So, that had been his youngest sibling.

  Whom he’d met for the very first time as an adult.

  And he’d behaved like … like … fuck.

  What was something he could compare it to? Like a random stranger he begrudgingly had to meet, greet, and play nice with?

  “What do you do?” “Oh, that’s interesting!” “Tell me more about this specific part …”, the playbook he used for friends’ dates or the like, not family.

  In fact, he’d had almost that exact conversation with Tanja’s first boyfriend … who apparently hadn’t quite put two and two together on just what her surname indicated and run for the hills about five seconds after leaving what he thought Isaac’s field of view was.

  Seriously, what the actual fuck had that been?

  There wasn’t really a “good” way for something like that to go, getting blindsided by a new (adult) sibling had certainly been one of the more shocking events of his life, but Isaac couldn’t help but feel that, as far as non-violent scenarios were concerned, he’d found himself action out one of the worse ones.

  But this wasn’t what he should be thinking about, not with what he was about to do, yet putting the whole thing out of his mind for the sake of work the instant it was inconvenient … wasn’t putting family on the back burner like that generally seen as the unhealthy response?

  Urgh, why couldn’t there be a nice and simple solution to problems like this?

  ***

  New York really had changed. And yet, in countless ways, it had stayed exactly the same. Almost as though it had been preserved in amber.

  The System allowed people and communities to indulge many of their quirks, and it seemed like New York had settled on, well, preserving its “New Yorky-ness.”

  The Mage’s Academy, simply known as “The Tower,” was new, but otherwise, it was only a matter of makeovers. The Empire State Building had gotten a new exterior coat of magical paint that made it stand out even more in the skyline, and the Statue of Liberty had gained a new shell of Starsteel to demonstrate the nation’s second liberation, this time, from the threat of annihilation.

  But overall … while it was nice to see that some things hadn’t changed, it was also incredibly jarring. If New York had been the first city he’d visited, his response would have been “oh, great to see nothing’s changed”, but instead, he’d seen how nothing was the same and then gone here, only to get slapped by this blast from the past.

  Also, he’d run off in the middle of dinner … New York had fantastic food carts, but no matter how badly he might want to patronize one of the city’s many, many foodcarts, he was already thirty seconds from being late, and the fact that the only reason his “tardiness” was even a remotely possibility was the fact that his speech had been moved up would be immaterial if he was, in fact, late.

  So he fell towards the city at speeds that would doubtlessly be setting off alerts of all sorts, but at this point, with him having burned through all fast travel options available to him save those that needed to be saved for actual emergencies, there weren’t very many choices to be made.

  And then he landed before the main entrance like a meteor, though the guards had clearly been warned ahead of time, as they didn’t so much as twitch in surprise, while his long experience with moving at ridiculous speeds allowed him to keep the ground entirely intact, and the nearby plant life utterly unruffled.

  Isaac gazed up the towering building for a brief moment, then used one of his [Skills] to replace his casual clothing with a sharp suit and strode inside, doors opening before him as though by magic, the fact that he was meant to be here making the building itself help him get to where he needed to be.

  The World had largely unified under the UN, bit by bit, as dictatorships broke under the weight of an increasingly powerful population while the dictator at the top needed to suppress others in positions of power lest they be deposed by them, all the while being more and more likely to be deposed by the people themselves.

  It was the exact same thing that happened to monarchies and the nobility with the development of a wealthy merchant class. Well, not exactly the same, but a similar process.

  And with globalisation’s ceaseless advance, it had just, sort of, made sense.

  It had actually been China who’d started the process, after a “minor” purge of corrupt officials powered by truth-telling and corruption detecting [Skills], constitutional reform to further streamline their citizens’ path to power, and then proposed reforms for the United Nations that had been largely accepted … at least once everything that had clearly been meant to be “sacrificed” had been hacked off, only having been included to let others feel like their input had been accepted.

  In the end, all nations still had their own governments, but those functioned more as repositories for the country-wide boosting [Skills] held by politicians, while also making smaller-scale decisions, while such things as universal human rights were now actually written into law, planet-wide, and the International Criminal Court at the Hague actually worked now.

  Of course, that wasn’t to say things were all right now.

  Culturally, India was still grappling with the caste system; any “untouchables” who had chosen not to leave the nation still living in relatively shitty situations.

  The US was still ludicrously car-centric unless you lived in one of the few cities with proper public transportation or could fly.

  And as for Germany, well, its reaction to anyone trying to implement common-sense reforms regarding alcohol, even just raising the minimum drinking age to eighteen, had all the grace and dignity of a Chihuahua at the veterinarian’s office.

  Politics might have gotten less corrupt due to the abundance of truth-telling abilities and Thomas Jefferson’s statement of how liberty could only exist if the government feared the people had been proved true far more often than it should have to be, but it was still a real mess at times.

  The final door flew open so quickly Isaac half-thought he’d crashed into it by accident, as though the very building itself were worried he’d be late, and he quickly marched down towards the podium, spinning to face the audience the moment he reached it, and fulfilled a childhood fantasy.

  He, acting as the returning hero, dropped the head of a monster upon the floor the one who’d paid for its death, splattering gore across previously pristine ground … of course, no one here had hired him to kill the Death Knell of Worlds because no one had known it existed, the spectral mass hadn’t dropped anything even remotely resembling a “head,” and the car-sized hunk of ectoplasm he dropped was too solid to splatter … but none of that diminished the euphoria of the moment in any significant way.

  “This is the largest chunk left of the Death Knell of Worlds. A World Boss. One, as you know, isn’t found on our summoning list.”

  Granted, there were a hell of a lot more wandering apocalypses than anyone with half a brain was comfortable with, but it was still a short enough list for your average person to recognize all the names, let alone realize when one was new. But for those listening, there was an obvious way to reconcile that paradox, a solution he was going to immediately upend.

  “It also isn’t found on that of any known alien species.”

  This time, a ripple of unease washed throughout the grand chamber, but a small one. After all, he could have just discovered a new one …

  “Because this creature wasn’t summoned, but created. It’s a fusion of all the monsters that destroyed the civilization I found, and wiped them out to the very last sapient.

  “We, the scientists of the world, assumed that any civilization that managed to wipe themselves out would simply be overrun by whatever creatures they summoned, something that would be possible to deal with.”

  “We were wrong.”

  Of course, that set the cat among the pigeons, but he decided to keep going and ignore the growing noise that had reached the point of triggering the room’s noise control enchantments.

  “And, as some of you may know, I have a [Skill] related to uncovering the past. I checked the origins of this monster. Its constituents were mere Tier 1 and 2 monsters, and they destroyed the civilization in question around a week after the initialization.

  This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  “When I found them, a hundred and fifteen years later, they’d turned into a Level 147 Nascent World Boss and would doubtlessly have kept growing if it hadn’t run into me.

  “We can still put an end to this, if we catch them in time … but there are up to 400 billion stars in this galaxy in need of checking, and we have no idea if the growth of these things is linear or exponential, nor do we know if the growth of these bosses stops at World.”

  Isaac took a step to the left and smacked the block of ectoplasm with his palm, making it wobble.

  “Right now, we’re looking at a treasure trove of unique materials, Aspects, and even new World Items. If we don’t go after them, though … I have no doubt that they’ll be able to make their way to us within your lifetimes, and that they’ll come in the form of true calamities.”

  The carrot and the stick. Offering wealth might have been alone, but telling them that failing to grab said wealth might bite them in the ass in the most literal of ways … but there was one more point he needed to make before taking questions.

  “Also, there is a Dyson Sphere out there that this thing ...” another smack on the blob, “… emptied of life, who knows what else we can find?”

  A sphere enclosing a star. That just had to hold all sorts of fantastic rewards and futuristic technology, didn’t it? Perhaps even the secret to non-magical FTL, which could be boosted beyond all sanity with the right [Skills] and enchantments?

  Of course, as far as Isaac had been able to tell, the object in question wasn’t quite up to the standards of the usual science-fiction “Big Dumb Object,” the kind that normally held reality-shifting potential and universe-shaking implications … but the politicians neither needed to know that, nor did the fact that this one was as much a dud as it could possibly be mean that everything similar would be equally lacking.

  “So, questions?”

  There were questions. There were a lot of questions.

  Some “interesting” in the sense that they gave the ones who asked them valuable information, others boring, but at the end of the day, there was only one that was actually dicey.

  “How big a problem can these ‘Nascent World Bosses’ really be if you took one down with just Ms. Hightower for help?”

  Well, actually, he’d blundered into that on his own, without Elena to assist, but pointing that out now would make what was a very serious situation sound even less dire, so he decided to leave it as-is.

  “Ambassador Botros, my entire build is about punching up, beating World Bosses, and the same boosting [Skill] that allowed me to kick the Leviathan around like a football during the opening minutes of the battle had long since leveled up and recharged.”

  Somehow, that caused a much bigger stir than anything else he’d said thus far. Because, for all that it had been known that he had, at one point in time, been able to wield that kind of power, whether or not the [Skill] was reusable was one of the big questions of discourse about power in the modern day.

  And while he’d fairly definitively stated that he didn’t have access to that kind of power right now, but that same state was also now, quite clearly, temporary.

  Though things did quickly calm down, and he was eventually allowed to leave.

  ***

  Isaac had read a lot of books from wise men or history makers. The Art of War, its German cousin, which was heavy enough to use as a weapon, On War, The Book of Five Rings, and so on … but there’d only been so much there to help him.

  But of all the books he’d read, the one he’d most likely retained the least from had been The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli.

  Yet even so, there was a single, specific paragraph that had stuck with him. To paraphrase, “it is better to be feared than loved, love is simply too fragile, but fear can easily turn into hatered and if that happens, you’re fucked.”

  He had the weight to throw around and enough political capital stored up to get away with that a few times. But playing it like that would inevitably bite him in the ass in the long term, and unless there was a true emergency, “long term” should always be one’s priority.

  So he played things differently.

  All Isaac needed to get his foot in the door was his name, which was the biggest hurdle most people stumbled at. And from there, he could make his pitch, focusing on utilitarian arguments and common-good strategies. Of course, there’d always be people who’d say no to even that sort of thing, but at that point, he could either compromise … or dig up some skeletons in their closet and get them out of the way that way. He very much preferred the latter, assuming the person in question was susceptible to the tactic.

  And having dropped a chunk of World Boss into the middle of the United Nations assembly would open a lot of doors without requiring further actions on his part.

  But he was both hungry and had located the appropriate food carts during his speech, his sensory [Aura] having endlessly washed out through the walls and across the city, learning literally everything he could.

  Therefore, after a few quick conversations with various people, he’d arranged to have access to a conference room and spread the word that, in half an hour, he’d be in said room, doing some of the paperwork, and if anyone were to drop by to “chat,” he wouldn’t be opposed to having a conversation.

  In the end, that wound up a mixed bag.

  He did end up having quite a few productive conversations, most boiling minor concessions that he’d have given anyway in exchange for just about every person and organization that mattered throwing their weight behind an expanded exploration effort.

  Of course, for most of these people, finding Nascent World Bosses before they could become actual World Bosses wasn’t quite their priority, but rather finding resources, scientific curiosities, and inhabited planets that humanity wouldn’t have the drive or spare population to colonize for centuries yet, considering how badly the birthrate had cratered while the lifespan exploded.

  But they’d do it, that was what mattered.

  However, he also did not get a lick of paperwork done, paperwork which had actually needed doing, because somehow, it had gotten worse while he’d been gone!

  Yet everything he’d done so far was merely the start of things. The government of the world could/would only go so far, and being just one man, Isaac himself could only do so much.

  Which left him with the following question: of the Earth’s ten billion citizens, plus another three billion spread out across the rest of the solar system, and two more found in the other core worlds of Epsilon Indi, Tau Ceti, Epsilon Eridani, and Sigma Draconis, how many would be willing to head out into the black if given half a chance?

  Also, bonus, no one had realized he’d gotten a World Item, which meant he still had the time to figure out how to get rid of the damn thing in a way that wouldn’t raise a whole host of issues.

  ***

  Three hours later, Isaac was standing in the main auditorium of Akashic Academy.

  He’d set this up with his phone while he’d gone out to eat, contacting old friends and subordinates to find the right candidates, then pass those names onto people who would then contact said candidates, asking them to come here, as he was about to make them an offer.

  And Isaac was well-known to make those kinds of offers, to grant specific, invaluable support to those who had the potential to become great in a specific way that either benefited him, or would, in his opinion, benefit the world.

  So by the time he showed up himself, the word had been out for a good twelve hours already. Which was very little in the grand scheme of things, even today, with fast travel available, but that was why he’d be repeating this a couple of times after this. And even so, the room was filled to bursting, and a quick conversation with Leon Schmidt, the dean, in whose hands Isaac had left the academy he’d founded before heading off into space, had revealed that many of those people had been there for hours already, despite the fact that the time of Isaac’s arrival had been know the entire time.

  Though then again, it hadn’t been known if there would be any limitation on attendance, so “getting a spot early” would likely have been a good idea … if it hadn’t been for the fact that Isaac made a point of never over-inviting people. That was a recipe for frustration if doing so left people out in the proverbial cold, and that would have wound up dinging his reputation.

  So, he took one last check of the time, to make sure he wasn’t too early and thereby running the risk of shutting out those who were on time. He wasn’t.

  With a single use of [Phantom Step], his short-range teleport, he made himself appear behind the lectern … and then found himself forced to wait a good thirty seconds before things were quiet enough that he wouldn’t be talking over people.

  “I believe most of you know that I’m not one for long speeches, and I definitely don’t plan on wasting any of your time.

  “As those of you following current news are most likely aware, we need the galaxy to be explored as quickly as possible.

  “The government is going to send out survey ships and scouts, and that’s an excellent start, but I believe there is a way to improve our odds of being able to find and deal with issues before they become dangerous.

  “Firstly, I think that enabling as many people as possible to go exploring would help, which is why I’ve invited you here.

  “Secondly … I’ve been working towards dealing with monsters that threaten the world and gained the ability to hold back World Bosses in the end. So, what kind of abilities do you think people who set out into the outer reaches of space will gain if they’re allowed to start early?

  “End of the day, the offer is simple: you get a ship, plus money for supplies and crew, put reasonable effort into exploring for ten years, then you can either come back and get the ship fully repaired, refuelled, and brought up to the latest standards in exchange for ten more years of exploration, or you can do whatever the hell you want, and keep the ship, free and clear.

  “And if you manage to preempt a threat by calling in me or another S-Ranker to deal with it, that’ll get you your ship immediately.

  “What you explore, and where you do it, doesn’t really matter to me, as long as it’s new. Questions?”

  A woman in the audience raised her hand, so he motioned for her to speak.

  “What exactly do you consider ‘reasonable effort’? That covers a lot, including ‘anyone who doesn’t work themselves half to death is a freeloader.’ So …”

  She trailed off, waiting for him to fill in the blank.

  “Whatever definition you use will be fine,” Isaac replied. “Anyone whose idea of ‘work’ is glancing at the sensor readout for five seconds every other day and believing that to be sufficient would not be in this room and be made this offer.”

  A few more hands had flown up the moment the first question had been asked, so he picked one at random.

  “Are we going to be competing for this opportunity?”

  “No,” Isaac shook his head, having to fight to avoid rolling his eyes. “Like I said, you all qualify; that’s why you’re here, and if, of all the ships I currently have available, one’s demand exceeds supply, that just means more will be built.

  “But if you choose to accept my offer, you will get a ship.”

  The rest of the conversation went by pretty similarly. Asking clarifications on specifics, sharing worries that needed to be soothed, all that sort of thing.

  In the end, almost half the invited people wound up accepting, which he counted as a win, and his cue to hurry on home.

  Though as he quickly walked that way, he remembered something. The conversation they’d had before his phone had interrupted them.

  Would extending a version of the same offer, sans strings, to his younger brother be a good idea, or would it merely be seen as an attempt to buy a good relationship?