Hiro approached the bus terminal mimic with his mask on. Beyond, he could see a gold beam indicating there was a merchant in the vicinity.

I can check that later, he thought, when the SE bonus has ended.

His Hyottoko mask had no effect on the mimic, so Hiro blasted it with {Blade Whirlwind} instead.

Wham!

This brought the creature to life, the beast crunching forward on the cracked pavement as its steel frame split to reveal a nasty, glass and metal tooth filled mouth.

Valeria hit it with a bolt and Hiro blasted the mimic again, their attacks doing little against its health bar. As he had discovered with the last mimic, these monsters were tanks and they maintained health by eating.

“Get ready, Rena!” Valeria shouted.

The creature lurched forward, wolfing down some trash in its path. Just as its lower frame scraped against the pavement, Rena came rushing forward with her hands drawn, heating radiating from them.

Hiro saw it all play out before it could happen. He saw the mimic turning to her, whipping its tongue in the woman’s direction, yanking her into his mouth. He saw it crunching her, killing Valeria’s partner.

Not if I can help it!

Hiro used {Bounce} to shoot himself forward.

He cut through the mimic’s tongue, which immediately caused both the beast to roar out in pain and for cheers and clapping to sound off in his head.

You have new followers!

Right, do cool shit, Hiro thought as mimic lurched toward him, angrier than ever.

He hit at the creature a few times just to keep it at bay while heat rushed out Rena’s palms, her hands red as if she were holding them up to a light in a darkened room.

Myriad fire ants spread over the mimic, which squealed in pain as what was left of its glass body melted. It shifted toward her and bits of its steel melted, white hot metal dripping to the ground as it expired.

Soul Essenced poured into the three of them. Rena turned to him and started laughing immediately.

“Right, the mask.” Hiro removed it and grinned at her. “One mimic down, god knows how many to go. Shall we continue?”

****

Hiro leveled up soon after the clothing goods store.

The upgrade came during a fight with some of the armored rat creatures, which had taken over a small corner park near the Williamsburg Bridge, the kind of park he would have stopped to take a break in after making a delivery.

His STA and REG had increased, Hiro not yet sure of if he should feel this change or not.

Maybe I need more access to the Doom System before I can really understand these numbers…

Now pushing toward four thousand followers, Hiro was ready to visit a merchant and see what he could buy. But they still had another thirty minutes left with the Soul Essence bonus in play.

“Life always is like that, isn’t it?” Valeria said as they passed a bodega with the windows shattered, the walls covered in graffiti and the place looted. “Normally, the monsters don’t stop coming until we actually want them. Ugh. The only ones I know at the moment are in Bryant Park, your bunnies.”

“We could get there in twenty minutes or so if we hurried,” Hiro suggested, not mentioning he could get there faster with {Bounce}.

“Do you really think we could take them as a team?” Rena asked Valeria.

“Maybe. But I’d like to really get those fuckers this next time around, meaning we’ll need to go way stronger than them. You just hit Level Three. Hiro and I are Level Five, yeah?”

“Right,” Hiro told Valeria.

“My guess is we need to be Level Seven at least if we want to take the bunnies on. And without the current bonus, it’ll take us a lot of kills to get to Level Seven. A lot. Every time we level, our SE requirements for the next level double. I still have seventy-five SE needed before Level Six. If that pattern continues, I’ll need a hundred-sixty SE after that for Level Seven.”

“We got a ways to go, then,” Rena said.

“Another option would be to get some sick Roulette Skill that allows us to take them out in a single attack.” Valeria fixed her hat over her head. “Not entirely impossible, I suppose, but it all seems random until it doesn’t, if you get what I’m saying.”

“What does?” Rena asked her.

“I mean, there is a method to the Doom System’s madness in the way it both helps and hinders, but there is still a randomness to it that makes me not able to predict if we’ll get the actual power we need or not.”

“Or we go in with more people,” Hiro suggested. “Juan and Marcello might be interested.” He glanced toward the {Beacon} he had left on the building where the two brothers lived. “We’re almost there. And be on the lookout for the—”

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“Lady in a yellow raincoat,” Valeria said, “got it. If I see that bitch, don’t worry, I’ll shoot first, ask questions later.”

“Val,” Rena said under her breath, but Valeria never responded.

They moved on, the streets ahead eerie, empty.

It still struck Hiro from time to time how quiet New York City had become. There had been points that he hated the place with its constant swell of humanity, how messy it all was.

He had often compared it to Tokyo, how much larger Tokyo was than New York City, yet how much quieter and a hundred times cleaner. Yet there was also something about New York’s messiness that drew Hiro in.

It was a reminder that everyone was alive, everyone was all moving in a direction. Backward or forward, didn’t matter. They were directions nonetheless.

Now, the city was empty.

His HUD told him there were now just over seven hundred thousand survivors. Yet the streets were vacant.

The Doom System’s concept of the city might span a larger area. The Tri-State area, maybe, New Jersey side, up to Connecticut, the denser parts of Long Island. This thought was followed by another.

Hiro turned to Valeria: “Tell me more about AI hallucinations.”

“You really think this is what it is?” Rena asked him.

“I don’t know what the Doom System is. But Val—can I call you that?”

“You can,” Valeria told Hiro as they circled around a building that was barely held together by three walls. It used to be a deli by the looks of it, the interior a splash of glass, rat droppings, blood stains, and sharp objects.

Hiro noticed something. “Wait. Put a pin in that.”

The three approached the body of a man who had been impaled on a street lamp. In doing so, they were presented with the text of two different skills.

Hiro took out his phone before it could finish buzzing and read the warning:

“Who wants some Stolen Valor?” Hiro asked.

“I’m good,” Rena said. “Both those powers are… disturbing.”

“A little,” Hiro said as he read the first one.

{Fugitives of Pompei}

Rank: D

Type: Attack/Area Affect

Upgrade: 1/10

Description: No one knew what lay beneath the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Novosibirsk, but a pulmonaut-turned-mathematician named Sofia Kovalevskaya gave her life to discover the Secret of the Ooze.

Using simple equations developed over a decade of long winters, Kovalevskaya mastered her endocrine system, gaining the Turtle Power necessary to fast for a hundred days.

She traveled underground from Novisivirsk to the ancient destroyed city of Pompei, guided by a bipedal rat known as Splinter. Upon reaching Pompei, she soon discovered the Orto dei Fuggiaschi and befriended thirteen victims of the Mount Vesuvius eruption, resurrected by the villain Krang.

Now, those thirteen ashen warriors are your allies.

Summon the ashen warriors once per battle either as a distraction or to overwhelm your enemy.

Valeria squinted at the explanation. “See? The system has lost its shit mixing Russia with Ninja Turtles and Pompei. Either way, I could use that. Plus, there are upgrades available.”

“I’ll take the second skill, then,” Hiro said.

Roulette Skill: {Kiss or Slap}

Rank: E

Type: Transformation/Utility

Upgrade: N/A

Description: The Alster Swans of Hamburg are some mean bastards, and don’t you dare insult them!

Claiming that she was doing it for the ‘Gram, an influencer and OnlyFans model named Sabrina Orificina learned this the hard way by asking one of the Alster Swans the time old question in a cute uwu voice, kiss or slap?

The Alster Swans definitively chose slap.

Using this once-per-battle skill will trigger one of two outcomes: it will randomly knock your opponent down to a quarter of their normal health; or, more likely, it will heal them back to a hundred percent.

Are you feeling lucky? Go ahead, {Kiss or Slap}.

Hiro’s phone buzzed and he checked the message.

He shoved his phone back in his pocket. “What?” he asked Rena, who gawked at him for choosing the skill. “Think about it. I cast it at the beginning of every battle when an enemy is already at full-health. It’s not upgradable, and it’s low-level, but it’s something else I can try that could give me the upper hand.”

She nodded, impressed with his reasoning. “I didn’t think of that. And if you’re lucky, it’ll cut their health to a quarter.”

“Exactly,” Hiro said as they started back toward Juan’s place. “But back to AI hallucinations. What are they exactly? I didn’t really get into the whole AI thing aside from generating images to share with my friends.”

Valeria continued: “What are known as ‘AI hallucinations’ occur when a machine learning model generates an output based on false data. Think of it like this: when an AI, especially one trained on vast, diverse datasets, tries to predict or generate something, it sometimes combines bits of unrelated information in unexpected ways.”

“Like Ninja Turtles, Russia, and Pompei?” he asked.

“Correct, but mostly just with earlier models and tests. Have you ever hallucinated, Hiro?”

“I’ve gotten high, sure. I took mushrooms once, but—”

“You had a bad trip, then?”

Hiro remembered his experience taking shrooms with his friends back in Kansas City. “Yeah, I guess you could call it that,” he told Valeria.

“An AI hallucination is like that. You were tripping balls, right?”

“Beyond that,” Hiro said as he relived the experience. He felt his skin crawl in remembering the first wave of the hallucination, how it had utterly floored him.

“When you took those mushrooms, your brain started seeing something that wasn’t there. The mushrooms disrupted your brain’s normal processing, causing it to mix, um, sensory inputs and create nonsensical images, or patterns. AI systems were designed by humans to function and reason like a human. It’s common sense to assume a hallucination would operate in the same way.”

“You really got her started, didn’t you?” Rena said. “Kidding, Val. You know I agree with you about the humans designing things in their image part, I’m just on the fence about the rest of it. But continue.”

“Here’s what I’ll say, Hiro: when you saw the walls melting or the trees turning into strange creatures, your brain was combining familiar elements in unfamiliar ways. The Doom System is doing something similar. It might take elements of Western fantasy, bits of human culture, and aspects of mythological monsters, and blend them together into these bizarre, terrifying things.”

“Like a quarterback with fiery mana footballs and charred people protecting him?”

Valeria smirked. “Yeah. Like that. The Doom System clear, clearly, lacks the human ability to understand context and reality, so it just creates based on the data patterns it has learned, no matter how strange or nonsensical the result. In both cases, whether it’s your brain on mushrooms, or we’re talking an AI with faulty data interpretation, the hallucinations are a result of disrupted processing. And either way, it’s only going to get worse from here.”

“This part I agree with,” Rena said as they approached the building that Hiro had marked.

There were two graves out front, freshly dug. One belonged to Carmen, Juan’s wheelchair-bound sister, and the other to Marcello, his brother.

Hiro shook his head. “Shit.”

“Are these the people you were looking for?” Valeria asked.

The trio paused once they heard a man’s voice explode out of the building. “I’ll kill you!”