“What? Where? On the southern plains?”

“Here! In town! Holes are opening everywhere! You need to get out there, Olivia. People are panicking, and it’s accelerating the death toll.”

“Eik, please save Tracy!” Olivia besought him before disappearing in a blur, a trail of flames and heated air lingering for a second.

“I’ll try,” he promised the space where she’d been and rolled up his sleeves. “Harry, was it? What got her?”

“It was a Xaraxis-2, 4, or 5. I didn’t get a good enough look to say exactly which with certainty.”

“A spider, huh? I’m going to cut her shirt,” Eik said, retrieving his trusty knife from the worktable. “It’s not a Xaraxis-5, at least,” he confirmed once he got a better look at the wound.

“How can you tell?” Harry asked, his eyes constantly flitting from his companion to the door, then back to her.

“They don’t leave a gash like this,” he clarified, tracing the edge of the injury with a finger as he contemplated the best course forward. He went around the store, gathering anything he thought he might need. “How bad is it out there? Like, how bad is it really?”

“Worse than anything you’re imagining,” Harry muttered. “It’s like nine years ago all over again. It might be too much for us this time. We don’t have enough Awakened anymore.”

“Hold her down, please. If she wakes up and starts panicking, it’s going to end in a terrible, and likely fatal, greeting for me.” Harry did as instructed. A muffled explosion shook the little store, rattling the glassware on the shelves.

“Being in here, it’s almost like everything is still okay. As a matter of fact, I’m kind of surprised that this tiny little store hasn’t been flattened by the fighting by now. The monsters should be here any second.”

Eik frowned as he worked. “Don’t jinx my cute shop like that, please. It’s been through enough today already.”

“Sorry… How’s it looking?”

Eik hmm’d as he came to a decision. “I can’t tell if it’s a Xaraxis-2 or 4. Both the wound and the effect of the toxin are too similar without seeing the bastard. I’ll have to guess.”

“Guess?” Harry repeated with horror. “Won’t that be dangerous?”

“Doing nothing is most certainly worse.”

Harry hesitated momentarily, his eyes firmly planted on his comrade, but in his line of work he knew the value of decisiveness. “Alright, do it.”

Eik injected a dose of antivenom directly into her open wound and hoped for the best. Before he could get to cleaning the wound, his nice, well-built ceiling came crashing down like a barrel wave breaking on shore, covering everybody and everything in dust and debris.

Something of considerable weight caught Eik painfully on the shoulder on its way to the floor, sending spikes of agony through his entire upper body and causing his arm to go numb from the neck down. What felled him, however, was a dense roof tile striking his left shin with an ominous crunch against bone.

Whether he had hit his head or the explosion had deafened him he couldn’t say, but the scream of anguish that escaped his throat was barely a distant keen inside his head. With the dust in his eyes, he couldn’t open them, but a hand grasped him by the wrist, pulling him along at a speed he wouldn’t have been prepared to follow even if his leg didn’t feel like it had been mangled beyond recovery.

Eik tried to tell his guide to slow down, but as soon as he opened his mouth, he inhaled a lungful of dust, eliciting a coughing fit that triggered nets of agony emanating from his shoulder injury. He was pulled bodily over something that dug painfully into his ribs, further worsened when his lower body cleared the elevation and let his broken leg come down hard on the floor.

Suddenly they stopped and a splash of water hit him in the face, working some of the debris out of his eyes. He leaned his head back, hoping that the gesture was enough to tell his savior that he’d appreciate another wash. His wish was graciously fulfilled. When he could finally open his eyes, Eik thought that he might have gone nearly blind. His perfectly cooled storage room was darkened to the point where the surrounding shelves were hardly visible through the gloom.

He tried to stand but his leg and arm failed him cruelly, forcing him to sprawl back onto the floor to reduce the pain. Disoriented, he dragged himself away from the shelves toward the door that had to be somewhere behind him when his elbow knocked against something soft.

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A limp body on the floor sent him crab-walking away in shock as a yelp built in his throat, but before he could utter a proper sound, however, a hand was placed firmly over his mouth. Harry’s face appeared in the periphery of Eik’s vision, a finger gesture begging for silence. Eik nodded and the hand eased away.

Looking around, it became apparent that what he had initially mistaken for blindness was, in fact, just an absence of light caused by a collapsed wall blocking the entrance to the storage room. Eik realized he had regained at least some of his hearing when the grating sound of rubble being displaced reached his ears. Quietly as he could, made his way over to the pile of debris and risked a peek over the collapsed wall.

Eik stiffened at the sight of a five meter long monster with a crocodilian snout and a body resembling that of a big cat, its skin black as coal. It struggled to stand up, writhing in the debris like a decapitated snake, growling and whining, clearly terribly hurt. Somebody must have sent it flying through Eik’s shop and then forgotten about it.

Screams and sounds of combat reverberated from outside, clear now that there wasn’t a storefront to block it out. The monster seemed eager to get back out there, even though, judging by the way it moved, its foreleg was probably broken.

“What the hell is that even?” Eik mouthed with a horrified expression.

Harry just stared at the struggling beast, fingers caressing his weapon at his belt. The man was clearly shaken by the whole situation. Eik was pretty sure the only reason he wasn’t freaking out himself was that his mind still hadn’t allowed him to fully comprehend the severity of what was going on. The global, irreversible collapse of the world order, all countries, and all societies had been the most traumatic experience in Eik’s life and if this truly was a repeat of that, then he might not be able to take another round.

“Can’t you take care of it?” he tried with trembling voice.

“You wanna get caught up in a fight with that? And I’m D-rank. I’ve never even seen a monster like that. It’s better to shut up and stay hidden.” His point was only reinforced by the defenseless and unmoving figure of Tracy in his lap, whose steady breathing filled Eik with hope for her recovery. The bag of medicine Eik had sold Olivia laid next to them.

Seconds after he swallowed a healing sphere of his own, a smoldering pain razed up his forearm as if a white hot nail was being dragged across his skin. An involuntary yelp made it past his lips, eliciting a sharp inhalation from Harry, whose face took on an expression of anger before he noticed Eik’s arm.

“You’re awakening,” he whispered with surprise as he stared at the text lining the apothecary’s forearm. “Eik, you’re awakening!”

As he blinked tears out of his eyes, the script continued to carve itself into his arm while he watched, the unseen scorching nail seeming to cauterize the wound as it appeared, occluding what would otherwise have been a stream of blood. Eik found himself forced to bite down hard on his lip, just to keep down the screams.

He could barely concentrate enough to take in the neat, red words.

[Eik Magnasen]

[TX497-81414—NEW]

[Human]

The text faded without a trace, as they had on Olivia’s wooden plaque. He would have appreciated a plaque of his own like that right about now. Eik got halfway through a breath of relief before the agony returned in full force.

“Congratulations,” Harry whispered with a smile, despite the dire situation. “You should carry one of these around from now on. It’s only forced onto your skin when you first awaken.” He dangled his own flat piece of wood in front of Eik, who was slumped against the wall, exhausted.

[F-rank — III]

“Not too bad,” Harry mumbled. “I started as a fourth stage, right on the cusp of E-rank, but you’re a little stronger than you were before, at least.” Eik chuckled weakly.

Again, the script vanished. And this time Eik knew what to expect.

[Choose one:]

[Blades]

[Concentration]

[Resistance: Toxin]

These three choices lingered, their red outlines glowing slightly in the murky storage room, urging him to hurry up.

[Blades], [Concentration], and [Resistance: Toxin].

Two of those were obvious in their meaning. One, not so much. [Concentration]? What, would it make him think real good or something?

[Blades] would be, well, a heightened proficiency with blades of various types, granted instantly into the Awakened’s mind and body as if by magic. Seeing a weapon skill offered as one of the three first was apparently incredibly common and they were immensely popular both for that reason and for the simple fact that they fulfilled a coolness factor that many pursued. Even routine use of a knife would be enough to offer the [Blades] ability. Eik glanced down at his dull work knife.

The Resistance series was pretty common as well, providing protection from all kinds of things. This one was obviously a result of his daily experiments with poison.

“Seems pretty obvious to me,” Harry commented quietly, having read along. Eik eyed the twin blades sheathed on the man’s belt and rolled his eyes slightly. What a mystery.

“I think it’s best to think a bit more about this before I make my choi—” They slid. Or rather, half of the room they were in started sliding downward at an angle. The wall Eik was leaning against gave way and he tumbled backwards, everything behind him seeming to disappear downward, hauling him helplessly along. The bag with medicine rolled a couple of times before Eik managed to snatch it up and hold it tightly to his chest. Wherever this was leading, he’d probably be grateful for the medicine.

“No, Eik!” Harry shouted. The man had gotten clear of the affected area by pure reflex, carrying Tracy under his arm. From the middle of the roiling rubble wave Eik had neither the line of sight nor the presence of mind to see the monster that had been thrown into the front room of his store, but the earsplitting screech responding to Harry’s exclamation told him that the agile D-ranker would have no time to worry about him anymore. Even as he tried to use his new F-rank power to scale the sliding fragments of his floor and wall, the retreating Harry shot Eik a final look of genuine guilt before he disappeared from sight, leaving him to fall helplessly into the earth.

Dark, damp soil splashed around Eik like an avalanche as he fell. Harry had done the right thing in fleeing with Tracy’s unconscious body. He wouldn’t have been able to do anything to save Eik, even if he didn’t have a second person in his care as well. It would have been a sign of foolishness and overconfidence, frankly, if the D-ranker had jumped down after him. Still, he found himself chuckling morbidly at the thought of Olivia’s reaction when she found out about it.

In seconds, all light was swallowed, the furious, foreboding rumble of the earth announcing Eik’s journey to the depths.