She picked me up again. I thanked her from the bottom of my heart - literally, by coughing up stale blood.

“Battles over, we’re gathering everyone and leaving for the tunnels ASAP,” Kris said.

“Tracking, you got anymore refills?”

She raised her one remaining eyebrow. “Afraid not, we’re almost out and scavenging is still ongoing.”

I surveyed the aftermath. “Shit, I need to go find my swords.”

She put a hand on my shoulder. “Speaking of, just some friendly advice, you need to stop losing fights just as you’re about to win them.”

“How so?”

“You blew its head off, yeah? Always aim for center mass, weak spot was close to the heart.”

“How was I supposed to know that?”

“What do you mean? I shouted it before the lines clashed.”

“Fuck me, I was unconscious.”

“Not in a million years, soldier.”

We parted ways and I started searching for ammo after tucking my broken left arm into my belt harness, using it as something of a makeshift sling. My right somehow remained mostly functional, although minimal movement seemed like a solid plan. A bitching headache stabbed through my skull and cracking my neck felt oddly reminiscent of slipping a disc. A few minutes of wandering resulted in zero found swords. Walt ran towards me, shouting something so I waved at him. One of my standing notifications disappeared, replaced by a seizure. Or an aneurysm. Possibly both.

A wave of warmth rippled through me. Walt stared again, and then slapped my face.

I protested, “Fuck. Stop it.”

His eyes lit up. “For a moment I thought you were gone.”

“What happened…?”

He spoke without making eye contact. “I said I patched you up… but that’s not true, strictly speaking. My System-shit, as you call it, if you are too wounded and it fades… you die.”

“Oh, right, not good. Well, we’ll manage…” He stopped me from getting back up, his hand firmly pushed my good shoulder down. The dude remained considerate, even now.

“I’m not finished. The effect… It inspires hubris. It’s a bad combination. You need to stay close to me while you recover, with the others.”

“Well shit, I need to find my swords at least.”

“Don’t worry, they are gathering everything.”

Right, fuck, who cared about stuff? Only staying alive mattered now, what was I thinking? We went over to the worryingly large group of dead men and women walking. He told me to sit down, shut up optional. Walt made painstakingly sure no one’s buff timer expired at any point. I was completely exhausted and dozed off somehow.

A gentle shake from someone I didn’t recognize woke me up sometime later. The nap left me feeling much better.

The walking alarm clock spoke. “Hey, hey, we’re leaving in five, get ready alright?”

From the looks of it, I didn’t need Walt’s enhancement to live anymore. A pile of swords was right next to me, but I couldn’t stash them all and settled for the usual twelve in my quiver, then dumped the rest in a nearby wagon of wounded which had appeared out of nowhere. Last calls for departure sounded and enchanted beasts of burden appeared to pull our cartloads of casualties. No man left behind, except for the dead.

Our destination, the entrance to the tunnels, was a good four hours out, but eight was a better bet at our current pace. It took quite a bit until socializing began to appeal. Jens remaining half and I had a for-realsies heartfelt conversation. She thought I’d died early in the battle and we resolved to stop pussy-footing around each other. We had to cut it off halfway, incidentally about how far along we were on our trip, when another red flare went up far to the north. I promised Jen a rain-check and joined the call for fighters. The rest planned to angle west, then north again. We would intercept. Fast movers only, so pure mages, speedless hybrids and endurance fighters had to stay behind, keeping our losses from expanding further.

Kris bellowed orders, “Listen up, the two of us will form the vanguard, rest of you are to catch any that slip by.”

An advance scout entered visual range and sped frantically towards us, followed by a snake of goddamn bunnycrabs in the distance. Command opted to keep way more lights out than strictly necessary during the evacuation, clearly a smart move. The lesser lobsters looked more like four-legged crawlers, their stingers intertwined into chitinous limbs with a central, almost enclosed, sphere hanging from where the combined appendages met - those housed the bunnies. Kris and Jerry – Wulf was an endurance fighter - ran forward, the rest of us made a concave line.

Christ, they were fast - both the frontrunners and the crabs. Then the air around Jerry shifted somehow and he raced ahead. He circled around and Kris slowed down her leaps. The leading few of the stretched line were outright butchered by Kris but the real star of the show was Jerry. I’d been eager to see what my class-mate was capable of.

He crashed into a denser group of Breakfast’s murderous siblings, dealing physical damage with dual-wielded slices and stabs while several magic swords trailed behind in the air, connected by a bright white wire. Awkward looking stops and strange movements baffled me for a moment until he turned into a fucking blender, combining swordplay with whip-like master manipulation of the stringed blades. A group of craven crabs bunched up to surround him when a whipsword stretched its line taut in a wide upward arc until it was right above him, then shattered into controlled conic shrapnel, killing most of them amidst puffs of dust on the earth. Across, a bunnycrab tried to catch one of the corded oversized daggers but it just disappeared only to manifest again on a loose white wire that I hadn’t spotted earlier near Jerry.

“What the fuck man.” I said, to no one in particular.

Some dudette next to me responded. “Yeah, those two are really something. Probably the only reason we haven’t kicked it yet.”

She misunderstood me but any correction went unsaid. “Yeah, yeah…”

I came to appreciate my class in time, but couldn’t help feeling a little jealous again. The feeling disappeared very quickly when the incoming line started dispersing to the sides, then a giant mass of bunnycrab appendages appeared suddenly on the artificial horizon. I matched the spread by going wide as well and prepared for a rematch against the rapid rabbits, Kris and Jerry headed for the variant.

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

It was hard to judge speed at a distance, but closing in helped. Our paces roughly matched, although I wasn’t really trying particularly hard. Bad news for the hybrid crustacean who lacked a ranged attack. I settled into a rhythm of kiting with consistent spacing and well placed ten mana snipes, refilling my coin and foraging ammunition mid-skirmish, always finding more targets to challenge. Until they ran out and my battle-frenzy dissipated. We were done. Our best settled their fight some time ago and once again tore deep into whatever remained of the onslaught, nearly out of sight. A trail of red flares hovered in a diagonal in the distance to our north-west.

I was slightly surprised by how far our running battle had taken us south - didn’t have a lot of emotion left to spend, hence the mild effect. Instead, sheer terror monopolized my senses.

Ash and cinder rained.

We reformed to an extent, our outrunner groups preferences shifted to extreme social distancing and panicked shouting. Then a yellow-red laser beam incinerated a few more of our fellows. Kris glowed and answered with her last javelin. At least I thought so. She didn’t have any more and had just gone from a ready position to a finished one without any transition, like reality just skipped a few frames. She told the rest of us to run and argued for a moment with Jerry until he conceded. The dragon landed, lazily.

I was at a loss for words. Sure, the thing was intimidating and all but it was covered in various scorch marks, scrapes, jutting shafts and other extremely minor injuries – and that was just the head. It shook like a dog and most of them snapped or fell off. I spotted my sword, still half-embedded in what passed for its kneecap, along with a few other curios here and there, some System-spawned white, others man-made metal.

Everyone fled, except for Kristen and me. The dragon cocked its head and Kris advanced with halberhammeraxe in hand. She stopped in front of it and shouted as loud as she could, deafening. Then the dragon roared, more reminiscent of an earthquake, tremble and all, nearly popping my ears. She stood and readied herself among dancing flickers, in defiance of overwhelming power.

I ran.

Not away, but towards with a curve out to my right side, only needed to get close. The last I saw was the tenement sized lizard languidly raising a front claw and getting ready to presumably swipe. I had other things on my mind and changed my sub-process, nearing its bad leg. Closing revealed tiny white forking circuits expanding from my embedded projectile, accompanied by a mild but constant hiss of stringy steam. The Greatbeast shifted just as my sword entered the three meter radius of my [Launch] and [Control] skills. A thought activated the prepared process – launch on repeat.

My very sharp magic smart sword nearly disappeared into its knee until it hit some kind of resistance with a loud, sharp clang. The beasty twitched almost invisibly while I sped past underneath. Job done, I fucking legged it towards the latest red flare. I tried to master running with superhuman speed and a broken arm at the last second, weighed down by increasing clumsiness and mounting exhaustion, my body not feeling quite right.

Then I spared a final prayer for Kris.

Happy hunting.

Kristen

The sideways swing was coming in. I slammed my halberd into the ground, imbedding it quarter way up the oversized blue blade. The kickstand had long-since become redundant. I readied myself and waited as eternity compressed into something fleeting and I became so much more.

[Boost], [Focus]. The last was the first, my initial accidental vocalization and favorite personal mantra. Now, an echo resurfacing and reverberating on the still surface of reality, only to reinforce a message – power was all. So had I chosen for every upgrade. The combination exemplified the great within the simple. One to empower, the other to localize. Any action, any movement, any moment; all could be amplified without limit, provided one was skilled enough.

A contest of might between myself and the dismissive tyranny of a myth come to life. My companion would not hold without support. Then, amidst falling flecks of flame, I felt it was time.

I stepped in, then pivoted, transferring and amplifying momentum with every movement as I twisted to extend my other leg in a roundhouse sweep where the contraction of every muscle, every shift of weight and the burden of every joint were all accompanied by the same two-part thought. [Boost], [Focus].

The great talon and all I could muster met, mediated only by the halberd in the middle.

My boot exploded between foot and hammer-end, yet perfection would not be denied. As was execution, so was result. And thus claws were shorn. I pulled my chipped companion out of the ground while sparing a glance at the fresh footprint, then set off to collect another trophy and refilled my energy. The dragon responded in kind, gathering fire.

Gabriel

The vultures were circling - figuratively. They weren’t actual eagle-sized birds, just pairs of wings with a bladed tail. They waited until I picked up speed and then swooped in, forcing me to abandon my run in favor of avoiding or blocking their fly-by’s. Blinked swords severed trailing razorblades, over and over. My armor minimized injuries, even when I messed up because they tag-teamed me together with the occasional stray bunnycrab, allowing me to keep fighting - for now. I burned through swords, in too much of a hurry to collect them, as they kept repeating the combo attack every so often.

I only caught up to our evacuees by the time they’d reached the out-of-place mountain which housed the narrow cave leading to the staircase within – barely in time too, only two shootable swords remained in my combined arsenal. The feathered fucks harried them as well, with similar amounts of success. Probably. There weren’t many people still outside, hopefully because they’d nearly finished carrying the maimed through the ill-fitting fracture, rather than our numbers having been culled yet again.

I reported to Wulf, who ordered me to help repel the avian attackers. After finding my bundle of blades, I joined the defense. We were nearly done with only a handful of fighters still outside when gently descending embers sent a chill up my spine.

“RUN!”

Within moments I found myself shoving the guy forward who’d pre-empted me to the mountainside crack, we were all squeezing ourselves through the- My armor caught on a protrusion while I hopelessly tried to push back against whoever was behind me to unhook it, the fabric refusing to give way amidst incoherent shouts of impatience. I finally shot the offending piece of rock and dislodged myself in a stumble. A few frantic moments, then some squeezes and steps before I dove and tumbled down the stairway just as an upward rush of air greeted a wave of dragon fire entering the tunnel. Finally the panic stopped and we made our way further in a stupor, somehow unharmed.

Then a feeling of safety settled in, even if there were sounds of combat deeper in the tunnels, and I realized Wulf had never come down.

I found most of my buddies huddled together in a corner, subconsciously picking up on how few there were left of us. Yet all I could do was embrace the relief of small miracles. My adrenaline crashed, I had nothing left to give a world that was all too willing to take. I sat down, settled against a wall, and drifted away into sacred oblivion.

I only slept for a couple of hours. The fighting wasn’t over and calls had gone out for replacements to take over constantly intensifying anti-swarm duty. We didn’t have straws to draw so I volunteered for the short one. A blessing in disguise, despite my former misgivings I turned out to be pretty good at this. Just had to nuke a long hallway full of spiderwolves intermittently, and then break out with some help to collect the swords and do it all over again - well, not quite so easily. After a clear, an endurance fighter took over to bunch the bastards up until I could reap a proper harvest. For some reason, the wolf-headed giant spiders with leathery skin instead of chitin didn’t freak me out, at most the sticky white silk they left behind disgusted me.

I lost track of time once more, but it probably took half a day or so of rotating exhausted people out, and back in a few hours later, before we managed to smash our way out of the molten shut remains of the thin passageway. Just in time, as the tunnels were getting increasingly violent.

I stepped up the winding spiral and took a deep breath of stale cave air. The stink downstairs had gotten so bad, people actually encouraged smoking. My mounting joy peaked as I made my way outside and basked in rays of sunlight. Our losses were staggering and most of us were wounded or crippled but only one thought crossed my mind.

We survived. Victory.

As others shared my experience one by one, I found a lively discussion to join. The central premise was both simple and contested.

‘What are we going to do?’

I didn’t get to give my two cents before everyone shut up and a sudden silence overtook the scorched field.

A gold outlined black system notification box had appeared right in the middle of my field of view.

“You have been granted a free point.”