The ongoing process of finding a reasonably safe spot led me to the fifteenth floor, another unassuming office setup, but entirely covered in a layer of frost and with a bunch of animated clouds of ice crystals drifting about. That would be neat to check out, but was a no go for my current objective. I didn’t know how long it would take, but sooner or later some of the Chinese or European players would pass the first boss and gain access to this area. I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of leaving Lindsey in the stairwell in her vulnerable state, just so we could continue looking for keys unimpeded.

I closed that door and jogged down another flight of stairs, still marveling at the rapidly improving fitness level of my avatar. I felt like I could run for days. If the game was just going to level you up in a handful of sessions, what was even the point of starting out in your normal body? To ensure you could adapt to the changes? But that didn’t make sense. Joe hadn’t started out anywhere close to his baseline human body, and he was moving around just fine from what I saw. True, I hadn’t seen him the moment he logged in, but that just meant that he has, at most, taken a day to adapt to a totally different body.

My musings were cut short by my arrival at the sixteenth floor. Pushing open the door, I found another lawn with a small-ish house. Unlike the last one, this scene was far from idyllic. The ambient light was dimmer, as if it were evening and there were only nearby streetlights to see by. There was a makeshift barrier of old furniture and trash, not unlike my own recent handiwork, sprawling across the lawn, casting deep shadows in the poor light. The house itself was completely dark, but I could just make out that at least one of the lower windows was broken.

I took a few steps into this shadowy vista, and heard a hollow moan from somewhere in the darkness. Ah, good. I brought my hand forward, summoning a tiny mote of solar energy. The harsh light only deepened the shadows, but in the areas it did illuminate, I could see corpses, twisted and mangled. I smiled.

“Zombies.”

I could see now that there were several partial corpses, mostly missing one or both legs, strewn about the lawn. As soon as I cast light on the scene, they started shifting around and clawing their way toward me. They were making more progress than one might expect from a mangled and partially dismembered body, but not enough to be concerning. They were the only humanoid monsters I had seen beyond the Hollow Men, but I detected no obvious magical constructs at work, making these normal monsters, not weird shells for terrifying spirits.

I directed my palm to the nearest zombie, opened the floodgates for just a moment, and watched the radiant mass of energy burn through the corpse and into the lawn. Only charred limbs and a pit of magma remained. Damn. Throwing the sun at things really got results. I aimed at the next nearest crawling corpse, and tried for an even shorter duration burst. A fist-sized bolt of gleaming gold bored a hole through the head and upper chest of my target, a somewhat less excessive display, but no less functional. Probably more cost effective too.

As it wasn’t a natural part of my power, I didn’t have an intuitive sense of how much essence I could use from my star without taxing it, especially now that I had cut the essence it was leeching from me down to a trickle. I was lucky that the game systems were smart enough to recognize it as my power at all, and prevent it from blinding me. Though considering the truffle that had tried to grow into me, it seemed likely that crafting these extra powers was a normal part of the progression. In any case, I’d probably need to feel out the limits of using it offensively, lest I risk damaging it. In the meantime, so long as I only opened the edges of the bubble holding my star, I figured that at the very worst I would deplete the corona, without harming the core. Probably.

Motion in my peripheral vision shook me from my musings. It was another corpse, this one fully intact. It lept out from the darkness behind the barricade, oriented itself towards me, and began to sprint forward, gurgling and shrieking all the way. They had fast ones. Not too surprising, the floor would be almost pointlessly easy otherwise.

The monster reached me with unnatural quickness, lashing out with an arm. Most of the flesh had been stripped from its hand, leaving a bloody claw of bone behind. I had to respect the dedication to detail on display consistently in this game. I trusted my power to handle such a simple physical attack, and I was not disappointed. My power sprung forth as its attack connected and I saw, for a fraction of a second before it snapped back, skeletal fingertips dipping into where my body should have been. Then the moment passed, my power finished its task and took off the zombie’s arm.

Interesting. I guess while my power was actively striking, my body served as a sort of portal to my inventory. I had tried to hold my power open before, but I was a lot weaker then… might be worth revisiting. This time, when the zombie struck out and my power made ready to defend me, I instead held it open. Its remaining arm passed harmlessly through my body, as I stood there straining. An eerie black film formed over my body as I sustained my power. I felt like I was trying to hold up the roof of a building whose walls had been knocked out. I relaxed, and my power retracted.

The zombie remained whole, or as whole as it had been after its first strike. Its next few strikes saw it taken apart by my reactive defenses, as I considered what I had just figured out. Maybe this could serve as a less lethal way to use my power to defend myself? That would be handy if there were conflicts with NPCs or other circumstances where I needed to fight, but not disassemble my opponent. It was more energy intensive at the moment, but I suspected that it was just mystical muscle memory at work there. I didn’t see any good reason why I shouldn’t be able to have very short activations of my power, and just not take anything.

I stepped back out of the zombie floor, letting the door swing shut behind me, and started working my way up. We could bring Lindsey down here, Joe and I could clear out the zombies, then we could use the interior of the house as a safe place for one of us to watch over her. Bonus points for Joe getting some easy practice for his new passive powers. We’d need to be careful with that, though. Weren’t old style houses like that really flammable? It seemed weird to me that they’d be built that way, but I guess it was probably a cost saving measure or something.

I arrived to find Joe sitting across the landing from Lindsey’s silver nest, idly summoning and dismissing his new pale fire. He seemed to be deep in thought, though it was still tricky to read his expression in this form.

“What’s on your mind?” I asked, mindful to keep my voice down.

“Mind control,” he said, “Free will.”

“The predictive aspect of your power?”

“Yeah.”

I scoffed, “Joe, corporate AI can, with maybe a week of data, predict which microtransaction, at what price point, and exactly when to present it in order to make a sale. They have something like ninety-nine percent accuracy, and it’s only that low because a small handful of individuals end up much harder to predict for some reason. Alien AI knowing when you are going to activate your power, even though it does need to recursively consider its own influence, really shouldn’t be enough to cause an existential crisis.”

“I guess you’re right,” he said, “so, you find a good spot?”

“Yeah, Sixteenth has a house and lawn instead of an office. Zombies for the monster theme. We should be able to clear it without a major problem, and so long as you don’t burn down the house.”

And so we set out. Joe carried Lindsey down to the landing for the sixteenth floor, and we went in. The fight to clear the floor was very anticlimactic. It turned out that Joe’s ability to see fire in the future was a great predictor for ambushes, once we figured out how to use it correctly that is. The trick was that he needed to produce a small burst of flame anytime he saw an enemy, even if he was going to take it down with his alternative power of being a giant dinosaur man. After we had sorted that little detail out, we systematically cleared out the first and second floor of the house, as I had already taken care of the few outside. I guess the challenge for this floor was supposed to be the jump scares? Or maybe the zombies had some sort of horrible damage over time that they inflicted if they managed to bite?

The majority of the interior was intact, we discovered as we cleared the interior. In fact, one of the upstairs bedrooms was hardly stained with blood or cluttered with corpse bits at all. We retrieved our incapacitated companion and set her on the bare bed. The majority of the household items, particularly anything that could potentially be useful, were missing. I guess the scene was supposed to have been looted, or the owners packed up and left to flee whatever zombie scenario the floor was meant to imply. We didn’t find any loot boxes either, though we didn’t look too hard for them. We did find that the door to the basement was boarded up, though we left the obvious boss room alone for the moment.

“So what’s the plan?” Joe asked, once we had moved our friend into her new nest. She stirred a bit, but ultimately made no move to get up.

“Just what we talked about before, unless you have a different idea.”

“No, no, just seems like I’ll probably be bored and I was hoping you had come up with something better, or that she might have woken up by now. Just wishful thinking.”

A thought was pushed into my head. A reminder. I sent a quick thought of thanks to Nico, and with a wave of my hand, deposited the ten golden loot boxes we got from the survival waves onto a nearby dresser.

“There. You are also on gacha duty. I’m sure between practicing your new power and playing with whatever neat might be in the boxes, you’ll survive.”

“Man,” Joe complained, “Why is your login timer shorter anyway? Is it another mystic thing?”

I shrugged, “Could be. You can ask Lindsey when she wakes up. She might have paid attention to hers at some point.”

At this, she sat up.

“Joe, Will, I have something important to tell you,” she slurred, “I used my power outside the game. I cut my dress.”

She blinked a few times, looking between the two of us. Her eyes grew vacant, and she looked around once more before laying back down.

I chuckled, “Good luck getting anything coherent out of her.”

And with that, I set out, leaving a sullen reptilian and an unconscious European behind.

The next floor, the seventeenth, was another office. It was just rendered at a ten-to-one scale. The desks towered over me, rising easily thirty feet into the air. The ceiling rose off into the far distance. Worse, roaches moved about the office. Roaches which would have been enormous if the office were at a normal scale. As it stood, they were likely fifty or more feet long, and crawled over and across desks, occasionally stopping to whip their vast antennae about. Though I probably had the firepower to kill one, without a movement power I would be quickly overrun. I stepped back out and closed the door, this challenge was probably beyond me for the moment.

On the eighteenth, I found myself staring. Computers. This floor had computers. Also a great deal of clutter, but that wasn’t important. Could I finally replace the functionality I had lost when my implants had failed? I knew old computers were slower. The ones from a few decades ago were roughly half as fast, and required double the power. Could I make up for a few more decades of reduced speed with my inventory’s time dilation? Something about that seemed off, but it had been years since my computing history class, so I wasn’t sure what. Could be that older computers were lacking entire functions that newer ones had? The encroaching swarm of surprisingly normal rats pulled me from my reverie. I took in the layout of the room, and deemed the computers suitably distant from the entrance to not be at risk.

I poured out radiant fury, immolating the entire swarm, and leaving me marooned on a little island of tile floor, surrounded by burning fragments of ceramic and molten concrete. With my foot, I reached out with my power, ripping out a rectangle of the floor and whatever substance was beneath it, returning it in the next instant, but upside down. I tested the surface with my foot, finding the surface to be cool, but made of some strange, springy material.

I crouched down to get a better look. It was like some kind of sponge, and I couldn’t tell what color it was. If I hadn’t been attuned to all of the sensory weirdness this game had to offer, I would have probably said that it was grey, but it most definitely was not. It just didn’t have a color at all. There was also something weird going on, magically speaking, but it wasn’t like anything I had seen yet. As I watched, the material gradually transmuted itself into bare concrete. Some kind of proto-material? Whatever, I could always gouge out more chunks of levels to get a look if I needed to.

I strode across the bridge I had made, bypassing my impromptu moat of flames. As I approached the area of the office with the computers, I noticed three shapes moving about a table, with one larger shape further in the back. They were rats, but they had strange patterns on their fur. They each had a black band around their waists, with brown fur below that point, and white fur above. They were also impeccably groomed. It gave me the impression of some sort of formal office dress. The game helpfully identified one of the three smaller ones as I got closer.

[Rat Engineer]

Weren’t engineers stereotypically dressed like slobs? Unkempt appearances, and all that? Maybe this was a stereotype from a different time. As I got closer, I could see that they were working with something on the table. A large metal tube, with a lot of tubing and wires running to other parts. Were they making something to fight me? Some kind of jury-rigged gun? No longer content to cautiously advance, I broke into a flat sprint.

“Don’t you dare make me nuke you! I want those computers intact!”

But they only worked faster. One of them moved towards a small red button wired into the mess. I skidded to a stop and thrust my hands out in front of myself, priming my power. I didn’t trust my automatic reactions to handle a proper projectile weapon.

With a deep reverberation, a mass of something burst forth from the tube, into my body, and on into my inventory at high speed. I dropped my power before it became too taxing, and found that it was just a bunch of junk that they had launched at me. Still, getting hit by a fistfull of screws at that speed would have probably turned my midsection into hamburger.

I let out a shaky breath. Getting shot in this game? No thank you. I momentarily weighed the potential risks of pushing the attack, but decided that I really wanted those computers, and it didn’t look like that thing could fire again quickly. I pressed forward again, only for the larger shape made its presence known. It was another larger rat, this one with dark rings around its eyes, and a rectangular patch off center on its chest.

[Rat Chief Engineer]

It scaled one of the taller computer cabinets and hurled something at me. Small purple rocks? They impacted nearby, none quite reaching me, and burst with surprising force. I could feel the force of them in my chest. Then, I was hit by the most terrible odor I had ever smelled. I nearly vomited, doubling over coughing uncontrollably. I could hear the other three working on something, probably reloading their makeshift cannon. I gasped, trying to catch my breath, and only managed to make the coughing worse. I fell to my knees as my body was wracked with violent spasms. I had underestimated the enemies here, and now I was going to die to something stupid.

Did I have any air in my inventory? To my surprise, I found that I did. The small office space I had created for Nico seemed to have air, though I didn’t remember filling it. I covered my mouth with my hand, and tried my hardest to suppress my coughing. Then, opening a link between Nico’s office and my hand, I held it open as I took as deep a breath as I could.

Straightening, I rushed the table where the rats were making ready to fire on me again. I released two bursts of energy, burning a menacing metallic red, which reduced the rat cannon and the table it was on to slag. One of the rats also perished in the exchange, but two managed to leap to safety. I could hear the larger one somewhere behind me, rummaging around, no doubt to pull out another weapon or gadget to turn on me.

I was alone, facing three enemies, surrounded by things I wanted to keep intact. I was holding my breath, and if I stopped I would probably end up in another coughing fit for long enough that they could use something else on me, and to top it all off, my power was already flagging from holding open portals twice… Nope, time to cut and run.

I reached out to the nearest computer, a massive box that was about my height, with two reels of tape turning on the front of it, and hastily dropped it into my inventory. I felt the metaphysical weight of it and nearly stumbled, but I managed to keep my footing as I dashed away, gasping for breath as I neared the entry point to the floor. The air here reeked of ash and burning chemicals, but it was worlds better than whatever that rat had thrown at me.

In the stairwell outside, I finished my coughing fit and caught my breath, my throat raw and stinging. After a few minutes to compose myself, I turned my attention inward. Time to check out my prize.