The cat ran off into the night. The damn coward.

Seth leaned against the open window. His shotgun had carved a wide cone in the fog, and tendrils of mist snaked through the air, slowly filling in the gaps. He considered chasing after the cat. That thing had nearly torn him apart. Nearly killed him.

A fucking cat. What was that thing anyway? The invisible man's pet?

If so, that was embarrassing for him. His pet had put up a much better fight than he had. All that remained of the invisible man was the beautiful mural that dripped down the kitchen walls. A masterwork painted with a brush of steel and polished wood. Seth held up the shotgun and admired its destructive power. God, was this weapon gnarly.

When Seth had evolved, all he'd asked for was some extra ammo. A simple wish that the parasite had expanded on to a wonderful degree, enhancing the shotgun far beyond his wildest expectations.

The new weapon had immediately changed the tide of battle. It had completely obliterated the invisible man, the mere sight of the carnage had sent the cat running, and beyond all that, the shotgun didn't even need any ammo. Seth would never have to reload again. Sure, the weapon needed to eat, but it didn't seem very picky in that regard.

However, Seth figured some extra testing wouldn't hurt. The shotgun had two barrels, and two triggers to match. He held the gun up to the window and pulled the first trigger.

A black slug jumped from the left barrel. It reached out, jaws stretching wide, and bit a massive chunk from the window, tearing out a piece of the wooden frame in the process. The rest of the window shattered, sending glass shards raining through the fog. The slug chewed for a moment, then retracted into the shotgun, gulping its meal down its fat gullet.

Seth shivered at the strange sight. It was like watching a snake swallow a mouse. Creepy, but also pretty cool.

Now, for some target practice. He lowered the shotgun a bit, pointing it out the open window in the same direction the cat had fled. Not that he expected to hit the damn coward, which had long disappeared, but it was as good a direction as any.

He pulled the second trigger.

Glass exploded from the right barrel in a wide cone. Even with his enhanced strength, the gun kicked like a mule, and his arm leaped up. The glass shards screamed through the air so fast that they broke the sound barrier. A loud bang echoed through the night as the shards broke apart, disintegrating into a deadly mist.

So that was how it worked. The weapon ate from the left barrel, then it spat its payload from the right barrel.

Seth smiled. This thing was pretty goddamn awesome. He opened Inkling.

Inkling Version 1.0

Name: Seth Mayhew

Stage: 5

First Shadow [+50% Efficiency]

Strength: 30

Reflex: 12

Vigor: 23

Clarity: 13

Integration: 60%

Free Points: 4 [+4 Each Stage]

Wishes:

ChainBreaker [+10 Strength | +5% Integration]

Inkling [+5 Clarity | +25% Integration]

FeelBetter [+10 Vigor | +10% Integration]

LinkedSouls [-10% Integration]

SpitFire [+5 Strength | +25% Integration]

The latest wish was called SpitFire. A fitting name for a shotgun that could eat something, then spit it back out at supersonic speed. Seth held up the gun, admiring its sleek black barrels and polished wooden handle. If only he'd had this gun back at the barn, those zombies wouldn't have stood a chance.

His evolution had brought Seth up to stage five, and he had new free points to spend. Seth considered his current stats. SpitFire gave him an additional five Strength, bringing him up to thirty. What had he started at? Seven? Eight? Either way, his current Strength was almost triple that.

Safe to say, Seth didn't need to spend his free points there. Earlier, his boost to Vigor had saved his ass. He could boost his healing even further. But the invisible man had slit his throat and the cat had torn his innards out, and yet, here he was. Still standing. Did he need more healing than that?

No, his weakest stat was Reflex, which was at a measly twelve. Seth dropped all his free points there, bringing it up to sixteen.

He stepped back and bounced on the balls of his feet. Considering the fight he'd just been in, he felt pretty good. It wasn't the boost in Strength, nor the extra points in Reflex. It was all his stats put together. By now, he had to be far beyond the capacities of a world-class athlete.

An alarm sounded from his phone. Seth flinched at the noise, and he quickly fished it out of his pocket. A fat notification lit up the screen, all in red.

Student Safety Warning: Shots fired on North Campus. Potential active shooter. Seek shelter and stay put until future updates.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Of course. Seth's fight had made a bit of a ruckus. It wouldn't be long before the police found his apartment and the bloody mess within. If Seth wasn't wanted by the police before, he would be now.

It was strange. Seth found it hard to care. After everything he'd faced, the police were more of an annoyance than a threat. Still, Seth had to leave the apartment. He grabbed his bag and brought it over to his laptop.

The Signal still streamed from the laptop speakers, a glorious hum that drained down his ears and vibrated in his bones. It was a shame to turn it off. After his last evolution, Seth only found himself hungrier for another.

Unfortunately, that wouldn't happen for a while. The demo had improved the Signal tenfold, but it was still just a drop in the ocean he required to reach the next stage.

Unless….

Seth had an idea. His original plan was to run the demo on his desktop since it had a better GPU than his laptop. Now that his PC was scattered in a thousand pieces, he'd thought that plan was dead in the water. However, he was at Shelby State University, which boasted vast computing resources, freely available to the students.

One such resource was Updraft, the university's virtual computer lab. It was a system that gave students access to computers far more powerful than anything they could buy on the market. If Seth uploaded his demo to Updraft, he could run it ten times faster than on his laptop.

A smile crept up Seth's cheeks. With the destination in mind, he slammed his laptop shut and tossed it in his backpack. Fog drifted from the shattered window, long tendrils spilling onto the floor. Seth breathed in the cool air, and he looked down at the three-story fall. Sirens blared in the distance. The police would arrive at any second.

Time to go.

Seth jumped from the window. Wind rushed by his ears, and he landed with a heavy thump, shoes crunching against broken glass. The shock reverberated up his legs, but it wasn't any worse than falling a few feet. Even if the fall had injured him, he'd heal almost immediately.

Updraft was hosted at Weaver Hall, a building on South Campus. Seth took a moment to reorient himself, then set off into the fog. His long strides carried him down the sidewalk at a steady clip. No one was out this late, or perhaps they'd seen the student safety notification and were hiding away.

Either way, Seth kept SpitFire in hand. Who cared if anyone saw him carrying a double-barreled shotgun? They'd just call the police or campus security, and what would they do about it? Shoot him? Seth had survived far worse.

South Campus wasn't far. Seth hurried around the back of the student union building, across a manicured lawn with fresh-cut grass, under a tunnel that ran beneath some train tracks, and then he was there. This part of the university was older than North Campus, and its buildings were a strange mix of worn brick and the newer remodelings of steel and glass.

Seth stood before one of the modern buildings, a giant structure that snaked around the back of a hill. Its steel beams undulated in a flowing pattern, with giant panes of glass stretching between them, more of an architectural art project than a practical design. Weaver Hall must have cost the university millions, but why spend that wealth on anything useful when it could be flaunted to their donors instead?

Dim lights shone inside the building, reflecting off the tall sheets of glass. Perhaps for the cleaning crews? Seth expected the doors to be locked. That in itself wouldn't be an issue, but if he broke in, an alarm would probably go off. Then campus security would show up, or the police, and dealing with them would delay setting up the demo.

The door was unlocked.

Hmm. Problem solved. Seth shouldn't have been too surprised. Lots of professors and their TAs held office hours late into the night, and Weaver Hall was a popular spot for students to work on various projects. Especially with the career fair tomorrow.

Seth had almost forgotten about the career fair. It was funny, a day ago the career fair had been the first thing on his mind. He'd been preparing for weeks, working on his demo, preparing his presentation, deciding what clothes he was going to wear.

Now he didn't give a shit. Why bend over backward, doing everything he could to kiss the ass of some suits, all for the opportunity to be a corporate slave for the rest of his life?

Seth took a moment to look around. Sporadic lighting reflected across the polished tile floor, and a few chairs faced the wide windows. Otherwise, Weaver Hall's lobby was empty. Seth hurried past the lobby and into a long hallway, trying to remember where the computer labs were. He'd been in this building a few times before. Some of his aerospace classes had been held here. Seth peered into the empty rooms until he finally found one lined with desks and PCs.

Seth stepped inside and hurried to a computer in the corner. With a jiggle of the mouse, the screen flashed to life. Perfect. Now what?

During his first semester at Shelby State, Seth had taken a mandatory course that taught how to access university resources. It was a simple, one-credit class that ensured all students had the tools required for their future courses.

Unfortunately for Seth, he'd taken that class over a year ago, and he didn't remember any of that shit.

He needed to open the terminal. That much, he remembered. Then… oh, perfect. There was an instruction sheet under the keyboard, a laminated piece of green paper with bold instructions.

Accessing the virtual computer lab was fairly simple. Technically, Seth didn't even have to be in this building. He could have done it from his laptop, but then he'd have to SSH into the system. That required some weird program he couldn't remember the name of, as well as Updraft's IP address, which he'd have to look up on the university website. The whole thing would have been a pain.

Instead, Seth used a flash drive he found on the desk to transfer the demo's files onto the computer. From there, he needed to start up a virtual machine on Updraft. However, Updraft couldn't access outside resources. To get the demo onto the virtual machine, he'd need to upload it to the university's shared repository.

Most students chose not to store their personal files in the university repository. Mainly due to a nasty legal clause that gave Shelby State the rights to anything stored there. Seth had heard more than one horror story of a student's invention being stolen by the university, though he didn't know how true any of that was.

Either way, Seth wasn't worried about his intellectual property right now. He uploaded the demo onto the repository, which only took a few seconds.

Now for the fun part. Seth opened a terminal and entered the command to start up a virtual machine. Updraft presented Seth with several hardware options. The best machine was a beast with dual state-of-the-art GPUs and 256 gigabytes of RAM. Not bad. Seth chose that one, obviously. As soon as the virtual machine loaded, a new window popped up, displaying the virtual desktop. And since he'd uploaded the demo to the university repository, the program's icon was right there, waiting for him.

Seth clicked on the icon, and the demo's familiar interface lit up the screen. He smiled at that. Oh, the wonders of modern technology. He pressed the demo's start button and….

Nothing happened.

What the hell?

Seth looked through the demo's settings, making sure they all matched his laptop. But they were exactly the same, down to the strange IP addresses in the input and output destinations. So why did it work on his laptop, but not here?

He checked the laminated instruction sheet. There was a command to check the error log of a given virtual machine. Seth navigated back to the terminal and typed the command.

Errors flooded the screen, a long list, but they were all the same, repeating into infinity.

[ERROR: ID-156808 failed to connect to an external network. Make sure the firewall is configured to access required network resources.]

Damn it. Seth had forgotten how locked down Updraft was. It wouldn't let him access outside networks, which was why he'd had to use the university repository. But his demo needed to process live data. How was he supposed to stream that input data if external networks were blocked?

There had to be a way to configure the firewall. The error message implied as much. Seth didn't know how to do that, and the laminated sheet was no help, but there had to be a way.

He'd hoped setting up the demo would give him a quick fix of that glorious Signal. But, in keeping with Seth's experience, computers never did what he wanted without a mountain of troubleshooting. Seth sighed as he opened the web browser and navigated to the university website. It was time to begin the long process of reading through technical manuals and program documentation.