Chapter 269: Righteous Fury

Five months. Five bloody months of preparation during which the fourth Anniversary had passed with a bare minimum of trouble, Events had been the usual pain in the behind, and so on.

Isaac had managed to grind all the way up to the edge of the fifth Evolution, but not quite crossed that threshold. If he’d asked to wait, he might have managed to delay the operation, but that would have been both selfish and stupid. The power boost would have been substantial, yet during the delay the enemy would have had even more time to prepare, potentially allowing them to gain really nasty powers.

Not to mention that they might have been able to move more than they already had. Their enemies had started running pretty soon after Lorient, but in the end, there were hard limits as to where they could run. There was only one planet for them to hide on as space travel, while vastly more common than before, was still heavily regulated. And once someone like Zambon had their trail, then, well, running was damn hard.

The cult’s main defense had been a near-ubiquitous “non-existence” to a whole lot of tracking and detection [Skills], which made them functionally immune to most methods that would be used to hunt them down. But once someone actively scanned them, that lack of scannable information was a dead giveaway.

And now, finally, they’d finally reached the point where they could round up a satisfactory group of targets at once. Training camps, logistics centers, and a few more portal centers were the big targets. But apartments and houses were also on the hitlist where there were sufficiently painful targets available.

But holy shit were some of those places in the middle of nowhere.

Underwater villages that lived on water-breathing Aspects and small air bubbles that kept electronics safe, buried compounds in the Hoggar mountains, hidden valleys in the Himalayas, random islands in the middle of the ocean, the Australian Outback, and so on. Most of them were functionally self-sufficient and had had months or years to build up defenses.

And then there were those trying to hide in plain sight, which would be a titanic pain to hunt down in their own right due to the potential for collateral damage. As first Hamburg and then Lorient had shown, people at his level fighting at full power could turn innocents into smears on the pavement without even noticing.

These destinations were being parcelled out based on how suitable various individuals or groups were to both the area and targets known to be present. The overall preparations had to have been noticed by the enemy, but simply knowing an attack was imminent didn’t help much when they didn’t know what was being targeted.

A whole lot of people had been pulled into this operation, ranging from various NATO member militaries to independent entities like Camelot, whatever Davy Jones’ organization was called on the official paperwork, and Fenrir’s group.

Everything was being coordinated by one Major General Gibbs via one of the longest-range party [Skills] Isaac had ever heard about, which could connect to the parties of his subordinates.

After Lorient, Isaac had earned himself the epithet of “Sage”. He’d had “Auric Sage” as a title for years, for obvious reasons, but after the supreme act of coordination that had utterly obliterated the cult forces in the city, he’d gained it as a standalone title as well. Despite the fact that he’d been using knowledge as a weapon since the very beginning, it had simply taken a damn long time for “mastermind” to become a part of his public image.

Isaac’s own target was the Himalayan compound. He had the mobility to engage in this truly shitty terrain, and this place was the one they had the least amount of information on, making him the natural choice. In addition, this was the only suspected location they had on any of the Aspirants for the Horsemen’s [Heir Classes].

He’d also been paired up with Yoo-jin, Fenrir, and sort, Jason. The Guild leader was there because ice was good at generating footholds, the Icelandic giant was no stranger to this kind of terrain and Jason had tagged along as this was the likeliest location for goodies he could steal and deliver to Zambon. However, he was sneaking around far away, not letting himself be seen by anyone.

Seriously, calling this place isolated would be like claiming that Mariana Trench was just “deep” or that the sun was merely “hot”. It was countless kilometers from the nearest settlement, let alone anywhere with a decent connection to the wider world, almost impossible to reach before to the [System], and even now, getting here had been a pain in the ass. In the end, a single portal mage had walked here with a few escorts, then allowed more portal mages to arrive via a portal, and then those people had called in the army as a whole.

But Isaac had taken a more … circuitous route. Fly up into outer space, where the vacuum didn’t bother him due to his Ankou Aspect, then drift until he is above the target area and fall back down to Earth until he reached the cloud layer. And there, he sat on the edge of a tiny platform that hovered three kilometers above the Earth, built by Karl. It was a flimsy thing, between the wind and the weight of him in armor, it almost broke, but it was almost impossible to detect unless you knew it was there and let him stay up here without spending a single iota of mana.

But once shit kicked off, he’d be in a position to pull off some … interesting stunts.

The opening shots of the brief war that followed varied greatly on the location. A combination of door-breaching charges combined with mass-evacuation [Skills] snatching away as many civilians as possible in cities. Ocean-parting magic to expose underwater targets.

And in the Himalayas, [Rend the Earth] tore off the roof of the enemy underground base, revealing them as an easy target.

Guns roared to life, spells lanced through the air, and a fortress of ice manifested around the allied forces to protect them from the inevitable counterattack. All of this happened over the course of a single second.

In the next, the frozen fortifications were reinforced by the [Skills] of the soldiers present, gaining a barbed wire perimeter, wood and steel reinforcments, sandbags, wards carved into the walls, and more besides, turning what had once just been a building made from unnaturally thick ice into a defensive perimeter that would daunt even the most elite of military units.

But here, it didn’t serve as a simple fortress, but rather a defensible fortification they could fire at the cultists from, all of whom had suddenly been exposed when the ceiling had been torn off their little hideout.

Of course, even caught utterly flat-footed, their enemies had been training since the very beginning of this madness. Shields snapped up, people dodged through hails of bullets, and a party or parties were established to coordinate a response as more cultists boiled out of the lower levels.

Isaac grinned, charged a kabar with energy, leaned over the side, and dropped it.

It plunged through the air, gathering speed even as he further accelerated it with his telekinesis until it hit the ground in the middle of the enemy formation, missing them all by a mile. And yet, the enemy defense fell apart, carved apart by the coordinated use of firepower and cooldown [Skills].

[True Cut] was both an infinitely flexible and incredibly limited [Skill]. He could cut anything and everything, yet the number of things that were within his mana pool’s capacity to cut was fairly limited and the number of stuff that was worth cutting was even smaller.

But destroying an enemy’s party was a worthwhile expense, even at the cost of almost two thousand mana.

The actual impact of a party on a unit’s combat power varied based on their training, ranging from special forces like GSG-13, SAS, Seal Team 6, and the like, which were basically a hive mind at this point, to regular coordination that was barely better than regular old talking/shouting.

And while his current foes weren’t at the special forces level of party dependency, shit still hit the fan when their coordination was suddenly obliterated.

People weren’t able to warn each other about what they were about to do and friendly fire suddenly became a real threat, especially when the person launching the attack thought they’d managed to get the warning out because they hadn’t realized that the party was down. But the real problem was that they couldn’t coordinate their responses to Isaac’s allies or alert each other to big incoming attacks.

Re-establishing the party took mere moments, but those moments were not only costly, but they revealed much about the capabilities of individual enemies.

And then, he dropped another kabar while drinking a mana potion. This time, he aimed for a person who likely had a party [Skill]. And on top of everything else, the blade he dropped was making use of the power it had gained from the Crystalline Sage. Namely, blowing up.

Of course, this cost him the weapon until he could repair it, but it didn’t require any mana and the overall number of blades he had at his disposal was utterly ridiculous. He could afford to “waste” dozens before it became a problem.

As his mana shot up, he dropped another blade. And another, until a steady hail was either landing on his foes’ heads or falling into the stairways deeper down, messing with reinforcements.

And whenever it was looking like some coordination was returning to the ranks, [True Cut] put a swift end to that.

After around thirty seconds, even the dumbest individual had realized that any kind of even remotely proper coordination wouldn’t be possible with him up here. So they turned their sights on him.

But trying to hit him at a distance of three kilometers would be hard even if he hadn’t been focused on speed. But he was. Not to mention that being in the middle of the air as opposed to standing on solid ground meant that he could dodge in vastly more directions than he normally could.

So the enemy was forced to split their focus and waste a good chunk of their atta- … [Light Mage].

Isaac ducked to the side, a beam of searing heat narrowly missing. Most “light magic” was all about illumination or heat, with offensive spells merely being light-themed and traveling like normal spells, at speeds well below light speed. But there were people who projected raw light, with all the speed that implied.

Thankfully, light also refracted when projected through the atmosphere, but still, that guy was going to be a pain in the ass.

Only precognition allowed Isaac to ignore the barrage of light-speed attacks while keeping up his own strikes. And then Fenrir burst from the defenses, punted the light mage over the nearest mountain, and chased him down.

Well, that took care of that. But the real goal of him being up here hadn’t quite been achieved. The hope had been to lure out whoever was the strongest down there up here, or at least lock them into going only after him.

Oh well, royally fucking over the enemy’s overall engagement plan was a worthy cause too.

Isaac took his final mana potion and stopped attacking. There might still be dangerous foes down here and he’d need a full pool to fight them. And if they weren’t here, he could use [Continent Strider] to head to another warzo- … ah, there he is.

By now, Isaac had learned to identify Horseman Aspirants at a glance and pick out the variants he’d fought before. The figure blasting towards him atop a pillar of wind was the next War, and one that hadn’t even used [Axis Mundi] on Isaac’s allies before going for him. As for elements, it had to be air or wind, dangerous during duels in mid-air, but this guy couldn’t have nearly as much practice with his fourth Evolution [Skills] as Isaac did.

And Isaac wouldn’t be Isaac if he hadn’t also snuck a few aces up his sleeves.

[Fully Geared: Juggernaught Suit] activated as he pushed himself off the platform, falling to meet his enemy as three tons of supernatural metal manifested around him. This shouldn’t take long.