Chapter 55: Not Alone

*Jakob's group, moving out from the university*

Twenty-five of them had split off from the rest, organized into five formations of five, each one built around a name that already meant something after the fighting at the Audimax gate. Jakob led the group from the front. Behind him, spread wide to cover the flanks and the rear, came Elena Petrova, Mei-Ling Zhou, Konstantin Gruber, and Elena Becker, each with four Level 2 fighters falling in around them, spears gripped a little too tightly. It wasn't much of a professional formation but it was better than nothing. Contrary to them the monsters followed no formation but run towards them without any plan, only relying on their bestial instincts.

The street hit them the moment they left the others and come to the open street.

Monsters were everywhere — not hunting in the abstract, theoretical way the group had braced themselves for on the way out, but actively running people down in the open, dragging some of them off mid-scream, tearing into others where they'd already fallen and hadn't gotten back up.

There were not many survivors on the streets left but some managed to survive and were running for their lives. Contrary to Jakobs group, they were not even trying to fight back.

The smell reached the group before most of the details did, copper and rot layered over the cold night air. The human formation went sick, a ripple of held breath and turned stomachs passing down the line, the fighters suddenly looking a lot younger than they had a minute ago. But underneath the nausea, something else caught fire just as fast. Rage. Cold, immediate, and impossible to talk down.

Jakob reached the first monster before anyone could tell him to wait. His anger was boiling because of the horrific sight. He couldn’t wait, he needed to let it all out.

He didn't remember deciding to use it. One second he was closing the distance, spear low, and the next his mana was already pouring out of him in a single furious pulse — his Skill *Explosive Strike* detonating outward from the point of impact and tearing the creature apart in a wet, concussive burst that threw fragments of it several meters across the asphalt. The shockwave rattled through his own ribs, ears ringing, a hot rush of satisfaction burning through the anger for exactly one second before the dread caught up with it. He'd let the anger carry him further than he meant to, dumping far more mana into the release than a single kill had ever actually required.

That wasn't the problem, though. He still had a lot left.

The problem was the noise. A blast like that didn't just kill one monster — it announced their exact location to every other one within earshot, and out here, earshot was apparently very, very far. Already, shapes further down the street were turning, breaking off from whatever they'd been doing, drawn by the sound like iron filings snapping toward a magnet.

Every monster in sight and even more were alerted. It was not about if they would come but how fast.

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*Fuck,* he thought, already scanning the shifting mass of silhouettes reorienting toward them.

„Get ready!“ he shouted back at his formation, voice cracking with the effort of staying controlled. He sighted the next monster closing in and this time held back, drawing on nothing but his base talent instead of the skill — the same ability, scaled down to something quieter and far cheaper. The spear's tip met the creature's hide and released a narrow, focused pressure wave straight through it. No firey blast, no light, just pure pressure that struck the monster head on, reaching even its organs. The monster was knocked off his feet and thrown backward. It landed heavily on the ground some meters away, not moving. He used quite less mana and achieved a far better result but it was already too late to regret his previous mistake.

„Go!“ Jakob screamed, and threw himself at the next one before it had finished falling.

His formation surged in behind him, four Level 2 fighters with nothing but spears and momentum, throwing themselves into monsters they couldn't kill nearly as cleanly as Jakob could. Where his talent dropped something in a single controlled strike, theirs took two, three, sometimes four clumsy hits from multiple angles before a creature finally went still, ash-wood shafts skidding off hide that hadn't been softened by anything as elegant as a pressure wave. But for now, at least, the numbers worked in their favor — five against one, five against two — and one by one, snarling and stumbling and shouting instructions at each other, the monsters in front of them stopped moving.

The other formations weren't far behind.

Elena Petrova and Mei-Ling Zhou both fought without any offensive talent of their own, which put them, by unspoken agreement, further back in the group's overall formation — close enough to support, far enough that fewer monsters found their way to them first. They fought the same way as the recruits around them with no talents; spear-first, no shortcuts, just repetition, timing, and trading blows with anything that got close enough and trusting the formation around them to close the gaps.

Konstantin's formation moved faster than anyone else's. His talent didn't hit hard on its own, but it didn't need to — a fraction-of-a-second freeze at exactly the right moment, applied to a monster mid-lunge or mid-turn, was enough to let his people land finishing blows that would have missed a fully mobile target entirely. A monster would lock mid-stride, claws still raised, and before it could so much as blink back into motion, two spears would already be through it. Under his direction, his formation was already tearing through its section of the street at a pace the others couldn't match. Their formation relied heavily on teamwork.

Elena Becker's fighting style was totally different. Her talent threw out a perfect illusion of her strike a fraction before the real one landed — an identical phantom blow that monsters instinctively moved to block or dodge, opening exactly the angle her actual spear thrust needed a heartbeat later. Over and over, monsters twisted to defend against an attack that was never going to land, only to take the real one somewhere they hadn't been guarding at all, throats and joints and unarmored flanks opening up beneath spearpoints that shouldn't have found them so easily. Contrary to Konstantin Elenas talent was not meant for a teamfight. Her teammates had no other choice and fought on their own, relying only on their spears. Elena was still not entirely useless for them. They could still rely on her and that no monster would approach them from her side. She reduced the pressure by a large margin.

For all of it — Jakob's raw power, Konstantin's teamwork, Elena's solokills, the sheer stubborn nerve of the Level 2 fighters holding the line between them — twenty-five people were never going to be enough against the hundreds of monsters flooding this stretch of the city. Not on their own, and not for long, no matter how many of the things they managed to drop one at a time.

But they weren't on their own.

A short distance away, past the edge of the group's formation and the wreckage littering the street between them, other survivors had already thrown themselves into their own fight against the same tide. Rashid was there. Maximilian too, at the head of a group of their own, already deep in a similar formation.