Sebastian sighed, lying on his back, staring up into the sky.

He had just gotten some nice new clothes, and now they were scorched and covered in gore.

He was reminded of something Vik Vikerson, the CEO of BionicMuse, had drunkenly told him at the LAN party last week: “Girls with blue hair. Never trust them. They’ll lure you in with their fun and charm and carefree approach. Then they take you for everything.”

Sebastian had tried to extricate himself, but Vik had grabbed him tighter. “Promise me, Sebastian, you sweet boy, never trust the bluehairs.”

“I… won’t,” he’d said, and then spent the rest of the night avoiding the man.

“Guess he was right.”

He got up and oriented himself. He’d resurrected this time on a roof above the street he was killed on.

He carefully leaned over the edge to peer down, and frowned in confusion at what he saw.

It was the girl with blue hair who he’d seen in the stairwell—and who had just killed him—fighting Lars, the shirtless Vassal, along with Niels, the one in motorcycle gear. Who were both supposed to be dead.

The rage that had been on the girl’s face before she’d blasted off his head was gone, and she looked just as vacant now as she had in the stairwell, but was a lot more active.

He had no idea why she’d killed him. Maybe she was insane. He definitely had never met her before other than that stairwell encounter.

But he was more confused at the fact that Lars and Niels were still alive. They’d both seemed very dead when he’d been trying to loot them.

As he watched the fight, it didn’t take him long to realize the truth: they weren’t alive. Not really. They’d been taken over by the System.

It was weird that it had waited, when the one who’d been hit by a car came back pretty much instantly. Maybe it was different somehow because they’d been Vassals.

He realized something else as he watched the confrontation. While they may have been empowered by the System when it turned them into its puppets, they appeared now to have reduced abilities.

Well, at least shirtless Lars with the knife did. He’d been able to move so fast that it took Sebastian coming back to life to realize what had happened to him. If it hadn’t been for his hands being occupied by holding onto Sebastian’s legs, Sebastian wouldn’t have been able to grab the man’s knife and stab him with it. But a combination of surprise and an apparent unwillingness to let go of Sebastian’s feet had been Lars’s downfall.

But now, the girl with the blue flaming fists was almost able to keep up; Lars now moved like a video played at double time, instead of a flash of lightning.

She then tried a tactic Sebastian was familiar with: decapitation by magical blue beam of fire.

Lars was still fast enough to dodge the attack, but Niels—who looked like a really expensive Freddy Kruger cosplay thanks to Sebastian and his Molotov attacks—was right behind and far too slow to avoid it.

The attack struck him at the neck and his head toppled from his body.

Niels’s headless body staggered, then went to its knees. Sebastian expected it to fall over, but instead it picked up its burning, decapitated head.

Sebastian wondered if it was about to put it back on like the Headless Horseman.

But a reunion wasn’t what it had in mind, and instead launched the head at the girl, somehow able to locate her without sight.

She was able to dodge, but her body language said she hadn’t expected Niels to survive. Or she was just stunned that someone had thrown their own head at her.

Either way, it was the first emotion other than apathy or rage Sebastian had seen in her.

She screamed in apparent frustration, shot another ball at Lars as he came for her, then turned to headless Niels and blasted a hole through his chest.

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He was knocked back slightly, but most of the force was lost in blowing the hole open. He kept coming.

“They are zombies,” Sebastian muttered.

Unfortunately, they were far from mindless. And however lacking in speed this Lars-monster was, he was still faster than the average human by a good margin.

Apparently as fed up with zombies as Sebastian was, the girl screamed at the sky, then blasted off, blue energy shooting from her fists propelling her into the air fast enough to create a sonic boom.

“Where can I get a card like that?” Sebastian wondered aloud, the only sound he could hear a high-pitched ringing in his ears as he watched her fly away into the distance.

∎ ∎ ∎

By the time Sebastian got down from the roof, the monsters were nowhere in sight and his hearing had somewhat returned, though that sonic boom had definitely done more damage than any concert ever had.

The cards were thankfully still on his corpse. And a corpse was all it was, not a phantom, since he couldn’t connect to it.

Maybe because it was missing its head.

He was once again in need of clothes, but even now couldn’t bring himself to take the ones from his body.

He took the backpack though.

He tossed the cards in the pack and slung it over his shoulders, then looked up at the apartment building, considering if he wanted to go in again to get another set of clothes. The ones he’d taken hadn’t fit him particularly well, and there were plenty of clothing stores in the area. He could stock up on fresh new ones.

Plus, he was just paranoid about going in there again. He wanted to get out of here in case Bluehair decided to come back. With that fire beam, she could take him out at a distance. And if she saw him before his cooldown finished…

Making his decision, he headed to the bike rack to ‘borrow’ another bicycle, opening and closing his jaw to try to get his ears to stop ringing

He was almost looking forward to his next death, just to get rid of the stupid ringing.

He reached the bike rack and stopped.

Should he die again? Doing so left behind phantoms that he could control. He should get some practice. Get a new body and maybe build an army.

He stood there, dumbfounded that it took him this long to think of it.

Then he realized it couldn’t have been more than a few hours since that first text from Anubis.

He shook his head. It wasn’t a bad idea, but as he started to go through the logistics of killing himself, he realized he didn’t have it in him. What if he jumped off a roof and survived?

He’d need a more certain method. And something that wouldn’t destroy his corpse.

He amended his todo list: find a World Store outpost, gather cards, locate the first gate and clear it—and if he found time, figure out a fast, painless, and non-damaging method of death.

The first order of business, however, was finding something to wear.

∎ ∎ ∎

From her place on the roof, Qin Li Eema watched as the naked madman disappeared from her normal sight, riding away on his stolen mechanical horse.

What she had just seen had been… disturbing.

He truly did seem mad.

But not a murderer. He had let the group of seven—now a group of five—leave, despite having the literal jump on them. Which in its way had been more shocking than the brutal manner he’d fought in.

Though she had sensed the power of time in him, the technique he’d used—that he was able to use a technique at all was still baffling to her, as his core was empty and his channels static—had been different, and remained a mystery. He could die and come back, and each time, the power around and inside of him grew. His copies were mere shadows of his own rather meager power, but even for Eema, detecting which was the shadow and which was the man had been difficult.

For someone so weak, his trickery was hard to see through. If he gained more power, she might not be able to tell at all.

And it seemed, all he needed to do to gain power, was to fight, and to die.

Then there was the girl with the massive power signature.

After his fight, the madman had exited the building, dressed again, and Eema’s senses had pricked. She had detected someone with power, an amount larger than she had yet encountered in this world. There had been nothing, and suddenly there was, like a bonfire igniting.

A moment later the girl had stepped out of the building behind the madman.

Then she’d launched forward and punched him clear across the road before shooting a beam of blue fire at him that took off his head.

That time Eema had seen him reappear on a roof below and to her right.

There had been something strange about it, but she hadn’t had time to consider it as her attention had been drawn back to the girl, who began fighting two of the men the madman had killed, who had somehow come back to life without Eema noticing.

Except, ‘life’ wasn’t exactly correct.

There was a power in them, like that within the giant that had pursued the madman. But nowhere near as great, and connected to something vast and far beyond her ability to detect.

The girl had fought brutally, taking the head of one—which the headless body then threw at her, undeterred—and, when that failed, blasting a hole in his chest.

When this too failed to stop him, she appeared to grow frustrated, screamed at the heavens, then flew away in a display of power that rivaled a Lord-rank cultivator.

Afterward, the madman had left his hiding place on the roof, while the monsters—one headless—wandered off into the city before he could get down.

The madman had taken a pack from his old body, but for some reason not bothered with the clothes, then stolen another mechanical horse—which Eema’s heavenly messenger called a bike—and ridden off into the city.

Now, Eema stood on the roof, considering her options, considering all she’d learned so far, as she watched the madman through her Dragon-sight—her normal vision was not capable of seeing through buildings.

He was intriguing, but she wasn’t going to follow him. She’d made her decision. This wasn’t her world.

She had her own group to find…

She looked in the opposite direction, where she could still see faint tendrils of power connecting to something vast.

…but first, she could take out a few monsters.