Outrage of the Ancients (LitRPG Apocalypse)

Tristan

The landscape of Romania flew past quickly beneath me, forests, fields, highways, towns … exactly what I'd expected.

Because, sadly, this was the real world. Just because I had a land surveying Skill in [Know The Land] didn't mean I'd automatically find something previously undiscovered the moment I started looking around.

It was still worth doing, though; not only was there a chance I would find something, and it tightened the "web" of locations I could portal to, but it also kept me from going stir-crazy.

I'd simply opened a portal to a place I hadn't explored properly, just visited for a couple of seconds a few months ago, cast [Animal Transformation], and flew through in the shape of a common swift.

As far as birds went, the swift was nothing terribly impressive.

It was larger than your average songbird, but small compared to almost all birds of prey, and while agile, it didn't break any records in that department either.

What it could do, on the other hand, was fly. And keep flying for literal months, to the point where it did, in fact, hold the record for longest continuous flight.

The swifts stayed in the air for such ridiculously long periods that, in medieval times, people had actually thought these birds just straight up didn't have legs.

It was weird how comfortable gliding through the air was, despite how utterly alien a sensation it should have been.

Having my "arms" spread wide for hours was, quite frankly, unnatural, yet when they were wings, it seemed entirely normal, eminently natural, flying was something that had come as easily as breathing from the very instant I'd transformed.

Even so, today we were at the tail end of the three-day period where the System was creating monsters based on the happenings of the 15th century.

A whole lot of things had happened, as always, though the most devastating impact had certainly been Christopher Columbus, whose abysmal treatment of the natives during his expeditions had given rise to a Nation Boss that had all but exterminated the entirety of the Carribean, who had guessed that was coming and prepared for his return, but lacked the power to withstand a monster of such power … and then proceeded to attack Florida and work his way north, encountering Americans who had been caught entirely flat-footed.

A hero to some, a villain to others, and objectively a mass murderer, even if far too many people wanted to sweep that under the carpet so that the "discoverer" of America could be properly "appreciated."

But then again, there were a whole lot of crimes against the native population that had been largely brushed aside in favor of a clean historical record, most of which had come back to bite the US. In a very literal sense, when it came to the buffalo.

I wasn't flying to wallow, though, I was flying to "recuperate," so I tried to banish those thoughts from my mind, instead focusing on the landscape passing by beneath.

Then, I also cast [Tailwind] upon myself. I'd actually learned the spell just so I could teach it to Mia, who'd get a hell of a lot more use out of speed-bosting magic than I would, but there was something truly exhilarating about having the very wind push me along. Whenever that had happened on the ground, while I'd been walking, it had been the closest I'd ever come to flying, and now that I was actually flying, there was nothing quite like it … and then I saw the bodies.

I immediately cut the flow of mana to the spell, both slowing myself so I could better examine things and saving my mana in case the monster was still around.

Was that really … oh, fuck.

Human bodies impaled on massive poles that raised the corpses high into the sky, visible from afar, and already having suffered from the predation of crows.

Geographically, temporally, and method-wise, there was only one possible perpetrator.

Now, there was just one question that needed to be asked: was this Vlad Drakula, Prince of Wallachia, or Count Drakula, bloodthirsty vampire?

Because, if I remembered correctly, there was conclusive evidence that Bram Stoker had only ever had access to the name "Drakula," alongside the information that the bearer of said name had been Wallachian and fought against the Turks.

So even if most people considered the vampire and the impaler to be the same person, would the System still use an entirely literary idea only connected by the name alone as the basis for a monster?

…

Honestly, I'd just take a look at the nameplate. Chances were I'd have to run, entirely out of my depth, but even so, I still wanted to be able to make that choice in possession of all the facts.

I mean, logically, going by the ideas the System seemed to have followed thus far, Vlad the Third, Son of the Dragon, the Impaler Warlord, should have been the basis for the monster that was likely roaming the area.

It wasn't like there was a commonly accepted theory that he'd actually been a vampire, not in the same way oh so many people had believed the Bismarck to be a superbattleship, rather than a fiendishly effective convoy raider that would have been a real issue for the British, had she managed to freely operate in the Atlantic.

No, the misunderstanding was that Bram Stoker had known all about Dracula, everything, when he'd created his fictional vampire. Therefore, even with all the conflation of both versions of Vlad Dracula going on, the monster running around here should take after the man, not the undead bloodsucker.

Should.

Though even the historical figure might be a problem.

I mean, it wasn't like he hadn't managed to become notorious all on his own. Though he might have become truly infamous for the whole "impaling" thing, I also remembered a particular episode where scholars visiting his court had declined to take off their hats for religious reasons … so he'd had said hats nailed to their heads.

I cast [Animal Transformation] again, transforming into a golden eagle instead, which had one of the best eyesight I knew of, and definitely the best I could think of off the top of my head.

So, what did those look like? What had killed those people? Any bite marks, any signs of them having been eaten by something other than the crows I could see milling around? Did the amount of blood on the ground below the poles match what one would expect from a single dead human … and when the ever-loving fuck had I gained the ability to correctly estimate that?

… experience. Bitter experience, and a memory magically enhanced to the point where it worked far too well.

I couldn't really take a deep and calming breath while in bird form the way I did as a human, but ultimately, I'd managed to get over the instinctual panic reaction at some point in the past.

But I couldn't see anything that would indicate "vampire" to me.

Now if only I could see the boss himself, I'd be able to choose whether to engage or call for help … though the latter would be an action of last resort, as everyone else was incredibly busy, focussing on wiping out the current tranche of monsters to be able to focus every iota of energy on the next wave, which would show up in little over eighteen hours.

That was also why right now was the best time for me to go awandering, since I'd been able to send everyone to where they needed to go this morning, and then explore while trusting in my newly enchanted cellphone to ensure I'd be reachable in the event that I was needed.

I continued to sweep my gaze across the ground, scanning for my potential target.

Where oh where was he …

A good ten minutes passed, during which I found three more massacres but no sign of the one responsible. Maybe this was a vampire I was dealing with, one hiding from the glare of the sun?

I mean, not every vampire was vulnerable to sunlight, but that was a reasonable expectation.

And if it was a vampire, well, how did I kill one?

Some were vulnerable to garlic, all were vulnerable to complete and utter immolation, and as I'd already established, some could be struck down simply by being exposed to the glare of the sun.

Oh, and staking also worked a lot of the time, just not in the way traditionally displayed on the big screen. The key there wasn't putting a stake through a vampire's heart, nor about the material the stake was made of; in fact, a whole lot of stakes that had actually been used had been made of metal rather than wood, due to the far higher durability of the material.

Because it wasn't about going after the heart, it was about nailing the corpse to the ground to prevent them from rising or, you know, rising again.

If it came down to that, I'd use Nagelring to pin him to the ground, incinerate the body with magic, and hope that did the trick.

And if it didn't, well, Excalibur was literally designed to kill immortals.

My mind kept going in circles after that, endlessly running through potential scenarios without actually really improving in any measurable way. Or at all.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

By the time I saw the three-meter-tall figure stalking through the woods, clad all in red, I'd gotten far too distracted, but thankfully, I was also too far to be easily seen, let alone targeted.

Could be worse, I suppose.

Comparatively low-Level, "only" a Field Boss, and a general focus on Vlad the Impaler, not Vlad the Fictional Bloodsucker.

That was actually what "Kazikli Bey" meant; it roughly translated as "Impaler Prince."

Honestly, even with all the overthinking I'd done, the plan was nevertheless simple: put him down, and if he got back up, open a portal to Arthur or Dietrich and tell them about the immortal in need of killing.

My opening move was simple, straightforward, and the same one I always used when there wasn't something in the area that was liable to become collateral damage.

[Century Storm].

I absolutely loved that spell. Yes, I had to be careful when using it, and it also swallowed up a sizable chunk of my mana reserves, but there was nothing quite like drowing an enemy beneath a torrent of water and hammering them with enough lightning that any lightning rod attempting to divert the barrage would melt before it had even managed to block a tiny fraction of the attack.

The sky above instantly blackened, the cloudless sky swallowed up by immense reservoirs of rain and lightning, plump with so much water they were practically solid.

Vlad Tepes, didn't seem to care, continuing to march forward to … well, whatever his goal was, using a regal and confident walk that had to be murder on your legs to keep up for an extended period of time.

Yet another example of how the monsters created based on history were, in fact, monsters created on the basis of historical people and happenstances, rather than the people themselves.

Some were silent executioners, others had more in common with rabid dogs than human beings, and others still were rude bastards that spewed a never-ending stream of nonsense that basically focused only on two things: being as hurtful as possible and having some vague connection to the history they were based on.

As for what this guy would do … with any luck, I'd never get the chance to find out.

Angling my wings slightly to better catch the winds, my spell was whipping him. I let myself be swept out of the path my attack would be taking, the energy building in the clouds beginning to visibly crackle out of the collections of water vapor, as though unable to be contained, too eager to strike down my foes to stay put.

So I indulged it.

The twilight of the world beneath the storm suddenly turned back into day as dozens of bolts of lightning poured down like wrath of Zeus himself, each hammering home like homesick meteors and for a brief moment, the Field Boss vanished from view, replaced by an orb of light as bright as the sun itself, leaving me severely regretting my choice of shape, the golden eagle's excellent eyes burning from the sight.

And then it fell away, the world returning to normal, leaving him standing at the bottom of a small crater, charred and smoking, yet simultaneously healthy and glaring up at me.

At me. Over a kilometer up, in bird form, without even a single indication that the attack had originated from me. Yet that guy could tell.

Shoot.

And now what was he doing? He was running?

Had he decided that he couldn't strike out at me up here, and therefore, running was the correct decision? I mean, it wasn't what I'd expected, but I'd also never seen a monster flee like that.

That was when Vlad reached the middle of the vast mess of blood that had collected beneath the countless poles and their grizzly "decorations," spreading his arm wide as the crimson stains began to liquefy again and writhe.

Aaaaannd he was a hemokinetic. Of course he was.

Oh fuck.

I banked to the side, transforming into a peregrine falcon as I fell, aiming at the forest beyond even as the entirety of the massacre scene below rose up to meet me in the form of a massive barbed web of crystallized thorns and strings woven of blood.

Vlad had his hands raised, the web ready to fire … and then he paused, lowering them again, clearly having realized that he'd have real trouble hitting me. Peregrine falcons were fast, especially when diving.

And since I was diving at a location other than him, meaning he wouldn't be able to put that mess in my path, he'd have to intercept me from the side, which would require careful judging of not where I was, but where I'd be.

Yet I'd only left him a bare handful of seconds to make that prediction.

And all around me, half a dozen [Thunder Orbs] manifested around me, trailing just behind my tailfeathers while I pumped them full of mana …

Just fifty meters above the treeline, we split up. I spread my wings in an instant, ceasing the mad dive and diverting my trajectory away from the furious Field Boss while the balls of furious electricity went straight at the man himself.

He did launch the bloody net after me, but I was already moving away from him, and now that I was between the trees, he couldn't even get a good bead on me … though when the trees two meters to my right were reduced to splinters as his attack rocketed past, I almost had a heart attack.

The area I'd been in was "safe," for a certain definition of the word, but the area beside me looked like it had been slated for lumber harvesting … if such harvesting were usually done by drunken morons by way of randomly tossing dynamite at the target area.

Though I was currently speeding away as quickly as possible, and should be clear of his range, I moved further to the left, away from where he might strike next.

Until I was almost a kilometer away, at which point I began to ascend again, directing the storm to carry me while throwing more lightning bolts as soon as the charge had accumulated in the clouds.

I kept going until I was, once again, nearly a kilometer away, this time straight above him, and used a move that would leave him entirely incapable of targeting me.

I opened another portal into my room in the Untersberg, the tear in space hanging in midair, far above the Earth … yet here I was, standing on solid ground, looking down at Vlad Dracula, waiting for my next response. And unless he could curve his attacks at this distance, he wouldn't be able to strike at me here unless I was actively sticking my head out of the portal.

Honestly, this strategy was one hundred percent cheese, abusing a weakness to trivialize the entire fight.

But in my mind, that was perfectly fine, just so long as I'd found the exploit on my own, rather than simply googling it and then implementing someone else's solution. Finding a trick was its own kind of skill … oh, and this was real life. Who cared how I won, as long as I did, in fact, win without committing war crimes …

Which I technically was, seeing as there was something in the Geneva Convention about excessive ecological destruction, and I'd just unleashed a superstorm … but then again, that article had been written as a direct response to the Americans' excessive use of napalm to destroy the rainforests of Vietnam. This was on a far smaller scale.

And even if I was just waiting for something that I could respond to to happen, I shouldn't be letting my mind wander like this.

But he just kept throwing bloody spears at the portal, where they hammered into the ceiling, the only point he could target, at which point I could just make it vanish via repeated use of [Restoration of the Old], completely annihilating the blood and restoring the ceiling to its prior state, over and over again.

And yet … was this really how I wanted this to go?

My next action was to try and destroy his supply of ammo. Destroying liquid was hard, especially in the middle of a downpour that would have been record-breaking if it hadn't been artificial.

But what if I could destroy the thing that made blood, well, blood? What then?

I mean, I could think of one way …

Yep, I cast [Acid Rain] on the area directly outside the portal, something that was safe now that I wasn't getting rained on. Sure, I'd actually cast the spell upon an area I was in before, but at the time, I'd been under the protection of Genghis Khan's environmental damage immunity Skill, which wasn't the case now.

And now, it was time to wait.

End of the day, "melting" the proteins in blood would make the mess down there something other than blood in the scientific sense, though whether or not that would put the resulting mess beyond his ability to control was another story.

For the next few minutes, several more bloody spears splattered across my room's ceiling, the non-blood liquid carried along hissing as it came into contact with the stone, but that was equally simple to fix as the pure blood attacks, and I could charge up another lightning bolt all the while.

So when I could feel the spell having run its course, and with the last bloody attack having been nearly a full minute ago, I threw myself through the portal at my top speed, back in the form of a peregrine falcon, crackling sphere of energy clutched between my claws and diving straight at the monster once again.

The ground began to move as he noticed my return, massive muddy tendrils rising from the Earth … tendrils that stretched maybe ten centimeters before they fell back down, beyond his abilities to control.

And before he could try something else, I slammed the attack I'd been charging for a good three minutes straight into his burned and acid-eaten face.

[Arcane Wanderer Lv. 59 -> Arcane Wanderer Lv. 61]

[Physical Boost gained]

[Skill gained: Escape Plan]

And that was that. I cancelled [Century Storm] and returned to the portal, then checked the new Skill.

Or rather, that's what I would have done, had it not been for my body suddenly locking up the instant not being able to keep moving wouldn't result in me faceplanting.

Every muscle in my body tightening as though I were trying to lift a piano on my own, every nerve firing at random, sending hot, cold, pain, pleasure, and hair-raising anxiety straight into my mind, bearable only due to me being utterly incapable of focussing on any single sensation enough to truly feel it, my ears felt as though the people I could suddenly overhear talking in the chambers beyond were screaming in my ears, my eyes seemed to be staring straight into the sun …

It could have been a second, it could have been a century, but at some point, the sensation passed, leaving me to stumble a couple of steps forward before I could catch myself.

[Physical Boost applied]

Mia was well above Level 60. She hadn't warned me about what this would be like. And I knew her well enough to know that that had been ridiculous.

Now, what would be an appropriate response?

Either way, problem for later.

I spent the next few minutes marching in circles in my room, starting at walking speed quickly accelerating until I was running so quickly that I almost slipped on the relatively smooth floor, though I caught myself before anything else happened.

After that, I also threw a few experimental punches at the air, feeling the difference.

It was a lot. My ability to judge that sort of thing was severely limited, but near as I could tell, I'd just gained the ability to handily win Gold in a whole host of Olympic disciplines.

The difference was like night and day, yet, ultimately, my focus on magic meant I hadn't gotten quite as much out of it as Mia had to have gotten.

Still … I opened and closed my hand a couple of times while staring at my palm, marveling at the tangible feeling of power that was easily sensed from the muscles there.

Surely, in due time, the "miraculous" feeling would eventually end as this became mundane, but for now, it. Was. Awesome!

Then, though, I could look up the Skill's description.

It was a great Skill. Considering how much of my combat style revolved around smashing enemies over the head with Skills that functioned on cooldowns, anything that sped up said cooldowns synergized perfectly with the rest of my abilities.

Though I selected a different Skill, the capstone of my original Class, [Guide's Shortcut]. The number of daily portals had just doubled to thirty-two, massively increasing my versatility, but if I could get extra charges just from being in, or even around, combat, the possibilities were endless.

Yet I did have a Skill Boost saved up and a distinct suspicion of what the upgraded version of this Skill would look like …

As I thought.

I grinned, leaned out through the window to cast the restoration Skill on the mess the battle had made of the woods below, then began to walk through the corridors of the Untersberg with a massive grin on my face.

And no, I didn't brag about having beaten a boss monster on my own, especially not to people who were busily doing their own thing. I was just immersing myself in this sea of humanity, and feeling the power of having hit Level 60.