John stepped through the portal and found himself standing in the front lobby of a nightclub's fever dream.

  The space was small, claustrophobic even, with walls that might have once been painted black but were now covered in pulsing veins of bioluminescent green that traced patterns across the surfaces like diseased circuitry. The floor beneath his boots was sticky, and he really didn't want to think about why. Overhead, dim lights flickered in time with a bass-heavy beat that he could feel as much as hear, a rhythmic thump-thump-thump that reverberated through his chest.

  And there, blocking the double doors that presumably led deeper into the club, stood a group of bouncers. Green-souled, according to the Soul Vision Enchantment on his shades.

  Each one was roughly human-sized, standing upright on their hind legs. Their carapaces were a deep, glossy black that reflected the sickly green light in unsettling ways, and their mandibles clicked rhythmically as they swayed slightly to the muffled music. They wore the bouncer uniform too; black shirts that stretched tight across their chitinous bodies, and what looked like tiny earpieces that served absolutely no purpose whatsoever. He was pretty sure beetles didn’t have ears.

  John stared at them for a long moment, then glanced around the lobby again. A velvet rope cordoned off nothing in particular. A coat check window gaped empty and dark. Posters on the walls advertised events that had never happened and never would: "LARVAE NIGHT. FREE ENTRY BEFORE 11PM" and "DJ SCARAB SPINNING ALL YOUR FAVOURITE HITS."

  He felt something twist in his chest. Bitterness, maybe.

  So this is what the inside of a nightclub looks like, he thought, his jaw clenching against his will.

  He'd never been to one before. Never been invited. Throughout his life, when the few people who tolerated him had gone out clubbing, they'd never once asked if he wanted to come along. He'd told himself he didn't care, that he preferred staying in anyway, that loud music and crowds of drunk people sounded like hell. And maybe that was even true.

  But it still stung, didn't it? To know that he'd never even been given the option. That his first experience of a nightclub was going to be this twisted parody, in the middle of a portal world, about to fight giant insects to rescue someone who'd literally left him to die.

  John took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The beetles hadn't moved yet, still swaying to that bone-rattling bass, but their multifaceted eyes were fixed on him now.

  He rolled his shoulders, settling into his stance, and allowed himself a thin smile.

  "Sorry, lads," he said, having to project his voice with Ventriloquist to across the small space. "But I'm going to be crashing the party."

  +400 Aura

  The beetles surged forward as one, their movements surprisingly coordinated for creatures that should have been mindless. Their mandibles spread wide, revealing rows of serrated edges that could probably bite through steel. The sound of their legs clattering against the sticky floor filled the lobby.

  John didn't bother with anything fancy. He simply activated Aurora Blade and met them head-on.

  The nearest beetle lunged at him, but John was faster. His blade swept up in a diagonal arc, the ghostly northern-lights edge catching the creature across its thorax. Ice crystals bloomed from the point of impact, spreading across the carapace in an instant.

  The beetle's momentum carried it forward for another half-step before the Spell's effects fully kicked in, Dominate rendering it stupefied, and Gravity Snare pulling it down with crushing force. It crashed to the floor with a wet crunch, frozen and flattened simultaneously.

  The second and third came at him from either side, trying to flank him. Amateur hour. John Flash Stepped backward, and the two beetles collided with each other in a tangle of legs and mandibles. While they were sorting themselves out, he brought his blade down in a precise overhead strike, bisecting both of them in a single clean motion. The ice spread quickly, turning them into twinkling sculptures.

  The remaining two showed slightly more intelligence, hanging back and circling him warily. John didn't give them time to formulate any kind of strategy. He lunged forward, closed the distance in a blink, and struck out with two quick slashes. Left, right. Both beetles dropped, their bodies freezing before they hit the ground.

  +2,000 Aura

  John straightened, dismissing Aurora Blade with a thought. The entire encounter had taken perhaps two seconds. The beetles' corpses lay scattered around the lobby, monuments to their brief and pointless existence that would last only a few more seconds before the portal world decided to clean up.

  He turned his attention to the double doors. Through the crack between them, he could see flashing lights—reds, greens, blues, purples—all strobing in chaotic patterns. The bass was louder here.

  John grabbed the handles and threw the doors open.

  The sight that greeted him made him stop dead in his tracks.

  He'd thought the lobby was a twisted parody. This was something else entirely.

  The dance floor stretched out before him, the size of multiple football pitches lashed together, and every single inch of it was on fire.

  Massive flames licked up from the floor itself, great roaring pillars of orange and red that should have been turning everything to ash but somehow weren't. The heat hit him with a wave of scorching air that made his eyes water and his skin prickle.

  And dancing within the flames were the ants.

  Giant ants, each one roughly the size of a basketball player, their bodies segmented and gleaming a deep crimson. But it wasn't their size that made John's brain stutter. It was what they were doing.

  They were dancing. Really, properly dancing.

  One ant near the front was doing what could only be described as the Hustle, its six legs moving in perfect sync with the beat, stepping forward and back and side to side with a fluidity that should have been impossible for an insect. Another was doing the Bus Stop, moving in a tight square pattern, its antennae bobbing enthusiastically. Further back, a cluster of ants were locked in formation, doing a synchronised line dance that would have made any country bar proud.

  One ant was even doing the goddamn Robot, its movements jerky and mechanical. Another was striking pose after pose, each one more dramatic than the last, one arm up, one leg extended, mandibles spread wide.

  And hanging above it all, spinning in lazy circles, were multiple disco balls. Dozens of them, each one throwing fragmenting patterns of light across the inferno below, creating a discombobulating kaleidoscope of colour that made his eyes blur. Blues and purples splashed across the flames. Greens and yellows danced along the ants' carapaces. It was dizzying. Nauseating.

  John stood there, transfixed, trying to process what he was seeing. His mind supplied the word first, then the full realization followed a heartbeat later.

  Fire ants.

  Of course they were fire ants. What else would be dancing in a literal disco inferno?

  The absurdity of it all threatened to overwhelm him. He'd fought monsters before. Plenty of them. Giant spiders and beetle students and nightmare headmasters and all manner of twisted creatures. But this? This was something else. This was the universe taking the piss.

  And then the music registered.

  It had been there all along, of course, pounding through the speakers with bone-shaking intensity. But his brain had been too busy cataloguing the visual nightmare to properly process what he was hearing. Now, though, with his eyes adjusted to the chaos and his initial shock fading, the lyrics finally penetrated.

  "Burn, baby, burn..."

  The voice was deep, with a theatrical quality that sent a chill down his spine despite the oppressive heat. It had a distinctive timbre, aristocratic and menacing, dripping with dark charisma.

  "Burn, baby, burn..."

  John's breath caught. He knew that voice. Or rather, he knew what it reminded him of.

  Christopher Lee. Count Dracula. That particular brand of gothic horror villain who could make even the most ridiculous dialogue sound like Shakespeare. The voice was unmistakable, and it was singing a bastardised version of "Disco Inferno" on endless repeat.

  "Burn, baby, burn... Burn, baby, burn..."

  The ants seemed to love it. They threw themselves into their dance moves with vigour, their legs blurring as they spun and stepped and grooved their way through the flames. One ant executed a perfect spin move, its body rotating a full three hundred and sixty degrees before dropping into a split. Another was doing the Moonwalk, somehow gliding backward across the burning floor.

  John realised he was just standing there, staring, and shook himself. He needed to focus. Farah was somewhere in this madness, dead or alive. He couldn't afford to get distracted by disco-dancing fire ants, no matter how utterly deranged the sight was.

  The ants had noticed him now. One by one, their movements began to synchronise, all of them turning toward the entrance where he stood. Their compound eyes caught the disco ball lights, reflecting them back in a thousand tiny points. And then, as if responding to some unheard signal, they started to boogie menacingly toward him.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  A wave of giant fire ants, each one busting out their best moves as they advanced, getting down and funky while simultaneously radiating murderous intent. One did a series of fancy footwork moves that would have impressed John Travolta. Another was throwing in some robot arms while its legs did a shuffle-step. A third executed a perfect body wave that rippled from its head to its abdomen.

  The absurdity of it all might have made John laugh, if they hadn't also been closing in to kill him.

  He raised his right hand, fingers splayed, and readied Ultimate Shot. But he didn't fire immediately. Instead, he engaged Archmage, that beautiful Skill that let him moderate the component parts of his Combined Spells. Ultimate Shot was a chaotic maelstrom by default, but with Archmage, he could turn it into exactly what he needed.

  John mentally pulled up the sliders and adjusted them to what he needed. He cranked Aqua Shot up to maximum, Flash Freeze to just below that, and dropped everything else to one percent. The fire ants were literally made of flame, or at least surrounded by it. Ice and water were the obvious counters.

  A crystalline spike of frozen water formed above his knuckles, trailing wisps of mist and tiny ice particles. The other aspects were still there—a spark of electricity here, a whisper of necrotic energy there—but they were afterthoughts, barely noticeable.

  John fired.

  The frozen spike struck the lead ant square in the thorax and erupted in a burst of steam and ice. The flames coating its body guttered and died, extinguished by the sudden deluge of freezing water. The ant stumbled, its legs going stiff as frost spread across its joints, and then it toppled forward, frozen solid.

  +1000 Aura

  John didn't stop. He fired again, and again, each shot finding its mark with deadly precision thanks to Marksman and lived experience. The ants tried to dance around his attacks, their movements growing more frantic, but there were too many of them packed too close together. His ice-laden projectiles tore through their ranks, leaving a trail of frozen statues in their wake.

  But for every ant he dropped, another two seemed to emerge from deeper in the inferno, still grooving, still throwing shapes, still advancing with murderous disco intent.

  This is going to take forever at this rate, John thought, already calculating his next move.

  The problem was, he needed to be careful about how he approached this portal, since he couldn't go dropping his Level 9 Spells willy-nilly. Not when Farah might be buried under all this somewhere. Dead or alive. Her corpse had value if he wanted to bring her back, and obliterating her with a Supernova blast would rather defeat the point of this rescue mission, if she was indeed alive in there somewhere. It was possible. She’d basically been made of diamond last time he’d seen her, after all.

  John's Clairvoyance swept across the vast expanse of the dance floor while he fired an endless stream of Ultimate Shots, looking for any sign of Farah. The diamond mannequin form should have been easy to spot, even in this chaos. But there was nothing. No glint of crystalline surfaces, no humanoid shape that didn't belong.

  Which meant she wasn't here. She was somewhere else in the club.

  Good to know, John thought. Time to escalate.

  He'd been holding back, using his lesser Spells to avoid any collateral damage. But if Farah wasn't on the dance floor, that meant he could stop being so careful. It was time to bring out the big guns.

  Or, at least, the medium-sized guns.

  John drew in a deep breath and activated Hurricane.

  The Level 7 Spell roared to life with devastating effect. Wind erupted from John's mouth, expanding outward in a massive spiral that grew larger with each rotation. The flames that had been burning merrily across the dance floor were suddenly torn apart, ripped away by winds that could have stripped paint from buildings. Dozens of ants were lifted off their feet and hurled into the maelstrom.

  They tumbled and spun, their legs flailing uselessly as they were buffeted by forces they couldn't hope to resist. The wind carried them up, up, up, until they were pinwheeling through the air like discarded toys. Then gravity reasserted itself, and they came crashing down, their bodies shattering against the hard floor with wet crunches that John could hear even over the howl of the Hurricane.

  +5,000 Aura

  But the Hurricane wasn't done. It kept spinning, kept growing, tearing chunks out of the walls and ceiling, ripping the disco balls from their moorings and sending them flying like deadly projectiles. One smashed into a support pillar, exploding in a shower of mirror shards. Another crashed through what looked like a DJ booth, demolishing it completely.

  The sheer destruction was intoxicating. John felt a grin tugging at his cheeks even as he kept blowing. After everything he'd been through, it still felt way too good to just let loose on these bastards.

  When the Hurricane finally dissipated, the dance floor was unrecognisable. The flames were gone, snuffed out by the sheer force of the wind. The floor itself was cracked and broken, great chunks of it torn away to reveal the bare earth beneath. Bodies—or rather, body parts—of fire ants were scattered everywhere, their carapaces cracked open like eggs, already in the process of dissolving.

  But John wasn't satisfied yet. He could still see movement in the distance, more ants emerging from doorways and corridors that led deeper into the club.

  He activated Tsunami next.

  John raised his hands slowly, palms up, as if lifting an enormous weight. Water began to rise from nowhere, summoned by the Spell's power, climbing in a great wall that stretched from floor to ceiling. Thousands upon thousands of gallons, defying physics and logic, appearing from the ether.

  When John brought his hands down sharply, the water followed.

  The Tsunami surged forward with the force of a natural disaster, a wall of crushing liquid that obliterated everything in its path. The remaining ants didn't even have time to attempt any fancy dance moves before they were swept away, their bodies tumbling and breaking in the churning flood. The water rushed across the ruined dance floor, sweeping up debris and corpses, turning the entire area into a raging river.

  +12,000 Aura

  The water eventually found its way into drains and cracks in the floor, slowly receding, but the damage was done. Where there had once been an inferno, there was now merely devastation. Soggy, broken devastation.

  But he still wasn't done.

  John activated Earthquake.

  He drove his fist down into the already-weakened ground with all his Strength, letting the Spell flow through him. The vibration started in his arm, then spread outward, growing in intensity with each passing second. The floor began to rumble. Then shake. Then split.

  Massive cracks spider-webbed across the entire area, widening into chasms that swallowed what little remained of the dance floor. The walls started to crumble, great chunks of them falling away. Even the ceiling groaned ominously, sections of it caving in with thunderous crashes.

  John stepped back, admiring the destruction he’d wrought. By the time Earthquake was done, the dance floor section of the nightclub had been reduced to rubble. Complete, total rubble. Nothing remained except broken stone and twisted debris.

  +15,000 Aura

  John stood there for a long moment, catching his breath. Whatever ants had been hiding in the back rooms or side corridors would have either been crushed or driven off by the cascading destruction.

  Now he could move on to the second half of the portal world.

  John picked his way carefully across the rubble, heading toward what he assumed was the back of the club. The destruction he'd caused had revealed doorways and corridors that had been hidden before, and he followed the most obvious path, the one that seemed to lead toward the heart of the building.

  The corridor opened up into a much larger space. It was a performance area, a stage set at one end of a massive room that presumably represented a VIP section or concert hall, with a crowd of a wider variety of bugs dancing along in front of the stage.

  And on that stage was the boss monster.

  It was a dragonfly. An absolutely massive dragonfly, easily the size of a transit van, with four gossamer wings that shimmered with every colour of the rainbow. Its body was a deep, rich purple.

  The portal core floated above the stage, a perfect sphere of sickly green light that pulsed in time with the music that was still somehow playing. Its hourglass iris was transfixed on the boss monster. Scattered around its surface, John could see luminescent white souls being drawn upward in endless trails, absorbing into the core.

  The dragonfly was dancing. It was doing the Hustle, its six legs moving and its wings beating in time with the bass. Every movement was smooth, practiced, groovy. It dipped and swayed and spun, completely absorbed in its performance.

  And there, directly beneath the dancing dragonfly, was Farah's corpse.

  She was still in her diamond mannequin form, that strange body that had replaced her flesh and blood, but it was cracked all over, leaking beads of crimson. The disco ball's light refracted on her glittering skin, creating rainbow patterns on the stage floor. She was positioned like she'd been arranged there deliberately, arms spread, legs together, like some kind of macabre art installation.

  John stared at the scene, his mind churning through his options.

  He could end this right now. One of his Level 9 Spells would obliterate the portal core, the dragonfly, and probably half the building along with it. The portal would collapse, he could step out, tell Daniel and Marius that Farah was beyond recovery, and move on with his life.

  It would be the smart play. The safe play. Why risk fighting a red-souled boss when he didn't have to? Why put himself in danger for someone who'd betrayed him?

  But even as the thought formed, John grimaced. He knew he wasn't going to do that.

  He'd already decided to hand out second chances. To give people opportunities to redeem themselves, even when they didn't necessarily deserve it. Daniel and Marius were out there waiting, and John had told them he'd try to retrieve Farah.

  If her corpse was intact, she could still be brought back. The Revive mechanism cost Souls, and he had plenty of those. Bringing her back would give the trio a chance to make amends, to prove they could be better than what they'd shown in the School portal.

  Besides, John thought, I'm already here. Might as well see this through.

  He stepped forward, his boots crunching on broken glass and debris, and the dragonfly's head snapped toward him. Its movements stopped mid-dance, freezing in place like someone had hit pause on a video. Those bulbous eyes locked onto him.

  Then it spoke.

  "Well, well, well," the dragonfly said, its voice impossibly smooth and languid. It had a distinct swagger to it, all elongated vowels and casual arrogance. "Looks like we got ourselves a party crasher, baby. Real uncool. Real un-groovy."

  The dragonfly's wings buzzed, and it lifted off the stage slightly, still holding its dance pose. "But dig this, man. You just destroyed my whole dance floor out there. My fire ant homies were getting down, and you went and iced them. That's a real bummer, dude. Like, a total buzzkill."

  John didn't respond. He was already calculating angles, measuring distances, considering which Spells would be most effective against a flying target with red-soul durability.

  The dragonfly seemed to take his silence as an invitation to continue. "But hey, I'm a groovy cat. I can forgive. We all make mistakes, right? So here's what's gonna happen." It gestured with one of its legs toward Farah's corpse. "You're gonna turn around, walk away, and let me finish my performance. I got a vibe going here, and you're really harsh in' my mellow."

  It spun in place, executing a perfect pirouette. "And if you don't? Well, then I'm gonna have to groove you into the ground, daddy-o. So what's it gonna be, square? You gonna be cool? Or are we gonna have to boogie down?"

  John looked at the dancing dragonfly, at Farah's corpse, at the pulsing green portal core above. He thought about Daniel and Marius waiting outside. He thought about second chances and redemption and all those complicated, messy human emotions that made him do stupid things.

  Then he cracked his knuckles.

  "Let's dance," John said.

  +3,000 Aura