Apocalypse Redux
Chapter 221: Interlude the Fourth Horseman

“We are the middle children of history. Born too late to explore the Earth, too early to explore the galaxy.”

According to the anonymous person behind that quote, Josef Goodman’s generation was in a weird spot, with nothing big left for them to do, but they weren’t in a particularly bad place either.

Josef, however, had his own spin on that phrase. The way he saw things, his generation had been born just barely in time to see the splendor of the Earth before it was destroyed, but too late to do anything about it.

The adults had set the ball rolling on the planet’s demise decades and centuries ago, and they’d known about it since the middle of the 20th century, but no one had acted on the issue until it was far too late. At that point, the only thing that would save the planet would have been a massive reduction in the human population to accompany the needed policy changes, but no one would ever dare so much as suggest killing off a large chunk of the population to save the planet.

When he’d been a young man attending university, one of his professors had presented a moral quandary to the class, of how scientists had discovered a way to easily create bioweapons and ended up stuck between a rock and a hard place.

If they kept their findings to themselves, no one would be able to use this information to hurt people, but if someone stumbled across this information independently, the world would be defenseless.

On the other hand, they could publish the results and preparations could be made, but it would also increase the risk of someone committing heinous acts with their findings.

Most of the class had taken to the discussion topic with various levels of interest, but not Josef, no, when he’d heard that, it had given him ideas.

Too many people recklessly wasting resources, too many people trampling all over the environment, too many people making even more people. If he did anything to do something about that, he’d be remembered as a monster, he’d known that, but then again, something needed to be done. His legacy would be one of pain and death, but he would have a legacy and maybe humanity would even be around to remember him.

As it turned out, the paper had been published, and tracking it down hadn’t been that hard. He’d even begun to consider how to be able to figure out how to use the information.

Transforming bacteria was something every biology student did in practical seminars, although if those microorganisms weren’t utterly harmless, that meant something had gone very wrong.

Growth mediums, bacteria designed for easy transformation, all of those the university already had on hand.

Of course, you couldn’t get the DNA sequences for bioweapons delivered, that would raise all sorts of alerts, so he’d have to make them himself, but the campus had an oligonucleotide synthesizer, so that wouldn't be a problem.

Another issue with making bioweapons was the fact that they were, well, bioweapons. You weren’t immune to them just because you were the one making them. However, the campus had workbenches that allowed for the safe manipulation of toxic and/or infectious materials without risk.

The only potential issue he’d been able to see was that the stuff he needed was scattered all over the campus, but he’d been making plans about how to deal with that when everything had changed.

The [System]. It had fallen from the sky like a gift from the gods, granting all of humanity even more ways to destroy itself. For the first few hours, Josef had despaired.

But then, he’d received words from the deities themselves, who’d thrown him a lifeline. If he made sure the world ended, which it was practically guaranteed to do already, then he’d be rewarded beyond his wildest dreams in the next life.

The only condition? No offensive actions for the first ten years of the [System’s] existence, only preparations and self-defense. And really, who expected humanity to last that long in the first place?

It had been a relief beyond what could be put into words. That deal separated him from the fate of all of humanity, preventing him from going down with the rest of the idiots. So long as he stayed put and only acted once his deadline was up, he was safe. All he had to do was sit back and wait until everyone else destroyed themselves, and his future, his afterlife, his eternal soul was guaranteed safety.

He’d even managed to place himself in charge of the group, wearing an ethereally glowing mask, taking up the mantle of the Horseman of Death, metaphorically at first, and later, as the [Aspirant for the Mantle of Death], literally. This place worked, for the most part.

Which made it all the more infuriating that someone was threatening that by breaking the one rule their organization had.

He’d known that these people were morons and crazy people for the most part, few rational individuals would dare enter into a pact with the gods of darkness. But what kind of absolute … there wasn’t even a word that could describe a fraction of a percent of the stupidity of the action that someone had taken in the South Pacific.

Building a city of nightmares and illogical existences was a waste of resources that he’d never have signed off on, but alright, sometimes, people showed initiative.

Stuffing a bunch of people in there to go mad and become cultists? Eh, it fits the theme of things, but why though? What was the point?

And that just left the final issue: why the ever-loving fuck would someone give up everything they stood to gain just to strike out against the man bedeviling their organization, Isaac fucking Thoma?

They hadn’t just summoned one [Raid Boss], but two. TWO!

Once he got his hands on that bastard, they were done. Gone. Removed from both this organization and the world of the living. Maybe that way, the consequences of failure would fall only on the absolute moron’s shoulders, not on the organization as a whole.

“Who’s responsible for that mess?” he ground out as he glared around the room, standing at the table, hands on the tabletop, his full weight resting on them. As far as he recalled, this was the first time he wasn’t holding this meeting sitting in his chair, the very picture of grace and poise.

“Which one of you …” he sighed internally and sat back down before continuing “Someone here has made a terrible mistake. I want to correct it, for all our sakes, but I need to know who it was first. So, who decided to create a nightmare city in the South Pacific?”

“Uh, I thought that was you?” War asked. Well, the new War, at any rate. The horsemen were a pain to replace, but they’d found enough individuals who met the requirements for [Aspirant for the Mantle of So-and-So] that when one died, the next could be let evolve. But the new one would always have less time to train up their fourth Evolution [Skills], and the bearers of the red mask died far too often. And considering how much of an idiot the latest one seemed to be, it would soon change hands once again.

“You thought I would break the only divine order we ever got, doing it all behind everyone else’s backs … why exactly?”

War shrugged.

Utgardloki glared at the meathead, the effect much diminished by the full-face mask he wore, but the message was clear. The current War was good in a fight, someone to throw at an enemy in a pinch, but not someone who should be speaking up in strategy meetings.

The man in the wooden mask, carved to depict a picture of the mythological creature he’d named himself after, shrugged as well, mirroring the other man’s motion “There’s this thing called thinking, you should try it some time.”

Godsdamnit. This was going to spiral, Josef just knew it. In the real world, Utgardloki was a fraud, a huckster, on par with his mythological namesake, who’d once tricked Loki into getting into an eating contest with a wildfire and Thor into trying to wrestle old age into submission. He couldn’t afford to show his real self out there, so when he was here, where it was safe, he liked to let anyone who got on his nerves have it.

“So we’ve established that it wasn’t me, and as far as you know, it wasn’t anyone else here. Would you mind making sure we don’t have any links to that mess?” Josef asked, steepling his hands.

Utgardloki nodded slowly and retreated to the edge of the conference room, where he began to fiddle with his phone.

Outside, barely seen through walls that resembled black glass, the rest of their organization roiled, a mass of random strangers selected by divine providence.

The way his [Room of Infinite Conspiracies] presented their organization was always strange to him. The people he actually wanted to talk to were in the room with him, and the people he talked to most often had become the inner circle of the organization. And everyone else was out in the void, observing but only able to interject through the greatest of efforts.

But as useful as the ability to have everyone in the same room despite them numbering in the thousands was, it didn’t even hold the candle to the fact that they could be in here without stopping what they were doing in the real world. The people here were occasionally managers, lawyers, and doctors, jobs they’d reached because they wanted to experience their jobs before the world ended and they lost the chance.

But most held rather more menial tasks. Josef himself, for example, was currently sitting in a coffee shop, sipping tea out of a ceramic cup, silently observing every use of a one-way cup, every time someone picked up a plastic stick, stirred their drink twice, and then tossed it. A hundred instances an hour, a thousand a day.

This place was a microcosm of human wastefulness, of people refusing to take even the smallest of steps for the environment. This was how the world should have ended. With people always choosing the easy path, small compromises mounting into catastrophic ones.

But now, there were monsters, and the world would instead be destroyed in a sea of fire and blood. Eh, same difference.

In his [Room], another argument burgeoned. He squashed it, but the next showed up a few minutes later. And another one after that. It was never over particularly stupid stuff, just a reasonable disagreement voiced at a high volume.

Until eventually, Utgardloki pushed himself off the wall and slapped his phone, well, the metaphysical representation of information gathering that looked like a phone, anyway, onto the table.

“Turns out some of those organizations down in R’lyeh have awful cyber-security. I mean, we’re talking ‘trying to keep out a tank with a mud-brick wall’ levels of bad. One of my minions got in and as it turns out, this wasn’t us. Just random people who got stuck in the city of nightmares.” he explained.

“And the city?” Famine asked, “Where the hell did that city come from?”

Utgardloki shrugged “I only know what they know, and they have no idea.”

“Hol’ up, you’re telling me that city just … appeared in the ocean?” War asked, “How’d anyone pull that off?”

“That place couldn’t have been built before the [System].” Fox interjected, “And getting to the Level that lets you pull off that kind of construction, especially at the bottom of the ocean … I don’t think anyone could do that now, let alone back when this city had to have been built.”

“So you’re saying that … it’s real?” Kronos gaped “The real R’lyeh, from the stories, it’s been there the whole time?”

“Does it really matter?” Josef asked, a grin back on his face, though no one could see it “Whatever that place really is, it’s still a threat. A threat to this world, which we want to destroy anything.”

He let loose a cold chuckle before continuing “Anything that makes this world more dangerous is good for us, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter what happens to any one of us, because humanity’s extinction is guaranteed, and we’ll be rewarded for it even if we didn’t cause it directly.

“So how about we sit back and relax, then point and laugh as those nerdy twatwaffles stick their heads in the hornet’s nest. This fight is theirs to lose, and it just got a hell of a lot harder for them.”

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