The address was just a few miles off the historic district. Five minutes away from me, if that. I toyed with the idea of simply leaving it. There wasn’t a lot of Lux in that direction, and even if there was, this wasn’t an interaction I could have as Matt, the NPC. Until I had a viable explanation for my sudden transformation into a User, anything that happened would have to occur under an anonymous guise.

Eventually, the closeness of the address and the urgency of Sara’s message won it. She hadn’t seemed like the sort of person to easily lose her cool, and if she was panicking enough to send out a guild-wide message, it was probably indicative of her being in a particularly difficult spot.

Plus, with the there wasn’t much on the line. If the situation were truly beyond the pale and there was nothing I could realistically do for them, I could simply drive away.

I turned down a side-street, twisting the throttle until my bike reached the threshold of speed I was comfortable with. The constant and incessant screaming mingled with gunfire was encroaching on the serenity of my mind, drops in a well of terror that grew beneath the stalwart shield.

I passed a small group of armed people crouched over a burned corpse, the scent of singed flesh plying at my nostrils.

One of them—an archer—stood and watched me go, her wary eyes trailing me as I accelerated by.

Was the dead man a friend they’d lost? Or had they used the chaos as cover to kill and rob him? This was all happening so fast, both in terms of violence and body-count, that it was unlikely anyone would ever know.

Was it even possible for any of us to come back from this?

It doesn’t matter. Stay focused.

The bike still felt foreign and unfamiliar beneath me, but it was designed for both speed and comfort. I felt myself relaxing somewhat as I rode, and loosened my grip on the handles.

A woman, missing one arm, stumbled backwards into the street. If I’d run into her on a walk in the evening, the savagely fierce expression on her face would have stopped me flat.

Sara.

She was beset on all sides by monsters that looked like a combination of upright standing lizards and demons. They were darkly colored with violet accents. Tentative tongues flicked out of their mouths.

The Adventurer’s Guild lieutenant lashed out at one of the many dark figures that approached her, a long coiled whip unfurling in a series of lightning fast strikes. It appeared to be threaded with a mix of standard dark cord and magenta, giving it a vibrant luminescence.

With the final strike in the combination, the whip lashed around one of the lizard's throats. Then Sara did something that seemed to defy physics entirely. Bracing the whip beneath her armpit, she used it as a fulcrum, tossing one of the lizard men into another. They collided together and fell to the ground.

Sara’s whip could change forms at will. A solid weapon.

Sara danced back, using the breathing room to switch weapons, replacing the whip with a hand crossbow. “I’m going to make a purse out of you assholes. That’s right. Follow me.”

I looked back at the alley she was adjacent from. Sara had said there was a man down. That was why she wasn’t running. She was drawing them away.

Only, she’d made a mistake with the weapon switching. warned me that from the way the creatures moved, they were likely far faster than they appeared, and the magic whip was likely the only reason they were showing the previous level of caution.

As soon as Sara brought the crossbow to bear, I saw them hunch, ready to leap on her. I moved as quickly as I could, using to tangle up the two prone lizards and blasting the one beneath with It scrabbled in a new panic at the idea the others would consume its prey before it even managed a bite, and began to shove and attack the lizard above it, drawing blood.

It would have been a decent opener if there were only three. But the two remaining lizards weren’t at all distracted by the disruption, entirely focused on their goal. One of them ran at Sara from the side, his stance low, his mouth open. The other was just a few seconds behind him.

I ran through my options. It was unlikely I could stumble both of them. It was a miracle my first attempt to use went so well, given that I was on the back of the motorcycle and my focus was subpar.

A dangerous idea occurred to me. It was haphazard, but my options were limited. I honked once, then picked up speed, driving directly at Sara. Her deer in the headlights' expression faded almost immediately—likely assuming I was one of the members of the Adventurer’s Guild she’d pinged. Unsteadily, I drew with my right hand in a reverse-grip, keeping my left glued to the bike’s handle. A small red spot, the size, and shape of a pomegranate seed appeared in the back of the closest flanking lizard’s neck.

I used the combined momentum of the bike and my arm to drive the dagger into the critical spot on the lizard’s neck. The impact was jarring and I was immediately unsaddled, crashing to the ground with nothing but the dagger-struck lizard as a spiny cushion. With my other hand, I reached out for , sending the now driverless bike careening into the lizard across from Sara.

Supine and fighting a moderate stun from the impact, I released the dagger, still lodged in the back of the dead lizard and used My crossbow all but flew into my hand, sighting dots already aligned, pointed upwards at the only lizard still left on its feet. I adjusted my aim slightly, so it hit the critical point, and pulled the trigger. The lizard collapsed, dead before it hit the ground.

“You’re not from the guild. Who the fuck are you?” Sara said. She fired her crossbow at one of the lizards on the ground, then, learning from the earlier misstep, withdrew her whip. It lashed across one of their faces, sending it reeling back, clutching at its eyes.

“Just a random passerby,” I grunted.

The other was crawling towards me in a fury. Instead of making the mistake of trying to rise to my feet, I tapped into and readied myself in a half-crouch. When the lizard reached me, I snaked my arms around its neck, bringing it down to the ground on top of me with its belly facing up.

It raged against me as I held it, my leverage and technique the only thing keeping it from tearing me to pieces.

“Kill it!” I yelled.

Sara’s whip struck the creature’s stomach several times, leaving long red gashes. That only seemed to exacerbate the lizard’s rage. Its head rotated towards me, biting air rabidly, and I gave up trying to throttle it, both hands completely tied up with pinning its head and arms in place. Its powerful legs thrusted against the concrete, and I risked releasing its head for just a second to drive a punch into its side. It shrieked, more in panic than rage.

“I’m out of mana. Can’t shoot it, might hit you.” Sara’s voice held just an edge of panic before her gaze settled on the knife sticking out from the first lizard I’d used to cushion my fall. She pulled the knife out, having noticed where it landed, and stabbed the lizard in my arms in the neck repeatedly.

We both heaved out long, ragged gasps, as the lizard finally fell still.

“Get the last one, I’ll get the blind one.” I wheezed.

“Last one?”

“Over there. Hit it on my way in.”

I crawled on my hands and knees to the lizard still cradling its head and ended it. My injuries from the trial—specifically where the matriarch had hit me, was significantly more tender than it had been before this mess. Fuck. I needed to catch my breath.

“Good news,” Sara said. “It’s super dead. You left out the part where the thing you hit it with was a motorcycle. Tire tread right up the middle. Bashed its head on the curb on its way down, from what I can tell.” She tossed me my dagger, and I barely managed to catch it by the hilt. Then the grocery bag with the illuminating lux still inside.

I mentally kicked myself. Until my region was fortified, the lux was my main objective. If I lost track of it playing hero, I was an idiot. Sara cocked her head. “You do all that on purpose?”

I waved her off. “Bike-thing was a happy accident.”

Sara stepped further back into the street, looking back and forth. Any levity left her face, her expression grim. “Where the hell are they?”

“Waiting for someone?”

“Our healer. Or literally anyone else. We all organized and divided up to look for Lux. Then the Guild-leader got hit.”

“How bad?”

“Bad.” Sara nodded, her lips tight. “If he’s not dead already.”