With every new street, city block and possible chokepoint that their group passed unmolested and entirely unopposed, Mia’s initial wariness grew into a mighty paranoia.

  Except, paranoia was an unfounded fear of something going wrong. Mia’s disquiet might have stemmed from a gut feeling, or perhaps even some slight dusting of trauma from the last few weeks’ events. However, logic supported it, and the others shared her sentiments.

  The enemy was pulling away their monsters and any proper beastkin forces they might have had in the area for some reason. Likely, to gather a force large enough to oppose the one Mia and company were part of. Any moment now …

  Mia kept her Arcane Shield spell up at all times and held it aloft to cover her head and most of her torso from the front. Sparkle was back on scouting duty, even if he whined about wanting to recharge a bit more.

  “One sniper down,” Helene called out, startling everyone within earshot. Mia whirled on her mother, eyes wide and almost frantic. Nearly two hours of suspense, fraught with premonitions of danger, had left her nerves a bit frayed. “Two of the support squad got hit too, though they are just temporarily paralysed. Three more remain. They are on the fifth floor, in the rightmost apartment of that building on the corner.”

  Right. Her Storm Sprite probably blasted the sniper into the afterlife with a point-blank lightning strike. If the sniper had been the only one capable of causing harm from that far away, they were safe-ish for now, but it’d have been stupid to let down their guard.

  “Are they attacking or retreating?” Brent asked.

  “Neither, they are trying to grab the three I hit,” Helene said with a clear note of discomfort in her voice, and Mia noted that her mother had carefully avoided saying that she’d killed the sniper outright. “T- my Sprite is holding them off for now, but one of them put up a barrier which grounds his lightning, so he can’t do more.”

  Mia moved over, just lingering close to her mother, and gave her hand a reassuring squeeze when Brent nodded and turned away to bark orders at the quickest members of the group.

  “I’m fine,” Helene said softly and gave Mia a soft smile. “You don’t need to worry about me, sweetheart."

  She totally did, but she knew saying that aloud would not be especially well-received. So Mia nodded, but only to pull her mother into a quick side hug before peeling away. They didn’t have the time for anything more, and the group set off at a jog towards the building, trying to cut off the beastkin’s retreat.

  The three who remained in a combat-capable state took a bit too long to come to the decision to leave their wounded behind, and by then, Mia’s group was surrounding the building.

  They tried to escape through the roof. One of them was apparently some kind of avian bloodline with large feathered wings, and he gave an honest attempt to carry his fellows to safety. Lina slapped him out of the sky like he was an oversized mosquito, though she did soften the landing enough so they survived the six-story fall with only a few broken bones.

  “Do we gotta waste health potions on them?” One of the soldiers murmured, and his sergeant whirled on him with a thunderous frown.

  “The world might have gone to shit, but it won’t make war-criminals out of us,” he barked, stomping over to the private who spoke up. “Private Hoffman, you earned yourself two subsequent babysitting shifts for that remark. Second Lieutenant Braum, go with the stupid brat and tend to our prisoners of war.”

  “Yes, Captain!” another man, presumably Braum, said and snapped off a salute. Meanwhile, Mia was staring at the man who was apparently not a sergeant. Why did she even think he was a sergeant?

  Was it because he had that drill sergeant voice from the movies? Way to go, me. Mia wondered, feeling a bit ashamed of herself. She still didn’t know his name. She really needed to pay more attention to the people around her; it couldn’t be good for her mental health to focus solely on her goals with tunnel vision.

  Mia took a deep breath, taking the momentary pause in their advance while the soldiers carted the prisoners away to circulate her mana. It was one of the simpler meditation exercises aimed at calming the mind and granting it clarity, especially when paired with the breathing technique and the kata form that accompanied it. Mia had to forgo the meditative combat dance, but the other two she could do, and she felt some of the dark shadows clinging to her mind retreat. Not fully, and not especially much, but enough to help her centre herself.

  They advanced a bit further, a bit less than halfway to the location of the last Rift still ahead of them, when the afternoon turned into dusk, and they decided to stop for the day. Most of Mia’s group pulled back, holding up in random apartments and setting up the defences for the night. The soldiers were all swapped out for well-rested ones, and Jeff’s group took over from the larger gathering of Raiders Mia was a part of. They wouldn’t advance further while it was dark, but they would be on standby in case the beastkin mounted an offensive under the cover of darkness.

  Mia stayed up a bit late, but despite her slightly bloodshot eyes, she had a wide grin on her face. She finally got it. All the stupid runes she needed for upgrading her Spectral Blade spell were sitting idly in her runic-model. All it took was a few days with the help of her fancy witch hat and some sleep deprivation.

  Still, it was worth it. Her conjured Blade finally had an edge enhanced with Chaos-aspected arcane mana, which would vastly increase its cutting ability. The original version was sharp, but there was nothing magical about that sharpness; it did the same damage as a steel sword. Now, she could cut through things with much greater ease, and that went doubly so for spells and magical constructs, due to the Chaos aspect’s mana-disruptive qualities.

  As she was lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, she found her thoughts whirling despite her physical exhaustion. She wondered which spell she should work on next, or whether she wanted to swap out one of her current spells for a new one.

  Blunted Bolt was useful for nonlethal takedowns and had its uses in more serious fights, as her sparring sessions with Camie had shown. It was good to have something with a larger area of effect; it made herding your enemy around easier, or forcing them to keep their distance. Still, she’d been wanting Mage Armour for a while. Perhaps it was time.

  Then she checked her spell list just before passing out and realised she still had both Mage Hand and Arcane Explosion in her Spell Tome. She fell asleep feeling rather silly and decided she’d axe either of those two. She couldn’t remember either of them ever being useful, so they were heading for the chopping block.

  Whichever one she didn’t choose, she would axe next when she finally had some damned free time to do the stupid Ritual. She had all the reagents and runes; she just needed a day or two to set it up and then cast it. But no. The stupid Werewolf King and his stupid monsters were being stupid, and she had to beat some sense into them.

  The next morning, they got ready, had some breakfast and then the group from yesterday was reassembled with a new addition.

  “Clive?” Mia asked, and the tall man gave a brittle smile. He looked horrible, with sunken, bloodshot eyes, hair wild as a bird’s nest, and his clothes still caked in the grime of the Raid.

  “Sorry for disappearing on you,” Clive said, his voice tinged with some guilt. “I- they are dead. They killed my brother and his wife. I … I had to take care of my niece.”

  “Who?” Brent asked, his voice low and carefully neutral.

  “Who?” Clive gave a humourless chuckle. “Those damned monsters these bastards let loose. Dragged them away to feed their Broodmother is what the military types told me. The little one only survived because she has a Class that lets her bury herself underground like a mole.”

  Mia grimaced but stayed silent. She didn’t trust herself not to put her foot in her mouth if she opened it.

  “Our condolences,” Brent said. “What can we do to help?”

  “Let me help kill that bastard,” Clive growled. The jovial man Mia knew was gone, leaving behind a revenant driven by rage.

  Brent frowned and stared at the man. Mia saw the moment he made the decision to be blunt and a voice of reason, even if it got him punched in the face. “And let you get yourself killed? To leave your niece alone?”

  Clive’s nostrils flared in anger, but he visibly restrained himself and took a deep breath. “I need to make sure the ‘evil monsters’ can’t come back to torment her. I promised. Brent. I promised. Don’t take this away from me.”

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  Brent stared at him for a long few seconds, face carefully devoid of emotion, and Clive stared back with a steely gaze filled with determination, daring the other man to deny him.

  In the end, Brent gave a reluctant nod. “On the condition that you rest, Zeigler’s alchemists cook up sedatives that knock you out even if you can’t fall asleep otherwise. You will drink that if you must, you will be more baggage than help in the state you are in.”

  Clive frowned, but gave a reluctant nod of his own after blinking blearily at the people gathered behind Brent. “Fine.”

  He turned and left, almost stumbling from the uneven gait his massive tower shield forced on him.

  Helene spoke up once he was out of earshot. “Was that wise? To let him fight in that state?”

  “He would have fought regardless,” Mia found herself saying, then started shifting uncomfortably under her mother’s stare. “It’s what I would have done, if- if you died. At least this way, Brent made sure he’d be in a state to be a help and to fight within a somewhat stable structure.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Brent said, sounding weary as he shook his head. “Well, that’s done with. Let’s get to work, yes?”

  Mia nodded when he glanced at her, and then they were off. Her initial glee at getting to test her new and improved spell was much diminished after that encounter, leaving only a colder determination to see this mini-war end before it could tear apart more families and traumatise more children.

  *****

  This new day was quickly turning out to be much more intense and action-filled than the one preceding it. The Sun was only reaching its zenith up in the sky above, and yet Mia’s group had to fend off no less than five probing attacks.

  Two more snipers, both of whom Sparkle sniffed out in time. Two monster ambushes led by burrowing worm-like creatures that opened passages for their kin. And a final aerial assault was done by a large group of flying beastkin.

  In all honesty, that last one turned out to be the easiest to beat back. Helene had been on overwatch, using her own white-feathered wings to fly while the two Sprites circled around. The aerial attack had been detected almost as soon as the beastkin flew above the canopy up on the Werewolf’s hill.

  They were quickly forced to learn that flying too close together was a death sentence when Helene released a massive bolt of lightning that struck them from a hundred metres away and chained through ten of their members. None of them died from the hit, but the ones whose teammates were too slow to catch them certainly did when their paralysed bodies splattered across the pavement. The ones that Helene didn’t take down, Lina did. The Aeromancer was finally in her element, fending off flying foes, and she was clearly pleased by being able to make her abilities shine despite the grim task.

  Mia’s Spectral Blade spun forth, spinning so swiftly it looked more like a murderous pink disk to the naked eye. The worm monster — an Evergreen Tunneler according to the Kill Log — didn’t see it coming, erupting from the middle of the road and showing its ugly mug for all the world to see. It looked like a massive lamprey with a tube-like body, a front-facing, wide-open mouth, and a circular jaw filled to the brim with teeth that were even now chewing through fist-sized chunks of rock and asphalt.

  The Spectral Blade went right through it, entering through the jaw and coming out through the back of what was probably its head. There was no resistance; the spinning blade went through it like the monster wasn’t even there. Then again, it was just a Level 10 monster. Sure, it was big and ugly as sin, but it was super specialised for its sole task: digging. Meanwhile, Spectral Blade was now a legitimate Rank 1 spell, not just an up-scaled Rank 0 spell like it had been thus far.

  Its momentum carried it a bit onwards, but not enough for its hindquarters to fully exit the tunnel it had made, which neatly blocked the exit of said tunnel and trapped the other monsters Mia could sense charging behind it.

  ‘Sparkle?’ Mia sent.

  ‘On it.’ The Sprite chirped, already down in the tunnel as he zipped around, picking apart the magical weave maintaining the tunnel’s structure as he had done so before. ‘Found it. Send the Blast!’

  Mia did just that, conjuring the spell and letting it zip across her Bond and erupt out of Sparkle’s floating form. It struck a node in the weave of the earth magic webbing across the tunnel’s walls, and the Chaos-aspected explosion thrummed into it, its very nature destabilising the local weave. The magical structure collapsed as the node vanished, and the tunnel followed behind it not a moment later, burying dozens of monsters in an earthen grave.

  A pleased smirk flickered across Mia’s lips as she felt the monsters’ repugnant presences be snuffed out in quick succession. Her expression fell when three of them refused to fade even after a whole minute has passed since she collapsed the tunnel on top of their heads.

  “Three survived!” Mia called out, making the few people already relaxing tense right back up. “Two Level 13s and a Level 16, that one’s probably an Elite too.”

  This was the third monster ambush today, and it was by far the one with the most monsters and the most Rank 1 monsters in it to boot.

  And I just crushed the ambush in its crib. Mia thought with grim satisfaction, even as she refocused on the task at hand. There were still monsters to kill, so she couldn’t relax.

  The earth rumbled, and the middle of the road caved in, collapsing on top of the caved-in earth that was no longer supporting it. Taking that as the signal, all three monsters started moving.

  “They are coming,” Mia said, mostly to herself. Anyone with a working pair of ears could hear the oversized murderous plants digging their way through the earth.

  The strongest of the three came first, bursting through the surface of the caved-in road. Mia’s eyes widened a little at the monster, though she didn’t miss a step in twisting the spell-circle affixed around her wrist with a mental yank. Her Spectral Blade, still spinning at the edge of its range behind the monster, began its rapid dash back to the hand of its mistress.

  The green tentacle-monstrosity from hentai-hell — or heaven if you were an absolute degenerate — stepped forward, its bulky frame causing a slight rumble to ripple across the ground as it did. It looked like Cthulhu’s vegan little cousin, with empty black eyes, a bald head and a massive beard of writhing tentacles covering its entire torso.

  It raised an arm, an arm which ended in five more green tentacles where fingers should have been. They reached forward like green serpents, snapping towards the nearest combatants just when the Spectral Blade struck, crashing into the creature from behind.

  Mia felt the spell circle around her wrist stutter, and she instinctively clenched her will down on the spell weave in an attempt to keep it intact. It worked. The Blade cut through the monster that was the size of an elephant standing upright, with the matching width to boot.

  The Spectral Blade snapped into Mia’s open palm, and she wiped a bit of sweat from her brow, though she grinned nonetheless as a massive arm thudded to the ground and viscous black liquid seeped from a massive horizontal cut along the monster's side.

  Mia was far from the only combatant, however, and none of the others hesitated to throw the best they had at the strongest monster they had faced all day. A hail of exploding bullets — which Mia had learned were in short supply due to having to be made by an Enchanter instead of a simple Skill — landed on the monster, scorching some tentacles hanging from its face and even managing to detach some of them.

  Lightning bolts, lances of Blood, spikes of Earth, missiles made of Fire and all sorts of other elemental attacks struck the Elite monster in quick succession. It stumbled back, collapsing to a knee as its green skin was burned away and oily black blood seeped forth. It gave Mia a creepy feeling.

  “Don’t touch the black stuff!” She shouted, hoping she’d be listened to. If she wasn’t, it was up to them. That stuff felt almost like liquid miasma, which couldn’t be healthy to anyone around it.

  The second monster chose that moment to show up, emerging from the same collapsed section of the road. It was one of those freaky four-eyed gorilla-things, though the System branded them an ‘Evergreen Brute’.

  Mia was happy to see that one of its arms was mangled beyond repair, hanging limply at its side as the creature ambled forward. There was also a sizable chunk of concrete protruding from the side of its head, which looked rather unhealthy.

  The Spectral Blade flew at it, ripping through the air and then all but bisecting it, only getting stopped by its spine. Mia grimaced, glancing down at the stuttering spell circle around her wrist, and then yanked the Blade back into her hand.

  Fully bisected or not, the monster flopped forward and collapsed, then its miasmic presence popped like an overblown balloon. The kill wasn’t as clean as she would have liked, but dead was dead.

  The third monster was in an even worse state when it emerged, crawling along on its two massive arms, each clenched into a fist. It was missing everything from the waist down, though it was somehow still moving forward. A well-placed shot with an exploding bullet neatly solved that issue.

  Not that it stopped other fighters from letting loose their own attacks, making sure a dozen times over that the monster was truly dead, and that it would be staying that way. That left Budget Cthulhu once again on its lonesome.

  “The bastard’s healing!” One of the soldiers shouted, and Mia snapped her gaze back onto the monster. She was just in time to watch on in horror as the oily black blood hardened into a carapace, then shattered to reveal a perfectly healthy monster. It even had its arm back, and the large slash Mia had left on its side was gone, too.

  However, its miasmic presence had shrunk by a noticeable margin. “It lost a Level for that stunt!”

  Mia never knew there were Skills that could sacrifice Levels to achieve things beyond one’s ability, but maybe it was a monster-only ability that could not be powered by non-broken mana.

  “Keep up the assault!” Brent bellowed. “It’s tough, but it bleeds, it will die like the rest!”

  It would just take some time. Mia stepped back and dismissed the frayed spell structure of her Spectral Blade, taking a second or two to check over her spell circle and then recast it. If it broke on her, the resulting backlash might knock her out of the fight. It was better to err on the safe side.

  She gripped her newly formed blade in one hand, the other still holding an Arcane Shield up to cover her head as she stepped back into the fray. Things had been a bit hectic and filled with combat today, but overall … they had been going pretty well. Nobody had died on their side yet, not even among the soldiers sent to supplement and shore up their numbers. Victory seemed to be a done deal, just a day or two more of slogging through the streets and beating down whoever stood in their way.

  So, of course, Mia’s anxiety was spiking as her paranoia ran wild. Which was why she had Sparkle still out scouting in a wide circle around the fight and why she was the first to learn of the incoming force of beastkin heading their way. At its head was a werewolf standing head and shoulder above even the second-largest beastkin.

  Above his head floated a crown made of pure Darkness, and he rode on a massive quadrupedal Evergreen monster.

  Mia, strangely enough, felt more relieved than anything. Her paranoia had once again proven to be entirely warranted, so it was just well-deserved caution, not paranoia. She wasn’t paranoid. If that bastard is not the Werewolf King, I’m eating my hat.

  She had a target, knew the trap, so she could start planning around now. Just waiting for the other shoe to drop had been incredibly grating on the nerves, so Mia was hit by a massive second wind as she stared down at the bastard who started it all through Sparkle’s eyes. I will kill you.

  If anyone deserved to be murdered in cold blood, it was this furry mutt, thinking himself king while acting like a common bandit.

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