Chapter 69: Interlude Thoma Family

When the icy grasp of fear for her youngest son grasped Maria Thoma’s heart, the glass in her hand came apart in her grip as she reflexively tightened it.

Thankfully, for all that she hadn’t reached anywhere near the Level of her children, she was at a level of enhancement that let her catch the shards before they skewered the kindergartener currently standing before her with a book she’d like to have read to her.

The child blinked up at Maria with wide eyes, not quite sure what had just happened. And if it were up to her kindergarten teacher, she never would.

Blinking the already forming tears out of her eyes, Maria gave a quick apology and muttered something about having to throw away the broken glass before spinning on her heels and hurrying out of the room as quickly as she could without alarming any of the children.

Kids that young … if they saw one of the adults trusted to watch over them appearing to flee, they might believe there was an actual danger.

Even so, something about what she was doing had clearly caught her boss’ attention, the older woman poking her head out of her office as she passed.

Catherine Grey had already been old when the [System] had arrived, and been long since in a position to retire, much like Maria herself, but neither of them had felt able to simply stop.

Either of them might one day decide the young children of the day were not ones they wanted to watch over for half the day, but for right now, neither of them felt that impulse.

“What’s wrong, Maria?” the older woman asked, voice gentle.

“It’s a …” she’d wanted to simply put this off as a family emergency, then rush out and try to … to … just do something.

If something had happened in front of her, to any of her children, it wouldn’t matter who was doing it or how impossible her intervention’s chances of success were. She’d claw the bastard’s eyes out, without a single thought spent on what would happen to her afterwards.

But this, knowing that one of her children was in mortal danger and well beyond her reach, her helplessness as certainas the fact that one of her children needed her …

Maria’s silent sob was the only answer she could get out, but it was all she needed, Catherine rising from behind the desk and hugging her.

“If you need anything, you know you just need to ask.”

Maria managed a nod, but she knew there was nothing to do.

Not even call her other children, because at right that very moment, all that would achieve was distract them. Even if they had all turned out a tad more adventurous than she might have preferred, there was one thing she knew for certain: now that they knew the problem existed, they’d be doing their damndest to save her youngest child … or so she had to believe.

***

Today was a part of Viktoria’s “cooldown” cycle.

After exploring, after trying to further the bounds of magic, and after working as a volunteer healer wherever it seemed the most useful, she always spent a few days partying.

The burn of high-proof liquor never fading from her tongue, dancing long past the point where any even remotely normal human would have died from exhaustion, temporary rainbow hair dye that should long since have been washed out by her sweat only kept in place by her magic …

An endless parade of different nightclubs and festivals, across every continent, the current location typically slipping her mind minutes if not seconds after the teleport ended, blotted out in favor of something more immediately interesting…

And then, it happened: the beacon’s activation slamming into her heart like a sledgehammer.

Viktoria missed a step in the frenetic dance carrying her across the dance floor and tripped, falling against a fellow dancer, the other woman catching her before anything more could happen.

“Letting me catch you, that’s an interesting way of …”

Accidentally “falling” and letting someone attractive catch her might have ordinarily been an icebreaker she’d have used, but that moment was the very definition of “not the time.”

And before that sentence could even be finished, Viktoria teleported away, finding herself crashing heavily to the floor of her apartment with a soft curse. Spatial relocation while leaning on something … this outcome had been inevitable, and she’d known that. Just not been in a headspace to actually use the knowledge.

It was quite clear that Derek was somewhere well beyond where she could reach, the beacon outside anywhere humanity had properly surveilled, let alone colonized, and as such, she’d arrive months from now even if she headed out right that instant.

The chances of her taking a couple of days to gather forces, being critical were low to nonexistent.

And, after spending a decent chunk of her time as a healer in whatever capacity was needed tended to earn one a lot of favors, most of which concerned saving someone’s life. Getting a fast ship with a pilot worth a damn would be the very least her efforts should get her …

***

Isaac froze, his hand already on the doorknob to the meeting room, when the alert came, his normally iron self-control cracking as he realized just what had just happened.

Ordinarily, seeing how everyone around him instantly flinched, how guards immediately went on alert at the merest hint of his anger, might have been gratifying. Or a terrifying testament to the power imbalance in society.

Right in that moment, though? All it amounted to was a warning that he might find himself delayed if someone decided to take premature action against his perceived threat.

Maybe.

He’d honestly find himself flabbergasted if he lost more than a few minutes if they decided to be stupid. But even those might be critical, and Isaac was not the sort of person to pick those kinds of pointless fights.

So he did his best to appear “calm,” the mask slowly settling back into place as he forced his face back into an expression that wouldn’t make people think he was about to burn down the building. All the while, studiously ignoring the squeal of protest from the metal of the doornob he was currently crushing, fingers digging into the enchanted metal as if it were soft clay.

“Apologies,” he said, marveling at how his voice, at least, sounded even. “Family emergency. I’ll have to cancel all meetings for the foreseeable future.”

And then he released the doorknob, slowly taking his hand away, turning, and starting to walk away. Giving the information he’d just shared time to spread.

With every step he took, he sped up, going from a “standard” walking pace to highway speeds before even reaching the end of the corridor, taking the turn there so rapidly that the art on the wall was starting to wobble from the wind whipped up by his passage.

But the guards there, at least, had been forewarned and wisely chose not to pick a pointless fight with him, simply letting him pass. One even kindly opened a window for him, sparing Isaac the need to ask. Or just break the damn thing. It wasn’t like just anyone could open the exterior windows of the UN building; that’d have been a security concern.

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Isaac obliged, hurling himself out the window before conjuring a pillar of flame to lift him skyward; he’d get beyond the wards faster by rising above them than by flying out into the city.

Jumping off high places because that was faster, the very moment that became survivable, was perhaps one of the most absurd habits he’d absorbed from video games … and that was perhaps the very last mental tangent he’d be able to afford going on for a very long time.

The very instant the wards stopped stifling the full breadth of his abilities, he spent a single second to make sure the beacon was in the general direction he’d expected it to be and triggered [Continent Strider’s] secondary effect to teleport to a location he’d been before.

The fact that said location was located on the ass-end of human-occupied space, and that the distance should have taken two months to cross, didn’t matter one iota before the power of a fully leveled legendary [Skill].

Reality tore before him, and amidst a rush of atmosphere, Isaac tumbled into interstellar space, nine hundred light-years from Earth.

He wouldn’t be able to use that effect again for a month, but he wasn’t done yet.

Because in addition to the “skip a month of travel” function he’d just used, he also had a regenerating pool of “skippable hours” to be doled out on a per-case basis, and he’d saved up enough of those to launch himself a little closer to his actual target, the furthest system from Earth he’d ever gone, that being Hope.

Isaac found himself nine-hundred and ninety-seven light years from the planet of his birth before he slowed down to think on his next steps.

There was only one route along which he could have headed out with his current technique, but now that that particular bag of tricks was empty, he needed more precise coordinates to proceed.

Isaac looked inside himself for the mental beacon still calling to him … and froze.

Because while it was still there, and it was abundantly clear that his youngest sibling was still alive, he didn’t have Derek’s location. He had a zone nearly fifty light-years across where his brother might be.

This was a problem, one that went well beyond his family and the families of Derek’s crew.

There was something rotten in the state of Denmark; the fact that the beacon wasn’t working as advertised was only the start of things.

While Isaac had made sure to get confirmation that Derek had safely left that hellhole of a system he’d found himself in, the fact that there was a place nearby full of eldritch monsters that was lacking a planet couldn’t be a coincidence.

But … but simply heading for the center of that area was still something he could do, and that would take long enough even with [Continent Strider’s] initial effect, which simply sped up long-distance travel by an escalating amount. Certainly long enough for him to make other arrangements.

And as such, his first call wasn’t to the allies he’d be asking to help him look for his little brother.

The world around him turned into a multicolored maelstrom as he triggered [Alcubierre Bubble], beginning his journey. Then he pulled out his phone.

Though “phone” wasn’t exactly an adequate description for the device sitting in his hand. For starters, it contained three separate comm nodes, each miniaturized to the point where they were no bigger than a marble, at a cost that at least began to explain why that little device cost about as much as a light cruiser.

When the person on the other end picked up, Isaac initially wasn’t sure if it was due to him calling or some information about the situation having reached her in the barely two minutes that had passed, but the first sentence cleared that up.

“If you’re calling to ask for something to help with your family issue, I might not be able to help officially,” Fleet Admiral Hunt said.

In other words, she wanted him to add a legal fig leaf to his request. Which he would have as a matter of course. If he’d needed one.

“Unfortunately, I believe this is a problem that extends into your sphere of influence…”

Isaac quickly rattled off the issue as he saw it, while Hunt listened in silence, before finally finishing with a statement of “I’m putting some more resources into figuring out what’s really going on out there; you’ll know as soon as I do.”

“There’s a division of battlecruisers heading in that direction already, to deal with the free-roaming eldritch monsters,” she said. “I’ll redirect those to go see whatever the hell out there is capable of causing that kind of disruption. And prepare an expeditionary force here. But I doubt I’ll be allowed to send anything substantial without more proof.”

She and Isaac shared a wince. Politics.

“If it exists, you’ll get it,” Isaac promised. “Thank you for your time. And be prepared for some S-Rank volunteers.”

“I’ll let you get to that, then,” Hunt said, his tone even edging into flat. “Good luck and Godspeed, Dr. Thoma.”

“Same to you,” Isaac said and hung up, then pulled out a sizable metal bracelet out from under his suit’s sleeve. It promptly began to unfold around him, quickly locking him into a small “room” of metal walls that were paper-thin in the most literal of senses, while bare-bones accommodations began to pop out of the walls, floor, and ceiling.

The “transport pod” was the size of a very small apartment, but it was better than simply hanging in an empty void for weeks or even months on end, and it was man-portable to boot, so there was little a reasonable man could complain about.

… So it was little surprise that the overwhelming majority of people who ever tried one of these out stopped within a matter of hours, and a not inconsiderable portion of those then went on to bitch and moan online afterwards. Which had inevitably led to a crash in development of these things, which was why this model was effectively the same one he’d left Sol with the first time.

And Isaac, what did he do with his new surroundings?

Nothing. Nothing save sitting in the central chair, closing his eyes, and going to sleep.

Around him, a new room faded into existence as he transferred his awareness elsewhere.

Once upon a time, it had merely been a recreation of the modern idea of a medieval castle’s main hall, complete with banners along the walls, each the [System’s] idea of what the inhabitants’ coat of arms should be.

Isaac’s, for example, had been a clock over a sea of blood, a pair of crossed swords behind it.

But that had been before Arthur had used his Capstone to boost it, tripling its capacity, resetting the [Skill’s] Level to 1, and gaining a guaranteed further tripling of its capacity with every threshold it hit, for a theoretical maximum of 1,053 members.

Being a secret society, however, the [Round Table] had nowhere near that many members just yet.

As such, the changes had been minimal. The room had grown a little, the table in the middle had grown a lot more, and as more technologically inclined people had joined, the whole place had swiftly taken on a steampunk vibe. It’d probably be a few more decades before the medieval elements were nothing more than aesthetic accents in a futuristic situation room, but for now, it simply wound up looking like the architect had had two conflicting ideas for this place and managed to achieve neither.

Still, the basic functions hadn’t changed. Borrow a [Skill] from another member once a week, transport oneself to another member, or transport objects between members, though anything that involved moving physical matter through this place was incredibly costly and generally considered a matter of last resort.

End of the day, though, there was only one thing he needed it for right now, the purpose it had always served: an untraceable, uninterceptable means of communication with people who were just as invested in preventing humanity’s extinction as he was, unimpeded by distance or interference.

Grabbing a paper from the pile always left in the corner of the room, Isaac wrote down a note for a time when they should actually meet to talk, in this place. Zero outside paper trail.

And then a second man appeared in the virtual space.

Tall, blond, good-looking, a blade at his side that somehow gave off an aura of inevitability that was, quite frankly, underselling its destructive potential.

After all, Excalibur would destroy any weapon, shield, or armor that did not match it for historical importance or metaphysical weight on contact. There were, perhaps, fifty melee combatants in all of humanity he could not hard-counter by virtue of his weapon alone.

Arthur Wells, whose shared name with Britain’s forefather seemed like too big a coincidence (though they had ruled out any reincarnation shenanigans), was one of Isaac’s oldest friends and allies and clearly knew what was going on without needing to be told.

And he only asked a single question: “What do you need?”

“Something’s fucking with the Bloodine’s beacon. Do we have someone who can break through that kind of interference?” Isaac replied equally simply.

“Won’t know until we try. Worst comes to worst, I’ll have to do it.”

After all, while everyone else could borrow one [Skill], the thing that made Arthur so damn terrifying, the fact that let him become a singularly powerful individual, however briefly, was the fact that he could borrow several at once. And the limit was not numerical, but based on what he could control.

Which also meant that, unlike the normal double-stacking of [Skills], one could only get one of, such as [Privacy] or [Inspect], they usually did, utterly shattering most barriers, he could throw as much power at a problem as he needed to, only absolute defenses being able to reliably keep him out.

Just one issue: even Arthur had to suffer under the once-a-week limitation, albeit one that existed purely on a per-person-borrowed-from basis. And there were only so many people scrying-relevant [Skills] he could draw from. Which, in turn, limited both the number of practice rounds in the past and the attempts he could make in the here and now.

“Please tell me you’ve been practicing that trick while I’ve been gone …” Isaac trailed off.

“Enough to break through anything terrestrial,” Arthur said, both of them keenly aware that this was almost certainly an issue that went well beyond anything he could have possibly tested himself against. “Of course, it’d have been easier if we had you here to anchor any attempts …”

“My sisters should still be on Earth, and my parents definitely are; use them,” Isaac replied immediately.

Arthur nodded.

“We’ll save him.” He finally said after a long moment of echoing silence.

They both knew neither of them could guarantee that. Neither of them cared.

It would be weeks, if not months, before they could even do anything …