Surreptitiously, I checked my t-shirt and pants. For some reason, Sue was staring at me, which made me feel a bit insecure. Was it the stain right above the stomach? Or the pants that were way too tight, especially after I had gained all that extra muscle? But none of the others made any indication that I looked weird, so I chalked it off to one of her weird quirks. She did seem to be a bit spaced out…

“Anyway,” I said after a moment of silence. “I am off to walk around a bit and check on the bikers. I need to get used to… all those physical changes.”

It was slightly unsettling to experience the result of the massive changes that my body had gone through. My balance was somewhat off, my timing, coordination. Everything felt… wrong.

When regaining those stats through training, my brain apparently had sufficient time to adjust, even if the changes happened extremely fast compared to the world I had been used to. But spending points… that was a different story.

Which raised a good point…

“Uhm, Jimmy, I just realized… you said that it is well-known that the body adjusts to pre-injury status quickly, based on a self-image one has… but what happens if I use points and suddenly am stronger than I have ever been? Will I revert back?”

Jimmy chuckled while shaking his head. “Maybe you should have asked that question first, before dumping all those points in there. I thought you were smart!”

Chagrined, I shrugged my shoulders. “Well, it’s not unheard of that I forget some important details.”

“Well, in this case, it didn’t cause any harm,” Jimmy said to my relief. “The ‘system’ alters your brain accordingly. It is not instantaneous, but fast enough so that your body won’t work against you. But, if you were to increase your muscle mass using mana, something that green mana can do, for example, then that will disappear soon after.”

Dodged a bullet there. But then again, the evidence so far had been relatively clear that points used to bolster characteristics were there to stay. After all, people like Golgiat and Jak’lo had spent their points a long while ago, and unless Jak’lo was an absolute freak, he’d not have intelligence in the mid-twenties naturally. Still, it was nice to hear confirmation from the resident expert.

But enough of lollygagging.

“Thanks, Jimmy. Time for a midnight stroll for me!”

“I’ll join you,” Betsy said before I had taken more than a step.

Which came as a big surprise. So far, Betsy had been kind of reserved. Not like cold, but also not really part of the friendly ribbing and all that. Perhaps she was just the quiet type. But whereas Sue was always up for doing stuff, talking smack, and challenging me wherever she could, Betsy had been… well, doing her own thing, and more oriented toward the rest of her group instead of me.

And if anyone, I would have thought Sue to volunteer, but she had stayed oddly quiet the whole time.

But either way, I was glad for the company. I wasn’t likely to be going into the bikers’ compound this night anyway, so having her around wasn’t going to be a liability. And perhaps it was a good opportunity to get to know her a bit better.

As we made our way along Main Street, I realized again how quiet everything was. It wasn’t as if Lake Placid had every been a noisy town.. but you’d hear the humming of the air conditioners, a dog barking somewhere, maybe even a few people coming home from whatever party they had been attending.

Usually, I liked the silence, but somehow, this night, it felt oppressive. As if something terrible was going to happen, the stillness a portent of disaster, like the quiet before the storm.

Subconsciously, I clutched my sword harder, ready to react at a moment’s notice. I strained my ears, to hear something, but to no avail - the only noise was coming from our soft footsteps on the asphalt and our breathing.

“Daniel,” Betsy whispered. “Are you sure it is a good idea to be out here?”

“I really don’t know,” I responded quietly. “But I need to go there. If you want, you can head back, though.”

For a moment, Betsy seemed to be wavering, but then she shook her head resolutely, and motioned me to continue walking. She was a gutsy lady, for sure. Where Sue had flinched from killing a gar, Betsy had not hesitated even once.

Despite the ominous feeling of impending doom, nothing noteworthy happened. There were some noises in the distance, like a yapping sound, but that quickly subsided, and then it was quiet again. Soon after, we arrived at the hotel of the bikers, careful to stand hidden in the deep shadows of the oak trees planted in the little park adjacent to the compound. Not surprisingly, there were no lights in any of the windows.

But, of course, the bikers guarding the lobby either had no idea how to guard properly, or they just didn’t care. Which was in line with what I had observed previously. Instead of remaining hidden, somewhere behind the doors, or at least in some easily fortifiable location, they were lounging on armchairs. And rather than staying quiet, they were talking animatedly with each other, even if with muted voices, and smoking cigarettes. The glimmering points on their smokes were clearly giving away their location.

The guard on the roof did a better job of hiding his presence. But after a few minutes of quiet observation, we were able to see some movement there as well.

“So what’s the plan,” Betsy whispered in my ear, which caused me to twitch slightly. That was… way too close for comfort, even if it was oddly… tingling.

Focus, Daniel. You have never even looked twice at Betsy before…

“Let’s just stay and watch for a bit, I want to see if they change guards and if there is movement behind any of the windows. It is hard to imagine that they’re all sleeping already.”

“Perhaps we should go to… maybe one of those buildings across the street? I think they are mostly empty.”

At first, I wanted to brush off her suggestion, but then I figured that there wasn’t really a good reason to do so. Yes, it reduced the number of exits we had for an escape, but on the other hand, it provided even better cover and felt… safer.

A few minutes later, we approached one of the houses from the backyard. Luckily, someone had smashed one of the French doors leading into the house at some point, presumably to loot the property, so it was easy enough for us to get inside and find our way to a second-level room with a window pointing at the hotel.

The room turned out to be for a little kid, based on the blue theme probably a boy, with toys spread all over the floor, and lots of stars, little spaceships, and moon stickers covering the ceiling over the bunk bed. It was a grim reminder of the toll the transition to this new world had taken – a cost that those without kids or elderly parents were more prone to forget about.

Betsy’s face looked grim as she made her way to the window. Even though she didn’t say it, it was clear that she had thought as well about the human suffering and the tragedies many people had experienced during these last couple of weeks. Similar to me, she had been in the enviable position of not having a family or a lover with her that had simply disappeared, like it had been the case for Ben. But even if there was no spouse or kids, most of us had parents that we might never see again.

Shaking off the sad feelings, I joined Betsy at the window and started watching what happened on the other side of the street. As it turned out, not much occurred.

As we settled in for a lengthy wait, I turned to Betsy.

“So what drives you, Betsy?”

“Hmm?” She responded distractedly. “What do you mean?”

“Like, you train, you go on missions, you… try to get stronger… why?”

“Well, what are the alternatives?” Betsy asked. “Sit around and do nothing? That is not me. I am… driven. Always have been.”

“But driven by what?”

“I don’t know… just master new skills? That is how I picked up engineering. When I was younger, my dad would give me those building sets - Lego, first. Then Lego Technic. Soon I moved on to models; I always enjoyed building stuff. And when my girlfriends would go and study languages, or business, or whatever struck their fancy… I went on to engineering, even though I was only one of three girls in a cohort of two hundred.”

“So, how was that?”

“Awkward. Hundreds of college guys, constantly trying to impress the only three girls in their classes. At least, it was easy to find people for group work.”

I had to chuckle at that. “I guess guys are like that.”

Betsy rolled her eyes. “Oh, man, you have no idea.”

“But so, going back to what drives you… what is mastery? Is that all that there is for you? Do you even get satisfaction from mastering something?”

“Well… good question,” Betsy admitted. “When I got my engineering degree, I was happy, but then there was the next challenge of proving men in the business that a woman could do things just as well as they did, or even better. So I guess… yes, I get satisfaction, but it is fleeting.”

After a moment, she continued. “And mastery… so I have been working on water magic, and I like to get good at it. It is just so amazing, the feeling of mana flowing through my body, the ability to form water in shapes defying all laws of physics that we are familiar with. And I know that sounds a bit like hubris… but I want to become the best at it. Many people say that water magic is perhaps the most useless of the mana abilities, but I think it has immense potential if you just get good enough at it. And so that is what I want to do. And it is nice that the system provides us with a quantifiable measure of our ability. So I try to push that, see how high I can get.”

“Is there a highest possible level?”

“Jak’lo said that the theoretical limit is level 100.”

“Level 100, huh? I guess I still have ways to go,” I mumbled.

“Yeah, right?” Betsy chuckled. “My highest spell is at level 22, and it seems like progression gets more and more difficult with every level.”

“But what about beyond learning magic and getting better at skills?” I asked, curious if she was just two dimensional, someone who only had a single, well-defined goal in life, and was going after it with blinders for everything else left and right. Somehow, I hadn’t had that impression of her.

Betsy giggled. “This sounds like talking to a shrink. But to answer your question… I am really not sure. I am a bit aimless right now, with everything kind of turning crazy. Once things settle down, though… well, I wouldn’t mind finding a nice guy too, you know, have like a family, I suppose.”

“So, you’d like to have kids?” I asked, somehow surprised.

“Yeah, I think I’d like that. I always liked kids. They are so adorable when small, and I’d like to teach them things, you know? You don’t want any kids?”

“Hell no,” I blurted out. “Kids are like way too much work. And they are annoying little brats, more often than not.”

Again, Betsy chuckled, as if I just had something funny. “I see. How about a girlfriend?”

Fuck, was Betsy hitting on me? I mean, she was nice and all… but she was like 33. Cute for her age, but… well, still freaking old!

“Uhm, I …, haven’t, I mean…” I stammered.

“Sooo…. you haven’t thought about it?” Betsy asked, teasingly. “Is there anyone you like?”

“I… well…”

Dammit, Daniel, think! There had to be a way out of this without offending her.

“Sue?” Betsy continued to probe.

“What? Sue?”

That had come out of the left field. Why would I be interested in Sue? I mean, she was cute as heck… but also kind of old. Even though… 28 wasn’t that much older if I thought about it. But she was also annoying the heck out of me, more often than not. Then again, she was cool and fun in other ways. But I didn’t think that she was interested in me, and, of course, there was also Annie…. What a mess.

Before I could form a coherent response, I suddenly spotted movement on the roof of the hotel of the bikers. And even though I could barely make out the figure, the suddenness of the movement, spoke of a certain degree of surprise or alarm.

“Betsy, something is happening.”

“I don’t see anything,” Betsy said, scanning the darkness. “No, wait, there is something there… someone is coming.”

And then we could hear panicked screams in the distance.

Someone, or something, was attacking Lake Placid. And the screams seemed to come from all over. When the first of the squat creatures approached the hotel of the bikers, it became clear who was causing the panic – gars, armed to the teeth, with their terrifying reaver dogs on long leashes.

Moments after we could make out the hulking figures, the biker on the rooftop was screaming the alarm and began to pepper the gars with arrows. And he wasn’t a bad shot either. In the first few seconds, I could already see a couple of his arrows finding their mark in the mass of gars rushing toward the building.

The guards at the entrance didn’t do quite as well.

Inattentive as they were, the gars sprinting toward them had caught them completely flat-footed, and before they could mount any sort of effectual resistance, they were overwhelmed and slaughtered. Luckily for the rest of the bikers, there was someone else just inside the foyer that had had those precious few extra seconds to get himself ready and was in a better defensive position to delay the gars until there could be reinforcement by the remaining bikers.

But the way I saw it… this fight wasn’t going to go well for the Hell’s Devils.

Which put me in a bit of a quandary. On the one hand, I’d be happy to let the gars do the work for me. It’d be way safer for me like that, and I couldn’t even be blamed for going on a killing rampage of fellow humans afterward. On the other hand… arguably the gars were a lot worse than the bikers, and when it came down to it, I should perhaps support fellow humans against those vile creatures, just to increase the odds of any of us surviving this night and the coming days and weeks. And that didn’t even take into consideration that Annie was, perhaps, in that building, in some dank and dark basement room, and would be slaughtered with the rest of the bikers if they got overrun.

“I need to give them a hand, I think,” I whispered to Betsy.

At first, she thought I was crazy, but when I explained my reasoning to her in a few quick words, she readily agreed to help out as well.

Careful to not make any noise, we made our way down and opened the front door. Just across the street and the little parking lot in front of the motel, we could see dark figures milling around and heard the clash of weapons, interspersed with grunting, and screaming, an indication of the life and death struggle taking place just a short distance from us.

Suddenly, a massive flaming sphere appeared in the hands of one of the gars and shot toward one of the open windows on the second level. Seconds after it burst, flames began to shoot out of the room, and thick, dark smoke was billowing into the night sky.

Fuck. Things suddenly had gotten a lot worse.

“Daniel, I’ll try to deal with the fire, if you can keep them off my back,” Betsy grunted before dashing off into the darkness, toward the side of the building with the fire.

Keep them off her back, she was saying… as if that was easy. There had to be like a hundred gars out there. And some of them even were adept at magic, something I hadn’t encountered so far.

But Betsy was relying on me.

Cursing, I cast Shadow Skin and made my way closer to the fighting. A few gars were lingering further back, weapons at the ready, clearly ready to pounce on anyone trying to make a run for it. And then there was that fire mage… he had to go first.

I circled around, and when I noticed that he was casting another spell, I pounced on him from behind, stabbing him right in the back. With a guttural scream, he dropped to his knees, and the red mana disappeared from between his hands.

Immediately, the gars close by turned around and tried to understand what had happened. Not that it was that hard, Shadow Skin or not, to figure out, with me, holding a bloody sword in my hand, standing right on top of the corpse of the fire caster.

Unfortunately, I had expected the red mana gar to be the only active caster, which turned out to be an almost fatal misperception. Instead of rushing toward me, the gars were, weirdly enough, holding back, positioning themselves right next to two of the creatures that were dressed slightly differently. And the reason became apparent within mere moments. One of the gars suddenly had a fiery orb floating above his hands, while sparks of electricity arced between the hands of the other.

And then, before my brain could really catch up to this new development, a lightning bolt arced across the short distance, hitting my sword and racing down my arm into my body.

The bright light completely shot my night-vision, and my body convulsed from the electrical shock. With my high vitality, it wasn’t a lethal strike, but it certainly took me a second or two to recover. Which was almost enough to get me fried by the fireball. The moment I regained full control over my body, I tossed myself to the ground, anticipating the fireball to go right toward where my body had been mere moments earlier. And indeed, the instance I slammed into the asphalt, there was a whoosh of scorching flames that licked across my body, but didn’t fully engulf me, thanks to my quick reaction.

I rolled over the ground, trying to extinguish any flames that might have caught hold on my clothes and got up into a crouch. Unfortunately, I had dropped my sword on the ground when I had been hit by the lightning, so I was facing the gars without any weapons and just a few smoldering scraps of clothing left on my body.

In other words… I was in deep shit.

Five gars stomped toward me, four of them with spears and one with a fucking greatsword that was almost as long as me.

In a split-second, I assessed my options.

Running was possible, but I wasn’t confident that I’d be able to get away, especially since they had some reaver dogs around. I also didn’t like the idea of leaving Betsy alone in her fight.

It was too late to activate Aura of Droghul, with its long casting time. And, for that matter, it only had a relatively minor immediate impact on more powerful opponents, which would make it ineffective for my current predicament anyway.

Other than that… all I had was Scorching Flames, my newest and hitherto untested spells. But beggars can't be choosers. The problem was that even for that spell, the casting time was going to be more than two seconds.

Then again, I might just have the thing to pull it off with…

I pulled red mana into my arms at a frenetic pace. I knew it was going to be too late to avoid the gars from laying into me, but I needed to focus on getting my spell online as quickly as I could. A split-second before the gars were there, I activated my grey-mana-based ring and felt my skin hardening immediately. The ring had finally completely recharged this afternoon, just before I had leveled up my stats. And I was really thankful for the auspicious timing.

The next moment, four spear-tips slammed into my chest. To the consternation and surprise of the gars, they failed to do more than poke holes into my clothes and cause some superficial cuts and scrapes. I sure felt the impact, but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle, especially now with my improved physique. The only weapon I really had to worry about for the moment was that gigantic greatsword that was whistling straight toward my head. But with my improved agility and perception, it was easy enough to sidestep the attack, and the next one as well, while still concentrating on getting my spell online.

I could have simply teleported away instead, but then I would have had abandoned Betsy, and that didn’t sit right with me. It also would have depleted my teleportation ring for another five days, which I’d rather wanted to avoid. Still, an option as a last resort, if the shit truly hit the fan.

But by now, I could feel the red mana churning violently in my arms, seemingly demanding to be released as if it was a rabid beast.

And there was nothing I wanted to do more.

With a howl-like sound, the red mana screamed out of my fingers in a wide arc that engulfed all five of the gars attacking me.

Howling in pain, they stumbled out of the flames, clothes, and hair on fire. But I followed right after them, flames at maximum pressure. I had a couple of seconds at best before the spell-slinging gars would try to take another shot at me, so I had to make use of the time I had.

Less than two seconds later, I focused the energy into one finger only and directed it toward the magic casters. My legs and arms were still tingling weirdly from that lightning, and I sure as hell didn’t want to be hit by another one. And fire wasn’t much higher on my list.

So I needed to distract them.

And my finger of death worked perfectly for that, because seeing a screaming cone of flame coming right at them, even if not reaching them, made them lose focus for long enough that I could rush right in and close the distance.

And once they had flames licking all over their body, their confident smirks were wiped out by the burning kiss of fiery hell I had brought to them.