“Ow.” Isaac grumbled as he woke back up, draped over the side of the couch in an uncomfortable posture that could have easily caused back problems in a normal person.

Normal was however not a qualifier that could really be applied to him anymore.

A glance at the window revealed that it was still in the middle of the night and Isaac wasn’t entirely sure what had woken him. It clearly hadn’t been the light of dawn or his alarm clock and he’d been sleeping like that for the entire night, so something else was clearly at work here.

Isaac stood bolt upright, knife flashing out of its sheath at his belt as he looked around, silently stalking through his apartment. He’d spent years essentially at war and gotten pretty sensitive to disturbances, making it entirely possible that something had happened but only been noticed by his subconscious.

He ended up making three rounds through his apartment, checking every door and window for signs of a break-in, twice, and if any of the money was gone. That was when he realized what had happened. He’d gained five points in Fortitude from the Aspect of the Hydra, significantly reducing his need for sleep from one second to the next.

It was something he could have easily realized if he’d been fully awake, but he hadn’t been.

With a sigh and a few muttered curses, Isaac sheathed his blade and plopped himself back onto the couch.

Having more time to do things during the night was why he had done this, after all, he’d just forgotten it for a brief moment.

But what to do now? Normally, he’d be summoning stuff, but as bad as calling a bunch of wailing ghosts into his apartment would be, using metal to cover up said wailing would go over a hell of a lot worse.

As the old joke went, only a German man wouldn’t ask you to stop blasting music in the middle of the night because he’d already be on the phone to the local police station.

It was tempting to just run off into the nearest patch of forest and start summoning there, but he knew it wasn’t a good idea. He preferred far off areas where no one was likely to stumble over him and the monster, the kind that wouldn’t be well lit at all. Not that forest trails had any kind of lighting in general, but that was doubly true for those far off places.

There were night vision [Skills] he’d eventually be able to get, or just naturally gain the ability to see in the dark once his Perception got high enough, but neither of those solved the immediate issue.

And while bringing a light or two was an option … until the monster smashed them and left him stumbling around in the dark. Ergo, not a good and proper idea, either.

That ruled out the idea of spending tonight summoning monsters.

There was a traditional activity most people did during the spare time an increased Fortitude afforded them, but that wasn’t a viable option for Isaac either.

A lot of people had picked up new hobbies in the form of enchanting, alchemy and other forms of crafting.

Isaac hadn’t. He’d been the Purser of his hunting group, the guy in charge of the books. It had been a fine use of his Economics degree even after he’d stopped working in finance, making it a good choice. He did know how to make a few basic things that were so simple to create it was easier to make them yourself instead of buying the finished product from someone else. Basic health potions, basic mana potions, some basic but nasty poisons, etc.

But even those required new and unique ingredients that required him to summon stuff, which he’d already decided to not do.

He might have also gone off to buy the materials needed for summoning, but it was the middle of the night, literally the only shops that were open were 24h supermarkets and those certainly wouldn’t have the stuff he needed. Online shopping was, of course, also an option. Unfortunately, most of his liquid assets were in the form of bills he’d gotten by selling Aspects to the mob, aka, not availed to pay for online purchases.

That just left doing all the stuff he’d been putting off while galivanting off to Milan. Check the countless emails he’d likely received during that time, deal with anything that needed dealing with, and all that stuff.

And once that was done, maybe, just maybe, he could find a good place to start summoning.

“Let’s see what he have here …” he muttered as he logged in.

“’Would you like to protect yourself from monsters?’ Well, yes, but I sincerely doubt you’re in a position to do that.

‘Unfortunate misunderstanding involving a possible firing’ Yeah, no, I heard that loud and clear and I already have a job.

‘Hey, are you allright, bro? End of the world party, my place, Thursday, you coming?’ Ah … I almost forgot about that.”

Isaac muttered under his breath as he read the messages. There were a large number of [System] related messages offering new ‘technology’ to help protect oneself, an official university newsletter to the tune of ‘we’re working on understanding this, don’t do anything stupid’ and a general message from the government that basically amounted to ‘don’t do anything stupid’.

But most of it was spam that had somehow crept through the filters since their subject material was something completely new and different, though it quickly petered out as time passed. Likely, someone at the email provider had caught on to the fact that there was an issue and updated the filters.

Isaac wrote a quick email back to his former employer about having another job and pointing out that there was no misunderstanding involved at all, his former boss both had firing privileges and completely exploded at him. Given the phrasing of the email, the words ‘you’re fired’ had clearly passed his boss’ lips, even if Isaac had already hung up at that point.

But it was the last email that really grabbed his attention. The sender was someone he hadn’t talked to or even thought about in literal years, they’d drifted apart after they’d finished university and then the usual shit had happened before they’d really had a chance to reconnect. Aka, the end of the fucking world.

Also, as the title of the of the email would suggest, Samuel Barnes was a typical frat boy, or at least that was the image he liked to present. Much like Calise, Samuel was someone who enjoyed projecting the persona he wanted people to interact with while actually being incredibly cautions and reserved.

Mind you, Isaac was pretty sure that Sam still enjoyed the parties he threw, it was just that he had desires beyond beer pong, girls and hiding reality beyond a haze of alcohol.

At the end of the day, it was pretty likely that this particular message was a genuine invitation to an actual party that would be happening tomorrow evening. Particularly when one considered that this particular message had been mass sent to a few dozen people, likely everyone Samuel would have liked to be there but hadn’t replied to his other invitations. Undoubtedly, he’d also talked this up to everyone he’d met in person and also sent out a mass of texts, precisely none of which Isaac would have read.

Isaac’s face sported a massive grin as he typed up his reply. A proper university party, divorced from the chaos he’d been experiencing the last few years, something entirely different from the fighting he’d been doing. Nonsense, drinking, comradery, that was what he was looking forward to.

The reply itself was a simple ‘of course I’ll come’, typed up and sent off in a matter of moments.

But even with all of that out of the way, he still had hours upon hours to kill until the sun rose and he could do some of the other things he wanted to do.

There was doubtlessly a good book he hadn’t read for several years to be found somewhere in this apartment, but that was only something to use up the time, rather than something productive.

So, he started thinking. What was the most important thing holding him back at the moment.

What was the biggest thing holding him back? What did he need to grow stronger and save the world? Time, obviously.

Time which he could easily get by increasing his Fortitude to reduce his need for sleep. He could also quit the job with Bailey’s research team, but that wasn’t going to happen for obvious reasons.

As to what he wanted and needed to do in said time, that was also easy. Grind, increasing both his [Skill] and [Class] Levels. To do both of those things, he needed summons and that was where the problems started.

He could get his hands on powerful creatures by simply summoning them, but that would still leave him with massive corpses lying all over the place for anyone to stumble across and he had absolutely no intention of sparking rumors of an insane fighting maniac stalking the streets of his hometown, summoning monsters from beyond the void to slaughter them as if they were no more dangerous than a chicken.

Yeah, that could only end terribly.

There were a few creatures he could summon straight into his apartment, which didn’t leave behind bodies, but they were few and far between. The Specters and their weaker Ephemeral cousins were perfect, but anything stronger would no longer work. A Wraith would cut this place to pieces in quick succession while a Poltergeist’s telekinetic field would utterly trash the entire apartment in seconds.

Once he ran into his limit where the Specters where concerned, that was basically it. He needed to find something else to do, preferably safe, private and without the risk of random people stumbling over his monsters and ending up maimed or dead.

This was the true crux of things. He needed a new place, one that fit all those requirements.

So that was what he did for hours afterwards. He checked the housing prices outside the city, how much it would cost to just buy the land and then somehow build a house on top of that … he considered every conceivable possibility, but there were no two ways about it. There was absolutely no fucking way he could afford it.

When he took the money from Calise into account, he could sort of afford the cheapest of land out in the middle of nowhere, but that wouldn’t be enough.

But he couldn’t really use that money.

Funnily enough, Isaac was in the same situation that many a drug dealer found himself in. He’d read somewhere that while they had a large supply of cash on hand due to their profitable job, they had no proper excuse or explanation for actually having this money.

Therefore, they couldn’t really spend it on things that would be logged like cars and yes, houses, leaving them limited to smaller luxuries. You know, like hookers, blow and more plasma TV’s than any sane person could ever need.

It would take a while for Isaac to get enough money in a way that could be explained, but it could be doable. He could use the money he’d gotten from Calise to pay for everything that could be paid for in cash, then go ahead and save literally everything else.

Eventually, there would also be legal and relatively open ways to sell Aspects and then he should be all set in short order.

Even so, any actual purchases would remain a pipe dream for the near future, meaning literal years.

That was way too long. He couldn’t really think of a good alternative option to just summoning everything somewhere out in the woods and just leaving the bodies, but that didn’t mean such an option didn’t exist, just that he hadn’t found it yet.

After another few minutes of daydreaming over what to buy, Isaac sighed and snapped the laptop closed. He wouldn’t be getting anywhere right now, so he turned his apartment upside down while looking for a good book, found one, and retreated to the couch until morning.

A contented smile was playing across Isaac’s lips as he roused himself for work, hours later. He’d been spending so much time working and waiting for the time he could work to arrive that he’d nearly forgotten what it was like to just relax for a bit.

In the other timeline things had been so desperate he’d been on duty basically twenty-four seven and when he’d come here, he’d still been stuck in that same horrible mindset.

Now, he had work and he’d obviously be doing that to the best of his ability but after that … after that, he’d be going to his first party in half a decade. Or at the very least, his first party that hadn’t had the apocalypse casting a deep dark shadow over it.