Episode 4.4 - Apocalypse Part 2/2 - Finale of Arc 1!

Apocalypses sure do come up in stories a lot, don't they? Even fantasy has worlds where the demon king won a century ago, or some magi-tech nuke reset the world. Spurred, I suppose, by our fears of what humans might do to the planet someday. There can be a type of escapism in apocalypsism, of watching humble people eek out life in some war-torn nuclear wasteland, but it was never my cup of tea. The sort of escapism that actually has something meaningful to say, contemplations and musing on life and humanity and living, were always a tad too highbrow for my purposes. Maybe I should have watched more of them; it might have prepared me better for this...

It started slowly. I woke up - apparently having been swapped to Eshu’s lap at some point - just as Lila finished healing the rest of her troops. We used the telescopes to watch it start. With those massive barrier walls gone, armies from the two invading worlds began meeting on the plains of Escape's defenceless overworld. Machines, robots and cyborgs versus demons of all manner, grizzly, wild and mystical simply stepping out of their own worlds and into this one.          Clashing violently with the hapless locals of Escape’s woefully light fantasy lands, and later still, unleashing all hell on each other. Bullets meeting magic missiles, chainswords clashing with seething demonic blades.

 Soon, the sun fully set and the blue moon rose. Oddly, I never noticed it until now, but Escape's nighttime isn't that dark - nothing like the darkness of a cloudy night in the countryside back home - instead, a sort of video game darkness, one you can see just fine in. It feels unnatural once you notice it, to be honest. That said, it's dim enough that before long we can see the explosions and flashes of gunfire light even without the telescopes. That, of course, is just the start.

Once everyone else is patched up, Lila offers to heal me further, but I can tell how insanely tired she is. I'm still sore and stinging all over but I tell her otherwise and she finally agrees to rest. We stay where we are on the roof, eventually just sitting down on the hard stone, the four of us snuggle up to one another, Major Tom hovering close by, clearly as invested in watching as we are despite his apparent lack of eyeballs.
    After some time, we hold hands - me at one end, then Eshu, Ko next to her, then Lila and even Tom - tightly, as though not just for warmth, but in a desperate hope that we can tether ourselves to sanity as we watch the world end.

The small firefights are just the prelude, as I said. Soon missiles fly through the sky. In the far distance, with the world barriers gone, we can actually see the worlds of the other games. To the right are castles, most clearly from this distance: thrilling towers and grey bulkheads of aristocratic fortitude. And on the left are these massive domed cities, like something you'd put on the moon, all interlocking hexagons and tinted glass.

 Intercontinental, or I suppose, interdimensional missiles, strike through those towers, levelling castles and eviscerating the towns and cities we can't properly see from here. Meanwhile, the Sci-Fi domes soon explode as meteorites rain down on them from above, as spells and dark rites tear apart the massive skyscrapers we can see beneath.

Far more forces roll across the borders, and entire armies invade. The Demon Realm uses portals, Lila explains. The Mechanised Empire is no further behind, teleports as well as less fantastical helicopters and troop transports soar across the sky.
    Between it all, Escape's harmless kingdom of bland, friendly-faced NPCs is ablaze. The capital, that is the game's starter area, seemingly gets hit by an accidental off-course missile and simply disappears. Looking in that direction now, all you can see is a colossal crater in the ground.

Fires burn in every town and hamlet. Literal goblins loot and pillage villages of screaming characters. You want to comfort yourself, assure yourself they're just NPCs, pretend video game characters - but then, isn't that also true of Lila? Could I just watch that happen to someone as lifelike as her?

The war rages on into the night. Before long, far too fast it seems, while somehow feeling like the longest night of our lives, the sun starts to peak over the horizon, shining its glorious rays on three separate worlds of ruin. Harsh light spills down on medieval cities flattened to dust, on metropolises of shattered glass and metal. On the burnt grass and ruined remains of Escape.
    Our demon master was right; it misses us. The borders of the three worlds are all to the north, where we are is like a little, thin southern peninsula, just barely free from it all.

"That thing is, it's wrong," Eshu mumbles.
    She's referring to a creature that appeared a short time ago in the Mechanised Empire. It is truly gigantic, the size of a city, so tall and wide we can see it just fine from here. Its writhing, otherworldly appendages rise and fall, crushing whole districts. Its eyes glow with a fire that lasers out and melts all it touches, from buildings to mountain sides, rendering them glass.
A stray beam hits us no less, travelling miles upon miles. We cower, even Lila, as our shield glows hot for a few seconds, turning from green to yellow and then burning bright hot red, before, just as fast, the stray blast is gone. The shield holds, but takes some time to recover its initial colour.
    Go our Grand Imp I guess...

"It's like Chutlu or something," Ko mutters. Lila and even Tom suddenly stare at her, "Err, what?"

"You know the name of the Great Demon Sovereign?" Lila says, shocked.

"It's an eldritch entity from a story in our world," Ko says almost apologetically, "the guy who wrote it was afraid of air conditioning, although he liked cats so probably not all bad, haha..."

Lila considers this, "I see, to think he is just a story in your world. Chutlu was one of our prior Kings, but Demon Sovereigns are far too powerful to simply die of old age. Eventually, they descend and take their rightful places among the ranks of the Netherworld. Summoning one requires the most powerful demons, and then some. Doing so is without doubt our most powerful weapon."

"So your people will win then?" I ask, staring as the monster continues to flatten an entire civilisation.

She shakes her head, "It's how I found out all this was coming. I received orders to start practising the rite of summoning. I would, should have been helping bring that thing into the world right now had I not fled. The problem is, those mechanised guys have matched the demons tit for tat all night, right? So, how will they respond to this?"

Ko goes paler than a night of watching this had already made her, "S-Sek, I didn't play that game, but I saw the memes. Didn't it have, as an absurd win-condition, that got GIF-posted all over? Didn't it have..."
    It dawns on me, too, "Jesus, the Hydrogen Bomb?"

We don't get time to explain that to our fantasyland companions. We see it, long and grey, unassuming really. A little logo we can't make out from here, but we can guess is the sign for radioactivity.
    A hydrogen bomb, a type of very real nuclear missile, courses across the sky, before smashing into the demon realm.


Two more soon follow it.

‘Nukes’ scared multiple generations of the real world. The fear of them, the drills and tight negotiations around them. And before that, the site and use of them on two civilian populations. Their depictions in media have always been powerful, in anime media as much as anywhere else. We may have been escapism junkies, but we'd still seen the odd classic or two and seen the impact it left on the minds of those generations that came before we were born.
The chilling, empty, white void. The mushroom clouds rising, the melting skin, the horrendous aftermath. You can't ever be ready to witness that with your own eyes. I wonder would we have gone blind or been burned ourselves if not for Lila's spells?

This world isn't like Earth; when it's over it’s not just cities that are gone - as though ‘just cities would be anything less than horrendous as is - No, when the light fades for us, there's nothing left, the Mechanised Empire is crushed under an eldritch abomination's foot, while the Demon Realm is atomised before our eyes.
    Lila claims there will be survivors, bunkers deep below the ground. That they'll bide their time and eventually come up, but I can't see it. The once lush view is just wasteland now. The wind will blow the nuclear radiation back over Escape, too, no doubt, probably over the Mechanised Empire, too. This fort, those of us in it, surely we are all that's left in the world now.

The sun is high in the sky before any of us finally start to speak again.
"Is it over..."

"For now.”

"That, that wasn't an event cutscene, was it..." I mutter.

"No," Ko says softly, "This is real. The developers, maybe they always planned this. They never said Escape would remain an isekai paradise forever, did they..."

"It was implied!" I blurt, "I mean, come on, we hardly signed onto, to, to... to this." The sight before us zaps any anger I might try to muster.

"It's not like we can change it any," Eshu adds, squeezing my hand, "At Least we're still together, right?"

"Ya, you're right about that. We might be the only players who are even.”

Lila floats up in front of us, back to the devastation beyond, "Quite right, and we got work to do, K'? All sorts of work. I've found things in the menu that we can construct to ward off this ‘radiation’ and the like. If they work, maybe we won't need my chaff barrier permanently. And then there's you guys, the next step in training is magic, if you can do it, might take the pressure off of me, hehe."

We stare, collectively exhausted, at her enthusiasm, "We can do magic?" I manage weakly.

"Well, we'll find out, won't we! I know it looks bad out there, is bad out there but we can't be so foolish as to hope we're the only survivors. Robots don't get radiation poisoning, the undead can resist it, and bunkers can hide you from it. We're gonna' be busy kids, today is the end of the world, oh yeah! But tomorrow? Tomorrow is the start of our world."

“How the hell can you be so gung-ho after all that?”