System Finale: An Apocalyptic Space Opera LitRPG (The System Apocalypse Book 12) Read online

  She ignores me while I shout at her, asking what she means by soon. She ignores me as I pound on the force screen. She even ignores me when I scream as her thugs get their hands on me and start lopping off limbs. Everything’s recorded, everything is something she could hear if she wants, but she doesn’t.

  I don’t matter, not since she got what she wanted.

  Which is about par for the course for dealings with the Shadow Council.

  Chapter 4

  True to their word, Harry appears not long after. They even wait until I’m mostly together, which is always nice. With my high Constitution, I regenerate limbs at a decent pace these days—not like the multi-day affair at the start of the apocalypse—but it still takes time, especially when they’re intent on pulling me apart every once in a while. I sometimes wonder if the System is lowering the speed of change, just to help reduce the amount of time I spend in pain. Wishful thinking that.

  The War Reporter looks even worse than the last time I saw him, which is kind of saying something. I mean, he was pretty broken from his time in captivity, and running around, fleeing for our lives, wasn’t exactly stress-free. Especially when one isn’t a combat Classer and in the middle of the Forbidden Zone. Then on top of that, we had the betrayal by Dornalor and…

  Well.

  “You look like shit,” I tell Harry as he hesitantly walks in, stopping a short distance in.

  He glances at the doorway, then around, his dark skin paler than normal. His nervousness rolls off him like a wave, and it’s something I want to question him about but decide against.

  Not yet.

  “You don’t look… no. Truth. You look just like yourself. Other than the stumpy foot,” Harry replies, arms crossing. “How?”

  “System shenanigans.”

  “I’ve watched your ‘sessions.’ All of them. They made me watch them, so that I could report on it properly. I’ve watched what they did to you, how they did it…” Harry speaks fast, hands moving in aggressive flicks and gestures. As though what he has to say can’t be expressed just by words. “I watch them pull all the bones out of your limbs, one by one. Watched you scream and cry and beg and—”

  “I remember. I was there,” I cut him off.

  “Then how!” Harry shouts. “How are you still… still…”

  “Sane?” I shrug. “Pretty sure I started out a little crazy. I know more than a few friends who would insist on that as a truth.”

  “You’re joking. You’re bloody joking! You sodding fool, you overgrown manchild, you, you, you…” He splutters to a stop, unable to keep going. I find myself grinning, which makes him turn even redder and angrier.

  “It’s good to see you too,” I say.

  That breaks him. He goes from growling and spluttering to shocked to just trembling and silent. I watch for a few seconds, before a small insistent part of me that sounds a lot like Lana, redhead ex-girlfriend and my external emotional support vehicle, points out he could use a hug.

  Let’s just say the next few minutes are awkward. Hugging isn’t something I do. Certainly not with men I’m not sleeping with or intending to sleep with. Yes, yes, I know, toxic masculinity and all that—but I grew up in a straight-laced traditional Chinese family. We didn’t hug one another because such outward displays of affection were just not done.

  So, yeah. It was awkward, but the fact that it seems to help him is a reward in itself. By the time I finally lead Harry over to a chair, get him a drink of water—lacking anything stronger—and take a seat, he’s pulled himself together.

  “Seriously, John. How are you managing to hold it together?” Harry says.

  “The System.” I tap my head. “It’s taking away a lot of the pain and other effects. I have a feeling the high mental resistances my Class offers does some of that too. High Willpower maybe?” Not all the truth, since I know from the Library that it’s not always the case, though all of those do help.

  “So what? The System lets you deal with being tortured?”

  “The aftereffects at least.” I add, almost contemplatively, “Though I find myself grateful they keep me to mostly bland foods. I’m somewhat less than enthused by ribs, meaty meals, and spaghetti.”

  Harry stares at me for a long moment, trying to figure out if I’m joking. Or how much I’m joking. Because, I’ll admit, there’s a lot of truth in what I said.

  Before he can speak, I ask, “How have you been? And how long has it been?”

  “A month,” he answers the second question first, then glances around, almost hunching in a little. I wonder if he was meant to tell me that, but since no one breaks in to stop him, he continues. “I’ve been… well. I’ve been better.”

  “Other than watching the highlights of the John Lee show, what else have you been up to?” I ask. “What happened to Dornalor and Ezz?”

  “Not much. I’m not exactly a prisoner, but I’m not really allowed to go anywhere either,” Harry says. “The prison that’s attached to this space…” Harry looks around, waiting to see if anyone intends to come in and stop him. “It’s underground. They don’t let me up, and the place itself is huge. These dimensional spaces, they’re all hooked into specific corridors.”

  I make a noise for him to go on.

  “Dornalor’s upstairs. Stuck. Endila has stayed with the Captain. The Heartbreak is docked and unable to leave, at least for now. Ezz has been retasked to become one of their serving bots. They… did something to him. He’s not himself.”

  I blanche a little, though truth be told, it’s not particularly surprising. Why leave a potential threat running around when you can just wipe its memory banks and reinstall it? What makes Ezz itself is just code, right?

  Gods, I hope not.

  “So you got the run of an underground prison…”

  Before I can complete my sentence, the damn Library decides that it’s time to do another information dump. It’s gotten a lot quieter over the last few years, the lack of new experiences and needs meaning that the Library has felt the need to do the information dump much slower, in ways that don’t require me to get a pounding headache or wonder if someone has driven an icepick through my ear. Unfortunately, this time around, it decides that dimensional prisons are well worth exploring.

  Funnily enough, the information on prisons is combined with information about research labs and the construction of both. The Questors—the Corrupt Questors—have reams and reams of data for both. Not because it’s particularly helpful for puzzling out what the System is, but because we need—they needed— prisons and research stations to conduct their often illegal and aberrant experiments.

  There are as many prison blueprints in my brain as there are grains of rice in a family cookpot. Too much for me to really get more than a cursory understanding, but it seems dimensional prisons are considered one of the most popular and secure methods by governments. Especially for high value targets.

  Not so much for your average Questor though. As I guessed, the cost of maintaining a dimensional prison is expensive. The additional cost of running time at different speeds than base reality adds to the cost. It’s why most prisons never have their time zones altered, reducing cost overall. That being said, a single dimensional prison cell is as expensive as the entirety of a normal Classed prison, due to the Mana cost of holding the dimensions apart and still connected.

  It does explain why they have the prison here though—in a world at the heart of the Forbidden Zone. Having enough Mana regeneration floating around ensures the prison defenses don’t fail. The problem with failing Mana regeneration and bottoming out a facility’s Mana is that no one ever knows what will happen to the dimensional threshold.

  Sometimes the prison cell drifts away, detached from the universe, carrying its contents away until someone finds it. Undramatic but annoying. Other times, those cells might follow the connection back to plain reality, sometimes going so far as swapping parts of base reality with itself—or just merging. Those can be great—freedom for those
imprisoned—or disturbing. Some of the nastiest mutations happen when the two climb in together.

  Other prison types—from the fan-favorite asteroid prison to the lava-submerged ones—have their own advantages, but nothing allows you to spend more time dealing with recalcitrant prisoners than dimensional prisons. Also, due to the gap separating the imprisoned and base reality, they can’t use Skills or spells, meaning that individuals with kingdom- or business-wide buffs are neutered—both ways. Then, of course, you’ve got things like ability to control how people enter and exit the dimension and break-outs—or break-ins to free them—become much more complicated.

  That’s what is taking Mikito and Bolo so long. If they’ve realized where I am, then just barging in and killing everyone is not a solution. At best, they cut me loose to float through the various secondary dimensions for all eternity before the artificial cell breaks apart.

  At worse? Well, recombining with base reality in an uncontrolled fashion is very, very painful. And most often, lethal.

  “John?”

  “Sorry. Library dump,” I say. He gets it, and there’s no reason to hide it from those who might be listening. “You getting a chance to talk to the other prisoners?”

  “Some.” Harry’s lips thin as he shudders a little. “There are… people… here who need to be kept away.”

  “Not killed?”

  “If they could kill them, they would.” Harry makes a face. “Some of them have backup plans, things they can release, mass destruction Skills or equipment ready to go off. Others…” Harry shudders. “Nothing’s supposed to be immortal. But some of those things…”

  “Are really hard to kill?” I finish for Harry, understanding.

  I’ve heard of them. Mutations and twisted abominations that have been corrupted by unaspected Mana. Experiments by Corrupt Questors or even the Galactic Council themselves. Sure, certain Skills like Mana Blade or All for One do direct damage via the System, but stupidly high resistances or regenerations can offset that. There are Skills that let you bank health or other resources for future use, and some of the hardest to kill have banked a metric ton.

  Vampires—the Galactic equivalent—are one of those. Quite a few varieties, from the usual blood-suckers to emotional vampires, but their goal is simple—drain people of their resources to benefit themselves. Some are full-out monsters, no different than Goblins, while other vampires are Classed individuals or mutated Classes. Skills that let them bank health, Mana, Stamina, it all benefits them and makes them extremely hard to kill.

  Even worse are the ones who have backups, Skills that let them sort of survive. Most of those are monsters in truth, mutations, because death is death in the System. What comes out afterward is never right, never normal. It’s a known fact, but some fear the idea of death so much that they refuse to listen and take the chance of coming back warped and twisted over oblivion and whatever is out there.

  “So this is where they keep the undesirables, the ones who are a little too dangerous to kill or a little too useful to get rid of. The ones who might be useful as a lever in a future time,” I say.

  “Yes.” Harry’s eyes are haunted as he leans forward and whispers. I’m not sure why he bothers, I’m sure we’re bugged all the way to the rivers of Styx and back, but I lean in to listen anyway. “They have the Sun Killer here.”

  “Seriously? Isn’t he like… dead?”

  “As if that ever took.”

  I grunt. Damn monster has been killed a half dozen times in recorded history but kept coming back. Some assumptions were that they were just different versions of the same thing, others that the Sun Killer was a swarm monster, while others just posited illusion abilities. None of that seems to be real. Or perhaps they all are.

  “How do they contain it? Last I heard, it’s nearly a thousand kilometers long and burns with the heat of the suns it consumes,” I say, puzzled. The math of keeping dimensional places is simple—bigger they are, the more expensive. And with the inverse square law of area, well…

  “It’s sleeping. Shrinks down to no bigger than a Bug.”

  “A bug?” I hold my fingers maybe a millimeter apart.

  “No, no. A Bug. You know, the car.”

  I stare at Harry before shaking my head. “You British are weird.”

  “What?”

  “Those rusted heaps are so… so… sixties.” I shake my head. “I guess that was the heyday of the Brits though, before you really collapsed into a world of chips and EastEnders.”

  Harry stares at me as though I’m insane, and I keep my face flat. I don’t want to give away the fact that the only reason I know about the EastEnders is listening to Ali complain how it’s a pale shade of itself and nothing like Home and Away. Whatever that was….

  Gods, I sometimes hate having a memory that doesn’t seem to forget the dumbest of things.

  “Asshole,” Harry says. “Not all of us watch the EastEnders.”

  “Sure, sure. Some of you ran into the middle of warzones rather than deal with all that cockamamie.”

  “Cockamamie?” Thick lips purse. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Nope. Been tortured for the better part of a year. Either with really boring conversations or literally.” Then, deciding the man’s a little more stable and less likely to fly off the handle, I ask him the question I’ve been meaning to. Even if I am somewhat curious who else is trapped here. “Mikito?”

  “She’s alive.” Harry shrugs. “That’s all I know. They let me send out the occasional report, but it’s all heavily doctored and reviewed. Whatever I watch is heavily scrutinized too.” He frowns a little, tapping his skull. “Even my Skills are compromised, so I’m not exactly sure how much I learn is… well… real.”

  “The Weaver?’

  “She and the Shadow Council have their own people. Not Legendarys, but a lot of them. Where she’s using one Skill, they’re wielding a dozen. Makes everything hard to grasp. Identify Truth gives me a headache each time I read any actual report.”

  “But Mikito’s alive.”

  “Yeah. Can’t say much more, other than that she and Bolo have been bouncing around the planet, making a fuss.”

  I sigh, but that’s not unexpected. I doubt they’d let him in if he could actually provide me any real information. Still, I have to try. “Any idea of what kind of fuss?”

  “Mostly good deeds. Killing monsters, wiping out bandits—”

  “There are bandits on this planet?” Even Earth had some, but the fact that you generally needed a safe place to rest your head meant that you either got bandit towns with large infrastructure levels involved or the bandits became quite short-lived.

  “Yeah. Seems like one of the groups had a Classer with a Zone of Tranquility and it made for temporary Safe Zones,” Harry says. “Wish we had gotten more options for those kind of Classes on Earth.”

  Thankfully, the Library doesn’t do a dump at that opening. Mostly because I’ve already looked into it and the data dump happened then. “Those kind of Classes are extremely rare, and even more so on Dungeon Worlds. It’s almost as though the System knows that individuals who get such Classes rarely leave their initial starting zones. Add the fact that basic initiation would mean they start out as a Basic Class and it’s almost impossible for them to survive on a Dungeon World, what with the other Class requirements.”

  “The Pacifist ones?” Harry says.

  “That’s one version. Immobility, demarcation of their ‘homes’ or residences, the requirement for large ritual areas,” I list off the first few that come to mind. “Makes it all difficult.”

  “Still…”

  “Yeah. We could have used a few more Safe Zones. Especially in places like Australia,” I say.

  Harry can’t help but nod. The country is still a mess a decade later. Sure, there are a few shores of civilization, but they’re rare. Add the fact that pretty much the entirety of the backcountry is monster heaven and you’ve got high-Level Adventurers all over the Galax
y making their way there, causing their own brand of trouble.

  At least the Yukon managed to avoid a lot of those problems by just having the Duchess take over. I do wonder how she’s faring. I kind of screwed her over too, though I got the feeling while she’d be happy to take her pound of flesh if she can get it, I’m low on her priority list. At least for now.

  “So doing the adventuring thing then?” I say, rubbing my chin.

  That sort of makes sense. For all the benefits she gets being linked to me and getting experience from me as I up my System Administrator levels, Mikito is still somewhat low-Leveled for this region. Ditto with Bolo, from what I recall. If anything, the Dragon Lord is significantly behind us, unless he’s managed to acquire enough experience to upgrade himself to a Heroic.

  “Looks like it. She’s certainly seen the sights.” There’s a hint of doubt in his voice. When he sees the inquiring gaze I offer him, he continues. “She might be trying to find information on where you are.”

  “Right, the Council’s Guantanamo Bay. What do they call it? Something really dramatic, wasn’t it?”

  “The Abyss,” Henry supplies.

  “Right, right. I thought this prison was relatively well known?” I say. “I heard of it even before we arrived.” The look he gives me makes me go defensive. “And not just from the Library!”

  “Think about what you heard, will you, John?”

  I frown, then run the information I have through my mind. It doesn’t take long before I realize the problem. “Oh. There’s no location information.”

  “Exactly. And most of the rumors are along the line of ‘the Council has an ultra-secret prison where they keep the worst of the worst.’ More conspiracy theory than actual information,” Harry points out.

  I sigh and lean back, staring at the man. He’s relaxed a little, but as he catches my regard, begins to sense my motives for the questions I’ve asked, he tenses again. “So you think no one knows where we are…”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “I said, no. I’m not going to try to leak that information in a coded message. Or somehow do a dead-drop of information to Mikito. Or make her my ‘source’ so we can have a conversation.”