It took a while for Lina to calm down after her outburst, time Albert spent preparing. There was no telling what he would find at the far end of the cave, where the monster that had trapped the B-ranks in here was supposedly waiting for the trio to walk into its lair. Besides, a rather shocking amount of blood had dribbled down his throat from ruptured vessels in his nose while he was unconscious, making him rather nauseous.

He rejoined the girls after taking a trip to a secluded corner of the cave, wiping the last of his spit and blood with the remains of his shirt.

“You look horrible.” Lina said.

“Feel even worse.” Albert said. Neither he nor she mentioned the mind rescue. “How about you? Ready to move out?”

Lina hesitated. “I feel… empty.”

Albert nodded gravely. “I know. What I did to save you… left you momentarily powerless. I’m sorry, it was the only way.”

Lina’s eyes widened, and a hint of panic colored her face. “Will I? Will I get my power back?”

“It won’t come back on its own, if it’s what you’re asking.” Albert said, holding up a hand to stop her from interrupting him. “But, I won’t leave you like this. I wouldn’t have even if you hadn’t convinced me to let you stay. I’ll figure something out after we leave this place, alright? I trust that you can handle yourself in the meantime.”

She nodded. “Of course. I’m not just my magic.”

Albert nodded at that. He had already glimpsed at the fact that Lina was much more than just the sum of her magical abilities. She had skill.

Then he turned to his diminutive companion. “Scrappy? You ready to move out?”

The girl hummed.

“Well then let’s go.”

It was after a while that Lina spoke again, time Albert spent resting and recuperating while keeping up vigilance in case of an attack. There didn’t seem to be monsters, for the moment, and no trace of what had held the B-ranker from leaving.

“How did you kill the B-rank?” She asked.

“Tricks.” Albert said without turning.

“Tricks?”

Albert turned to look her in the eye. “Did you not see it? Barely a power of 70 and I took out a bloody crazy, enraged B-rank. You might not know what the number means, but you must have seen how weak I was before I entered your mind and had that… epiphany. Imagine what I could have done, had my Power been ten times, a hundred times that. Just imagine. What about you? You were a B-rank also?”

“The rank is politics mostly.”

Albert hummed pensively. “Don’t demean yourself. What is true power when a simple trick can bridge a gap? Because you see, that person I killed wielded magic even I couldn’t replicate, not even now with almost double the Power. And yet, a trick was all it took. He was merely human after all. Perhaps slightly more than just human, but human enough to die when a ball of thermite was launched at him.”

“Thermite?”

“Surely you didn’t think I overpowered him, right? It would have been silly for me to fight at all, had it been the case. No, thermite produces mighty hot fire, but is entirely chemical and mundane. No use protecting yourself from magic when what kills you is chemistry. It had cost me, to summon the necessary components. I had not yet figured out the deeper facets of my Power, casting without a sacrifice or a struck deal with myself.”

“Yourself?”

“Yes. It seems that I cannot fool myself. It’s my subconscious. If I think something is unfair, then my Power won’t do it. That’s why I pay the price, be it in mental energy or otherwise.”

“But the… thermite, was it? We have wards against mundane attacks.”

Albert shook his head. “Then he was an idiot because he didn’t have any. He had wards for kinetics and raw energy, but not against mundane matter moving slow enough not to be a threat. I encased the thermite in a fireball and tossed it, slipped right past the ward before the real fuel ignited. By the time it did it was already beyond the ward, free to burn as it did.”

“Scary.”

“Tricks. Nothing more. Not yet, at least. Wait until I can access my pocket space, then I’ll show you the power of real mundane tricks.” He paused. “Sorry, that was not the direction I intended this talk to take. What I wanted to say was this: I will give you power but you will need to put in the work to grow that power if you want to follow me, and fast. We’ll talk more once we get out of here.”

With that, he strolled away and into the tunnel, holding Scrappy by her hand.

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The rest of their escape was uneventful. They finally found the monster that had stopped the B-rank from escaping, and it looked like it had been powerful at the time it fought against the now dead B-ranker. But it was soon evident that the monster had been badly wounded, and was no match for a rested and powered up Albert and his two companions.

The battle lasted less than a minute, and Lina demonstrated what Albert had known all along about her. She fought valiantly and skillfully, and while without magic her power was limited, she made up for its absence with sheer skill until all that was left of the monster was a diced-up corpse and twin clouds of Doom and mana.

No Power gain. Albert grumbled to himself, then his gaze landed on the riotous energies coming from the dead monster. There was enough material to do some serious work, but…

His gaze lingered on Scrappy’s small form. Unlike Lina, she had barely done anything in the fight, mostly having watched from a safe distance. This made her a priority to raise in power, but… To bestow more power onto her would be unfair – it was something she didn’t earn.

Eventually he decided to take it for himself. The Doom rebelled at first, but a casual swipe of Albert’s hand stilled it, the cloud of potential energy looking like a storm cloud frozen in time, a still frame of a force of nature.

Albert simply stuck a hand in the cloud, and it vanished.

Power +2. Total is 130.

It barely even hurt anymore.

The rest of the trip happened in silence. They made good time, but still took a whole day to navigate the maze of caves, occasionally stopping so that he could summon food or keep watch while the girls slept. It was midday when they finally reached the exit, crisp winter air carrying the faintest smell of smoke.

Tulebord village, he thought as he looked around.

Beyond the smell of smoke, the air reeked of mana, Doom and… something else. In the distance sounds of battle came from the valley below, the rumble of gigantic masses clashing with the earth, and the snarls of beasts.

“What happened to the trees?” Lina asked, pointing.

Scrappy gasped, squeezing Albert’s hand. He squeezed it back protectively. Barely a few meters from them the whole forest looked like a scene straight from a nightmare. What had once been an idyllic sight, pine and conifer trees with the occasional hint of snow, now was the stuff of nightmares. Branches were twisted and knotted, coalescing in vague shapes that scraped the mind, and their eyes hurt just from looking at them.

The green of leaves had been replaced by the red of blood, and some of the shrubs seemed to drip crimson liquid into pools that had been gathering on the ground, small rivulets flowing away along the slope of the mountain in slow, coagulated turbulences. White foam carried the sensation of boiling fat and flesh.

“Doom happened.” Albert said. “These are but the first signs. We need to move.”

“Towards the battle? Are you crazy?”

“I just want to see.” He took off at speed towards the sound of clashing steel, and for a moment Lina was left alone with Scrappy. The two looked at each other, the smaller girl looking like she was ready to dart away at any moment.

Lina almost jumped in surprise when Scrappy spoke. “He wants to save the world. Will you help him?”

Lina blinked. “What?”

“The world is breaking.” Scrappy pointed at the gnarled trees. “But he can fix it, sort of. Not this world, but the world. He promised me, he can promise you too! He fixed me.”

Lina did not understand, but nodded anyways. Truth be told, there was something about the diminutive girl that made her hair stand on edge, like she was looking at a dangerous predator and not at a small girl barely of age. Then, there was the strange manner in which she talked, and the almost reverent way she talked about Albert. Lina had caught the girl staring at the man in fascination many times, not like she would someone she liked, but like she would a god.

It was a couple minutes before she and Scrappy caught up with Albert, and he looked surprised to see them. He was in deep thought for a moment, and Lina thought he would explain himself and why he was acting like this, but something in the distance caught his eye. There was nothing Lina could see, but she didn’t know that he was not limited to the visible spectrum. Ss he tuned his eyes to better see magical energies, he could intuit a sort of flow in the way Doom moved.

As he looked at the sky, Lina was surveying the battlefield below. Hundreds of golems, brown creatures of solid stone taller than a building, were battling against an army of thousands upon thousands of… what were they?

They looked like normal, human soldiers at first. Some of them, at least, were armored and armed. But a closer look revealed that most of them had discarded their weapons, or never had them in the first place. They didn’t fight normally at all, instead launching themselves against the golems as if in an attempt to eat them, like rabid dogs who could not think straight anymore.

Lina felt her stomach clench and turn. These were not people, their deformed faces and limbs were white and sunken, deep gashes on their flesh that dripped dense ooze darker than blood. They were surprisingly nimble and fast, strong enough to tear the golems apart piece by piece, snarling and spitting all the while.

“Rabid beasts.” She heard Albert mutter. “This is what happened to the people they amassed around the battlefield.”

“The soldiers?” She asked, even though she hadn’t even meant to speak. Her mouth had moved on its own, her mind dissociated from reality.

“Not just them. They surrounded the battlefield with civilians. What were they thinking?” He paused. “They wanted to make people into some sort of super soldiers?” He shook his head. “Everyone turned into zombies instead. That’s what Doom was doing to you, by the way. Do you see it now? Where the world’s headed?”

Lina couldn’t tell whether Albert was talking to her, or to Scrappy.

Before she could ask for an explanation he spoke again. “Let’s move quickly. This much Doom and mana will turn you into one of those monsters before you can even notice.”

“I feel normal.” She said.

“I’m protecting you now. It won’t last. Not at this insane concentration of Doom. And I won’t be able to save you this time.”

“Where do we go?” She found herself asking, as if even the idea of running away on her own had been washed away by the sight of the ‘sombies’ as Albert had called them. A part of her mind was fearing that the whole world was going to turn out like this, and even though battle and magic accelerated the process, soon there would be no safe place on Earth save for wherever Albert happened to be at the time.

Finally she understood why Scrappy was with him despite all his strangeness. Even if he didn’t keep his promises, even if he didn’t make her more powerful…

“We follow the Lithoids back to their… camp.” Albert said. “Whoever controls then has a fragment of an artifact I need. But first, we make camp and rest. It’s finally time I give you some new powers.”