Chapter 71: Level Eleven

Michael had been hearing it for a while without really hearing it.

Somewhere underneath the sound of the fight — underneath Johannes typing out Mistelbach's numbers, underneath the low hum that had run through his own body while the points went into his stats one at a time — there had been a sound that was familiar but unfamiliar at the same time, isolated, sharp, spaced out. A crack, then nothing, then another crack a some seconds later. He'd registered it as gunfire without ever stopping to think about what that meant.

*Police, maybe? Did they finally show up to help?*

He looked out across the square again, scanning the fighters properly this time. No uniforms. No rifles slung over shoulders, no tactical gear, nobody moving in the kind of formation actual officers would have used. Just the same mix of ordinary people in ordinary clothes that had been out here the whole time.

*Is it a skill, then?*

Before he could get any further with the thought, the sound came again — closer this time — and he finally saw where it was coming from.

It was that guy. Michael watched him for a second before the rest of it caught up: it had been five, maybe six hours since the system arrived, since any of them had touched a weapon or a skill or a talent for the first time in their lives. And this man was already handling his like he'd been born with it. *And I thought I was doing well.*

It was Jakob.

He stood well past the rest of the group, alone in a stretch of street littered with broken glass and the burnt-out shells of two cars.

He shaped the fingers of his right hand into something close to a pistol — whether out of habit, showmanship, or because the skill genuinely demanded the gesture, Michael couldn't tell — lined up on a monster some meters out, and fired. Something left his hand at a speed nothing human should have been able to track, closer to a gunshot than anything thrown or swung, and it hit the monster square in the chest and detonated. The whole thing looked absurd and looked incredible at the same time. It was also brutally effective. Anything under level five that caught one of those center-mass just stopped existing, the explosion doing the rest of the work a blade would have needed several strikes for. If it was powerful enough to bring down something stronger, Michael didn't know yet. But even against something tougher, that much force landing in one place wasn't going to be a small wound — the kind that opened flesh down to bone in a single point of impact, cauterized black at the edges from whatever the shot was actually made of.

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Watching him, it looked like Jakob could have handled the whole horde by himself — assuming his mana held out.

It didn't look like mana was a problem for him either. Which meant he'd almost certainly done exactly what Michael had just done behind that burned-out car: dumped his own free points straight into his reserves the first chance he got. He was the only one standing that far out, alone, deep enough into the fighting that nobody else was within ten meters of him. Just like Michael did in the Audimax. Was he imitating Michael? Maybe, but Michael would never know.

Jakob clearly walked away from whatever formation the group had started with. From a distance it looked reckless — like he'd left the others to fend for themselves and gone off on his own.

The truth was closer to the opposite. He was absorbing more than half the pressure on that side of the square by himself, monster after monster turning toward the one person making the most noise and doing the most damage instead of spreading out through the crowd. Around him, people who would otherwise have been fighting for their lives were instead helping drag the wounded back toward the building, or catching their breath against a wall for the first time in what was probably hours. He was the reason they had that breathing room. Which also meant he was taking almost all the kills, and all the experience that came with them — far more than Michael could count from here, and more than Michael had any way of knowing.

What none of them could see was exactly how far it had already carried him and how high his Level already got. Jakob's Status Window now showed Level eleven. Three levels higher than Michael himself, and still climbing with every kill he added alone.

He walked through the wreckage of the street calm, unhurried, like none of this cost him anything. Michael barely recognized him. A few hours ago this same person had been swinging his spear wildly at nothing in particular, too panicked to land a hit. Now a monster broke from the pack toward him — something deer-shaped, long-legged, moving fast, Level 5 by the size of it — and the old Jakob would have either bolted or flailed the spear in front of him and hoped.

But this Jakob was totally different. Not only his demeanor but also his actions. He raised his hand calmly again, and pointed his index finger at the thing while it closed the distance. He waited. Let it get closer than it needed to. And then —

*BOOM.*

The shot caught it mid-stride and the monster screamed, a sound that had nothing animal left in it. It didn't drop the way the weaker ones had. It kept coming, one leg buckling, blood pouring from a wound that had opened most of its chest cavity. Jakob had clearly expected that. He stepped into it as it stumbled past him and drove his spear straight through the ruined opening the shot had left behind, all the way, the point coming out the other side in a spray of dark blood. The deer-thing's legs gave out mid-stride and it went still.

[You have killed a Thorn Stag (Level 5)]

[You have received 250 Experience Points]