Apocalypse Redux

What came before ...

What came before ...

My name is Isaac Thoma, and unless something goes terribly wrong, this recording will never see the light of day. I don’t want to cause a crisis of faith in anyone who’s been fortunate enough to live in a somewhat sane world up until now.

Now, if you’re watching this within a few centuries of this being recorded, you might find most of this superfluous, you’ve learned all of this in school.

However, if you’d like some context for everything, well, I’m providing it.

But I also know that I can’t guarantee that this information won’t be needed, and considering that, starting two weeks from now, I’ll be off exploring the galaxy, I won’t necessarily be around to share this knowledge myself, I’ll be leaving copies of this recording with several trusted confidants.

Fundamentally, there is much more to this universe than meets the eye, and not just in the sense that there will always be something to discover.

Gods exist, but they aren’t what you imagine. They’re powerful, but bound by their own rules, split up into three factions.

The neutral gods balance themselves, but the others, well, they are split up into a faction that is ostensibly good, and one that is ostensibly evil. And those last two are eternally struggling for control.

Anytime one of them takes an action, it disrupts the balance of the universe, and the other is able to take an action of equal gravity. It becomes an eternal chess match of taking action after action, trying to coax the sapient beings of this universe to make things happen without requiring divine action.

As far as I know, things were calm for a long time, until the “good” side created the System. A way for anyone who wanted to to grow beyond their normal limitations, acquiring magic and supernatural skill if they just put in the effort.

And the response was devastating. A simple addition to the System, that allowed its users to summon monsters to kill for experience points and grow at a ridiculous rate while also, well, risking releasing an enemy capable of exponential reproduction if left to roam.

Past that, it didn’t even take much. Humans being humans, some people got greedy, others overestimated themselves, and little over ten years after the System initialized, humanity was functionally extinct.

“But we’re watching this,” you’re probably thinking, and you’re right. Humanity is still around. BecauseI traveled back in time.

A hidden safeguard in the System let me, and only me, try everything again, from the point of initialization.

So that’s what I did. I joined a team researching the System, and helped them grow, and together, slowly, we started sharing the knowledge of how everything worked. What enemies were powerful, what enemies could be beaten with a trick, what to focus on, and so on. We provided a way to grow safely.

But like I said, humans are humans. It’s not a question of if something stupid will be done, it’s a question of who will be the one to do it.

The first big incident was a Stormheart Gestalt that wrecked a large chunk of Los Angeles. We found out that to have been an act of terrorism, aimed at disrupting System research there because trying to understand this “divine gift” was considered blasphemy, but that was much later. As far as we knew, it was just someone’s mistake.

So we mourned the dead and kept going. A serial killer rose to prominence afterwards, one Arianne Krebs, who lost her husband to a monster that some moron called into being and started to take that out on anyone she perceived as being reckless.

Ironically, even though we at Research Team Bailey were panicking, thinking we were about to be attacked, Mrs. Krebs later told me that she considered us to be one of the few sane people in the world.

Oh, right, I did get my hands on that police report, combined that with my knowledge of the other timeline, and then led the cops straight to her. She almost killed us, but we managed to arrest her.

A couple of weeks after that, we found out about the terrorist organization known as the “Children of the System” when they put a bunch of Megalodons in the Bodensee and attacked the rest of the team when they went to investigate, I was babysitting an experiment back home.

Anyway, long story short, they inadvertently made themselves known to the world and got pulverized. But that incident did really catapult us to prominence, and half of us went to Seoul, South Korea, to visit the research team of one Professor Kim Yerin, someone who managed to do almost as much as we did without the benefits of future knowledge.

Also, to establish a relationship with the Hunter’s Guild, its Guildmaster, Seon Yoo-jin, and start trading for access to the Dungeons they established for smooth leveling.

That went well … until North Korea summoned the world’s first [Raid Boss] in the hopes that it would destroy the South Korean capital. I managed to trap it within a Skill that lets me fight enemies one on one for long enough that a proper defense could be established, and it was stopped, but that was a really bad sign of what was to come.

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Though thankfully, North Korea sorta just, uh, imploded afterwards. It was a dictatorship already made unstable by the appearance of the System, and I’m pretty sure that it didn’t take much for foreign intelligence services to rip it apart.

And even with how insane things felt at the time, none of us knew how chaotic things would get from then on.

Still, there were a couple of good things that happened around that time. I established Akashik Industries, a company that used smart summoning to provide monster materials for other companies, which I used to fund the team’s experiments.

And I established a bloodline, as anyone can at Level 50, and the System’s magic made it so that any direct blood relatives could also claim it, if they wanted to. So my parents got access to the hellfire and regeneration that I use, and my little sisters became even worse hellions than they already were. I mean, I love them, but if they were two whirlwinds reincarnated into human form, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

So, things stayed like that for a bit … and then we saw the face of the enemy. Our “true” enemy. A small trick from the dark gods, contacting a few people which spiraled into a massive cult convinced that the world was going to end because humanity was going to do something stupid, so might as well just end the world themselves and be rewarded for it.

Hell, the only reason they hadn’t done that on day one is because they were given a waiting period of ten years before being able to attack directly or let loose big monsters. Like I said, if gods take actions, an equal and opposite response will be taken, and giving their cultists a delay lessened the “karmic weight,” as far as I can tell.

But that delay didn’t mean that they weren’t allowed to fight back if we came after them. So when an unrelated investigation stumbled across one of their offices, well, Hamburg has never been the same, but we did find out about our true enemy … and spent the next several years hunting them down.

Of course, when it rains, it pours, and we also got to find a city that drives people mad at the Pole of inaccessibility, complete with explorers robbed of their sanity by their surroundings, fiercely attacking anyone who came near. The city is still there, and using some … divine means we managed to figure out it’s some kind of artifact, created by some kind of incomprehensible deity who just left it lying there.

But eventually, we did manage to conquer the city and promptly left it alone, quarantined.

All the while, me and my friends were working together to set up ways to fight and kill bosses to harvest experience and materials safely until eventually, the cult snitched on themselves. Sort of.

One of their criminal enterprises got raided by the police, they reacted, the cops called for reinforcements, the cult responded by throwing even more force at the problem … by the time the dust settled, a city of fifty-thousand people was annihilated and there were a million different threads to pull to find the rest of the cult. Which we did. A few got away, but most were annihilated.

Years passed, space got colonized, and so on, but the cult and the danger posed by reckless monster summoning were never not on my mind.

You know, if anyone watching this plans on making a space colony, do have at least some legal code in mind when you start. The first time I went to Ceres, I literally had to give the guard a list of everything I was carrying that might be required to be declared, and it was a long one, because not a single item was known as being required to be kept outside.

And as for other regulations, well, safety regulations might be a mess, but they’re also written in blood. For most rules, there are probably a few gravestones that can be pointed to as their source.

Anyway, that’s just me going off on a tangent.

Eventually, we found the cult again, on a single small island in the pacific, and came after them hard. And they summoned a World Boss. The first one, ever. The biblical Leviathan, three hundred miles long, firebreathing, a living hellgate that spat lesser demons. It took us a little over a week to beat and by the time we won, maps had to be redrawn on a global scale, with all of Oceania being gone, as well as the northern coast of Australia, the southern coast of China, the eastern coast of India, even America and Africa caught a few rogue waves.

Except we just got a new issue. The fact that every World Boss drops a World Item, which can reshape the world itself, in a single specific way. In this case “The Soul of the Ocean” could reshape the entirety of the Earth’s oceans. I used it to fix all the damage humanity and later the Leviathan did, but someone else could have done something a hell of a lot nastier.

The cult was gone, and we were generally in a position to take down any monster that showed up.

I also started an academy during that time, but then, Ymir was summoned on Pluto. The idea was that with the World Boss stuck at the bottom of a gravity well, all you’d have to do is chuck rocks at it … and it went about as badly as it could have.

But it died, and I got my hand on his World Item, one that could terraform a planet. I chose Mars, in exchange for ownership of Olympus Mons in perpetuity. The nations of Earth couldn’t sign fast enough.

In the years since, we’ve summoned a few World Bosses ourselves, planned for any fully thought-out, but nothing went badly. Homeworld Command has quite a few squirreled away somewhere.

Eventually, I decided to go explore the universe with my girlfriend, Ms. Elena Hightower.

So, that is the true history of the System. The fact that humanity survived while making some of the dumbest choices possible isn’t because we’re so incredible, or superior to any aliens that may or may not be out there, it’s because of literal divine intervention and time travel. And that’s not something we can repeat or count on happened again.

Ultimately, if there is one takeaway from everything that happened, it’s this: “don’t be an idiot, use your head, and things will go well.”

Or, you know, at least not disastrously spiral out of control.

Either way, I’m going off to explore the stars with my girlfriend, and if something goes wrong again, I just hope that people know what to do. They should. No matter what the System throws at people, someone should be in a position to do something about it.

Nowadays, humanity is spread all over the galaxy, or at least enough planets that no singular disaster can wipe us out. But that doesn’t mean that we no longer need to be careful.

Like I said, use your head as something other than a battering ram, and don’t do anything stupid.