Chapter 68: Not the Only Ones

Michael kept moving.

The lesson from the reptile stayed with him — not fear, exactly, but a new weight behind every decision. When the next monster came at him, a Hound-Fox no different in size from the dozen he’d already killed, he still let it close the distance and still cut it down with a single pass of the blade. His status sense had already told him what it was: Level 3, nothing close to what had almost taken his head off. He didn’t relax anyway.

[You have killed a Hound-Fox (Level 3)]

[You have received 50 Experience Points]

Two more of the same came at him from a side street, close enough together that he had to commit to one before dealing with the other, and for a moment he thought about the crawler again — about how fast something could change its decision mid-strike. Neither of these did. They ran straight and died straight, one gutted as it passed him, the other caught across the throat before it finished turning.

[You have killed a Hound-Fox (Level 3)]

[You have received 50 Experience Points]

[You have killed a Hound-Fox (Level 4)]

[You have received 100 Experience Points]

The fourth thing was bigger, built low and wide with a shell along its back that clicked when it moved, many legs ending in something between claws and hooks. It was Level 4 too. He didn’t rush it. He let it close, watched how its legs worked before committing to anything, and when it lunged he stepped past instead of through, driving the sword up under the shell where the plating gave way to softer flesh. It took a second strike to finish — the first one hadn’t gone deep enough — and for half a breath its legs kept scrabbling at the ground even after the second blow opened it from underneath.

[You have killed a Chitin Strider (Level 4)]

[You have received 100 Experience Points]

Ten monsters since he and Julian had set out again. He hadn’t been counting on purpose, but the number sat there anyway, somewhere behind the exhaustion starting to build in his arms.

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Julian caught up to him a few minutes later, breathing hard but moving easier than he had all night, some of the color back in his face. He didn’t call his summon back out.

[Ding! You have leveled up]

[Congratulations! You have reached Level 7. All baseline attributes have automatically increased by +1 point. You have received 5 attribute points and 1 skill point]

„Three,“ Julian said, before Michael could ask. „That’s all I managed while you were doing that.“ He didn’t sound bothered by it. If anything he sounded like he’d stopped keeping score somewhere along the way.

The level-up brought back Julian’s confidence but more important was that his mana was back. All of it. For the first time in what felt like hours, he wasn’t running on empty, and he didn’t waste it now. There was no reason to call the summon back. What they needed was already ahead of them.

The first thing they registered were the noises — shouting, metal on bone, something screaming that wasn’t human. After a few more steps, they could finally see what they were hearing. A hundred people, maybe more, spread across the open square in front of a building Michael recognized from a dozen ordinary days that felt like they belonged to someone else’s life.

The human group was not alone. Monsters were everywhere among them, and people were fighting back.

He scanned the crowd immediately, looking for faces he knew before he’d even decided to look. It was the first time since the portals opened that he’d seen this — not a handful of people running together, not two of them alone in the dark, but something closer to a battle, closer to a small scaled war. He understood, watching it, that this was probably going to be normal from now on. Not today only but every day and night.

Most of them still carried the basic spears the system had handed out to everyone. But not all of them fought like it. One woman closed the space in three steps that shouldn’t have been possible for a human body, gone before Michael’s eyes had finished tracking the movement. Somewhere near the center of the square, a monster came apart in a burst of light and force that could only have been an explosion skill, throwing two smaller creatures off their feet along with it. Debris lifted off the ground near another fighter and hung there for a half-second before snapping forward like it had been thrown — no wind behind it, nothing physical driving it, just something reaching out and moving matter because it wanted to.

One man got bitten to the shoulder. Michael expected a deep wound but the man didn‘t even stagger, his spear already swinging back around. Michael watched him take a second hit. It was claws this time, raking across his forearm but again without so much as opening the skin properly. *That has to be a body talent. Nothing else explains it.*

A woman nearby was swinging her spear in wide, careless arcs. It seemed that she wasn’t trying to kill anything. She was more interested in landing a hit than opening a wound, and that was already enough. Every monster she touched staggered afterward, muscles locking up for a full second or two before it could move again. Long enough for someone else to finish it.

„It’s already starting,“ Michael said, mostly to himself. „We’re not the only ones anymore. The change is beginning.“

„It was always going to,“ Julian said. „Reaching level three isn’t hard. All of humanity — the part of it that survives — is going to awaken talents eventually. I still don’t know how they’re assigned. Which means someone out there could awaken with something monstrous, and we’d have no way of knowing until it happened. Nothing about this is safe.“

Despite the chaos of it — the noise, the blood, the dying — there was order underneath. People fell back when they were hurt and others closed the gap behind them without being told. Nobody broke and ran. Somebody out there was directing this, even if Michael couldn’t see who it was yet.

Then he found the faces he’d been looking for. Jakob, near the far edge of the fighting, shouting something to the people around him. Matteo a few meters from him, spear moving in short, practiced strokes. Others he recognized in pieces — a jacket, a way of standing, a voice carrying over the noise.

He started moving toward them.