Adrenaline was pumping through John’s veins when the north-western outskirts of Watford came into view. His Dragon Wings were beating steadily, propelling him neither too fast nor too slow, just enough to keep him at the head of their little formation.

  The others were behind him in some configuration, but his gaze had been fixed forward for so long that he didn’t know the precise arrangement. He just knew that Doug, Lily, Jade, and Chester were backing him up in this, and that was all that mattered.

  Part of it was his focus on the mission ahead, hyping himself up for the battle he was about to undertake. He also had to admit that, even after everything, he was too nervous about their reaction to his new fit. Upon som exploration, they’d found that the farmer must have had multiple adult children, or at least Uni-aged, and their closets were goldmines for John.

  A black shirt with a large skull icon on the front, straightforwardly edgy without being obnoxious about it, Enchanted with Intimidate to grant him that extra little bit of extra menace that could be vital against belligerent enemies.

  Black jeans with artfully torn knees that he'd created himself with some careful scissor work, giving them that ‘distressed’ look that somehow cost extra in shops before the apocalypse. With the Steel Skin Enchantment, they darkened to a near-obsidian sheen.

  Black combat boots that were actually practical for fighting and not just aesthetic even before he gave them Force Push, which basically made them into booster boots—he could jump insane heights while wearing them.

  Fingerless gloves with Phantom Hand only seemed practical. A silver chain with an Ankh on the end of it had a Light Burst enchantment in case he needed to temporarily blind his foes. Some new shades permanently enchanted with Soul Vision, so the Spell wouldn’t take up a crucial slot. They were Soul Specs, now.

  And the pièce de résistance: a black leather trench coat that fell to mid-calf, the kind of thing that should have made him look like he was cosplaying Neo from The Matrix but somehow worked once it had been Enchanted with Shadow Stream so darkness billowed out of it.

  The whole ensemble screamed ‘edgelord,’ and John was acutely aware of it. But the thing was, his System rewarded edgelord behaviour. Looking intimidating, dressing dramatically, and playing into the dark antihero aesthetic all fed into his Aura gains.

  John pushed the thoughts aside, refocusing on the town ahead. There'd be time to worry about fashion critiques later. Right now, he had monsters to kill and people to save.

  Below him, the fields gave way to scattered houses, then to denser clusters of buildings. Watford grew in his vision with every wingbeat, steadily expanding from a distant smudge on the horizon. The transition from rural to suburban to urban happened steadily at this altitude, the patchwork of greens and browns giving way to greys and reds and the occasional flash of colour from a still-standing shop sign or painted house.

  From up here, Watford looked like someone had taken a sledgehammer to a scale model of a city. Maybe half the buildings were still standing, and even those were damaged, sporting collapsed roofs, missing walls, shattered windows that gaped like missing teeth. The rest were just rubble, reduced to foundations and debris fields that spread across streets like flood water.

  Fires blazed in scattered locations, sending pillars of smoke up to mingle with the burning sky. Debris was everywhere, coating every surface. Cars were overturned, lampposts bent or toppled, trees uprooted.

  It reminded him of those news reports he'd seen as a kid, footage from war zones. Cities reduced to ruins by artillery and bombs and time.

  He couldn’t decide whether it was just his overactive imagination telling him it looked worse than it had when they’d left. They’d been away for less than a day, all told, but anything could happen when you were facing the apocalypse.

  Soon, the outskirts were beneath them, and John’s Mana Sense radiated out. It flowed over the town and pinged him back with hundreds of signatures within his range of kilometres; the monsters active, as they always were in Watford, sweeping across the landscape and herding victims towards each other. The only reliable way to avoid them was to fly right over.

  Or, John thought with a smirk curling one edge of his lips, you can fucking destroy them all.

  Glancing back at his comrades, he gave them each a nod. They all returned it, then started moving away from him, heading south around the outskirts of the city while he plunged in deeper. They knew their part of this, what they had to do.

  Banking right, he started beating his mighty wings in earnest, pushing himself towards the nearest wave of monsters. A mass of insect monsters was pouring over the town from north to south like a black tide about half a kilometre to the south of his position, and he made a beeline for it.

  Clairvoyance let him project out a massive sphere of heightened senses, and he sent it ahead of him, sweeping it along the route the mass of monsters was taking. It let him see inside ruined buildings, beneath rubble, into any underground spaces anyone could be hiding in. After he’d thoroughly ascertained there would be no collateral damage, he took action.

  Reaching out with splayed fingers, he took aim at the horde of monsters, then made a fist.

  The world turned briefly white as a sphere of pure light erupted into existence at the centre of the horde. The brightness was blinding, more intense than staring directly at the sun. The hellish red sky overhead was completely overpowered, erased by this new and terrible radiance.

  It consumed everything it touched in an instant. The insect monsters and their surroundings vanished, swallowed by the expanding ball of annihilation without any chance to react.

  The light vanished as abruptly as it had appeared with a whump of air that he felt in his chest even from a distance, leaving nothing but perfectly spherical void, a three-dimensional bite taken out of the world. The ground at the bottom of the sphere glowed like metal in a forge, superheated to the point of liquefaction, the earth itself transformed into something that resembled lava. Wisps of smoke and steam rose from the edges where cooler air met the devastated zone.

  +25,000 Aura

  The Aura gain was less than last time, even though the attack shouldn’t have been any less impressive. It wasn’t unexpected, though. He’d realised early on that repeating the same trick came with diminishing returns, and there was no one directly watching him right now. If he wanted more Aura from Supernova, he’d have to escalate his use of it.

  Which seemed a difficult prospect, just looking at the aftermath of his attack. Even from so far, John could feel the heat of it, see the cherry-red glow of the superheated tarmac and earth around the blast zone.

  The Level 9 Spell’s destructive power was just as awesome the second time as the first, but he didn’t linger on it like before. There was a job to do, and he wanted it done fast.

  Mana Sense directed him towards the next nearest wave of monsters, this one moving from east to west across the small industrial estate that was apparently a Warner Bros studio, of all things.

  John quickly delved into his menus on the approach, seeking more firepower that would let him eliminate the enemy without having to slow himself down. Draconic Inferno and Hurricane could have got the job done, but not instantly. He wanted it to be a one shot. The eldritch intelligence directing these waves couldn’t have any chance to adapt to his blitz tactics.

  128,000 Aura wiped out a good two thirds of his remaining total, but he didn’t care. He was planning to earn a lot more over the next few minutes.

  Activating Accelerate, John practically rocketed towards the monster horde, sending Clairvoyance ahead of him to check he was clear to attack. The chitinous tide was swarming across the Warner Bros studio lot like a biblical plague, their insectoid bodies glinting dully in the hellish light. When the chitinous tide was in range, he struck.

  He targeted the centre of the horde, a sphere of space perhaps thirty metres in diameter, and raised his hands to either side of his body. The gesture felt natural, the Spell’s requirements injected into his mind and muscle memory the moment he’d unlocked it. All that remained now was to find out what it actually did.

  John brought his hands together in a thunderous clap that echoed across the ruined industrial estate, and reality compressed to match his movements.

  There was no other word for it. Space itself seemed to fold inward on the targeted area, the air rippling and distorting like heat haze as an invisible force seized everything within that sphere and crushed. The monsters didn't even have time to screech. One instant they were a seething mass of carapaces and legs and mandibles, the next they were crumpled like tin cans in a vice.

  The sound was horrendous. A grinding, crunching cacophony of chitin snapping and flesh pulping. The insects collapsed inward on themselves, drawn to a central point by an impossibly strong gravitational force. Their bodies compressed, reduced to a sphere of organic matter that hovered in midair for a fraction of a second before the Level 9 Spell carried out the second half of its name.

  The mass detonated outward with devastating force, sending shockwaves rippling through the air. The ground cratered beneath the blast point, concrete and tarmac buckling and cracking as if struck by a meteorite. The few monsters at the edge of the sphere who'd survived the initial crushing were flung away like ragdolls, their broken bodies cartwheeling through the air to crash into buildings and vehicles with bone-shattering impacts.

  Dust and debris erupted upward in a mushroom cloud, obscuring the aftermath. When it cleared, the devastation revealed was… impressive. There was nothing left but a crater halfway filled with debris. While Supernova annihilated everything with overwhelming heat, Gravity Bomb was more of a blunt instrument, expelling unbelievable levels of force to unleash devastation on the world. It looked like… well, like a bomb had gone off. A powerful one, made of pure force without any need for the heat of flames, leaving behind a ring of devastation where everything had been scoured clean.

  +40,000 Aura

  John stared at his hands—still held together from the clap—and slowly pulled them apart. The cooldown timer made itself known at the back of his mind. Ninety seconds. A little longer than Supernova, which required about a minute between uses.

  If Supernova was a miniature star, Gravity Bomb was a miniature black hole. The raw power on display was almost obscene. He'd just erased an entire wave of monsters from existence with a gesture, and the Aura gain reflected it.

  But he didn't have time to marvel at his new toy. There were more waves to hunt, more monsters to kill. He needed to keep moving, keep the pressure up, give the monsters' puppet master no time to adapt to his assault.

  Activating Accelerate, John launched himself toward the next concentration of enemies with a beat of his Dragon Wings, a predatory grin spreading across his face. The world blurred around him as his Skill—now Level 7—granted him temporary immunity from the laws of space and time. The town swept past beneath him in a smear of watercolour. Mana Sense pinged another wave ahead, this one sweeping through what looked like a residential area closer to the town centre.

  For days now, he felt like he'd been scrambling, barely surviving, rushing from crisis to crisis with desperation clawing at his heels. Most of his fights had been reactive, defensive, a matter of holding on by his fingernails while the monsters dictated the tempo.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Not anymore. Not with the kind of power he now wielded.

  Now he was the threat. He was the one bringing the fight to them. He was the hunter, and they were the prey.

  The realisation sent a vicious thrill through him, satisfaction that he probably should have been concerned about but couldn't quite bring himself to care. These fucking insects had spent days terrorising this town, herding people like cattle. They'd forced humans into fighting each other for sport, turned his species into entertainment for whatever sick fucks were watching from above.

  Well. Fuck them.

  John dove toward the wave like a bird of prey, Dragon Wings spread wide. Below, the insects were swarming through rows of terraced houses, their black bodies forming a solid mass that devoured the street.

  He pulled up short, hovering perhaps fifty metres above the horde, and sucked in a deep breath. Biomancy flooded his throat, reinforcing his vocal cords, expanding his lung capacity, preparing his body for what came next. The modifications felt weird as hell like always, but it was a distant sensation, pushed to the background by Accelerate's time dilation and his own fierce determination.

  When he opened his mouth, the roar that emerged was inhuman. In another life, it would’ve gotten him a decent job voice acting for ancient eldritch gods in video games. Reality itself seemed to tremble before his fury, the air thinning, making way for Draconic Inferno’s passing.

  White-hot flames erupted from his mouth in a torrential stream, wide enough to engulf the entire street. Insects caught in the beam were reduced to less than ash in an instant. The heat was so intense that the tarmac melted, running like water, and the buildings on either side spontaneously combusted, adding their own mundane flames to his magical inferno.

  He kept it going, the roar continuous, his enhanced vocal cords allowing him to sustain the Spell. The wave of monsters tried to scatter, tried to escape, but there was nowhere to go. He swept the flames left and right, tracking their movements, ensuring not a single insect made it out of the killzone.

  When his lungs finally emptied and the flames cut off, the street below was transformed. Where there had been a seething mass of chitin and malice, there was now only molten rock and dancing firelight.

  +20000 Aura

  John gasped for breath, his throat raw despite Biomancy's protections. The Aura gain was less than the previous attacks—diminishing returns, as expected—but twenty thousand was still a windfall. Every little helped, now, if he was going to grow into the powerhouse he needed to become.

  More than that, though, was the feeling of satisfaction. Deep, visceral satisfaction at wiping out a whole wave in one go. At being the one inflicting destruction for once, rather than fleeing from it.

  His grin widened. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a small voice suggested he was maybe enjoying this a little too much.

  He told that voice to shut up. He had monsters to kill.

  The ensuing minutes blurred together in a montage of systematic devastation. John tore through Watford like a one-man apocalypse, raining destruction from the skies. Supernova came off cooldown, and he used it to vaporise a wave swarming through the football stadium, the blast carving a spherical void into the structure and collapsing one of the yellow-seated stands. Gravity Bomb crushed another horde in the town centre, the explosion sending shockwaves through surrounding buildings and triggering a chain reaction of collapsing structures.

  He mixed up his attacks deliberately, varying his approach to maximise Aura gains. Hurricane sent a wave tumbling through the air like leaves in a storm, their segmented bodies smashing into each other with satisfying crunches. Meteor Strike obliterated a group clustering near the train station, the impact creating a crater that swallowed half a platform. Ultimate Shot, fired rapid-fire during Accelerate, turned individual monsters into explosions of elemental effects—fire and ice and lightning and force all detonating in a light show that lit up the ruined town.

  When he spotted a particularly large concentration near the Warner Bros complex, he mixed up Spells, layering Tornado with Draconic Inferno to create a flaming vortex that swept through the studio lot like the wrath of an angry god. The sight of burning insects being pulled into the sky by the cyclone was grimly beautiful.

  +15,000 Aura

  +18,000 Aura

  +12,000 Aura

  The notifications kept coming, each one feeding his growing Aura total. He was swimming in points now, rich enough to start unlocking the Level 8 Spells he'd been eyeing. The first one he grabbed was Tsunami.

  -64,000 Aura

  The Spell activated when he raised his hands, palms up, as if lifting an enormous weight. Water was summoned from the ground, thousands of gallons rising in a great wall in time with his movement, as if he was lifting it up. When he brought his hands down, the water surged forward with the force of an actual tsunami, tons of watter slamming into the street with enough pressure to shatter windows and buckle walls.

  The insects were swept away like toys in a bathtub, their bodies tumbling and breaking in the churning current. The water rushed down the street, a flash flood that turned roads into rivers and swept debris along with the monsters.

  +28,000 Aura

  Next came Vacuum.

  The Level 7 Spell manifested as a swirling vortex in his palm, a sphere of absolute nothingness that pulled at everything around it with incredible force. John held it for a moment, feeling the suction even through his enhanced grip, then hurled it toward a wave below.

  The Vacuum hit, and it ate at the onrushing horde, collapsing the monstrous formation. Monsters were yanked towards it, unable to resist, their bodies disappearing into the void without a sound. Its radius was only twenty metres, but it moved upon his command, seeping across the line of monsters, consuming the entire column in a span of seconds.

  +24,000 Aura

  John was grinning now, really grinning, lost in the rush of power and the satisfaction of turning the tables on these bastards. He swooped and dove and soared, a dark angel dealing death from above, his dark cape billowing dramatically with every movement.

  Every new Spell was another tool in his arsenal, another way to be creative with his kills, another method of destruction to keep the Aura flowing.

  But the crown jewel—the one that made him actually laugh out loud when he activated it—was Reaper's Gale.

  This one had the most elaborate activation sequence he’d encountered yet. Hovering in the air, he spread his hands to his sides in an angelic pose, then lifted them above his head as if in benediction, palms facing upwards, head bowed. After a moment, the light around him seemed to dim, and he felt something fall into his waiting hands, soft, so light he almost didn’t notice it.

  When he brought it down to eye-level, he was taken off guard. The fact it was a scythe was no surprise, but the look of the thing…

  It looked like it had been forged from moonlight and nightmares. The blade was translucent, ghostly, barely visible except when it caught the hellish skylight just right. The handle was bone-white, wrapped in ethereal cloth that drifted in a wind only it could feel.

  It was, in a word, sick. It somehow went beyond embarrassingly edgy and managed to be cool in a way that even he could appreciate.

  John was testing the weight of it when he spotted a target nearby. A massive wave of monsters was pouring through the shopping centre towards the east of Watford, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, a black tide that seemed to stretch from one end of the shopping district to the other.

  He descended, wings beating powerfully, and when he was perhaps a hundred metres away he brought the scythe back in a wide arc. The motion felt perfect, natural, like he'd been doing this his entire life. When he swung, the blade traced a line through the air that left a ghostly after-image.

  A visible gale swept out from the strike, billowing like mist. But it was wrong, this wind. It made no sound as it rushed through the street. It didn't disturb debris, didn't ruffle clothing or knock over loose objects. The buildings it passed through showed no damage, the ground remained undisturbed.

  The monsters, however, weren’t so lucky. The phantom wind passed through their bodies and pulled something essential out, something all too familiar. Ghostly wisps that might have been souls, or life force, or whatever it was that separated living things from corpses.

  They looked remarkably like the white lights that he’d seen trailing up to the great cores in the portal worlds. Funny, that.

  The insects collapsed in waves, hundreds of them dropping simultaneously as the Reaper's Gale swept through their ranks. It left no sign of external damage at all. The monsters simply became lifeless husks in an instant.

  +25,000 Aura

  +872 Souls

  “Damn,” John whispered, even as the scythe vanished from his hands and the countdown timer made itself known in the back of his mind. Five minutes. The longest he’d encountered so far.

  He stared at the street below, at the carpet of dead monsters, and felt something like awe mixing with his earlier bloodlust. Level 9 Spells were fucking insane.

  After that, he continued his systematic purge of Watford, rotating through his arsenal, combining Spells in creative ways.

  The Aura kept rolling in, even as the gains per attack gradually diminished. 15,000 here, 12,000 there, sometimes dropping as low as 8,000 when he repeated a trick too soon. But it was still an obscene amount compared to what he'd been earning before. He was farming the town, turning it into his personal levelling ground, and the monsters couldn't do a damn thing to stop him.

  But gradually, as the adrenaline high started to fade and the repetition set in, concern began creeping in at the edges of his thoughts.

  He'd been using Clairvoyance constantly, sweeping it across the town with every pass, searching for survivors. Looking inside buildings, beneath collapsed structures, into basements and attics and anywhere someone might be hiding. But he was finding nothing. No people. No signs of recent habitation. Just monsters, monsters, and more monsters.

  Where was everyone?

  Watford had housed tens of thousands before the apocalypse. Even accounting for massive casualties, there should have been someone left. Hundreds of people, at minimum. The town wasn't that small

  But his enhanced senses were finding only emptiness

  John swooped over another residential area, Clairvoyance projected out in a wide sphere ahead of him. He peered through walls, through floors, through rubble. Empty houses, empty streets.

  It was there, a good ten minutes into his assault, that he finally noticed something. It was in what looked like it had once been a shopping centre—one of those mid-sized ones with a supermarket, some clothing stores, maybe a café or two. Most of the structure had collapsed, the roof caved in and the upper floor pancaked onto the ground level. But there was a basement, accessible through what had probably been a service entrance.

  And in that basement, he detected movement. Warmth. People.

  Relief flooded through him so suddenly it was almost dizzying. They were alive. There were survivors.

  John banked hard, angling toward the shopping centre. As he got closer, he focused his Clairvoyance, getting a better sense of the space. Seven people, huddled in what looked like a storage area. They had supplies; he could make out boxes and crates, the shapes of sleeping bags.

  And as his enhanced vision resolved more detail, picking out features in the darkness, his relief transmuted into something more complicated.

  Two of the seven were wearing armor that he recognised instantly. Sleek, golden, polished to a mirror shine. The ponytail-like plumes on their helmets were distinctive even in the dim lighting of the basement.

  The twins. The golden-armoured twins from Curtis's little incident. Part of the five-person death squad that had sought to torture Claire to death to get at her father.

  Oh, for fuck's sake.

  John's wings faltered for a moment as he processed this. Of course they were here.The first survivors he found in Watford just had to have been part of that group. The universe had a sick sense of humour.

  He circled the collapsed shopping centre once, buying time to think. His first instinct was to just... leave. Pretend he hadn't seen them, move on, let them fend for themselves. They'd made their choices. They'd killed a kid. Whatever happened to them now was karmic justice.

  But there were seven people down there. Not just the twins. Five others who, as far as he knew, were innocent. People who might have sought shelter with the twins without knowing what they'd done.

  And John had come to Watford to save people. That was the whole point of this insane plan. Flying in alone, taking on an entire town's worth of monster waves, risking his neck to clear out the threats. If he started picking and choosing who deserved saving based on past actions, where did that end?

  Besides, he thought grimly, they're leaving. One way or another.

  No matter what they thought of the situation, this town was being evacuated. John was clearing it out, and he wasn't about to let people stay behind just because they annoyed him. Doug's group would deal with them later.

  Decision made John angled his wings and dove toward the collapsed shopping centre. He could see the entrance to the basement now, a dark square that led underground.

  Time to see how this played out. He just hoped it wouldn't end with him having to kill someone again.