Carnival - A LitRPG Apocalypse

John arrived above the Wall without fanfare. The Wall was a bit of a misnomer. Like any of the other Lines it was a string of fortresses and defences dedicated to keeping a high level and worryingly fecund monster species away from “civilised” areas. It had earned the moniker due to partially following the course of the old Great Wall that separated the Eurasian steppes from the heartland of China.

With a thought he switched to the local command network. “Traveller reporting. Any emergencies?”

“Finally some decent support!” came back a commander's voice.

“Stormwitch is my daughter,” he replied coldly.

“I’m still on the fucking line. Jerome: you’re a prick!”

“I meant mobile support! Not decent. Evie, you’re great.”

“Don’t you forget it pal,” Evie replied acidly.

Jerome took a moment, his deep breath audible over the comms before trying again. “The swarms have shifted rotation. Behemoth swarm has swung south unexpectedly and is moving towards Leh. Desert Orchid has moved north towards Jiuquan. Falcor swarm has reversed direction and is moving back towards Lucknow. We can’t lose Lucknow, it’s our furthest point east on the subcontinent. If we lose Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh is a write off. That’s a few million people either refugees or dead.”

“You can shoot off, kid. I’ll sort this out. Check on Ryn and Vic for me will you? Tell them I’ll be home tonight once we get this under control.”

“See you later, Dad. Fuck you Jerome,” Evie said as John watched her pip on his map head back to the portal site at Aksu, north of the Himalayas. He zoomed out even more and markers for the swarms appeared, helpfully supplied by Bob.

“What’s the priority, Jerome?”

“Falcor first or we might lose most of northern India. Then Desert Orchid then Behemoth. The big bastards are slower than the rest.”

“What’s the condition of the duty teams?” John asked as his eyes roved over the map. Bob’s helpfulness was not always good for morale. Falcor swarm was nearly two million wasps strong. Mostly around level thirty but with the odd champion that would rival a tribulation.

Behemoth were all lower level but they were huge wasps, the size of a family car as opposed to a scooter. They were disproportionately tough making them more challenging for bruisers to deal with. Not a problem as far as John was concerned though. The Desert Orchid swarm consisted of smaller, faster wasps adapted to the desert conditions of Xinjiang.

“Good for now, Traveller. We could use some more ammo for the turrets though.”

The variations in the types of wasps was one of the reasons they were such a problem. The primary queen lived in the tower hives south of what was formerly Beijing, or so they believed. A number of orbital bombardments of the site had produced some good PR footage but achieved bugger all as far as the council could make out.

Within a week the towers were back up and even larger numbers of wasps were spewing out to blanket the landscape around what had once been one of the most heavily populated areas of Earth. In a way it still was heavily populated but the council didn’t count monsters on their census, much to the annoyance of the Beastfolk faction.

John blipped himself north to Jiuquan and opened a temporary portal back to Sam and Raoul’s home north of Wayfaire. He kept it open while five hundred angry looking clones of Sam boiled through and began spreading out to support the fortifications scattered through the sands.

“OWA is reinforcing Jiuquan for now. I’ll deal with Lucknow while the Behemoths amble their way to Leh. Bob is sending additional ammo and drone support to Leh in the meantime. Let me know if anything changes. Traveller out.”

“What needs to die?” asked Sam over the command channel. John phased out the rest of her rant. Having vast cosmic power was great but they were still people. Raoul’s condition hadn’t improved and Sam was in a particularly foul mood. “Time to go murderhobo on these fucking wasps,” she snarled. Nice and professional, John thought. He was wise enough not to say anything. Sam was not a lady to argue with when she was in this kind of mood.

“I’ll leave you to it,” he mumbled. John appeared over the fortress at Lucknow. It was an imposing edifice of magically shaped stone bristling with barrels for short range defence. The artillery parks were well back from the line, scattered to the north and south, and a steady barrage of airburst shells were flying overhead towards the east.

The barrels poking from the fortress were almost all rapid fire anti air weapons. When they opened up it was like telephone books being ripped in half in rapid succession but loud enough to rupture your eardrums. Lines of light flew into the sky from the tracers. Bob didn’t need tracers and he was controlling all these weapons via a Server-Bob; he did like the aesthetics of laser beam-like torrents of metal tearing into the sky though. Sometimes one of the tracers would lodge in a thorax and set the wasp alight so they weren’t entirely pointless.

John blipped up and to the east. He emerged well above the danger zone created by the artillery's shrapnel. As it burst, wasps were ripped apart in swathes but the swarm stretched out as far as John could see. One of the vagaries of the system was that large gun emplacements didn’t earn Essence for kills. A bloke with a rifle would get Essence from a kill but an artillery team got nothing for the damage they did. It was one of the reasons the Inheritors in the south of the UK had struggled to level up compared to the other local factions.

John took a moment to note the flow of the swarm. Like a flock of birds the movement could look random at a glance but if you paid attention you could see the flows and waves as the creatures twisted and turned as though they shared a consciousness. In this case it was entirely possible they did. No one knew enough about the wasps. They did know the things operated as a collective, willing to throw disposable troops at a threat like hive creatures from before the system.

They had tried to push on the towers in Beijing a few years back, John recalled. After they nuked the towers the bruisers pushed in to clear the tunnels underground. It hadn’t gone well. The closer they got to where the Queen should have been the more they got swamped by angry vespids. John had to open portals for what was left of them to retreat in the end.

Since that time the wasps had owned all of southeast Asia, reaching as far as central India in the places where they met the southern lengths of the Wall. The other side of the Himalayas was equally garrisoned along a line running across northern China, parts of Mongolia and which finally reached the sea near what had once been Chumikan in the former eastern reaches of Russia.

One of the biggest limiting factors on John's power had always been dealing with multiple targets quickly. He could get around that by dropping rocks or opening portals to the sun but he wasn’t allowed to use his big moves anymore after he accidentally ruined a sizable percentage of Tunisia in a fight with a bunch of sandworms. So a few tons was the maximum these days and those simply wouldn’t cut it against flying enemies. They were most unsporting and tended to move out of the way as quickly as possible.

He would be able to get a few impacts before the swarm broke up, gained height and generally made themselves impossible to catch in the pressure waves from the impacts; the only element of his attacks that had any real effect on them. This didn’t mean he didn’t have options however.

“Button up your troops. You’ve got thirty seconds. Hold the arty now. No point wasting ammo.”

A series of curses and yells echoed over the command channel but John was just watching the update in his HUD. Bob knew where all the troops were and their situation. When the little light turned green John blipped along the edge of the swarm opening temporary portals. The other ends of the portals were 170,000 kilometres away from Earth. Each one cost him one hundred reserves and he moved along the front of the swarm putting one every 500 metres. In the handful of seconds it took him to reach a point where the mountains to the north were almost visible on the horizon, he had opened over three thousand portals to the void.

A measly thirty thousand reserves had turned a slice of north India into a no fly zone. The wasps could fly, in theory, but as soon as they did they were sucked into the void. Some of the strongest managed to dive down and cling to something solid enough to withstand the winds howling out into space. Keeping this many portals going at once was not a cheap process so he only left them open for thirty seconds. His reserves, prodigious as they seemed at first glance, dropped rapidly. In that time a huge proportion of the swarm was sucked away into space. All low levels so John received no Essence worth mentioning. The ones worth killing had all dived down and hugged mother earth.

John was still anticipating angry letters from conservationists.

“What’s the damage?” he muttered, having switched to his channel with Bob.

“A modest fraction of a percent of the atmosphere is gone and basically all surviving wildlife along the line of the portals. Sylvia will be pretty mean in her next email to you. Otherwise nothing major in the short term. This part of the world will have some weird weather and some really powerful storms over the next couple of years though,” Bob replied thoughtfully.

“As long as I didn’t break the rules,” he said with a hint of bitterness in his voice before switching back to the command channel. “Arty back on now please. Bob will give you targeting data,” John said a few seconds before he snapped the portals closed. The shaken and terrified wasps that had clung to the surface had a few moments grace to gather their wits before they were once again the focus of hundreds of guns parked fifty kilometres away.

The rounds looked like puffs of grey smoke from where John was but the effect on the wasps was satisfyingly violent. Shards of alien metal scythed into the survivors. They usually didn’t do fatal damage but they crippled legs and wings, throwing gouts of monster blood across the stones the monsters had clung to.

“Soldiers of the Wall… advance!” John said firmly. “Arty, hold in five seconds then wait for orders before resuming fire.”

Flyers launched themselves into the sky from the fortresses strung like beads across northern India. Most were locals from the Raj or the Caliphate but there were troops from every major faction mixed in amongst them. Despite their differences, when a trooper was on the Line all that mattered was holding back the tide. Whatever their bosses thought of the other guy’s bosses, they were all playing King Canute together for as long as they were serving.

Some flew with columns of fire, discs of force or gusts of air. Some just flew with no visible propulsion like Reg did when he deigned to indulge in aerobatics. Most flyers were casters, their flight created by an inventive use of their ability, but not all. There were a few bruisers who’d gotten a handy modification that granted them increased mobility.

The flying bruisers smashed into the surviving wasps first. Often literally as they chose to land on their targets directly before shooting off to sweep through the next closest enemy. As they landed the casters began their ranged attacks. Every kind of magical and metaphysical attack John could imagine rained down on those wasps currently undisturbed by the rampaging bruisers.

Blades of air scythed through limbs at the same time as torrents of angry energy bathed the wasps. The casters walked their fire away from the Wall and the berserker melee combatants. As they did so the slower elements caught up with the initial sally. They were leaving the fortresses dangerously undermanned but this was a rare opportunity to do some real damage to a swarm.

John watched from a kilometre up, tracking the troops through his HUD as Bob updated the troops positions. After a couple of minutes the soldiers were cheering and tossing grisly trophies to each other as they counted coups in the form of wasp wings and skulls.

“What’s the news, Sam?” he asked.

“I’m feeling a lot better now John. When we find this Goodman prick I want his balls but until then… I’ve got the Orchids under control. Lost a few clones but they’re falling back into the Gobi.” John checked and was glad he had subconsciously switched away from the command channel when he reached out to her. The Goodman situation needed to remain closely held for now.

“You’re good? We don’t want to piss off the main swarms at the moment,” he asked.

“Do you mean am I good or the situation? The situation is good John. I’ll stay on watch here and not push deeper into Waspland. You’re free to go deal with the Behemoths if south of the mountains is contained.”

“Raoul will be fine, mate. He’s a tough son of a bitch.”

“I know John. I just… seeing him like that- fuck. I’m copasetic, dude. Don’t worry. You go squash some giant bugs.”

“They’re all fucking giant bugs these days. Ok, I’ll leave you be and go play bugsmasher again.

John appeared east of Leh, a previously insignificant location beyond the fact it lay within the territory India and Pakistan used to bitch at each other about. He moved further east until he saw the edge of the swarm. The Behemoths were an odder than usual swarm. They were hairy to help them cope with the temperatures this far above sea level and their wings were more moth-like than wasp. With three metre long bodies on even the smallest of them, they deserved the name Behemoth.

This type of wasp was less numerous than the other border swarms. There wasn’t enough biomass in their territory to support a larger population but the increased toughness of their size and thicker chitin, coupled with the terrain being poorly suited to the human fighters, had let them hang on against any efforts made to wipe them out.

John hadn’t worked the Wall for a couple of months. That had largely fallen to a group of flyers and Evie. He’d been spending his time either off world working on the Ring -the orbital defences Bob, Belisarius and Kate had cooked up- the mines in the Belt, Mars or the south American Line. If he had a notch on his belt for every ant he’d killed he’d need a very long belt to accommodate them. Unfortunately at least half of the regular sweepers for the Wall had died at his home this afternoon.

Still, killing giant wasp-moths wasn’t that dissimilar to dealing with ants and due to their lack of numbers he didn’t need to risk the ire of the people who didn’t like him nuking places on this occasion. He moved steadily and carefully, maintaining a good distance from the swarm as he worked around the edges. Back in the day blipping the heads of things, seeing a waterfall of gore and bodies, had nearly given him a nervous breakdown.

Now he was so inured to the sight it barely registered. Heads vanished, wings disappeared and wasp gore flew as bodies crashed to the ground. If he had to be honest he found a kind of peace in these moments. Killing monsters was a lot better than some of the jobs the council had sent him on.

At least these wasps weren’t someone’s kid, dad or mum. However mad a human went it was never easy to collar them, or kill them if their crimes were bad enough to warrant a death sentence. A dozen insectile heads per second disappeared as John played the role the system had forced on him all those years ago.

As he carefully culled the swarm he stopped paying any real attention to the process. He could do this kind of shit on autopilot these days. His thoughts turned inwards and he began to try and figure out what the hell Mr. Goodman’s motives were.