A hurled chunk of rock bounced off my shoulder, a dull pain shooting through me, showing that [Diplomatic Immunity] had only taken the worst edge off. Meaning it hadn’t been outright lethal, and that I could tank a couple more hits with the Skill before it stopped working for a time.

I whirled around to see that another group of statues had risen from the ground, and was rapidly closing the distance, and seemed to have an unfortunate focus on me, which also meant that pretty soon, I’d be between the cops and the monsters.

Now there were six enemies bearing down on us, and I only had two portals left, and [Polite Rebuke] hit pretty hard when retaliating against lethal damage, so it might also let me take one down … any way I sliced it, the math wasn’t mathing.

Shit.

But I didn’t retreat, instead doing a simple sidestep that failed to open the distance even slightly. Then I stayed there, and the nearest statue lunged. So I bitch-slapped it backwards, sending it crashing into one of its fellows that I’d made sure to put right behind my target.

[Polite Rebuke] really was broken. It was a Skill meant for pushing through crowds, gently brushing aside others, but both its power and cooldown scaled to the level of offense given and you couldn’t get more impolite than trying to kill someone. And given that I’d hit the monster as it swung for my face … yeah, “get fucked” was an apt summation of what had just happened.

Granted, if I’d hit a human like that, let alone one with a physical Class, they likely could have still gotten back up. But as tough as stone was, it was also brittle, cracking rather than bending, and those two statues went to the ground in enough pieces that even a higher-tier version would have lost its animating spirit.

If this had been a movie, that achievement would likely have been followed by a long silence, but this was real life. If the cops stopped firing in a situation like that just because someone did something impressive … that could have ended badly.

Someone may or may not have shouted something or sworn, but if they did, I didn’t hear. Guns were loud.

I turned to the target they were concentrating on, [Fireball] already manifesting in my palm, but it was already falling over like a felled tree, head finally having come apart under the hail of bullets.

Instead, I flicked it at two statues that were standing too close to each other even as they began swiftly walking in my direction, where it detonated with a dull “boom,” sending them stumbling but not achieving too much besides that. A few more cracks ran across them, but that was all … and between having to cast the spell and paying attention to where I was standing relative to the people with teh guns, I’d overlooked the third and final remaining statue … which grabbed onto my wrist and began to squeeze. And pull.

Heh. If it had just squeezed, I’d have been screwed, but now … now, I could get out of it, using the most unlikely of spells. [Modern Makeover].

My wristwatch, one I’d made sure to be made completely of metal, switched wrists and turned into a band beneath the monster’s grip, flush to my skin, forming a barrier there. And above that, the cloth was piled high, leaving me in a short-sleeved shirt and shorts while there was suddenly a mass of cloth between my wrist and the living statue’s hand, which it suddenly found itself pulling on instead of, well, me.

So I yanked my hand free, took two steps back, and used my third portal charge to dump it onto the remains of the first one I’d wrecked with this trick. It, of course, shattered into a dozen different pieces while I restored my clothing into something slightly more dignified, which wound up looking like regular everyday clothing.

Which left me with the last two, which were already “running” at me, which made them quite a bit faster than walking speed but well below how quickly I could move at a dead sprint.

But there were others closer. They were fixated on me. So I did the obvious. I ran. Not to the cops to hide behind them, not in the opposite direction of the statues to get as far from them as possible, but towards a very specific target. The trail of devastation the Lincoln Raid Boss had torn included a series of deep footsteps in the space before the Capitol, and I ran along them, occasionally glancing over my shoulder to make sure they were still following. Perfect.

That’s when I cast [Lesser Visual Illusion] at the floor, covering the entire area of foot-shaped craters. I couldn’t cover an area like that with anything realistic, but I didn’t have to, considering that a flat, grey expanse flush with the undamaged ground would. I didn’t need a perfect illusion, I just needed something to make the holes impossible to see.

The statues might be smart enough to not step in the hole when they were visible, but as far as I knew, they would be as likely to stumble into the invisible craters as humans were, now.

If I’d been in place of the statues, I’d have gone around the area, but the statues apparently thought otherwise.

One [Fireball] manifested in my left hand while I extended my right at the nearest chunk of rubble and telekinetically pulled on it, causing it to start sliding towards me at slowly increasing speeds as the fire grew.

The orb of flame was flicked into the nearest monster’s face, making it stumble, but still not managing to do much damage. Then, its foot went through the “floor” and went sprawling, so I flicked my hand left and dropped the pulling spell, causing my projectile to fall and slam into it.

Stolen story; please report.

My initial idea had been to pull that chunk over and then throw it while enhancing it with [Lesser Telekinetic Push], which was still boosted for being my “favored spell,” but this worked too, even better than expected. Since the fall had damaged the statue enough that the next impact made it break apart.

That’s when I saw one of the cops waving, and ran to the side so that they wouldn’t hit me if they missed the statue while summoning a [Fireball] in each hand. The spell had some concussive power to it, but not much, and besides, explosions hit harder in enclosed spaces, something them splashing off the surface of the statues was the exact opposite off.

Still, I flicked them at the monster, resolving to learn [Force Punch] the next time I had the time.

But the next time, I only summoned one ball of flame while using the telekinetic spells to push or pull at the monster, trying to unbalance it, making it as hard as possible to rapidly advance while we were peppering it with fireballs and bullets.

Though in the end, it was the statue itself that dealt the final blow as it tripped over the edge of another crater, fell, and broke in half.

Well … that was a little anti-climatic. But I’d won.

Heh.

I’d actually won. With help, obviously, but that help hadn’t come in the form of an ancient legend made flesh capable of obliterating my foes with their pinkie, but ordinary people. People like me.

I started to laugh. It wasn’t anything normal, neither a chuckle a belly laugh, or anything in between, but a wheezing, incredulous sound that I hoped no one heard. Which was likely what actually happened, given how far apart we were standing. From their perspective, I was probably just standing there with a wide grin on my face, vibrating slightly. Until I eventually managed to get myself back under control …

[Class Evolution: Myth(ical) Mediator Lv. 35 -> Courtmage of Neutrality Lv. 36]

[Skill Boost gained]

… only to immediately lose said control when the System announced that I’d reached my fourth Class, which turned out to be the first one that didn’t come with two Skills right out of the gate. Though a Boost was always welcome, and improving my spellcasting might make the next fight so much easier. So [Arcane Core] was where it went.

Your mana pool is deepened, dual-casting of complex spells is streamlined, two separate well-known spells of high complexity may be cast at the same time.

And with that done, I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths to calm myself back down.

“You alright?” Anderson called out.

“Fine,” I shouted back before I opened my eyes and walked back to where I’d been when the mess had all started … had it really only been a minute or so ago? It had felt longer. Much longer. But when I went through it all in my mind, replaying it a couple of times, yeah, it had been a minute, maybe two, since the second group of statues had revealed itself.

Still, danger messing with your perception of time was nothing new, unlike the fact that I had, apparently, become a monster magnet.

“Hey, I’m trying to figure out why they went right for me. Is anyone else’s Level over twenty?” I asked. If someone was, I could always ask if anyone was over thirty, and if no one had reached that point yet, it would give me a useful glimpse of the levels of those who didn’t flit from flashpoint to flashpoint, poking their noses into the greatest of disasters even if their actual contribution to solving them was small.

No one did. Which threw up another question: was it the level difference that had caused the statues to focus on me, or had I crossed some invisible threshold that the ancients had been enough when they emerged into the modern world, and that hadn’t been obvious because these were the first monsters I’d run into since that point without someone stronger around?

So that was the difference in advancement between a professional who often had to fight when monsters showed up, vs someone who was always involved in a fight but only peripherally. In other words, fighting beget power even when one could gain Levels otherwise.

Oh … that was not going to end well. If conflict gave levels, then deescalation was against everyone’s interest from a power point of view, creating a, well, conflict of interest.

Because conflicts of interest were more than just something that led people who were already evil astray. No one was above them, sadly. The conflict would always remain in the back of your mind, reminding you of what you could gain if you made an otherwise “wrong” choice, and even those who resisted temptation might hesitate for just long enough for something to horribly wrong.

No, I did not expect cities to become the Wild West, where cops never tried the peaceful route and always wished things to escalate to the greatest possible degree so they would give the greatest rewards after being resolved.

Most people, in most situations, wouldn’t go anywhere near that far.

But some would.

And that would make the world a worse place.

“Well, that escalated quickly,” one of the police officers commented, staring at the remains of the wrecked statues.

“I’m guessing that’s the first and only time you’ll be fixing something?” Anderson asked.

“I’m on cooldown,” I told him. It was shorter than I’d expected, at little over seven hours, but still too long for me to wait out and still expect to catch my flight, especially now that I was hoping to hoard my final portal in case of emergency, the general gist of which I passed along to Anderson.

“But if I’m about to visit again, I’ll give you a call, and you can tell me if there’s something in need of an instant fix.”

I left for the airport via the nearby Union Station soon after that, but not without gathering several phone numbers and contacts for the future, which meant I’d likely be able to avoid bothering in a whole other timezone again.

After a fairly long metro ride, and an even longer “journey” through the airport, I finally found myself on the plane … only to be told that we had a technical issue that had to be resolved. Which then turned out to be unfixable an hour later, and so on and so forth. Blech.

Still, I counted today as an absolute win. Earned some brownie points, proved to myself that I was, at the very least, not totally useless in a fight, and had gained a Level.

And it had given me another good idea, one I really should have had earlier, though I wasn’t sure when I’d have had found the time to execute it. Offer to rebuild vital infrastructure in exchange for a meeting with some high authority or other.

Once again, I’d have to actually take the time to do so, but if I found myself with the ability to execute this plan and there was a place where “I represent three Ancients” wouldn’t get my foot in the door, maybe this would. Then again, if my status failed, my abilities were unlikely to make much of a difference either.

Anyway, I’d show up in California in the morning, make my way into LA, and walk around it right before the point where daily Skills reset and use my final portal to return to the Untersberg. Or maybe the magic academy. Somewhere with friends and allies.