I was still hovering in the air, still invisible and still in shock while I saw the gruesome battles below me, wondering how would I possibly survive here…

A loud screech sounded from somewhere behind me, breaking me from my daze. I turned around quickly to look at a large number of bats flying around. They weren’t those small creatures that stayed inside their caves though, these bats were massive! With a wingspan of at least 12 meters, a height of about 4 meters and fangs and claws that could rip me apart without any trouble.

As I calmly observed them, I noticed that their eyes were completely white. It seems like they are blind… but another loud screech reaching my ears and the bat closest to me suddenly rushing towards me shattered that assumption. I remembered too late that bats are usually known for sensing things with echolocation, and whether invisible or not they would still be able to ‘see’ me!

Cursing my stupidity, I dodged, just in the nick of time as the massive bat monster rushed past me. But just as I thought I had a bit of breathing room the bat turned around quite sharply and came at me again! How in the world is this thing so agile despite its size!!

I dodged again, and it turned around again, I dodged again, and it turned around again… this was going nowhere! To make matters worse, other bats had by now heard all the screeching this darned thing was making, and I could see a lot of them flying over to get their peace of the pie, namely me.

Seeing as things were getting a bit too out of hand, I dove low towards some house that was on fire and willed the fire to go smash right into the bat chasing me. The loud screech of pain behind me told me that it had worked, and I turned around to see the bat falling down to the ground with burns all over. That wasn’t the only thing I could see though, as I saw the swarm of monstrous bats were still chasing me diligently despite the death of their comrade.

Cursing everything I could think of, I turned around and flew as fast as I could possibly fly, while still throwing fireballs or boulders behind me whenever I could. I could hear that a lot of my blind hits had met their targets, but I could also still hear the flapping of a large number of wings and the constant screeches behind me, so I kept speeding away as quickly as I could.

I had been staying in the suburbs of the city till now, and I finally left the suburbs to enter the side of the city which was covered with buildings. I started making my way through them, zigzagging through a number of building hoping that this would help me get away from my pursuers. I could barely make the turns at the speed I was flying at, and I could only thank myself for the amount of practice I had done beforehand, otherwise I would have crashed about 10 times by now!

I started hearing less and less screeches and the flapping of wings also got distant, so I turned around and saw that the bats were flying around aimlessly. I could see that they could easily turn around sharply in between the buildings, perhaps even quicker then me, so how had I gotten away then...? I looked around and saw myself surrounded by buildings on all sides, and then I saw the bats still aimlessly flying around. Putting two and two together, I figured out that the buildings were somehow interfering with their echolocation.

I spotted a window open in a building nearby and quickly went closer to it to get away from the dammed bats. I activated heat-vision and scanned the room with the window open before entering it, but there was nothing that gave off heat so I entered. I was still cautious though and still remained invisible as I checked out the room completely before I put my guard down.

The room was actually quite nice and it looked like I was in a high-class hotel. I closed down the window and shut the curtains, then I slowly made my way across the room and opened the door, activating invisibility again. I peeked out into the hallway and saw splatters of blood and corpses everywhere, and some kind of huge creatures that looked a lot like ogres smashing doors. They were about 8 feet tall, had massive muscles that were bulging with every movement they made and had large fangs protruding from both their upper and lower lips.

I could hear screams coming from both upstairs and downstairs, which was surprising to me. How had so many people survived all that carnage from animals? Observing the hallway I found my answer, a sign that read: no pets allowed. Alright... still it doesn’t explain how no animals had entered here yet, or why these people hadn't been killed off by plants.

I saw that the ogres were getting closer to me, and pushing the thoughts about the surviving people aside I prepared myself... I waited till there were only two ogres left in the hallway while the rest of the ogres had entered different rooms, presumably searching for humans to kill.

I dashed off towards the nearest ogre at top speed and swung my knife with my complete enhanced strength straight at its neck. I was honestly expecting the knife to shatter, or for it to simply bounce off, but instead it cleanly sliced straight through the ogre’s neck!

I stopped and stupidly stared as the ogre slumped and its head rolled off. I looked down at the knife and it still looked to be in the same condition as before. The other ogre roared seeing its decapitated friend, but as I was still invisible it had no idea what had done this to its friend. I flew with blinding speed to the other ogre and slashed at its neck, and got the exact same result!

As I saw the second head roll off, I couldn’t help but laugh in a weak voice… I had been so completely afraid of all these monsters and how they were killing off animals from Earth that I had assumed they were a lot stronger when compared to me. I had never really thought that I stood a chance, but now I knew I could fight back. I had no idea if it was my enhanced strength, or if the combination of using both my speed and strength allowed me to decapitate these two so easily, but it didn’t matter to me.

As I saw the other ogres come rushing back into the hallway, attracted by the roaring of the second ogre, I grinned and flew right towards the nearest one!

3 minutes later I was standing in the middle of a pile of ogre bodies with a huge grin on my face. I then went to the nearest one and started drinking the blood that was flowing from a wound on its back. I drank a lot before I let go and stood up, waiting for something to happen.

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Blood successfully absorbed. Ability gained: Super-strength. Ability of enhanced strength is now converted into super-strength. You will now be much more stronger then before.

Nice! So there was an ability called super-strength after all! Furthermore, I just found out that I can drink blood and absorb abilities from dead bodies too! This will make things so much simpler for me! 

I grinned and started drinking blood from all available ogre corpses. After I finished I waited for the message to come from mind-me…

Blood successfully absorbed. Ability of super-strength already present.

Hmmm…. So all ogres had the exact same ability…? Weird. Is this the case for all these otherworldly monsters that one species has only one ability or is this only a coincidence with these ogres…?

Whatever the case may be, it was good for me. If one species has only one ability, then I could keep absorbing blood to improve that ability. Drinking more of Mark’s blood had improved my flight ability, so continuing to drink blood from creatures that had the same ability would grant me many more benefits won’t it? Though I will have to wait and see if this can actually be applied to all monster species or if it is only the case with these ogres…

Thinking about monsters, I couldn’t help but think of RPG games….

Wait! Games! This is exactly like those novels I used to read where game like elements came to the world… and the most important game element was obviously the player’s status!

I immediately said “Status!” and waited excitedly!

…….

……

Nope, nothing. No blue window showed up… I thought about it for a moment and then decided to go through all the list of commands that typically brought up the status screen.

5 minutes later I had gone through all the words I could think of: stats, profile, character profile, character sheet, status screen, character stats, abilities, ability screen etc etc, but it was to no avail. No matter what I said nothing popped up in front of me. Either there was no convenient thing as a status screen here or I just couldn’t think of the right word right now...

I sighed heavily but my disappointment was short-lived, as my thoughts were suddenly interrupted with a seriously loud crash from upstairs! I had been completely ignoring the shouts and screams that I had been hearing all along, and only now did I pay attention again.

There were no more sounds I could hear coming from downstairs, either the monsters had won or the people fighting them had won. However, there seemed to be a serious battle going on upstairs, judging from all the noise coming from there.

I rushed upstairs through the stairs and found the cause for all the noise. All the noise was coming from some sort of a huge ballroom, which could easily have held a function for more then 200 people. However, it was currently filled with about a hundred or so ogres who had surrounded a group of 30 or so people. The people were fighting back with a number of different abilities, including elemental manipulations, variant elemental manipulations and telekinesis! There was a girl who was undoubtedly moving objects with her mind! She kept on sending chairs and tables and smashing them on the ogres!

There was also a group of people behind the ones fighting who were whimpering away doing nothing. This group had about 10 people in it with 3 grown men, 4 children, 1 woman and 2 teenage girls. Probably these guys had useless abilities…

I could see that the ogres were going to crush the people and kill them off sooner or later. Normally I wouldn’t have cared about saving anyone, but three things attracted me towards fighting the ogres and saving the people.

Firstly, I wanted to see how much more stronger I had gotten with the ogre blood. Plus I wanted to see if all these ogres actually had the exact same ability of super-strength or not.

Secondly, and more importantly, the numerous cuts on the people who were fighting back, with blood flowing out of the cuts attracted me! Especially the telekinesis girl! I want that ability!

Finally, it can’t hurt for me to actually save someone for once. Even though I can’t care less about their lives, for all I know these may be the last few people left alive in this city, and as much as I like to stay alone I didn’t want to stay completely alone in a city filled with monsters! They can also help out with helping me survive with their abilities. If they hinder me, I can always dump them after absorbing their blood…

With that decided, I readied my knives and with another huge grin on my face I dashed off into the middle of the ogres, slicing off their heads, arms and any anything else I could cut. I moved like an invisible hurricane of death, and in a number of minutes had killed off half of the ogres before the people and the other ogres noticed me.

I could also actually feel that my strength had increased by leaps and bounds! It was exhilarating picking up the 8 foot monsters and throwing them into each other like rag dolls!

As I moved about killing every ogre in sight with ease, I couldn’t help but think about what my future would hold. With the confidence gained from fighting these ogres, I could finally stop simply surviving and could actually start killing off these monsters one by one!

A smile came to my face as I thought about all the future bloodbaths to come, and I continued on hacking away at the dwindling number of ogres…