Ten more people flew up after the first. They screamed for help as they rose almost twenty metres off the ground, their arms and legs waving about in an attempt to grab onto something. It didn’t help. Or maybe it did because seconds later, they all stopped in mid-air. Some people were less than ten metres off the ground while others were nearly halfway up the fifty-story apartment buildings, but while their vertical heights were different, it rang true that they were all stuck in place.

The few with rifles already had theirs primed, aiming up between the two buildings. Still, no one fired. Not because they were afraid of hitting someone, but because they couldn’t find anything to shoot. Leon watched as Dominic and Marcus scanned the area only to shake their heads when they glanced at each other.

Where were the demons? A few ideas came to mind, but they were so ridiculous that Leon couldn’t believe them to be true. What were the odds that gravity just decided to invert itself when they walked past?

Leon bit his lip, feeling useless. He had magical powers. He had a system that defied logic. His body had even been refined by life essence and cleansed of impurities, and yet he could do nothing to help in this situation.

People wobbled in the sky. Somehow, they were connected to nothing. Merely floating up in the air like a rabbit in a rope trap, waiting for the hunter to-. It dawned on him as something glistened in the sunlight. Leon thought to cycle his Qi into his eyes, but his control was so rough that his entire supply was shoved into his head. He winced as his channels throbbed from overuse.

Despite his limited Qi, the effect was immediate. Everything came into focus and his thoughts flowed a little easier. His eyesight became sharper, his hearing more sensitive, and to his disgust, his sense of smell also became more intense. Holding back the urge to vomit, Leon stared up at the sky with laser focus, only allowing his dwindling Qi to recede back to his stomach when he confirmed his guess.

“Cut the strings!” Leon screamed, trying to grab the attention of the trapped med students. “Cut the web with your knives! Quickly, cut the strings before-”

A long and thin leg reached over the lip of the roof, the appendage easily stretching several metres. It was covered in thousands of fine hairs and adorned with bladed spikes that glistened with the colour of wine in the morning sun. Leon shivered as the pitch-black arm appeared, but when the other seven reached down from the rooftop, he almost passed out from fright.

Leon had never been afraid of spiders. Disgusted, sure, but now he could safely add arachnophobia to his list of mental issues.

The demon walked in mid-air, stepping across its nearly invisible network of webs. The spider’s massive, knife-sized fangs dripped with purple liquid as it admired the tasty meals delivered to its doorstep. The drops of venom crashed down onto a parked car in the street, and with a bubbling hiss, the roof of the poor sedan folded in on itself and melted into a puddle of steaming goop.

The spider queen began to chitter. By rubbing its two front legs together, a spine-tingling wail echoed throughout the whole street like a million cicadas beginning to swarm. It stopped moving its forelegs, but for some reason, the sound continued without any signs of stopping.

Thousands of spiders began to crawl out from the balconies of the higher floors. They looked identical to the one standing at the very pinnacle of the web, but instead of being the size of a car, they had thoraxes that were barely smaller than an adult man. Then the smaller spiders came, followed by even smaller ones. All the way down to the size of a human head, spiders at different stages of maturity rushed out of the apartment buildings lining the street, every one of them rubbing their forelegs as they chased after their prey.

Leon began to run, his sights on the subway entrance. All he could think about was the human-sized spiders. He had never felt so much terror in his life. All of his sympathies drained away as his mind honed in on nothing but his own survival, his Qi flowing into his muscles, bones, and tendons because of that focus.

He didn’t even care that his channels were sore.

Screams echoed out from behind and above him. Sparing a glance, Leon watched in horror as over half the group were slowly hauled up to the invisible web in the sky. Then he forgot about them entirely as the people who were already trapped began to get eaten alive by the smaller spiders.

The young woman he’d scared earlier this morning was up there. A spider no smaller than Leon sunk its fangs into her neck, her screams more than enough to illustrate the pain she was in. Then she began to sag. As her insides were turned to liquid by the venom, she slowly deflated until she became a bag of skin.

When he made it to the stairwell, he stopped at the entrance and turned to see Mila and Olivia run past him. They only turned back when they were halfway down. The last remaining survivors made it down as well, but Marcus and the other riflemen had hesitated for a second before fleeing, some of them even firing a few shots into the cloud of black before they realised there was no stopping them.

Leon waited at the entrance to make sure they made it safely.

Mila screamed.

When Leon turned around, he expected to see a monster emerge from the shadows of the subway. Instead, all of the survivors were looking at him. Leon’s stomach sank as something pulled him up. An invisible rope was tied around his navel, but no matter where he swiped his arms, the web didn’t break.

Marcus sprinted over and grabbed onto his leg. Other people dived onto him, their weight holding him down long enough for someone to try and cut him down.

It didn’t work.

Nothing worked.

No matter how many people weighed him down with their entire body weight, he never stopped rising higher. Leon wasn’t stupid. He knew that this was the end, and that realisation allowed him to calm down more than he thought possible. His panic faded into a laser focus, reminding him of how he became when he sparred against someone.

Once he was more than three metres off the ground, Leon made a decision. He wouldn’t let his friend die for no reason. He shoved Marcus away, letting his friend fall and be caught by the others.

Everyone else had let go of him already anyway.

His friends screamed and cried beneath him. One story, two, three. Leon felt his heart thundering in his chest, eyes wide, helplessly waving his arm as he slowly drifted up into the sky. His friends were dragged into the subway by Eric and Alex. Leon sighed in relief knowing they were safe, but his fear came right back when he saw the thousands of spiders rushing around above him.

His Qi rippled in tune with his frantic emotions.

Grasping at his forgotten lifeline, Leon pushed every drop of Qi into his hand. It bulged against his skin. The pressure was agony in his fingers, but he ignored it and pushed harder and harder. Still, nothing happened. Leon made different gestures and shapes with his hands, even pushing the Qi around his palm despite feeling like his skin would rupture, but no matter what he did, he was no closer to releasing his Qi in an attack.

As death approached, Leon searched his mind for an answer. If pushing harder wasn’t going to work, then how was he supposed to use his Qi to attack? Did he not have enough Qi? Did he need a higher stage of advancement? How was this different from when he made that mist rise from his skin? How was this different to when he controlled his Qi in the shower?

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Intent.

The answer rose to the forefront of his mind like a beacon in the night. When Dominic reached for his gun, Leon desperately wished to run away; to move as quickly as possible and flee from danger. Leon took a deep breath and focused his thoughts, understanding that his sole desire to push Qi into his hand was only working against him.

Just like that, his Qi shifted and flattened out inside the palm of his hand. Leon opened his eyes and shoved his hand forward, a sheen of clear mist appearing over it an instant later. The layer of Qi was barely a hair thick, the manifestation so visually unimpressive that it looked like a misty rubber glove.

As he shoved it forward, Leon worried if it would do anything at all.

That was also when he realised how close everything was. Leon was face to face with a spider the size of a fridge, its fangs waving in excitement as they dripped purple venom onto his tracksuit. In fact, he was surrounded by spiders, all of them excitedly reaching out to him with their forelegs or fangs as they waited for the moment when he would be pulled onto the invisible network of webs.

When Leon’s arm fully extended, his hand brushed against the foreleg of the closest spider. The layer of Qi erupted like a balloon. All at once, a vibration shot up his arm as a wave of concussive force rippled out from his palm. His stomach dropped as the web holding him snapped, and the sky changed colours when the closest spider flew up into the sky and blocked out the sun. The last thing Leon saw was its long, spiky legs flying off in eight different directions.

Leon opened his eyes and found himself on a pile of something soft and mushy. He lay there for a moment, his mind reeling as thousands of black dots zipped around above him. The sound of snapping high-tension cables echoed throughout the street, making him wince at how loud it was.

The dots began to fall around him as hands gripped onto his shirt, dragging him across the ground for the second time this weekend. Someone was firing a gun nearby. Leon glanced around but he couldn’t see what was going on. Once they were halfway to the subway, he gathered himself enough to realise that he’d been pulled down from a three-metre-tall pile of desiccated corpses.

A terrifying hiss of pure rage erupted from above, the sound shattering the few windows that survived the nuclear blasts. The thousands of spiders suddenly began to descend from the skies, but when Leon reached the bottom of the stairs, the spiders refused to follow. They all stopped at the entrance, glaring down at them with their glistening red eyes.

Silence followed. The monsters stood around without making a peep, deciding to eerily wait at the entrance to see if the invaders dared to return above ground.

Everyone collectively sighed in relief. For whatever reason, the spiders wouldn’t follow them down. The hands set Leon down on the closest bench, allowing him to rest. Eric came over and quickly checked him over but he must have been fine since the guy left soon after. Leon closed his eyes for a second, his mind still reeling from the fact that he had almost died again, but then a wave of sensations began to wash over him.

A few notifications flashed in the corner of his eye as an overwhelming amount of warmth rushed into his pores. Leon could only assume that this was the life essence mentioned when he activated his status. Focusing on the feeling of being nourished, Leon watched as the wave spread through his body, making his every cell tingle with the pleasure of being remade.

As more and more warmth saturated his flesh, notifications began to flash in his vision.

[Congratulations! You have levelled up!]

[Congratulations! You have levelled up!]

[Congratulations! You have levelled up!]

[Congratulations! You have levelled up!]

[Congratulations! You have levelled up!]

Just like that, Leon reached level six in one go. He wanted to open up his status sheet, but Marcus swept him up in a bear hug, forcing Leon to focus on the world around him.

“Dude!” Marcus wept into his shoulder. His best friend wept. Leon had never seen his friend cry before. “I thought you were definitely- ouch!”

Marcus put him back on the ground and turned to the culprit. Olivia had pinched him, and rather harshly at that judging by the way he was rubbing his waist. Leon wanted to ask why she did that when someone else barrelled into him.

Only instead of a sweaty, muscular man sweeping him off his feet, it was a small girl who sobbed into his chest. As he wrapped his arms around Mila, the scene began to make sense. He’d seen her rush over in the corner of his eye but Marcus had swept him off his feet before she could get there.

While they had their moment, Olivia and Marcus also hugged and whispered to one another, likely glad that they had lived through the ordeal. When they were done, Olivia and Marcus walked back over.

“Thank God Eric pulled me down into the subway,” Marcus said, holding Olivia’s hand. “I wasn’t even thinking about how traumatic it would be to see you die like that.”

“I’m glad I spared you from the horrible sight of me being eaten alive.”

“Then you freaking blew it up!” Marcus said, ignoring Leon’s attempt at humour. “That was the most insane thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Did you see all those little bastards fall out of the web? That’s what they get for fucking with us!”

Fall?

Everything had been a blur. One moment Leon was focused on his Qi to the exclusion of all else, the next he was snoozing on a small mountain of corpses. Speaking of, he desperately needed a bath and a change of clothes. His second tracksuit was already covered in blood splatters and had a few holes burned in it by that damn venom. Luckily for him, it didn’t seem to do anything to skin or hair.

When Leon glanced around, he found some people looking in his direction with way too much emotion in their gazes. Most, however, didn’t even look at him. They stared at the ground, some crying for the ones lost while others just looked off into the distance with a blank stare.

There were only sixteen students left. Fourteen out of thirty had died. These people had lost friends, colleagues, and lovers, and now they had to live with the memories of seeing those they cared about being melted into a juice box. Worst of all, they might be next, their lives forfeit to some other nightmare creature.

Leon scanned the faces of the people around him. Where was Alex? Had the chipper Brit died as well? Leon sighed at the loss when a hand fell on his shoulder.

“Bugger me,” Alex said, patting Leon on the shoulder. “I thought you were done for. Those monsters were nipping at your heels when you let them have a taste of the old left-right goodnight, hey?”

Bugger me? Was Alex Australian or British? Leon got a good look at the guy and found that his entire back was soaked with blood, but he seemed relatively whole besides a few scrapes and a black eye. What the hell had happened to him?

“You’re telling me,” Leon said, rolling his shoulder to show Alex the holes in his stolen tracksuit. “I was so close the bastards were literally drooling on me.”

Alex whistled appreciatively “That’ll be a story to tell the grandkids one day.”

“Yeah. I’m glad you made it, buddy,” Leon said, patting the guy’s arm. “The world would be a darker place without you.”

“Thank you. That means a lot.”

Alex looked over at his peers, his eyes dull.

Leon wondered how many friends the man had lost today.