He’d come back in the political sense, he’d come back into high society, and now, finally, he was going to come back in terms of teaching.

  Also, he was feeling a bit lonely at the moment, Elena had found herself buried beneath sixty years’ worth of paperwork and was still yet to dig herself out from under that mountain.

  He should have been hit by the same amount, but, well, he’d overdelegated to a degree that could potentially have bitten him in the ass, but he’d chosen his people carefully and hated paperwork, so there was that.

  Sitting in the corner of her office in Camelot and watching her deal with that crap would not do either of them any good, he’d said he’d get the Aspects for [Alcubierre Bubble], and the usual techniques for going after the monsters in question could use some improving, so why not combine everything into one? It’d certainly help against the boredom.

  Perhaps that was the “final boss” of the [System], bored immortals. Bored immortals and the superpowered wars that might follow.

  And maybe those who had a [Class]-related interest in war, because a lot of other reasons for large-scale conflict no longer existed.

  Living space? Access to outer space, a metric shitton of planets, and the ability to terraform them all.

  Resources? See previous answer, plus monster materials. They might not be fully in a post-scarcity society, but it was close enough for government work.

  Ideological conflicts? Granted, those were harder to avoid, but at the same time, well, space. In many interpretations of the word. People could avoid each other, give each other space, flee to space to get away from problematic societies … none of those were perfect solutions, but they came as close as was possible in the real world.

  But overscaling [Skills] could form a nasty conflict of interest. Like Jason’s [Sic Semper Tyrannis], or, in English, “thus always to tyrants.” As in, that’s how you should deal with tyrants, put them in the ground and consign them to the dustbin of history, though you should remember how the tyranny came around to avoid it the next time.

  Jason’s Capstone helped him bring down tyrants in a myriad of ways, and every time it hit Level 30, and he did, in fact, bring down a tyrant (or had at any point during the leveling process), it’d reset down to Level 1 while retaining bonuses.

  Now, it was a [Skill] with a beneficial purpose, and “the Ghost” would be going after tyrants even if he didn’t have an extra incentive of upgrading [Sic Semper Tyrannis].

  But who was to say there wasn’t an alien tyrant out there with a [Skill] that required conquest, and a lust for power that would not permit them to leave [Skill] upgrade potential unused?

  It wasn’t like Isaac himself would let himself be kept out of a [World Boss] battle, his own overscaling fuel, without a damn good reason …

  “Can everyone hear me?” he called out, looking back at the space station circling Jupiter twenty kilometers back.

  Of course, the empty vacuum he was surrounded by shouldn’t allow any sound to be transmitted, and it didn’t, but, well, [Unrestricted Speech] had long since taken that particular rule of nature out back behind the woodshed and shot it in the head, leaving him easily able to make himself heard.

  All around him, charged summoning circles floated, ready to unleash living calamities that could take down most non-capital warships, and were functionally unsurpassable for anyone not at the 5th Evolution.

  For him … taking on half of them at once would be a piece of cake, and thrashing all of them would require him to activate cooldown [Skills], but only some of them, and certainly not the strongest of what he had available.

  “Now, I believe in teaching by example, so I will be explaining while I demonstrate.”

  As he spoke, the Void Dragon that had started emerging from its summoning circle ten seconds ago lunged at him from behind him, its maw open wide, capable of swallowing him in one gulp …

  Isaac took one “step” to the left, [Speed of Hati] letting him walk across the empty vacuum, then backhanded the beast while channeling [Power of the Behemoth] into his arm while using the first [Skill] to brace and prevent himself from flying the other direction as he sent the dragon tumbling away, even the massive monster relatively easy to move without gravity, friction, or air resistance to interfere with the process.

  “Some of you watching probably already know this, but most flying monsters are too heavy to take off under the laws of physics. So they use their magic to increase the inertia of the air underneath their wings, allowing them to take to the skies as long as there is air present to manipulate in the first place. Incidentally, taking away that air is the standard method to ground standard dragons.

  “Unfortunately … Void Dragons have that same relationship with the fabric of space-time itself. As long as they are present in the universe, they have something to push against with their wings, and nothing short of complete amputation will stop that, which is why …”

  Isaac cut himself off as he stepped back out of the lunging dragon’s maw, then kicked it in the snout to make it reel back yet again, though now that its wings were in use, it did not go flying.

  “… Which is why this next trick is so annoying. If you’ll forgive me for diving deep into the rabbit hole that is physics, we need to talk about the speed of light.

  “Three hundred thousand kilometers per second, roughly, light can’t go faster or slower than that, nothing physical can reach or exceed it, only sidestep the issue with magic, and that velocity exists independent of the speed of whatever is emitting the light.”

  An explosion of burgundy flame foiled yet another strike by the dragon, causing it to reel away, attempting to scrape the flames from its forearms.

  “Therefore, even though all other speed is relative, light is something you can always compare yourself to, and that’s something that this guy is unfortunately an expert in abusing.”

  The dragon made the mistake of unleashing its breath weapon at him, a purple stream of energy practically invisible against the black of space, an embodiment of vacuum, entropy, expansion, dissolution … an attack that wouldn’t really be able to exist in a universe purely ruled in the physics, and also the exact opposite of anything any physicist would consider “fire.”

  But because [Divine Fire], as a rule, cared only about the “concept” of things, and if it came out of a dragon’s maw and kinda looked like fire, it was fire for any definition that mattered.

  Even before it touched him, the cone of “flame” began to contort and compress, rapidly condensing into a marble that hovered above his palm.

  “So, if you leave these things alone for long enough, they’ll spread their wings, catch some cosmic wind that only exist for them, and slow down to absolut zero, relative to light, which normally translates to them getting torn away from you, who is moving at the speed at which the solar system is drifting through the universe, and then starts spewing flames while you try and catch it.

  “But I don’t feel like chasing one of the damn things halfway across the solar system right now, so here’s the official Navy training video on why letting it get that far is a bad idea.”

  With those words, he knew the vid in question would start playing on one wall of the auditorium from which he was being observed.

  The video was original. The Benny Hill theme had been added by him.

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Unfortunately, he was already edging up against the “this is going to be a pain” limit and flicked the marble of flame at the dragon’s forehead. The beast was almost entirely immune to its own breath weapon, but the “almost” in that sentence was the key point.

  All its power, capable of wrecking a cruiser in a single shot, crippling a battlecruiser, and wrecking anything outside the armor of a battleship, compressed down into a sphere the size of a marble, though? That was more than enough to burn through, but not while maintaining cohesion … but it came apart inside the Void Dragon’s brain. So there was that.

  Isaac triggered another summoning circle immediately afterwards.

  “Also, because they’re maneuverable as hell because of how they can treat empty space, unless you can do that too, you don’t want to fight them at a low relative velocity, because even though they’re a hell of a lot bigger than you, they’re also a lot more agile.”

  The next two minutes consisted solely of him dancing around the Void Dragon, marking its weakpoints by planting daggers in them. It died halfway through, so he had a third summoned and continued the process on that one instead.

  And then a fourth one.

  “If you aren’t as agile as the damn thing, then you just need to stick to high-speed passes. You’re probably going to end up having to chase it, but if you can start out at a high relative velocity, you can use that.”

  And from there, he started to do exactly that, shooting past the dragon over and over again, unleashing a solid bar of flame at whatever weakpoint happened to be exposed at any given time.

  After that, he wound up having to answer quite a few questions, most of them asking for exact Level recommendations which he wound up unable to give, simply because neither raw stats nor number of [Skills] directly translated into anything, until eventually, he was able to move on to the next beast.

  Unlike what the name indicated, a Cosmic Leviathan wasn’t anything like the actual Leviathan, a World Boss after whose battle maps would have had to be redrawn, hadn’t it been for its World Item being able to repair coastlines across half the globe and raise most of Oceania back from the bottom of the sea.

  It was still a Tier 10 monster, however.

  The metal sheet Isaac had inscribed the summoning circle upon seemed to balloon outwards, inflating and expanding in a way that was viscerally reminiscent of some kind of growth or pustule, while the metal became oddly luminous, shining with an inner light that appeared to illuminate veins or arteries, as though some great cosmic egg was taking shape before him …

  “Unfortunately, rupturing that thing will end with the monster teleporting elsewhere,” Isaac announced. “I know some people like to do that anyway, but knowing where at the cost of a minute of waiting is worth it. Just ready your weapons, charge any attacks that need charging, and then …”

  He trailed off, grinning at the “egg” that vanished then, unleashing it.

  As for what “it” was … Cosmic Leviathans always had a general look of a raindrop elongated to the point of absurdity, a tail that accounted for almost three-quarters of its length, the rounded body/head always the same shape, but anything beyond that was always random. Always.

  Too many eyes, each “filled” with cosmic energy of one stripe or another, at least three maws, precisely none of which were to be found in any place one would normally expect one, each with its own internal gravity well to both suck in and crush anything that beast felt like munching on …

  “Pick the side with the least number of black eyes, move past as quickly as you possibly can, before it can use its maws, and go for the thickest part of the tail you can get through in a single strike.”

  And with that, he hurled himself at the creature, its eyes already lighting up in myriad colors, preparing to unleash the stars caught within … even the dead ones, collapsed into singularities, the black orbs that represented black holes somehow also managing to shine, ready to unleash twisted snarls of gravity that could crush limbs, send bodies careening through space and tear open starships in an instant, though for his purposes, the biggest potential issue stemmed from its ability to disrupt his charge.

  As for the maws, as long as you were moving quickly enough, they wouldn’t be able to catch you, and the half a dozen blasts of radiation, miniature solar flares, and waves of stellar plasma were much easier to bull one’s way through than a field of shifting gravity that actively hated you.

  Steaming slightly and having been hit with enough energy to set off a Geiger counter, as long as it was close enough, Isaac banked sharply to the side, kicking off empty space to redirect himself through the base of the tail, leading with his sword and tearing off almost eighty percent of the Cosmic Leviathan’s body, length-wise, leaving the rest to careen through space, wildly firing every which way, forcing Isaac to launch himself after it and send it clear of the collection of summoning circles with a swift kick up the rear, then sent a cloud of daggers after it.

  “Tail works the same way a Void Dragon’s wings do, without it, it can only move itself with the recoil from its attacks, and that’s minimal. Get as much of it as you can in one go, use that one to check how much that is,” Isaac said, a thumb over his shoulder indicating the massive section of tail still flaying wildly behind him. “As for the body … go for the eyes, from range if you don’t feel like getting roasted.”

  Of course, a lot of people tended to get at least a little grossed out by dismantling monsters piece by bloody piece, gouging out eyes, severing tendons, and so on … but unless one specialized in powerful attacks that could finish fights in one or two hits, going for crippling strikes and building up into something more lethal was much more economical, even if the end result was something straight out of a Saw movie.

  Therefore, his cloud of flying daggers tore open the Cosmic Leviathan’s body in short order, and that was that, though he had to take a few seconds to redirect it afterwards, to prevent the corpse from careening into something important.

  And now, on to the Lord of Time and Space. It also didn’t quite live up to the hype its name generated, but at the same time, it was also a truly absurd pain in the ass to fight for most people.

  “There are few monsters that are more technically complex to fight than the Lord of Time and Space,” Isaac announced. “Space is twisted into a hundred separate pretzels, and time flows at a dozen different rates, all across the battlefield.

  “Marching into that mess is a terrible idea. You either have a build that counters it, are capable of magic that does the same, or have a set of pathfinding abilities.

  “This is a Tier 10 monster, you will not be able to overlevel this enemy, and overpowering it by stacking Aspects will take literal centuries, unless you’re getting them from World Bosses.

  “But there is one thing even this creature can’t block: attacks that move in a line that cannot be twisted via spatial manipulation!”

  He triggered the circle in question and the monster to begin to manifest, reality shattering like a warehouse’s worth of broken mirrors, pockets of altered time feeling like sores in the fabric of reality as the last fragments of “normality” were ground away into dust.

  The cores of these creatures were fundamental for the creation of all sorts of top-tier spatial enchantments, while their Aspects could both twist space in all sorts of absurd ways and protect the bearer from hostile attempts to do so, though, despite holding one himself, there was very little Isaac could do to directly counter its efforts. Without his [Skill], even the sound of his voice would have been trapped within this pocket of insanity …

  “Try and watch how the flames bend. Those are the kinds of paths you’d have to navigate to reach the core.”

  As he spoke, he triggered [Divine Fire] once more, warm orange flames streaming throughout the world around him, bending and twisting without his input as it bent to the power of the Lord of Time and Space.

  And the boundary of the twisted reality wasn’t just expanding outwards but inwards, getting closer and closer to his skin, ready to send blood and breath and everything else just about anywhere except where it was supposed to go … and then the world around him became filled with hundreds of swords, knives, and blades of all kinds.

  Isaac’s soulbound weapon had started life as a simple kabar, bought on Amazon on the very first day of the [System], then later bound to him with a [Skill] of his 1st Evolution [Class].

  And bit by bit, it had grown.

  New weapons to absorb, new shapes to take.

  The ability to gain more forms with unique abilities based on his Aspects.

  Aspects that directly increased the number of copies he could summon of individual weapons.

  And then, finally, the ability to manifest every potential version of his weapon at the same time.

  A constellation of death manifested around him, a thought sending them hurling outwards, guided by immaterial strings, sent careening all over the place as the monster diverted them from any place they’d be able to do real damage … but the instant they were outside, a second thought ordered the clouds of blades once more, englobing the twisted space around him, and shot back towards him.

  But they weren’t “weapons” flying through space. They were parts of him, bound to his very soul, inextricably and eternally fused to the core of his being. As such, the space separating them only existed on the physical plane; on all others, they were one and the same … and the paths between the physical manifestation of his weapons and his body were equally inviolate.

  And with how many weapons he’d chucked out there … the chance of him not hitting at least some of the monster’s six cores was pretty much zero.

  The mess around him warped and undulated, the disruption steadying a moment later in about half as complex a state as previous. So he threw his weapons out once more and tore them through what remained.

  A third pass wasn’t necessary.

  “Now, there are ways to develop soulbound weapons in that way,” Isaac announced, drawing a book from his storage ring. “And there’s a spell that can achieve something similar; contact Dr. Shaw about getting it.”

  Amy had made that a while ago, and meant to release it several times but forgot every time, even though she’d explicitly promised to have it ready for now when she’d heard about what he was doing … sending every person here to bother her felt appropriate.

  Isaac glanced down to check his watch.

  He had a few spare minutes before the next round of lectures, so he spent those watching one of the countless TV shows he’d missed by being out in the universe on his phone.