Apocalypse: Regression

Chapter 17

The car, after having picked up the others at the volunteer site, came to a halt at the edge of the mechrophage dungeon’s, one of the more foul smelling dungeons due to its proximity to a waste treatment facility. The team, consisting of only the people he could grab fastest, Spencer, Maria, Seo-ah, Allen, and Adele.

“Kind of wish Topaz was here,” Seo-ah said as she stepped out of the car last, just behind Nick.

“Yeah . . . me too,” he agreed, feeling like he already missed the bonuses from Potion Master, but Topaz had simply been MIA when he swung by the reconstruction effort. She had already crossed the rift again and was working with Betty and several priests to keep people on the other side healed, healthy, and safe.

“Don’t worry, none of you will need any potions with me here!” Adele proudly proclaimed as she took her mace and shield and exited the car.

“Kind of miss Will as well. He always had the backup backpacks,” Spencer said as he equipped his staff.

“He’s still driving people to and from hospitals though,” Nick said, explaining the driver’s absence.

“So what are we going to do, just sit here and wait for the dungeon to explode and start attacking people, or do we go in and kill the boss before anything bad happens?” Adele asked, twirling her weapon absentmindedly.

“I . . . don’t know. Normally I’d say we go into the dungeon, but I don’t know how or why it explodes this time,” Nick admitted. “All I know is that dungeons near the rift, one after the other, began to go off in the last timeline. I’m honestly too worried to send anyone through that portal until we know how it works and what happens. If it was the cultists, we can stop them when we see them enter. If it was the rift, well . . . that’s a whole different story.”

“Good point, so . . . stay here and stand guard from a distance?” Maria asked, looking between Nick and the dungeon.

“Until they let us get closer,” Nick replied, motioning at the guards blocking their entrance to the portal.

“I just hate that we’re here and not in the rift killing giant polar bears and spreading our civilization to a new world,” Adele remarked, causing Nick to do a double take for a moment, but then she added, “and making a ton of money! Those church bills are going to be huge after the rift.”

He laughed to himself, thinking, Ah, that’s more like the Adele I know.

“Alright, are you going to need anything else, young master?” Darleen asked. “If not, I’m going to go work on making headway with the legal issues and the DOA.”

“Thanks for taking care of that,” Nick replied, politely sending her off. He then turned his attention back to Adele, Seo-ah, Maria, and the others, who were staring at him quietly as Darleen drove off. “What?”

“Nothing at all, young master,” Adele snickered.

“I was just wondering, young master, if you’d like a cup of tea after the battle. Should we prepare crumpets for a post-combat snack?” Maria added.

“What’s so bad about being called young master, I don’t get why you all are teasing him about it,” Spencer blinked in confusion at the two girls.

“Of course you wouldn’t, young master Spencer,” Adele joked.

“I think ‘young master’ suits him,” Seo-ah mumbled, causing Adele and Maria to give her an odd look before all three of them turned their attention back to the portal.

“So how long of a wait do you think we have before . . .” Spencer began, but he hadn’t even finished the question before the entire portal went red as with any break, but this time, cracks started to form across the portal as well.

“What’s . . . What’s happening? That’s not what a breaking portal should look like!” Seo-ah blurted out in a panic, raising her weapon as she prepared for anything that might happen.

“I guess we made it just in time,” Nick told her, forming up right beside her as the two of them made a small two-person barrier in front of their mage, Spencer.

A second later, the cracking portal morphed, twisted from the upright oval as the edges and sides expanded, the front began to bulge and transform until the oval doorway had become a large sphere, the center growing wider than the top and bottom as it slowly levitated into the air.

“What the … what is going on?” Spencer asked, pulling out a journal as he began to take notes on what was happening in front of them.

“I don’t know… I’ve never seen this part,” Nick admitted as they watched the now floating round shaped red portal continue to grow until it was like a large squished disc in the sky. They weren’t they only ones confused as to what to do either, as the guards, who had previously just been standing there, had started to back up into the concrete buildings surrounding where the portal was, staring up in horror as they hid themselves within the building.

Then, after several minutes of growing, the portal exploded in a nova, dumping the entire contents of the dungeon and the swarm of mechrophages within it on the unsuspecting guild.

“Crap! The guards! They’re going to die! We need to save them! Move, move, move!” Nick yelled to his team mates as they saw the macrophages descending atop the fortified guild infrastructure.

While Nick could sort of glimpse the giant mecrophage queen in the background, it was hard to see anything past the wall of drones, spindly legged buzzing oversized hornets with half a foot long stingers and metallic wings as they washed across the building and the power plant, a tidal wave of monsters.

As worried as Nick was about the security guard’s lives for the dungeon, rushing toward it seemed like the macrophages had other plans than fighting him. In fact, to his surprise, and likely to the dismay of the waste treatment workers, the monsters were weren’t satisfied with staying where they were as they began to fly in a single, large, organized unit toward the waste processing plant, descending on it in an instant as the cutters, monstrous sized metallic creatures with sharp mandibles started to tear the plant apart and attack the waste plant workers.

As Nick and the others rushed toward the plant, the Mechrophages swarmed over the facility. The drones began descending on the few plant workers still there, stabbing them and holding them close to their bodies as the wires and chords and metallic parts slowly incorporated the human flesh into their abdomens. The other mechrophages began to immediately cut up everything they could find in the plant, even feeding on the waste, using it to start building their burgeoning hive. Their mandibles clicked and whirred, slicing through steel and flesh as though it were paper, feeding the ever-growing monstrosity.

In only a moment, before Nick and his crew had even managed to run halfway to the facility, the plant had become unrecognizable, festooned with conduits and tendrils that writhed like serpents. Every second that passed, more and more of the metallic tendrils spread across the building as it slowly began to morph into a host for the parasitic horde.

“Holy hell, I thought this was a D-rank dungeon,” Spencer said as he struggled to keep pace with his non-caster class companions.

“That’s only because, inside the dungeon, they have no flesh or biological matter to feed on,” Nick explained. “The more they get though, the faster they’ll grow. If we leave them alone in that plant, we could come back tomorrow, and it might very well be an A- or S-rank dungeon outbreak.”

“Crap . . . that’s . . . That’s not fair!” Spencer grumbled before quickly adding, “and they've spotted us! Six o’clock!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Seo-ah responded, her spear exploding in aura as she released a partial, shortened version of Hyeonmu’s Spiral dance, annihilating the incoming swarm of drones before the others even had to lift a hand.

In the distance, Nick spotted larger mechrophages, resembling twisted spiders with abdomens of coiled wires and circuitry, skittering along the ground, carrying carcasses of both machines, unfortunate wildlife they’d already managed to kill, and plant workers, depositing their haul into the gaping maws of a mechrophage that resembled a square rectangular box with six metal legs. Its mouth opened and closed with a sickening crunch as it processed the organic material.

"Keep them back! Don't let them add more to the hive!" Nick ordered, stepping forward with the Weight of Dedication in hand. He called on the righteous anger that burned inside him, adding Holy Fire to his speartip as he struck out. The spear punched right through the drones, who hadn’t bothered to stop their work even as his team approached, but while the flames spread onto the machines, it hardly seemed to bother the fully non-organic creatures. They just kept taking damage until they could not function and then fell.

"Watch the left side!" Maria called out as she raised her shield and deflected a barrage of sharp projectiles fired from a spidery mechrophage. She then charged at the metallic monster, swinging her longsword in a wide arc to cleave through the spider-like mechrophage that leapt at her as she got closer.

Allen, positioned slightly behind, took aim and fired his artificer crafted air rifle. The rounds streaked from his rifle, glowing with electrical energy, and caused an explosion of sparks and ichor as a mechrophage drone dropped from the sky with each shot.

"Into the belly of the beast," Nick muttered, signaling the team to move forward. They advanced, Maria taking point as the tip of the v-shape formation, Nick and Seo-ah to her left, Adele protected in the center and right with Spencer and Allen in the rear. They cut a path through the lesser mechrophage drones and strippers.

And with that, the Daedalus Guild plunged into the waste plant.

The team found the path through the plant torn apart. Nick vaulted over a twisted heap of metal and was met with a barrage of serrated limbs from a drone bent on impaling him. He deflected the blows with his spear and drove the Weight of Dedication deep into the carapace of the monster, causing its mechanical innards to screech as they unwound. At the same time, Seo-ah ducked low and dismantled a wave of skittering scavengers, their pincers snapping at her from the end of her spear.

As the team pressed deeper into the heart of the plant, the air grew thicker with the foul stench of decay and machinery. The walls seemed to pulse with a sickly glow from cables snaked along the walls, merging seamlessly with metal conduits that hummed with energy.

In the middle of the room, something that looked vaguely human but with half a dozen arms of varying size and function stood over a number of large pipes that had been torn open, a brown liquid sludge pouring from them. The creature was nearly eight feet tall, and its metal body had two large, scythe-like appendages for arms and numerous thick tendrils reaching into the pipes.

Nick used his Omni-Trainer’s Insight on the creature.

Mechrophage - Reaper

Level: 20

Type: Mechanical Collector

The Reaper is a humanoid Mechrophage that collects organic material from both living and dead creatures. Its core contains a processing unit that converts the harvested material into energy or resources for itself or nearby Mechrophages.

Insight Note: The Reaper is slow-moving but incredibly durable with a thick outer shell resistant to most conventional weaponry. It also has a secondary function: when near a dying or dead creature, it can emit a signal that draws nearby Mechrophages to the site, increasing the danger level exponentially.

The reaper toiled deliberately and methodically as it manipulated the sludge. With each motion, the brown liquid seemed to shift and writhe, transforming into a luminescent ooze.

“Allen, Spencer, I need you two to fry this thing from the inside. If it calls for help, we’ll be overrun.”

“I’ve looked at the remains of most of these things and they’re very well made. You’ll need to crack it open and expose its vulnerable insides before we can do anything,” Allen said.

“Then we have a plan. Crack its shell and let Allen and me do the rest,” Spencer added.

“Let me make the first strike,” Maria said. The others nodded.

Maria began to close the distance between herself and the reaper, her body beginning to glow with her aura. The creature turned towards her, its eyes glowing red.

Maria's longsword sang as it arced through the air, a gale-force wind gathering around the blade, amplifying its power. With a fierce cry, she brought the sword down in a shining arc that sliced through the air with the force of a thunderclap.

The aura-empowered attack struck true, smacking the reaper's outer shell with explosive force. The creature staggered back, its casing dented and cracked.

The reaper raised its scythe-like appendages, and with a guttural roar that reverberated through the chamber, the upper half of its body spun like a top, its bladed arms tearing through the air.

Maria blocked a hard strike from the reaper. “Go reap yourself!” she growled, pushing forward with her shield raised, each blow from the Reaper smashing against her harder and harder, the spinning tendrils of the creature whipping around her defenses and slashing her, leaving bleeding lines along her exposed face and forearms. One of the scythe blades cut deeply into the side of her shield, nearly ripping it from her hand with its rotational pull. The next blade cut into Maria’s shoulder, carving halfway to the bone even as she spun counterclockwise to put her body behind the misaligned shield.

Adele was there the next second, her shield protecting Maria’s right side, a chanted incantation on her lips, even her shield took a wicked hit from the reaper. Her healing spell burst from Adele as she finished her chant, stitching together the mounting wounds that Maria was taking as she fought.

Spencer chanted and wove intricate patterns in the air. Then a blinding flash of light erupted from his outstretched hand, coalescing into a crackling bolt of pure energy that lanced through the air towards the reaper. The lightning bolt struck the monster with a resounding crash and a blinding burst of light.

For a moment, it seemed as though they had won. The reaper stopped spinning and convulsed from the electrifying impact. But to everyone's horror, the creature merely shook off the attack with a metallic screech, its outer shell scorched but largely intact.

The reaper turned its attention towards Spencer, its crimson eyes fixing on the mage with a predatory gleam. With surprising speed for its size, the mechrophage charged towards Spencer, its bladed arms beginning to spin again.

"Open it up more!" Allen shouted as fired, his electrified bullet denting the drone but did not penetrate.

Without a word, Nick and Seo-ah charged towards the reaper, and the monster swung its bladed arms towards them. Nick blocked a scythe with his spear, closed in, and sent his weapon to his inventory, opting for a close-up, bare-knuckle approach to the monstrosity. His fists crackled with aura energy as he hammered the creature's armored shell, each strike weakening its defenses and interrupting the rhythm of its attacks. At his side, Seo-ah took every opportunity Nick opened up to exploit gaps in the reaper's armor with her aura-imbued spear.

As they harried the reaper, Maria leaped forward with a fierce battle cry, ducked under a scythe, and drove her sword deep into a joint between its body and hips. The blade stopped the body from spinning.

Nick saw the crack that Maria’s initial attack had made and equipped his spear, combining a burst of power from Charge with the power enhancement from Straight Thrust and punctured the crack with his spear head.

Seo-ah quickly flexed, posing, and activating her Ogre Might Bracelet. Her muscles bulged and she struck the same spot Nick had.

The two pulled, using the leverage their spears afforded them to widen the crack Maria had created. With a screech, the metal twisted and the gap widened.

“Move! Now!” Spencer shouted, his hand already glowing with a bright charge of energy.

Maria leapt from the back of the Reaper, leaving her sword lodged in its back while Nick and Seo-ah used Charge to zip away.

Then there was a blinding flash of light. Nick barely had time to close his eyes. Even then, a line of light flashed in front of him. The boom that followed made his ears ring.

When Nick opened his eyes, the reaper lay in pieces on the plant floor amidst the pipes. Its once-imposing form was reduced to a twisted mass of metal, gears, wires, and circuitry. Sparks still crackled from its exposed innards. The acrid stench of burnt electronics filled the air, mingling with the metallic tang of mechrophage blood.

As the team came to a stop, taking a moment to catch their breath, Nick saw Allen begin to pull out batteries and wires from his backpack.

“What’s that?” Nick asked, staring as the artificer quickly get to work on creating something he hadn’t seen before.

“We can call it a special surprise,” Allen told him with the same annoying ambiguity Nick knew all too well.

“We don’t have long. Is your surprise going to be ready any time soon?” Nick asked, knowing he wouldn’t be able to pry any more details than that out of the crafter.

“Give me a few more moments, and it’ll be gift wrapped with a bow,” Allen told him as Nick turned to the rest of the party.

“Alright . . .” Nick took an assessment of the others. Adele and Spencer looked exhausted, Maria was down a shield, and Seo-ah was conserving her energy as she leaned against a half broken wall. “While Santa is busy with that, are you all ready for what’s ahead?”

“Define ready,” Maria muttered with a grim laugh, her hand holding her shoulder where Adele had healed her wound.

“Do you need to sit this out?” Nick asked, genuinely concerned she might actually have to take a breather with the way she looked at him, shell shocked, while holding a wound that wasn’t there anymore.

“No, I’m good. Thanks for asking,” she replied.

“Good here too,” Seo-ah said.

Spencer nodded his head. “Same.”

“The Lord does not give me missions I cannot complete,” Adele professed, looking overly pious as if a halo were above her head as she closed her eyes for a moment. “Oh, and I’ve still got my mace as the cheat code if they put up too much of a fight.”

“And I’m ready too now. Present finished and ready for delivery,” Allen announced as he stood up.

“So are you Santa Claus or an elf in this metaphor?” Adele asked as she tilted her head.

“Nick said I was Santa, so . . . that?” Allen responded. “Does it matter?”

“Just you’re not fat enough for that,” Adele explained with a shrug as the group collectively took a deep breath and got back into formation.

“Why do people think Santa is fat when he has to lap the entire world in a night? That’s a lot of cardio prep. I bet he has to have incredible core strength,” Maria mused, ever the defender of Christmas lore.

“Can we focus?” Nick asked, pointing ahead of them.

“Right,” Maria and Adele both replied, looking like kids caught up past bedtime, pursing their lips and lowering their heads as the group moved out.

When they reached the center of the waste plant, they found that the machines had been torn apart by the drones, their twisted remains now scattered about the facility. Pipes were rerouted, their ends melted and twisted by the heat of the mechrophage's passage. The ground was a mosaic of shattered glass and debris.

The towering mechrophage queen stood, nearly thirteen feet tall, at the heart of the chamber, her metal body fusing with the machines and pipes around her. A pair of Reapers, their bodies crackling with energy, hovered at her side, providing her with a steady supply of sustenance as her elongated abdomen produced drones that scurried off to serve the hive.

Nick used Omni-Trainer’s Insight on the creature.

Mechrophage - Queen

Level: 40

Type: Mechanical Hive Mother

The Mechrophage Queen serves as the heart of the Mechrophage hive. The Queen's primary function is to birth new Mechrophages, which she can do at a rapid rate. She is surrounded by a protective shell of hardened steel with numerous tendrils extending from her body to siphon energy from the environment or Reapers to fuel her reproductive processes.

Insight Note: The Queen is highly dangerous, not only because of her size and durability but because of her ability to spawn an endless horde of lesser Mechrophages. The energy cores embedded within her tendrils feed subsystems tied to reproduction; destroying these will significantly weaken her and slow down her ability to produce more offspring.

"Focus on the queen! Destroy those glowing energy nodes in the tendrils before she makes more mechrophages!" Nick directed, planting the Standard of Greatness firmly into the ground.

They charged, and the moment the group moved, the reapers feeding the queen turned and started to spin their upper bodies.

“Not this time,” Adele said as she cast Spiritual Weapon and formed a giant pickaxe above the reapers. The pick came down not on the reapers but on a large pipe they had been feeding off of and processing. The pipe ruptured, and a slurry of liquid burst from it, covering the reapers.

Spencer unleashed a blast of cold energy from his outstretched hands, hitting the reapers and freezing the liquid that poured over them, stopping their spinning attack before it could pick up momentum but also freezing their legs in place to the floor.

Adele’s spiritual weapon rose again, this time aimed at the reaper on the left. The thin end of the giant glowing pick punctured the brittle frozen metal shell of the reaper and cracked something inside of it. The magical weapon then repeated the attack on the other reaper and disabled it.

The queen, though virtually immobile as she was half encased in the hive being created around her, was not idle. Her abdomen swelled and then spit out three dozen machines. Half were drones that immediately went to fix the damaged reapers, and the other half were octagonal blocks that scurried around on four legs. The blocks shot spinning circular saw blades at the intruders as they climbed the walls.

“Maria, blast them with Hero’s Gale!” Nick ordered, his voice tinged with the power that his charisma afforded him.

Maria barely glanced at Nick before nodding and pulling back ten feet. She closed her eyes, and a great green aura sprung up around her, pulling and twisting the air into a large tornado. Lances of energy formed a thousand wind blades flying in every direction, tearing the smaller mechrophages from the walls and shredding them mid-air and cutting the Queen’s feeding pipes and tendrils throughout the room to pieces.

When the wind died and the aura tornado dissipated, Maria collapsed to her hands and knees, her ultimate move coming at the cost of all of her mana and aura.

Questionable-looking water gushed from the ruptured pipes, pooling around their feet, while the mechrophage queen's guttural roars reverberated through the semi-transformed waste processing plant. The queen, though heavily damaged by Maria's Hero's Gale, survived thanks to the mass of metal armor that had been built around her. Her elongated abdomen pulsed, bulging grotesquely as she prepared to spawn another wave of monstrous mechrophages.

With a burst of speed, Nick charged across the flooded floor, his sandals splashing through the rising water. The queen's tendrils lashed out, but he ducked and weaved, using every point of his agility. He reached the base of her abdomen, where the pulsating mass threatened to unleash a new horde.

“Hold her off!" Nick bellowed over his shoulder. His team sprang into action, forming a protective circle around him. “Spencer, with me!”

Nick pressed his hands against the Queen's bulging flesh. Frost began to form under his palms, spreading rapidly as he poured every ounce of his power into freezing the reproduction cavity. Spencer was beside him the next instant, his own magic pouring into the creature. The queen shrieked, her body convulsing violently as the ice encased her abdomen.

Nick was so focused on spreading the ice magic through the queen that he only partially caught sight of the rest of his team defending him and Spencer as the calls of the queen brought more mechrophages to her aid. Seo-ah’s spear burst with pink aura as it launched glowing phantom spears upward, skewering a half dozen cutters attacking them from the roof, Adele shielded a recovering Maria even as she sliced through a spidery mechrophage that leaped at them from the hallway, and Allen threw EMP grenades that exploded with electrical energy while shouting “Ho, ho, ho!”.

The outside of the queen’s abdomen was almost a solid block of ice, halting her monstrous birthing process. With no outlet, the pressure building within the Queen’s frozen abdomen reached a critical point. With a final, ear-splitting roar, her body tore open, and a torrent of mechrophages burst forth, their forms twisted and mangled from being trapped within her. The explosion sent Nick and Spencer flying backward. The world spun as Nick tumbled. He felt his body hit something hard, and he struggled to prop himself up. He succeeded just in time to see the queen collapse, her torn and shredded body hanging lifeless.

You have gained 10,640 EXP.

You have leveled up! You have 5 unassigned stat points!

Congratulations! Frost Giant’s Magic Lv.3 has evolved into Frost Giant’s Magic Lv.4.

Congratulations! Learn the Basics V has evolved into Learn the Basics VI.

Through effort, you’ve learned the basic skill “Ice Sculpting!”

Drones dropped from the ceiling, the blades on the cutters stopped spinning, and the spidery legs of the carriers collapsed. The mechrophages around them dropped one by one, as if the queen’s death had left them nonfunctional.

“They’re not dead.” Maria noted as she poked one with her sword.

“No, they just lost their leader. The hive-mind thing isn’t just hyperbole with these guys. As long as another queen doesn’t show up to connect them all together again, we can kill them with little worry,” Nick explained as he got to his feet and stumbled towards the body of the mechrophage queen.

"Stand back," Nick instructed, switching out his spear for his sword. With a swift, precise cut, he sliced through the queen's chest cavity, exposing a still-glowing machine nestled within. It throbbed rhythmically, a sickly green light emanating from its core.

"Allen, come here," Nick called. Allen approached, eyes wide with curiosity and a hint of trepidation.

"What's that?" Allen asked, peering at the alien device.

"Future you—well, future us—used this to create a drone booster," Nick explained, carefully extracting the machine and handing it to Allen. "Our base could really use the bonus."

Allen's eyes widened in surprise and then quickly narrowed in focus. He turned the device over in his hands, already lost in thought. "I can see how it works . . . Yes, I think I can integrate this with our current systems. We could increase efficiency by at least twenty percent, maybe more."

"Good," Nick replied, offering a rare smile. "Get to work on that as soon as we get back. For now, let's get out of here before this place floods completely."