”

Goodman sighed.

“We decided the world was doomed and decided to sell you out, isn’t that what you all say about us? You’ve got it all figured out, right?”

“We pieced that together from context clues,” Isaac shrugged as he surreptitiously put his plan into action.

“Fine, you know what? FUCK YOU!” Goodman yelled, twisting his head to glare at Isaac while bending down to complete another part of the circle.

But then he sagged, and continued to work while mumbling, “How about you stop attacking me and I’ll satiate your curiosity?”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Oh, fine,” Goodman sighed again, “Have you ever really looked at the world? Really looked?

“The world has been on a trajectory towards annihilation for decades due to developments that happened centuries ago. Humanity rose above the muck of nature, thought itself better than everyone else. Hell, ‘primates’ literally refers to the first, highest, order of animal.

“That shit is unnatural. The universe was created by beings beyond our comprehension, divided into what simple-minded idiots like you consider to be good, evil, and neutral.”

Goodman paused as Isaac’s sword bounced off his eyeball, but then shrugged and ignored the next flurry of attacks, seemingly resigned to the situation.

“Nature, karmic balance, whatever, forced them to compromise, with both sides providing an equal degree of effort and planning. And it was a combination of both their visions, a constant cycle of creation and destruction until we showed up. Intelligent life.”

As he spoke, the man began to grin, as though being able to finally share this “universal truth” made him the happiest man alive.

It was at this point that Arthur, Elena, and Amy stormed in, unleashing every big attack they had left at the cultist. It. Did. Nothing.

“Intelligence is a curse, you know. We built stuff, kept carrying more than just genes across generations, breaking the normal flow of evolution. Less destruction, infinite creation, it broke the balance.”

He stopped drawing the circle as he said this, it being complete, and walked into its center. All that seemed to be left was to finish the “mana from sacrifice” runes, which he did.

“Until eventually, we created a world that was doomed to break using the knowledge we’d accumulated, until we’d leave behind a largely empty universe, where the only thing left were a few survivors huddling out in sterile constructions that are the very opposite of what my patrons want.

“They gave us the tools that we’d use to break this world, and once it was broken, existence would have to be reforged, remade with all the knowledge of what went wrong the first time around.”

Goodman laid his head back and stared towards the ceiling, grinning broadly.

“Can you imagine? A world without the burdens of the past, where everyone is free to live their lives as they want from birth to death, unbound by decisions and choices made centuries ago?”

Somehow, his grin grew even wider, impossibly so, even as he continued to carve into his chest. Isaac took this as an opportunity to try and ram Balung into his mouth and down the inside of his neck. Once more, it did nothing.

“It would have been glo- …”

The final symbol completed, Goodman’s skin went white as though all the blood in his body had vanished from one moment to the next, and he collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.

The circle flared to life, summoning materials vanished, and the chalk lines burned with power. Several of the summoning blockers Isaac had hidden while Goodman had been distracted shattered instantly, but enough held that the summoning of what [Book with Seven Seals] told him was the biblical Leviathan was delayed.

Everyone else withdrew whatever blockers they had on them, and Arthur was already requisitioning more from Camelot, to be brought through the [Round Table] by Steff, who’d stayed behind for this operation.

It would have been nice to imagine keeping this thing on ice for decades, until humanity could curb-stomp it with casual ease, but the [Book with Seven Seals] provided a prophecy that they’d have to fight it in a week or so. And unfortunately, both [Blessing of Innovation] and [Wisdom of the Simurgh] gave him a similar estimate for how often they’d be able to keep this up.

Seven days to plot the death of a [World Boss], and they hadn’t even cleaned up the [Raid Bosses] currently doing battle out on the frozen ocean.

Ok, universe, challenge accepted.