I had made a horrible mistake.

  These are undoubtedly the words that will be printed upon my tombstone. Well, assuming I had a tombstone. At this point, I gave even odds that I ended up a mindless undead servant, was buried in an unmarked grave by the US government, or was blown to pieces when Veles ate the Earth like Galactus.

  Was Veles going to eat the Earth like Galactus? I had no idea. He said he was going to kill everyone to achieve his insane idea of paradise. Was he going to do it with nukes? Exploding the Sun? Zombie plague? The last one seemed likely and that was almost a relief.

  I mean, zombies were slow and easily killed monsters. There was no way things would end like they had in World War Z. Even if the initial outbreak was everywhere, surely the governments of the world would know how to handle a pandem...okay, I hear what I'm thinking now.

  Either way, I was now travelling with a bunch of supervillains and we'd arrived at the scary ominous towers with little resistance. The place was being guarded by a bunch of rent a cops when I'd been expecting dragons or the National Guard.

  "Run you idiots!" I shouted, hoping to save them from getting annihilated when Susanos descended with the rest of us floating around us.

  Some did.

  Others pulled out their pistols and suicidally fired, their bullets bouncing of the protection spell that Susanos had conjured. The others proceeded to descend down to fight before unleashing their attacks on our surroundings. I wondered in that moment whether I would have to fight my so-called companions.

  Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, that didn't turn out to be necessary. As mentioned, there was barely any defenses for the huge field of towers that were channeling sorcery from the cosmos onto my home planet. It wasn't really a sight that inspired awe, looking like a combination of electrical towers and oil rigs really, but I could tell just how much it was doing just how much the air crackled with magic.

  It was, in a real way, the moment I accepted I was never going to come back to "my" Earth because it no longer existed. Veles had used the massive amount of resource stripping and experimentation he'd been doing on Mokosh to prepare my world to become more hospitable to him. He'd spread the stories of Larry C.C. Weis, even though he was the bad guy, because it made a place for him among Earth's mostly silent pantheons.

  I didn't know the exact specifics of how this all worked but I had the suspicion that Earth would always be a place of magic now. The problem was the only people trained in it were those already sworn to the God of Darkness. It was no longer an isekai, if it was, because Earth was now a fantasy world too. Why did that fill me with dread as a prospect? Ah, because mankind was certain to make something beautiful like sorcery into something that made the world worse than better. Even without gods of darkness putting their finger on the scale. God, I had become cynical over the past year.

  Maelor was the first person to attack the fifty-foot-tall structures around us, unleashing a black shadowy tendril tore it in half. There was brief explosion in its center as equipment caught fire and the tower fell to one side.

  "Destroy them," Susanos said, simply. "Destroy them all. We must make as much noise as we can to lure the Worm of the Underworld to battle."

  "And hope it's not a dinner bell," Jon said flying into the air and transforming himself into a dragon.

  NEW QUEST ADDED

  DESTROY UNIVERSAL MAGICAL CONDUCTORS 1/10,000

  I didn't have much hope for this plan working but certainly it seemed to be working. Susanos, Maelor, and Rachel proceeded to blast the towers with their powers. Garland and Maria used blades that slashed through the steel beams of the towers like they were tissue paper before pushing them over like they were anime heroes or superheroes. Alek used a ring to conjure packages of C4 explosives that he applied strategically, one after the other and detonated in the most peculiar merger of magic and science I'd seen so far. Jon? Well, Jon was burning them from the sky because he was a frigging dragon.

  Me?

  I was more hesitant because I wanted to make sure there were no remaining workers or security guards around. I may not have been able to stop my Brotherhood of Evil Mutants-esque brethren from killing anyone who stood in their way, but I could certainly get any survivors away. I hesitated to go all out but not because blowing up a bunch of government property but because I felt like wasting all my spell energy on towers was a bad idea if this was going to be just a prelude to our showdown with Veles.

  Real magic didn't 100% work like in Dungeons and Dragons but was closer Final Fantasy's early depiction of sorcery. You had spell "slots" and only X amount of them per day as a representation of just how much juice you were able to channel through your body. The stronger a wizard you were, the more could throw down. Blasting away at all these towers seemed like we were wasting a lot of energy before the big fight like running down the entrance to ringside before a big match. Which, probably, was the only MMA reference I was ever going to make.

  Indeed, the more I thought about it, the more that I realized my biggest issues here were how utterly half-cocked this all was. I didn't know if Susanos had packed potions of refreshment or not. It wouldn't have surprised me if she did or had another way to restore our expended power. But that was the real rub: I didn't know any of her plans regarding attacking Veles, how to fight him, or other essential plans.

  I mean, I made most of my plans up on the fly (which prevented them from being called plans at all really), but I normally liked to make some sort of outline of a strategy. I knew my team and their capabilities as well as what they could do. Susanos had been deliberately vague with details and only introduced me to the others literally a half-hour ago.

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  Was this some sort of trap? That didn't make sense either since Susanos could have taken me out at Crossroad. Even Sparky couldn't have stopped her if she'd wanted to. Hell, before Crossroad, she'd had us at the Elemental Temple of Water. Maybe I was overestimating her power level but I somehow suspected I wasn't.

  I was still pondering the idea when I heard someone calling out. "Please, someone, anyone, help!"

  All around me there were exploding towers and displays of magic as well as combat that defied description. Maria leapt dozens of feet in the air to swing around a glowing whip that bisected the tops of towers off while Garland used freezing spells before shattering them with his own version of PUSH. It was a very noisy and distracting but I still heard the words.

  "Damnit, why did I have to choose to be Neutral Good?" I muttered, looking for the survivor and knowing that they probably weren't going to think I was coming to rescue them. What with being involved in multiple felony murders and what was probably terrorism by the laws of our new Orwellian state.

  But I had to try.

  It didn't take long, thankfully, to find one of the security guards trapped under a piece of fallen tower that had just barely managed to avoid crushing him. He was in his thirties, had a five o'clock shadow, and a bit of a belly. Certainly, he didn't look threatening, and his gun was several feet away where he'd dropped it. He also looked terrified.

  "Okay, you're not going to like me but I need you to stop screaming and stand still," I said, trying to be as calming as possible.

  The security guard screamed at me. "AAAAAAAH!"

  "Oh, for Pete's sake," I muttered. "FRIENDSHIP. LESSER CHARM. SUGGESTION. I need you to stand still and let me rescue you."

  Using all three spells was overkill and probably the exact opposite of preserving my energy but I also was trying to save a life here. Thankfully, overkill or not, it worked, and the security guard froze up with his hands over his head.

  "Thank you," I said, taking a deep breath. "PUSH!"

  The metal flew into the air and proceeded to scatter nearby, thankfully not hitting the security guard along the way. I wasn't naive. Much as that sentence would cause Ania and Alek to laugh at me. I'd been fighting a war for over a year now and it had cost innocent people their lives. There was no such thing as a clean war, even when you were fighting against annihilation, and people died who you didn't want to.

  The security guard stood up then, seemingly confused that he wasn't dead. "Thank you."

  "You're wel--" I started to say.

  Unfortunately, no sooner did I open my mouth than the security guard's face twisted into a horrific corpse-like visage. The face was rotted through and one of his eyes was missing. His mouth was full of greenish puss and teeth that were twisted into little, tiny daggers of bone. He was a deathrot wight and coming at me fingers that ended in claws straight from the tips of his fingers jutting out through his flesh.

  I sliced its head off with the Perun sword, cutting through bone and flesh like they were air.

  The wight promptly fell over and disintegrated into powder. It had successfully hidden itself from my so-called divine senses and made me realize just how screwed the Earth possibly was. The deathrot plague had almost wiped out the Southern Kingdoms and left some places looking like Resident Evil 4.

  This? This was worse.

  The zombies were among us, capable of acting like regular human beings, and I was without a pair of sunglasses to see their true form like Roddy Piper in They Live. No sooner did I finish contemplating this than my bracelets pinged.

  QUEST UPDATED

  DESTROY UNIVERSAL MAGICAL CONDUCTORS 58/10,000

  Yeah, we weren't destroying these things nearly fast enough. I decided to put my maximum demigod intelligence towards figuring a way we could start a chain reaction or overload the devices so they could all be detonated at once. It was a long shot but something that might be able to make this go from being a pointless exercise in destruction to a very pointed one.

  Spotting the only building in this massive field, I ran up a set of metal steps and across a catwalk to the door leading inside. The door was locked but that didn't mean anything to someone who had a magic sword.

  Inside, I saw, thankfully, all of the staff had run for their lives and there were no more survivors or wights pretending to be them. Some had even left behind their coffee and doughts. I grabbed an untouched one and some of the coffee before sitting down at one of the computer terminals. It was still logged on and I took advantage of that.

  Figuring out a wholly unique system that incorporated magic into it should have been impossible. However, I recognized the programming style. The computers all ran on repurposed Epic DungeoneeringTM bullshit software and apparently things hadn't gotten any more advanced in the past ten years than when I’d been working with back in Michigan. My mind also worked at an astoundingly faster rate. It was, to press my luck, easy.

  Too easy.

  WARNING - DANGEROUS REACTION OVERLOAD WILL OCCUR IF YOU REMOVE SAFETIES. DO YOU WISH TO CONTINUE?

  Y/N?

  Y.

  YOU HAVE TRIGGERED A DANGEROUS OVERLOAD. THIS AREA WILL DETONATE WITHIN TEN TO TWELVE MINUTES.

  PRAISE VELES

  I didn’t have any problem believing Veles would make it relatively easy to blow up the place. He was, after all, a man who had absolutely zero fucks to give about the safety of his minions. He was going to eventually kill them all as well, I assumed, or at least turn them into undead. Still, I was grateful when the alarms started blaring around the facility. That meant it would be easy enough to convince everyone else to evacuate.

  So, I ran out of the steps waving my hands. "Hey, everyone! The place is going to blow! We need to get the hell out of here!"

  No one paid any attention.

  Ah, goddammit.

  QUEST UPDATED

  DESTROY UNIVERSAL MAGICAL CONDUCTORS 115/10,000

  \Yeah, we weren’t going to get this done before things went to Hell.

  "It's going to blow!" I shouted.

  With that, Jon came down and turned back into his human form. He was wearing a Nirvana t-shirt and ripped jeans. He looked like he'd just come from a cover band concert.

  "What was that?"

  "The field of towers! I've set them to overload!" I shouted.

  "I'm right here, dipshit!" Jon said, annoyed.

  "I'm not..." I sighed. "We need to get the hell out of here."

  "We're waiting for--" Jon started to say.

  That was when the sky split. A terrifying crack in the fabric of reality opened to a greenish black sickly-looking dimension where I could see spectral phantasms swirling about dark clouds. Hovering in the sky was the Eye of Providence in front of a pyramid, just like on the back of a dollar bill. It was the kind of visual you saw at the climax of bad Eighties horror movies only much higher budget. Descending from the sky was a cloaked figure that crackled with power as far above the other gods I'd fought as they'd been above me.

  NEW QUEST ADDED

  Survive 0/1

  "Meep," Jon said, sounding like a cartoon character.

  "Ah," I said, looking up. "I guess I underestimated Susanos' plan. It was stupid but worked. Veles is here."