Bryan explained to me that the reason we were using lubricant rather than water was the simple fact that water wasn’t running anymore in any plumbing… anywhere. Right, I realized; that made sense with the whole system-apocalypse thing that was going on. All systems disrupted. He’d done his homework and knew we would likely be fighting Sand Witches here, so he’d broken into an adult novelty shop in the strip mall across the street and grabbed a handful of tubes, which we were now using via these awesome-ass retro squirtguns he’d likewise pilfered from a toy and game collectors’ shop in the mall.

I had to hand it to him, that was some solid planning and execution. Or it would have been, if the amount of lube he’d brought to the party had met or exceeded the number of monsters homing in on our location.

That seemed increasingly unlikely, however.

Bryan frowned. “This is weird.”

I bit back a laugh as I squirted down another bagwitch. “You’re just noticing?”

“No, I mean the Sand Witches. They’re acting weird. Too organized.”

“They’re not big on healthcare and picket lines most Tuesdays?”

I made light of the situation as my ongoing coping mechanism demanded, but one glance toward the darkness outside told me that he must be right. The monsters had gone from aimless wandering to congregating on the pavement outside. Stranger still, only a few at a time pressed inside to try to get their rough bodies near ours. Most of them, instead, looked to be…

“What are they doing?” I asked.

He finished kicking apart clumps of mud from his latest kill, then shot a glance outside.

“Goddammit,” he muttered. Then he sighed. “They’re forming an array.”

“Oh, cool. Like a… flag array? Like one of those things I assume we borrow from either Wuxia or Lite Novels but honestly I’m not sure, I’ve only really leaned into them in Cradle or Defiance of the—”

“Yes,” he said, waving a hand to cut me off. “Sort of. They don’t plant flags, they use their bodies. They get themselves into a formation and then cycle their Cosmic Qi a certain way, something about vibrational energy, and a link is formed.”

“Between them? Sort of like people feeding the ritual circles in the Completionist Chronicles?”

“Yes, between them and…” As he trailed off, his gaze moved upward toward the night sky.

I got the gist. “Oh. Fuck.”

He nodded. “Indeed. Can’t let that happen; not yet, anyway. You and I have too much to do in this capitalism-forsaken building. So I’m going to need you to equip that weird helmet skill and put a few more holes in these doors. Only way to stop them is bait, and we ought to do.”

“I’m sorry.” I looked at him like he was a total stranger. Which, coincidentally, he was. To this me. “Are you off your head? You just saved my ass after I shaved off half my HP and took bleeding and berserker debuffs, and you want me to just do it again?”

“And again. Maybe three or four times. Anyway, I have more potions.”

“And that’s another thing.” I wagged a finger in his direction. “I understand the regression story and also the helper-sidekick-companion thing, but Bryan, you don’t just have knowledge. You have magic, like those potions. And you’re here. For me. What the fuck is that all about?”

He shrugged. “Your dream, isn’t it? That’s what you usually say. Why shouldn’t I come for you? The potions, that’s easy to explain. I remembered a way to cook them up quickly with enough Cosmic Qi; a recipe, you understand, that wasn’t usually feasible, and very soon won’t be feasible again, because usually Cosmic Qi is a little more precious. But tonight we’re rolling in the stuff. For the person who knows how to use it? Tonight is Christmas. Times about a thousand. You and I, Quart, are about to be filthy stinking rich, and about as OP’d as beginning gear will allow.”

I opened my mouth for a quick retort but was pulled up short at the picture he’d painted. “The beams,” I said.

“Bingo.” He nodded. “Activate that skill again. You’ll see.”

You have activated skill: Pothead!

This time I dodged the debuffs. I flinched upon realizing I’d just hastily activated it without considering them further; maybe in the future I should try to make more measured decisions if I was going to end up wielding space-magic of my own?

Nah. What was the point of magic powers without a little fun? And, naturally, a little risk?

Bryan reached over and rapped his knuckles on my helmet. It clanked like a pot in a cupboard, and I flinched again.

“Recognize that?” he asked.

I reached up and felt the smooth sides, the weird little hands at the lip. The decidedly unsmooth, pitted bottom (I may have included it as a tom in a homemade 5-gallon bucket drumset one time… just for fits and giggles). “That’s my stock-pot.”

I saw him smile as he watched realization dawn on my face. “It’s… I was wearing it on my head when I got thrown into the beam! It’s… it’s a skill now? Is that why?”

We staggered back as a wave of what I can only describe as telekinetic force rippled through our bodies. From the Sand Witches outside.

“Hold that thought,” he said. “You need to break some glass. Now.”

I bit back my fear. Outside they had gathered in a large circle, and something in the middle was beginning to glow. I’d have bet any amount of money it would become another of those invasion beams any second if they didn’t disperse. I knelt down for a track start, counted down from three in my head, and threw myself, skull-first, into the glass.

“Gahhh! Fuck!”

It broke. It just hurt.

I wanted to collapse in a ball on the sidewalk outside in pain, but my exit had indeed garnered some attention. There were new sounds out here now, not just the shuffling of burlap and shifting sands, but also a low hum, like powerlines when you stand too close, coming from the formation. And a sort of whispering, unintelligible but fueled with the intent to consume. That sound came from the three monsters who broke off to come at me.

With a huff I pushed myself up, ignoring the pain and blood spattering from my open forearms, and spotted my re-entry point. If I broke through right in between the two extant holes, maybe we’d be opening a big enough space to lure them all in.

Because that was a good idea, right?

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Duck,” Bryan said. His voice was calm and evenly pitched. This guy. Ice-fucking cold killer.

I got low just as he squirted a load of lube over my head, stopping one of the monsters. Then he backed away, pumping the pressure back up on his weapon, and I ran back in for all I was worth.

Glass shattered inward, much more this time; my plan had worked and we now had a hole three-men wide.

“Just like the derecho,” I panted as I turned to survey my work.

“You use food analogies too much,” Bryan said. He pulled out another potion.

“Dude, that’s not a food. Nasty storm. Land-hurricane, but in a place without the infrastructure to withstand hurricanes. Look it up. Iowa took it up the ass.”

He shoved the potion toward me and I slurped it down, feeling the pleasant sensation of warmth spread to every inch of my body as glass was pushed out of me and my wounds healed.

“Isn’t that part of tornado alley?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Not, like, the deep part. I mean sure, Iowa sees tornadoes. But not like Kansas or Missouri, you know?”

“There’s a difference between these places?”

“Bruh,” I said, affronted.

“Back up.” He pulled me to my feet and together we backed away, super soakers at the ready, but we didn’t fire. We didn’t want to scare them away this time. We wanted to draw them in. And they came.

“Fuck,” he muttered, eyeing the pile of mall-shop loot.

“You have a lot of secret santas this year, man, or what?”

“Hold that thought, too. We’ll have to come back.” He turned and began to pick up the pace as Sand Witch after Sand Witch spilled into the food court. Some still caught their burlap on the sharp edges of protruding glass, tearing open and spilling their sandy contents across the tile and rug, but now others made it through unimpeded.

I turned and began to run after Bryan.

We’d turn every few seconds and squirt down a monster or two, just enough to make sure we weren’t caught, but other than that we kept a steady pace. The Sand Witches weren’t particularly quick but they were constant, like a brisk walker. We led them down a long corridor with several shops boarded over and the odd occasional shop still in business, but all dark and quiet after hours with no power. Finally, as we neared an intersection where we could take a left or continue forward into Target, Bryan paused and checked the time on a pocket watch which he pulled from a jacket pocket on a little gold chain.

“Goddamn, you really are British,” I said, wheezing a bit from the jog.

He snorted. “Batteries are all dead. Hand-wound is the only reliable thing now. Goddammit, our bloody window is closing. We need to get back now or this entire night is a fucking waste.”

I raised an eyebrow. I was about to ask what the fuck he was talking about, when a few puzzle pieces clicked together in my mind, and I thought I probably had a pretty good idea what he meant.

“Another one’s coming, then? Here?”

He nodded behind us. “Back there. Food court. I had everything set up just right, but you had to go and fuck it up by kiting all these Witches in after you.”

“I’m sorry, me? As I recall, it was your idea to bring them in after us!” I spotted the reflection of a witch in the glass store front just to my left and spun to squirt her down as I spoke.

“Yeah, yeah. Ok. Mistakes were made on both sides. I just didn’t want to—” Another two got a little too close, and this time Bryan took out some of his frustration on them, furiously pumping the action of his super soaker like a middle-aged father unable to find more than five minutes alone in the bathroom. “—let them call down an invader.”

That pulled me up short. “Aren’t they the invaders?”

He scrunched his face up at me. “What, the Sand Witches? No. Just cannon fodder, this lot. You know. The appetizer. Real things are just… testing the water with them.”

“Ohhhh ok got it! So it is like Defiance of the—”

“Mate it doesn’t matter how long I spend with you, I never find that any less annoying. So let’s get one thing straight, alright?” He took his eyes off the cannon fodder and gave me his full attention. “I am not, have never been, and will never be a GameLIT reader. It’s just not my bag.” Without looking at it, he reached his gun hand out and bisected an incoming Witch with a strong, firm stream.

I worked my jaw soundlessly for a moment. “But… but you’ve come back, what—three, no four times? So you knew. You already knew about it. LitRPG, by the way. Let’s call it by its proper name.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Honestly, try asking in any number of Facebook groups if you want to start a proper flame war. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is, Bryan, by your own admission you’ve been hearing about LitRPG from me for, what, weeks of regressed time?”

“Months,” he muttered.

“And you’ve never seen fit, in any of your regressed loops, to pick up a book and try it for yourself?”

He shrugged. “It sounds insufferable enough when you talk about it. I don’t need to also be putting it into my own head.”

I stood still just a moment longer as he continued down the corridor, and I took out one more witch.

“Not even Audible?”

We took the angle and made our way down another long passage, Sand Witches trailing, until it ended with a multiplex cinema and ice rink.

“This is a fucking baller mall,” I muttered. “No wonder it’s still open.”

“This mall is garbage.” Bryan squeezed another tube of lube into his hopper, crushed it, and tossed it over his shoulder. “That’s the last of the sticky stuff. If we don’t find something wet, we’re fucked.”

“I have so many problems with what you just said.”

I looked around, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. We’d created a little more distance to give ourselves a breath, but the Witches were still coming, and there were so many more now. It was difficult to judge in the darkness, but it looked like burlap-clad shapes filled the mall all the way back around that last bend, and still they came. There might be a couple hundred of them in here with us. When I thought about the numbers, I didn’t like our odds.

“So, uh,” I glanced at Bryan, “you think there’ll be a fifth coming?”

He blew a sigh out through his nose. “We can’t die here. It’d be beyond embarrassing to get fragged before any actual invaders show up.”

I shrugged. “I saw some goblettes.”

“Goblettes?” He quirked an eyebrow. “Little things? Green?”

“Yep.”

This time he did laugh. “They’re even more pathetic than these bags.”

“Well I did ok,” I started to say, thinking to defend my heroism from earlier in the night, but it came out as a sheepish mumble.

I turned away and gazed out into the darkness. I stepped forward and leaned against the railing that surrounded the ice rink.

Fuck, I thought.

This was it, then? About to get buried alive by a bunch of animated sandbags, for the want of a glass of water? I shook my head. Stupid. What a stupid fucking dream. What was the point of the horror of killing little green men and getting all these magic skills and breaking my head over and over again against the mall door glass only to be—

I hacked up a good wad and spit it over the rail in frustration. Fuck this motherfucking—

I stopped breathing. Just after spitting into the rink I’d heard the most miraculous thing. The faintest, tiniest splash.

I turned and met Bryan’s eyes.

“Did you hear…?” he asked.

A grin broke out across my face and I nodded.

The next five minutes of my life were absolute hell. I kited the witches back and forth across the side of the rink, keeping them close but not letting them get too close, while Bryan set our trap. There was a USPS depot in one of the shops nearby, and the man broke in and made a run for the world record for most carboard boxes assembled in one sitting. Then he ran out, dragging them behind him on a banner of some kind, something he must have found inside and torn down from the wall. I continued kiting as he set them out strategically, and finally he yelled.

“Bring the Sand Bitches out!”

They were hot on my heels as I came right up to the ice rink entrance this time; I hadn’t let them get too far. As I approached where one would normally get onto the icy surface, I saw a line of upside down carboard boxes, laid out before me like a dock, and I began to run across them. Some of them collapsed and one or two threatened to slide away, but Bryan had had the foresight to stuff most of them with flattened boxes, and enough stayed intact that I was able to cross out into the middle of the rink.

A dock was an apt comparison, because of course, rather than ice, the surface of the rink was by now covered in a good inch of regular old liquid water, courtesy of having been without power the past couple of hours.

So it was that by the time I’d nearly crossed the box dock, and the bulk of the witches were clustered together on their own boxes behind me, they were all in a far more precarious position than I. I simply leapt from the last box into the shallow water, slipped a bit on the ice beneath, and then started making my way around them at a bit of a remove.

Bryan, meanwhile, had come full circle, and was quick to get rid of the one or two boxes back by the entrance to the rink, effectively stranding the witches, one and all, on the boxes. Which were nothing more than layered corrugated cardboard, so… you know how it is when your delivery gets set out on the porch and it rains before you bring it in? Yeah. It was all getting wet.

When the first Sand Witch lost their balance on their disintegrating box and fell in, Bryan and I high-fived in celebration. Then another fell. And another. Then three at once. And suddenly I realized that the incessant blinking in the corner of my vision was the XP ticker on my HUD. I was fucking raking it in, my dudes.

“I’m going to get a level out of this,” I murmured in awe.

“I should hope so. At least one. But that’s not even the best part.” Bryan patted my shoulder and started jogging back across the mall. He called back over his shoulder. “C’mon, Quart! We have riches to gather!”

Another two witches fell. Another five. And the XP kept ticking up.

“Fuck me,” I whispered. Then I followed Bryan.