Surviving the Apocalypse with a System.

“ Aiko , we can help Jack ,” Carol stopped the girl before she could leave.

“Aiko does not understand how ,” the girl turned back, genuinely surprised.

Some of the soldiers , still weary of her unnatural appearance, raised their weapons at her. Aiko just assumed them.

“It may not be much , but we should have enough air power to tilt the odds in favour of Jack. If human kind is to survive this apocalypse , then we need him to win ,” Carol explained.

Jack was losing badly and had no option other than to engage the new talent Manifest without having made a conclusive plan on its use.

Keeping it in store would serve him no purpose if he was unable to get out of this entanglement before the building came falling down.

Perception allowed him to understand the abilities of talents with relative ease before he even got to use them. It had allowed him to understand this new talent. The Manifest talent worked according to Aiko’s explanation of talents being replicated forms of great warriors of the past.

When engaged ,Manifest selected at random a locked talent in Jack’s System and materialised the great warrior from whom it was copied to fight beside him.

Manifest , though very effective in battles where one’s concentration had to be on multiple targets , had a nasty drawback . Once the warrior was summoned , then that talent that had been materialised would be forever unavailable to Jack , and no amount of summoning would get it back.

Its use therefore had to be limited , to avoid locking out a future powerful five star ability.

Manifest itself also had an unreasonable cool down of one week. With this one , timing was obviously everything.

“Manifest !” Jack chanted.

Instantly, a whirl of dust picked up around him and with it tons of static energy that fried all the prisms that were shooting at Jack on the spot. Caesar narrowed his eyes , curious as to what Jack was doing.

As the cloud of dust settled , an elven woman with grey cloudy eyes was left taking a knee before Jack.

Everything about her screamed warfare , starting from the many tattoos along the length of her arms to the haphazard corn rows her blue hair was plaited in that still had sparks of the white electricity jumping about on them.

“I am Nevya of Krassus , what is your order , my Lord ?” she asked.

Jack’s command came out naturally , as if that was something he had been used to doing , “ Kill Caesar.”

“ Your will , my hands ,” Nevya got up and produced a long body length pole arm from its sheath on her back.

The spear’s polished blade cracked with electricity that dragged out through the weapon's body as well, just waiting to be unleashed.

Nevya used it to point at Caesar , a declaration of her target.

“ You stand upon path. Move or I will provide swift passing ,” Caesar’s prisms started multiplying and spreading out threateningly.

It made Jack wonder how much stamina the man must have had in his System to be so extravagant with the use of his talents. As he was on this trail of thought , he pondered over why the man wasn’t using any other talent other than the one that granted ammunition prisms.

Nevya threw the polearm at Caesar with a powerful starting thrust.

The spear flew close to the ground, collecting and spreading wired chains of lightning that looked like sparkling mangrove roots eager to latch on anything within proximity.

Caesar deflected the blade as it rose up towards his chest but the impact itself was enough to ram him through the concrete wall and send him falling from the top of the 200 feet tall building.

He brought one of his prisms close and grabbed hold to stop his fall as Nevya came leaping through the hole he had just dug with his back , her spear speeding right back into her grasp.

“ You stand no equal of mine !” Caesar had his prisms swarm her , knocking her off trajectory and piling up all around her sending the woman crashing down.

Just as Caesar was about to make a dive and finish her off , an F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter jet came swooping past , showering him with its own rapid fire.

It was a bitter way to have a taste of his own medicine , the powerful bullets from the jet eating though most of the arm he had used to shield his face. He easily healed through that however.

“I need to take these flying machines out of fucking air ,” he decided to first deal with the jets , letting his prisms entertain Nevya for the meantime.

As for Jack , judging from how much damage he had sustained , Caesar reckoned that he would probably take some time to recuperate before coming back. Besides , he could always swat him away even when dealing with the new military arrivals.

The opponent he was worried about was Nevya , whose attack he had definitely come to respect.

Two more jets followed , cruising the sky at supersonic speeds . They became the perfect avenue for Caesar to flex his abilities as an enforcer a little.

The man timed the incoming jet , then swung off the prism he was holding on to , landing perfectly on top of it.

The speed at which it was cruising let him slide past its top surface with ease and leap onto the next jet flying behind it. His prisms made short work of the first jet as Caesar crashed into the cockpit of the second one.

The pilot tried to escape by ejecting his seat but Caesar caught it and brought it back down.

“ A mark of shame is it not , turning back upon battlefield !” he laughed as one of his prisms flew inside the cockpit and shredded everything in sight .

Nevya dug her spear into the ground and from it sprouted a chain of lighting that lashed onto every prism in sight , transmitting from one prism to another then blowing all of the annoying pieces to dust. She took a small breather , before her mind got back to battle mode.

She quickly started searching the sky , her master's orders echoing vividly in her mind.With all the noise he was making on the jets, it didn’t take long for Nevya to locate the man. Grabbing hold of her polearm , she tensed her legs and took a powerful leap into the air that propelled her like flight.

Once Caesar was done with the second jet , he set his sights on the third and last one. The pilot in this one panicked through her breather when she saw the man jumping off the burning aircraft in front of her , now poised to do the same to her.

He almost got to the third jet before Nevya intercepted , spearing him from the side and sending the both of them ploughing clean through yet another skyscraper , passing clean through it and making terrible landings into the second building through its board room windows.

Nevya fell on top of the board room table while Caesar rolled underneath it.

Seizing the advantage that he had , Caesar used the two prisms that had followed him to shoot from under the table at Nevya. A few bullets got her as they tore through the table’s woodwork before she finally jumped off and took hold of her spear.

With the pressure taken off him , Jack was able to heal off the wounds and compose his thoughts.

The System immediately gave him a warning of the rapid rate at which Nevya was consuming his stamina. It came as a shock to him , finding out that even if the Talent had taken independent form , it still relied upon and consumed the System's resources to remain active.

It was like giving a spendthrift your limited credit card and watching them spend it way past your budget.

The upside of Manifest , however , was that if the System user had really good luck , then it could summon a talent whose abilities were already maxed out. Luck was definitely on Jack’s side right now , with Nevya buffed to her full potential.

As she stood , Caesar was absolutely no match for her. It served as a foreshadowing to Jack of how powerful he could become after upgrading his Talents and Personal Attributes to their full potential.

[

System Warning

Stamina Residue : < 50 %

]

“ I won’t have any fight left in me after this , so you better finish the job Nevya,” he started looking for the stairs before the building caved in.

He had to be quiet and careful , engaging a monster at this point was a definite no. If he did , then he would be burning at his limited stamina from both ends.

“ You’ve gotta be kidding me,” he leaped to the side after spotting something he thought he’d already seen the last of.

On the new floor he had arrived was a Dread Ghost that was doing random patrols of the area. It seemed to have sensed him , for it stopped its aimless walking and turned to the direction that Jack had hid himself.