Leon felt sick after hearing Danika’s outburst.

If he had time to relax, he had time to cultivate. Leon was the only person who could kill demons without a gun. He needed to work hard to leverage that as much as possible. If he lost a friend because he was a hair too weak, he would never forgive himself.

Leon focused on his belly full of Qi and began to cycle the power throughout his body. By the time he walked into the bathroom, his body was already being remoulded into something better. He needed more strength; real strength. Despite how potent his new skill was, it was too violent to use more than once a week.

He needed to change the skill enough to not injure him while also maintaining its ability to do damage to horrifying monstrosities like the spider queen. Somehow, he knew that his new Qi Eruption skill would be no worse than a stiff breeze to that thing, but he couldn’t figure out how to make the technique stronger and weaker at the same time.

Pushing the thought down, Leon focused on making another breakthrough while he had access to a shower. Better to be safe than covered in something that smelled like rotting eggs and dead rats. Increasing the speed of his cycling, Leon quickly used up eighty percent of his Qi. When his supply dropped to a measly ten percent, something changed inside him.

Lines of burning agony ran up his fingertips and toes. It felt like strings were being seared into his flesh, forcing him to grit his teeth to withstand the pain. Once the burning reached his torso, the sensations multiplied as countless lines ran all across his body and into his organs. Finally, when he was on the brink of passing out, the strings reached his spine.

A molten cord of burning acid appeared in his back, running all the way up to the base of his skull. He was on the floor now. Leon wanted to cry out for help but he couldn’t. He would never let anyone see him in such a vulnerable state, not to mention that he couldn’t open his mouth even if he wanted to. His body simply wasn’t moving anymore, his limbs refusing to respond to his desires.

And while having someone with him would be nice, cultivation was a personal journey. They could assist by bringing him water or a pillow, but no one would be able to carry the burden of his own choices better than him.

Suddenly, the pain began to recede. Leon breathed out and opened his eyes. His body was slick with sweat and his muscles, organs, and bones ached, but there was no permanent damage at first glance. He was mostly thankful that he hadn’t passed out like his last breakthrough.

Leon bathed and left the showers. His muscles ached, his body was out of energy, and he felt like his nerves had been-. Ah, that was what he had felt. His nerves had been absorbing his Qi. The first breakthrough had enhanced his brain, and now the next had elevated his nerves.

Everything made perfect sense now.

The brain was the locus of control. It managed everything and was the most important organ in determining life or death, but the nerves were the organ that made the magic happen. Without them, people would be unable to feel or move. Brains didn’t even have nerves at all, which was one of the reasons they didn’t anaesthetise patients undergoing brain surgery.

So while advancing his brain was great and all, without the nerves to send faster signals, what was the point? He may be able to see a knife coming at his throat and process what he should do to block it, but if his nerves didn’t fire the signals in time, he wouldn’t be able to dodge the blade in time before it slit his throat.

Death would be inevitable without the ability to react fast enough.

When Leon made it back, he had a big grin on his face. First it was his brain, second was his senses. And if his guess was correct… Yep, his eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin were all absorbing Qi now. His next, and hopefully final mental breakthrough, was going to be focused on his senses.

Then he would hopefully move onto middle Foundation Forging and begin refining his body.

***

The first day of their trip to the mountains was uneventful. Things only began to go from bad to worse on the second day. Rather than one humanoid demon appearing every hour or two, groups of four to five started showing up. Whenever Leon’s Qi was above eighty percent, he would stand guard for the riflemen. They would pop a few shots and kill the vast majority, giving Leon the chance to experiment with the last demon.

He used a less dense version of Qi Eruption so that he didn’t cripple himself, of course. But no matter how many he killed, Leon couldn’t figure out how to improve the skill. Reducing the explosive power would save him from getting injured, but it would also force him to attack two or three times before he actually killed anything.

There had to be an answer to his problem, but it seemed that two days of experimenting wasn’t enough time to find it.

On the third day, they encountered the cause of the influx. A subway train was stopped on the tracks. They slowly approached until they came face to face with hundreds of demons. Earlier gunshots had set them off, prompting them to lumber towards the group in search of something to kill and feed on.

It took a few minutes for the group to get close enough to see the demons clearly, but when they did, there was a shift in the group’s morale, nearly everyone realising why there were hundreds of demons by a stopped train. Their clothing all but confirmed that they hadn’t wandered out of a rift, either.

Nearly all of them wore suits or dresses.

Convening with the group, they quickly realised that backtracking wasn’t an option. Unless they were willing to walk all the way back and then sneak through the demon-infested city above ground, there was no other way to the mountains besides this tunnel. Dominic whipped up a plan and quickly set up a firing line of three riflemen. They changed out constantly with each reload, working in a slowly growing harmony to slaughter the lumbering demons.

It worked quite well until it didn’t.

When Marcus sat down and took a drink of water, his hands were shaking from all the gunfire. One of the doctors also had a huge bruise on his shoulder and had to have a towel pushed into his shirt for extra padding. Life essence helped them recover, but even the constant stream didn’t do enough to heal them faster than they were injuring themselves.

The demons also didn’t stop coming. They had to constantly retreat, running back tens of metres every time they reloaded. By now, the train itself was gone, hidden behind the bend of the tunnel. Piles of demon corpses lined the floor, but the living ones were not deterred or slowed down. They simply stepped over or around the hills of skin and bone.

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However, that was nothing compared to their dwindling ammo. If they ran out of ammo before they could clear most of the horde, their only option was to turn back. Of course, Leon could try and deal with them all. While the thought made him feel nauseous, he genuinely wanted to be useful. Killing five of them wouldn’t be that hard, but ten or even twenty would force him to cripple his only functioning hand.

Just the thought of being helpless made his stomach churn.

Finally, after more than an hour of laying waste to the horde, no more demons came after them. They decided to set up a temporary camp for an hour or two. Everyone was exhausted, even the non-combatants. Having to set up and prepare ammo and then pack everything up two minutes later was extremely stressful.

When they were as rested as they could be, Leon escorted them towards the train under the cover of darkness for the sake of not alerting any hiding monsters. He was the only one with a light source… if a glow stick from the party aisle could be called a light source.

When they arrived at the front of the locomotive, Leon found that the windscreen was splattered red with blood. No one else seemed to notice the green splotch.

Leon guided them around the side of the train and through the small gaps until he came upon a massive pile of rubble. The next section of the tunnel had collapsed onto the train, most likely caused by the earthquakes after the bombs dropped.

Of course, Leon had no way to tell for sure. A demon could’ve punched a hole in the roof for all he knew.

Eric quickly found the emergency release latch for the closest set of doors. Leon hopped up and then hoisted everyone up one at a time, first taking their bags and then pulling them up straight after. Once they were all on the train, Leon gently pulled the door open to the next carriage.

He sighed in relief.

The roof was terribly dented and misshapen. Sharp rocks were sticking through the metal sheeting, but it didn’t look like it was at risk of failing yet. They could make it through the collapsed tunnel and out the other side without fear of being crushed.

Leon slowly led them forward until he reached the end of the train. He requested a torch and shone it out of the very back window, only to lock eyes with a humanoid demon. It didn’t react but Leon certainly did. He yelped and stepped back, shining his torch around and seeing what else was through that door.

There were too many to count. Leon tried, but all he got was that they extended farther than the light of the torch.

“That’s going to be a problem,” Eric said, flicking the torch in Leon’s hand off. “We shouldn’t alert them if we can.”

Leon nodded and followed Eric to the group where Dominic and the other riflemen were resting.

"The back of the train is blocked off by nearly a hundred demons."

“We don’t have enough ammo to deal with all of them. Almost out after that extended fight.”

Eric nodded. “We still have some bullets left, right? How many can you confidently take out before they rush onto the train?”

“We can take care of the scraps if the kid can blow up most of them. If not, we’ll have to rest for a day or two. My guys are worn out as is. And that’s not even mentioning the possibility that more demons may show up halfway through the fight.”

Leon glanced around at the shredded corpses of what used to be train passengers. There were only three or four in the cabin, the people too broken to transform into a demon, but that didn’t mean their slightly decaying bodies didn’t smell.

Staying here wasn’t the best choice.

“Waiting a day to rest isn’t an option. Our rations are already short, and that’s if we stretch them. We’ll run out of food the day before we reach the end of the subway line.”

Marcus stood up and walked over, seemingly the least affected by the extended fighting. While he didn’t have access to Qi since his aura saturation wasn’t full, it was obvious his semi-awakened spirit was doing something to help him.

“We don’t have infinite bullets, but we do have infinite Qi. What do you say, Leon? Can you handle them all?”

Leon frowned at his friend. The words hung on the tip of his tongue but he couldn’t utter them. There was no way he could kill even ten demons unless he crippled his only functioning arm. His left was still limply hanging in a sling, useless and withered. He would much rather avoid losing the use of both arms.

But as they all looked at him, Leon realised that they had placed their hopes on him… and he was about to let them down. Let everyone down. He’d slipped up too many times already. Every failure cemented his position in their minds, labelling him as nothing but a weakling; a burden to be discarded.

And now they were going to hear it from him directly. This was it, and Leon could feel it. Even if they didn’t leave him behind now, the idea would be stuck in their heads. Leon the weakling. Leon the burden. If something went wrong on their journey and they became overrun with monsters, they would be forced to leave him behind.

And even if everything went well, Leon would lose either way. His friends would slowly distance themselves once they reached civilisation again, and the worst part was that they wouldn’t even realise it. Distractions would pop up out of nowhere and priorities would shift. They would continue progressing their cultivation, get jobs, and have children while Leon was stuck doing nothing; left behind.

Excuses would flow like water until finally, he never saw them again.

His hands trembling, Leon opened his mouth to choke out a response when Dominic smacked him on the back.

“Don’t sweat it, kid. No one can do everything. Let the adults handle this like we should’ve been from the beginning.”

“I must apologise, Leon.” Eric said, “We’ve been putting too many expectations on you. We’re glad for your help, but if you can’t handle this we will just have to work something else out.”

Leon blinked, unable to process what was going on.

“You’ve been helping too much, anyway,” Olivia said, shaking her head. “Fighting demons with your bare hands is already crazy enough, and yet you help cook dinner every night and even cultivate on top of that. I’m surprised you haven’t run into a problem you couldn’t solve earlier.”

Marcus wrapped his arm around Leon’s shoulder. “Don’t look so upset. You’re one of the first people in the world to get superpowers and a week later you’re disappointed that you can’t wipe out fifty demons with one attack? I know you like to give yourself extra responsibilities, but sometimes shit just doesn’t work out, okay?”

Mila didn’t say anything. She just wrapped her arms around his waist and rested her head on his shoulder. Saying comforting words was one thing, but actions were another. Leon could feel her breathing as she relaxed into his body.

Feel that she was utterly at peace.

“Thank you.”