Outrage of the Ancients (LitRPG Apocalypse)

Joseph

Up to this point, Prague had only been hit by the very first wave of monsters, and it showed.

Intact buildings, reasonably happy people, and a regular flow of traffic.

Not anymore.

Phantoms clad in heavy leather coats and wielding firearms had come and … well, they'd tried to attack the people here. The ones under his protection.

And then they'd run squarely into him. Or rather, they'd run face-first into his fists.

[Invisibility] to easily maneuver the streets without drawing attention, [Defender's Mind] and [Nose for Trouble] to know exactly where the enemy was coming from, and then tearing said enemy limb from limb required very little beyond his own physical abilities.

So that was what he'd been doing for the past two hours, until he'd found himself on the Old Town Square, which had actually been around even so far back as the time of his creation, glaring at the being standing right there, which was coolly holding his gaze.

And even though Joseph was made from literal dirt and rock, his opponent was decidedly more inhuman.

Hair that was likely supposed to be "blond" was instead made entirely from golden thread, glittering metallically in stark contrast against pale and bloodless skin that looked almost sickly, yet simultaneously also likely being the shade that the person this monster was modeled after would have considered "handsome."

Although the most noticeable difference between this … being and most of the other creatures forged from the hell that the last century's history had apparently been, was that this being wasn't attacking any of the people in the area.

Instead, he was just standing there, his expression slowly morphing into a sneer as he looked Joseph over, while the civilians around seemed to be frozen in shock to run.

"It's Heydrich …" someone whispered. Joseph glanced to the side to see an old man looking at the monster with absolute horror in his eyes. That … well, it certainly couldn't be a good sign.

If this being had inspired that much fear that it was still recognized today, how horrific had it been in life?

"Of course, those money-grubbing cowards could only defend themselves by making a defender. Because they're too weak to defend themselves and too pathetic for anyone to want to do it for them," the monster, no, Heydrich, laughed.

Joseph had never wanted to be able to speak more; he wanted to rip into that specter of ancient evil, of the exact kind of prejudice he'd been created to combat.

This modern world had given him his voice, but even if sign language had existed during the Second World War, that bastard would have been too much of a bigot to even consider learning it.

Yet there was still a language they both spoke, the one shared by all of humanity, transcending language, nationality, and all else that separated people.

Violence.

Oh, and an upraised middle finger also did a decent job of communicating his feelings on the matter.

Heydrich simply threw himself out of the way, ripping a revolver out of the empty air, the gun's size downright absurd even to Joseph's eyes, with a barrel easily large enough to fit a child's fist inside.

And then the weapon roared like a dragon, and the Golem of Prague went flying, a crater the size of a beer keg in the armor manifested around his chest at the last minute.

Joseph slammed into the ground heavily at least five meters back, tumbling across the pavement until he managed to finally roll back to his feet, fists coming up into a combat stance he hadn't needed to assume in … well, ever.

Heydrich fired again, that damn hand cannon's report so loud it made everyone who remained on the plaza flinch and clasp their ears, the closest of these people now at least fifty meters away and running for the hills. But this time, Joseph caught the impact on his left forearm, rapidly regenerating the damage as the dirt cascading down from the "injury" reversed its flow to reform the limb.

Well aware of the fact that this was a very dangerous thing to do, the golem looked behind himself to make sure there weren't any people there, and when that was proved true… he vanished. Entirely invisible. And then he threw himself flat on the ground, the next bullet ripping past overhead.

After a brief moment of hesitation, Heydrich fired again, at the ground where he had to have heard over a ton of rock and stone hit the plaza … but Joseph had already been moving, and that had been the last chance at an "easy" hit his opponent would ever get.

Sadly, the invisibility winked out the first time he landed a strike, but even so, it didn't seem like Heydrich considered a stony fist the size of a pot lid slamming into and crushing his nose to be a fair trade in exchange for being able to locate Joseph again, not that he had much of a chance to respond as he went tumbling, coming to a stop only after several meters.

A dark smear across his face where his nose used to be, cracked teeth falling from his mouth as he roared in anger, Heydrich rose to his feet, revolver coming up … and then Joseph hit him again, slamming his foe's back into a rock wall that seemed to grow out of nowhere, preventing him from getting thrown backwards and thereby keeping the range open.

And Joseph simply went to work on him, slamming his fists into any place that looked even remotely vulnerable, slapping down the gun every time it began to move up into a position where it might be able to hit just about anyone or anything other than the floor.

For about thirty seconds, that was how things went. Blood flew and bones crunched, and suddenly … suddenly, the wall Joseph had forced Heydrich against crumbled away well before it should have, amidst a cloud of dark smoke.

And so did the stone around him as the Nazi finally managed to open up the distance again, stumbling backwards over his own feet in a way that, somehow, still managed to look somewhat dignified.

… or at least that seemed to be what the "man" seemed to be thinking, considering the cocky smirk that returned to that ruined face as he fired into Joseph's chest, sending him reeling.

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"This isn't doing anything to you, is it?" Heydrich sighed, glancing down at his gun, the pretend nonchalance utterly ruined by the dullness of his voice and the obviously broken nose that was the cause of the change.

Though Joseph wasn't focusing his attention on the man himself, rather trying to figure out why the ground around him was falling apart, ancient stone plates cracking like cheap pottery and slowly crumbling down into the earth beneath as things simply … fell apart.

"I really should have just flattened this entire city the first time," Heydrich announced in a conversational tone. "But it seems like that's happening on its own anyway. Also …"

His gun hand snapped up, and he fired yet again, aiming not at Joseph but at a civilian whom they could both see from where they were standing.

Yet the young man seemed utterly unharmed, almost as though the bullet had vanished entirely the moment entirely while, simultaneously, Joseph's chest exploded into a shower of muck that immediately began to pull itself back into place.

"Ach, so läuft der Hase …" Heydrich grinned. And immediately fired at a different civilian, the sudden burst of transferred damage causing Joseph to falter.

[Defender]. A simple name, for a slightly less simple power. Useless on the battlefield, because anyone participating in the fight was by definition not innocent, regardless of whether or not they were on the side of the angels.

But in the here and now, with civilians abound … nothing would harm them so long as he was here.

Heydrich continued to fire at anyone he could see, the city around him continuing to fall apart, only moving whenever he had to, yet at the same time making sure to stay out of reach of the pursuing golem's hands, taking full advantage of the fact that absorbing damage disrupted Joseph's invisibility.

Yet he had made just one mistake, one small miscalculation.

The entire town square and the surrounding buildings were slowly collapsing into a crater of gravel and rocks under the sundering effect of Heydrich's aura. But only one of them was capable of properly keeping their footing on ground like that.

And it wasn't the Nazi.

The rate of fire slowed, as Heydrich was forced to focus on hurrying away, then began to run outright, yet even that wasn't enough as the ground continued to be destroyed and became harder and harder to navigate.

And, then, finally, Joseph was close enough. One massive hand clamped down on Heydrich's shoulder like an iron vise, and before the ancient Nazi could react, Joseph's fist slammed into the bastard's gut … and went through. Straight through.

It might have appeared to Heydrich as though all the damage that had been directed at the environment had been dealt to the Golem of Prague. But it wasn't. It had been absorbed. And now, all that brutality and violence was being handed right back to the one who'd so carelessly put it out into the world, as it was only right.

The endgame of using the [Defender] Skill. Not just preventing damage and injury to those not involved in the fighting, but actively penalizing it with a second Skill that synergized so perfectly with the first one that it boggled the mind.

One could choose to fight Joseph; one could choose not to. But the one thing one could absolutely not do was attempt to hurt those under his protection. Because if you did … well, sometimes, protecting people involved hurting those who would attack them, to pay back all harm inflicted, not just by striking back, but by quite literally visiting the same damage on the miscreants.

An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

The [Code of Hammurabi].

And then, the reborn Nazi simply exploded, fragments of unnaturally pale skin and golden locks of hair showering the surrounding area along with fragments of leaden bones and brown blood that, judging by the cursing of a few people who'd made the mistake of returning to the rim of the crater, seemed to be sewage…

Suddenly very glad he lacked a working nose, Joseph continued his sweeps of the city, only briefly pausing to ask a bystander who understood sign language to send a message to the Untersberg using their cellular phone about the elimination of a Raid Boss, and a request for a return portal in a few hours.

***

Tristan

Reinhard Heydrich's specter had been killed. That was a weight off my shoulders, one I hadn't even realized I'd been carrying until I'd learned that he was, in fact, dead.

After all, he was one of the few truly competent members of the Nazi high command, ruthlessly and efficently putting his superior's desires into reality, to the point where he was one of, if not the only high high-ranking Nazi official ever assassinated by the Allies.

Hitler, on the other hand? Churchill had explicitly forbidden his assassination, for fear someone actually competent might take over. Göring had been a morphine addict, Göbbels and Himmler had been fanatics blinded by their beliefs … Heydrich had gone into everything, genocide and all, with his eyes wide open and fully cognizant of just who he was rubbing shoulders with.

In fact, he'd considered the whole lot of them clowns, and said so, out loud, but then he'd gotten himself fired from the Weimar Republic's navy and joined the Nazi party as his new path to a "respectable position."

Which, in my mind, made him the worst of the lot.

No, that came out wrong. It made it sound like I thought fanaticism was a legitimate excuse for the horrors of, well, any fanatical cause or regime, really. Which I didn't.

But when someone saw all an organization like the NSDAP for what it truly was, its flaws, its crimes, and the devastation it would wreak, truly saw it all, and joined it anyway, behaving like a fanatic without viewing the world through the warped lens of fanaticism … that managed to elevate him above the rest on the shitiness index. Somehow, without making the others look less bad in comparison.

That bastard had even been one of the major architects behind the holocaust. Hitler had made Jews public enemy number one, Göbbels had further inflamed things to get himself back into the Führer's good graces after one of his affairs had landed him in the doghouse, and Adolf Eichmann had managed the logistics of a literal genocide with such uncaring dispassion that his story had given rise to the idea of "the banality of evil."

But Heydrich had been the one to draw up the plans. And do a whole lot of other shit, earning himself many, many titles for his brutality.

Until eventually, he'd become the sole target of "Operation Anthropoid," with "anthropoid" quite literally meaning "resembling a human." As in, not actually human.

However, when gathering ideas of what the fifth challenge might be made up of, I'd missed him.

A mistake that had thankfully resolved itself.

Yet, what else was out there? Which of my predictions had proven true, which ones hadn't, and what had I missed entirely?

The fifth challenge had barely started, and it was already as devastating as any of the previous ones, and by the time it was over, it would likely have killed more people than all the previous ones put together.

Our history was just too bloody. Europe had been a battlefield since time immemorial, countless fragmented kingdoms endlessly slaughtering each other for literal decades at a time, but we also had an extreme concentration of ancients; it was just not enough.

Meanwhile, Asia's large population had meant that any wars that occurred there tended to be larger and therefore wound up with casualty numbers in the millions. You know, even before the World Wars and exploding population numbers had made that number sound a lot less "impressive."

South America had had the Aztecs, who had sometimes started wars purely to gather human sacrifices, and that was just the stuff I knew about.

And Africa was just more of the same as well. Kingdoms and empires rose on the bones of a previous nation, gobbled up a few of their neighbors until eventually, they too fell, be it to an outside force or civil war … in the end, nothing lasted.

Now, however, a bloody history was more than just a source of pride or shame; it gave birth to monsters. And those monsters were bloody well kicking our asses.

North America and Australia were also in trouble, though less than the rest of the world. Claims that "war" was a concept that had only been introduced by the European colonizers, that the native cultures had been living perfectly peaceful and idyllic lives, were pure revisionism to make colonizers look even worse … not that they needed the help. The true facts about that era were more than enough.

However, what was true was that their wars had been on a lesser scale, with fewer participants, and therefore, a smaller fallout. No "hundred-year wars", no "Genghis Khan's conquest," nothing that extreme. And they should have correspondingly weaker monsters.

I could already see how this was going to play out, I just hated the realization.

Although all that being said, it was about time Australia caught a break. The notoriously toxic continent had been hit hard when its already legendarily dangerous fauna had suddenly been upgraded into monsters.