~~~Lee~~~

Lee blew out a breath and slumped back in his chair. He didn't know what was going on with Stanley but assumed it had something to do with that Zeke kid. Luckily, the current bouts of rage from his twin were nothing compared to the terrifying experience they'd had this morning...

Stanley had come so close to becoming... a monster. A terrifyingly cold and heartless monster the likes of which Lee had not yet seen in this already nightmarish world.

He didn't know why it was happening or what the anger had to do with it, but then again, none of that mattered. All that mattered was how everyone had stepped up again.

His friends. His family. People he barely even knew. They had all been there for him and his brother when they needed it most, and he wasn't sure how he could ever repay them. Including the woman currently sitting across from him...

"Sorry, Saira," Lee said, opening his eyes and looking apologetically at her seated across from him. "This probably isn't what you had in mind for a date night, is it?"

Saira smiled mischievously and took another delicate bite of her dessert. "Oh, I don't know," she purred, eyes half-lidded as her tongue flicked out to lick the cream from her lips in a very slow and deliberate motion. "The view's not half bad."

If he'd been eating, Lee would have choked on his food when he felt the sensations coming from her through the soul link. Instead, he coughed and still had to take a sip before he could catch his breath. "Would you stop doing that?"

Her seductive smile shifted into a blatantly false expression of innocence. "Doing what?"

Lee sighed. He knew she was doing it on purpose, and she knew he knew. She kept doing it anyway, and he knew why. She was trying to distract him from moping over Stanley, and it was working. Perhaps a little too well... For that reason, along with others... he couldn't be upset with her. It just felt wrong to enjoy himself when he could so clearly feel Stanley suffering on the other side of the...

Another wave of heat and lust crashed into him, and it was so visceral that he could almost feel the scorching brush of her skin on his own... her lips sliding over...

Lee collapsed the soul link back into its normal state—rather, he asked Three to do it since he still hadn't figured out how the building was controlling it. That muted Saira, and he was almost sad to feel her go... but as much as he currently wanted to leap across the table and tackle her to the floor, that wasn't why he was here.

The woman smiled at him as she took another bite of her tiramisu. How Jamaal had pulled that one off was still a mystery... "It's okay to be happy even if others are not," she said after swallowing. "Being miserable yourself will not help Stanley. If anything, it will make it harder for you to help him."

"So would climbing over this table and..." Lee caught himself and stopped talking as heat rushed to his face. He shouldn't feel embarrassed. Not with the way she was behaving.

Saira quirked an eyebrow and offered him the next bite across the small table, her face the picture of innocence even as her soul delighted in the moment. "We did not drag him back from the edge this morning by wallowing in morose pity and despair, did we?"

"I know," Lee said, then ate the sweet fluff from her waiting fork. It was delicious, but Stanley...

"You were telling me about your previous girlfriend?" Saira interjected. "Anything I should be jealous about?"

"No." Lee sighed and shook his head. "In fact, I feel bad just thinking about..." He winced. "I think her name was... Emily... something?"

"You don't remember her name?"

"That's what I was trying to tell you... before. I'm pretty sure we were together for almost two years, but after that day... well, I forgot everything about her, even that she existed. Worse, I'm pretty sure I did so willingly."

"But you said you forgot everything from before, not only her?"

"Yeah, but... I still feel bad." Lee stared at the table but didn't see it, his mind in the past. "She was there when I woke up in the hospital... but I can't even remember her face. I didn't know who she was, and I didn't care. All the pictures and videos of us... they all meant nothing. All I cared about was Stanley."

He looked up and met Saira's gaze. "I haven't really thought about her since and don't even know if she's still alive... does that make me a bad person?"

Saira shook her head. "Relationships end all the time, and for all manner of reasons..." Her expression darkened for an instant before she forced a smile. "Forgetting someone is not a terrible reason to end things."

"But if I chose to..."

"You were fighting to survive. Sometimes sacrifices have to be made." Once again, something unpleasant flashed across her face. Probably a memory from her own past.

"What about you?" Lee asked. "Anyone I need to worry about?" He didn't really want to pry when he felt her reaction, but learning about each other was kind of the whole point of this date.

Her smile was bittersweet when she shook her head. "No. Mar's father has been out of the picture for... well, a long time. You see..."

It turned out that Saira had a lot more stories to tell. She wasn't actually that much older than him, but wiping out thirty years' worth of memories takes a toll. She'd come from India as a child, with parents almost too stereotypical to be believed. Her arranged marriage fell apart when she fell in love with a boy and got pregnant with Mar. Only for said boy to bail on her.

"It broke me," Saira admitted. "I took out a lot of my bitterness on Mar... I was afraid she would make the same mistakes as me, and it made me even worse than my parents. I am ashamed that it took nearly losing her for me to realize how foolish I was behaving."

It was the most difficult part of the night when she spoke about her abduction at the hands of those human monsters. "I was so helpless," she said bitterly. "They laughed at my struggles. They laughed when they hurt me. Worse than even that, though, was that I did not know if my daughter lay dead or dying in the street where I had last seen her."

"I was certain I would die, and all I could think about was all the things I'd said to Mar. And all the things I should have said but hadn't..."

Lee wasn't a parent, so he didn't know what it felt like to fear for your child's life. He imagined it would feel similar to seeing Gabriel or Anita in danger. Never mind, Aasha... Of course, he didn't need to imagine anything. He could feel Saira's soul, and through it, exactly how she had felt in that moment. There was nothing he could say in response to the feelings coming from her, so Lee only placed his hands gently over her clenched fists.

Saira blinked at his hands as if surprised to see them there, then unclenched her fists to interlace her fingers with his—fingers that felt like steel bands. She smiled at him, but there was little warmth in the expression. It was the grin of a tiger baring its fangs. "I will not waste my second chance," she said with conviction. "Not with Mar, and not with Aasha!"

"I know," Lee said, smiling. "It's one of the things I love about... you." He only realized what he'd said after the fact, when Saira's grin grew somehow more dangerous while simultaneously softening.

"Only one of the things?" she whispered, leaning closer with a gleam in her eyes. "Say more things you love about me."

"Well..." Lee swallowed, trying to get some moisture into his suddenly dry throat. "I... love how you..."

Time passed in a blur, and Lee only felt a little bad about enjoying himself while Stanley suffered. It helped that his twin calmed down as evening turned to night, and most of the people inside Three eventually made their own way to bed. He actually thought Stanley might even be asleep when Saira finally had enough.

Aasha was as thrilled as ever to see her mom when they left Lee's apartment, and Amy handed the girl over almost reluctantly. "She's an angel, Saira."

Lee walked with the women through the silent and sleeping building to the door, and Saira stopped at the threshold, looking at him expectantly. Lee hesitated nervously before going in for a kiss. He shouldn't have been nervous; the kiss was well received.

"I had fun," he said a little breathlessly once it was over and he'd stepped back. "We should... do it again?" He felt irrationally scared she would say no when he asked... but what if she did!?

She didn't say no.

"We should," Saira purred, her fingers sliding like silk over his as she slipped out the door and into the night. "Goodnight," her voice echoed back from the shadows.

Lee stayed where he was and watched with Mana Mind until Saira settled in under her tree. He didn't really get the whole sleeping outside thing, but hey, to each their own.

Amy smiled knowingly when he turned back but said nothing, and Lee went to the garage to keep working instead of going to bed himself. He was still a little wired after everything, and there was no point in wasting time tossing and turning. Better to do something productive, like increase his and everyone else's chances to survive by creating new and better runes.

He'd already finished Saira's staff earlier in the day, and while he still couldn't get it to store healing energy, he had crammed a decent amount of spare mana inside the former tree branch turned glaive. Thanks to her tree and the vines running to Three, she was unlikely to need mana while anywhere inside the fort, so most of that mana went into making sure the staff would never break and never dull. She claimed the wood still lived, so there was that, and if nothing else, it should prove a decent backup weapon.

Alejandro's armor was already the peak of defensive power he could create, combining every scrap he'd learned about tweaking runes with his intent. It would bend in the right places rather than break, and it wouldn't yield where he didn't want it to. He'd even incorporated something that should help with suppression if Alejandro ran up against a higher grade again. Though that was difficult to actually test... Otherwise, the man should be untouchable.

The armor advances weren't applicable to everyone, since Alejandro could get around some limitations with his class skills—he and his apprentice—but Lee had improved all the other defenders' weapons instead. Mostly with better cutting power and lower mana drain. He wasn't bothering with recharge features since the return was negligible and it was always better to bring the weapons into Three to recharge them that way. Especially since those weapons were only for people on active guard duty.

Many of the hunters in the fort took shifts on guard duty, but not all of them. In fact, they had a sizable portion of them that weren't even Fort members. Lee didn't sell runes to those people even if they wanted them, and the more local hunters usually only took a handful of rune weapons for emergencies. Like if they ran up against something that their normal attacks couldn't handle.

Lee hadn't forgotten that he might someday owe a hefty amount of runes to that alien... but he was going ahead on the assumption that the alien wouldn't come back anytime soon. Just in case that wasn't how things panned out, he'd started telling people that his 'enchantments' wouldn't last if they went too far away. He wasn't really lying, especially as his runes got stronger. The effects were powerful enough that it wasn't a hard sell, and as a bonus, he hoped it would entice more powerful hunters to stay in the area.

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

What he really wanted now was a time rune. Ideally one that other people could use. If anyone could freeze time like he did with his bubbles, it could be a literal lifesaver for healers and fighters alike, and the reason he wanted to work on it tonight was that he had sort of learned a new rune after seeing Stanley's attack on the undead.

His class skill, Language of the Rune, had reacted to the sight, and the idea for a new rune had been slowly growing in his mind ever since. The reason he said 'sort of learned' was that even with his limited understanding, it was already turning into a nightmare of complexity—never mind what it would look like once he had the whole thing figured out. Finishing it would likely be akin to building an entire analog watch out of mana. Gears, springs, levers, and everything else in between.

Even with his rune storage to experiment in, it was still a daunting process. Worse, he was increasingly sure the thing needed to be three-dimensional to work, which wasn't something he'd ever done. Aside from Three... Also, it wasn't actually a watch. It wasn't shaped like a clock and didn't look like one. Not yet. That was just his preferred analogy, though he guessed his analogy wasn't that far from reality.

Going 3D wasn't a real issue—he could stick the damn thing in a solid orb if necessary. The problem was that he didn't think they'd have any material durable enough to hold the rune once he successfully created it, given how large it was getting.

Also, he still had no idea what the finished product would actually do, though he knew it would do... something.

He'd extracted bits and pieces of the current whole—ones that he'd even successfully implanted—and the effects varied greatly. One piece had rusted the metal it was on, and that was despite May's claim that the metal couldn't rust. He'd thought it might be a fast-aging rune, but unfortunately, it did nothing noticeable to the monsters he'd stuck it on.

Another had slowed everything around it, including him, and he only knew what it did because people on the edge of the effect noticed what was happening. Even then, the effect was weak, and the rune burned itself out at an astonishing rate. Still, it was more than he'd had a couple of days ago... so he got to work.

...

Lee jerked awake when a door opened and then stared up in confusion at Gabriel standing in the doorway.

"Good morning, Uncle Lee!" Gabriel exclaimed before dashing to his spot with the usual enthusiasm.

"Good morning," Lee murmured, allowing Mana Mind to update him on the current situation. He'd fallen asleep in the garage... and Amy was still sitting outside. More importantly, Stanley was... stable. Not exactly happy, but he felt... better than he had since that night. Maybe even better than last night, though not a lot.

Lee stood up, and despite having slept slumped over on solid concrete, felt perfectly fine. There were definitely some perks to living in an apocalyptic hellscape...

"Sorry, Amy," he said, leaning out the door. "Did you get some sleep at least?" He was pretty sure he'd noticed her napping a few times before he passed out.

"No worries," Amy said while springing to her feet. "But I get first dibs on showering."

"Go," Lee said, waving her away. "I'll wait in here." He wanted to get Gabriel's take on his latest runes and thought the boy wanted to ask him something as well. Despite being as safe as possible in his workroom, Amy didn't leave until Jackson had taken up a post outside the door, but then Lee was used to her overprotectiveness.

His late night hadn't been for nothing, and he'd progressed in teasing out more of the time rune. Unfortunately, it was indeed three-dimensional, which made showing it to his apprentice much more difficult. In the end, he had to use his Mana Mind to build a 3D model out of mana in midair. Not that it mattered.

"Woah..." Gabriel whispered while he stared wide-eyed and stunned at the still-incomplete rune. To Lee's disappointment, he had no helpful insights to share. "What does it do!?"

"You can't tell?"

Gabriel shook his head, entranced even as he scrambled closer and studied it from every direction. "It's so... big! How can you make something like that!?"

Lee sighed and let the mana disperse. Gabriel was the apprentice, after all. He couldn't rely on the kid to figure out everything for him. "I think it's a... time rune?"

Next, he tried pulling out bits of the rune and letting Gabriel see those, all with the same result.

"I'm sorry, Uncle Lee," Gabriel said after the last one, his voice too timid. He was picking up on Lee's frustration...

"If anyone should be sorry, it's me," Lee said, forcing away his irritation. "You're my apprentice, remember? I'm supposed to be teaching you, not the other way around. Now, what did you want to ask me about?"

He already had a pretty good idea what the kid was working on, but Gabriel immediately perked up at the question before rushing to his spot and bringing back a plate. There was a drawing of a rune on the plate, and it wasn't one that Lee knew or had taught him. Despite that, Lee knew what it would do at a glance and knew his apprentice was a bona fide genius for coming up with it on his own.

"Is this rune okay?" Gabriel asked.

"You know what it does?"

Gabriel did, and Lee asked a few follow-up questions before creating a particular plate for him to use. Unlike with many of his runes, this time Gabriel went slower than necessary. Lee knew he really wanted to get it right, but his hesitance only made him mess up more. Still, he got it eventually, and then he set it aside for later.

Lee headed upstairs when Amy finished with his shower and cleaned up while Jamaal made breakfast. The woman had given up her apartment to another few families with kids, and given the way she stuck to him, it was almost pointless to have her own apartment anyway. Though throwing her out of the shadows might have played a role...

"Everything was fantastic last night," Lee said to Jamaal when the cook brought out his burrito. "But how'd you get sugar for the tiramisu? It had sugar, right?" It tasted too sweet not to have it.

"Ah, now that's a story," Jamaal said, beaming. "A visitor to our fort brought cuttings of a sweet plant. He said he traded with aliens to get it. Ms. Singh was able to cultivate it, and Mr. Johanson in building four turned the resulting crop into usable sugar! It is truly wonderful what we can achieve together, is it not?"

"It is..." Lee said thoughtfully. Alien sugar... he hadn't expected that, but it made perfect sense when he remembered the alien he'd traded with. How many aliens were already on Earth, and how many more would come? More importantly, how many came to trade, and how many were here to conquer or replace humanity?

Probably a bit of everything, he decided. The vast majority of aliens he'd met were monstrous killers, but the Anubians stood out as an alternative example, and now he couldn't simply write off every alien as evil. Though there was also the looming threat of enslavement brought up by Trak and Z...

He stopped worrying about all of that once he took a bite of his breakfast and instead focused all of his attention on savoring every morsel.

Then he went back to work.

Saira stopped by to see him later while he was standing in the courtyard and watching the kids take turns driving Gabriel's 'car' around the space. The screaming had probably drawn her in... The car was small and relatively slow and only got slower the more weight they put on it, but it worked. It was basically a child's toy, and the drain on the runes meant it wouldn't work for long outside the building... but it was still a good proof of concept.

Despite it being far less exciting than riding the flying discs, plenty of the kids still wanted a turn, and Gabriel watched it all with pride. Hell, he'd probably had more fun creating the thing than they did playing with it.

Lee left them there and took a stroll around his building with Saira instead. They talked about little things. How their respective apprentices were doing. Alien crops. That sort of thing. He even told her about his progress on the new rune, and she nodded politely in all the right places, even though she obviously had no clue what he was talking about through most of it.

It was a nice break.

Dinner at the Morales' apartment later that night was also fantastic.

Gabriel waited until after the meal to bring out a pair of paper-wrapped discs. He'd cajoled Amy into finding him the paper, not that it took much convincing. Gabriel handed one to Maria and one to Alejandro. "For you, Mommy, and for you, Dad. Open them!"

Both parents glanced at Lee, but he refused to give anything away. At least, as well as he could with his leaking soul. Still, they didn't hesitate to open their respective presents.

"Thank you, Gabe!" Alejandro exclaimed upon pulling out the runed disc suspended on a leather strap from within. "It's..." He trailed off and his eyes widened in shock when Maria pulled out an identical disc. It wasn't the sight that shocked him; Lee knew that. Not only could he feel the man's soul, but he knew what the runes were doing.

"What is..." Maria trailed off in a similar fashion while staring back at Alejandro.

"I want one!" Anita proclaimed into the lull, and Lee slid a miniature floating disc across the table to distract her while Gabriel explained.

"Mommy is always worried when you leave," Gabriel said to his dad. "With this, she can know you're okay and won't be worried..."

Maria pulled the boy into her embrace before he could finish. "Mi Chiquito!"

Lee's distraction proved inadequate when Alejandro joined the group hug, and Anita ran around the table to join in. He left them to it and only studied Gabriel's runes again to make sure they hadn't degraded since earlier. They looked fine. Not as clean as he could make them, but he didn't want to take away from the boy's efforts by stepping in.

He'd tested the runes with Gabriel earlier and knew exactly what the parents were feeling. It actually wasn't far off from what they'd already experienced while helping Stanley through the soul link... In fact, it was practically the same thing, just not as... serious. More of a window than an actual link.

"I learned it after we helped Uncle Stanley not be evil," Gabriel said once the emotional hug broke up. "Do you like it? Uncle Lee said it was good..."

They liked it, and they told him so enthusiastically. Lee piled on by bringing out two more presents he'd wrapped up while Gabriel wasn't around. This seemed like as good a time as any, and he wanted the parents involved for this one.

"Here, Gabriel, Anita," Lee said, holding out what was obviously a staff underneath the wrapping paper, and to Anita, he offered a disc similar to what her parents received, though with a different rune attached. "I got you both something as well."

Anita shredded the wrapping paper in an instant, then frowned at the rune disc necklace in disappointment. Gabriel was the opposite, and he unwrapped the staff that was slightly taller than him with a reverential hesitance that only got stronger as he saw more and more of what lay within.

Lee went to Anita first and showed her where to grip the amulet on each side. Her disappointment vanished when it lifted her into the air and a shield bubble materialized around her. It stopped holding her up once the shield formed, and Anita immediately started tumbling around the room while inside the spherical bubble. She ricocheted off the table, then a wall, and squealed, "Daddy, look at me!"

She was chaos incarnate as she careened around, and Lee quickly told Three to stop recharging the amulet, which resulted in her crashing to the floor moments later. Freestanding shields like that were serious mana hogs, but they could still act as protection while inside the building. Or just a toy, since he'd only made it as an afterthought, mostly so she wouldn't be too jealous when he gave the real gift to Gabriel.

"You have to let it recharge," Lee said. "And you'll need to be extra careful because the more stuff you run into, the faster it will pop, okay?" He wasn't lying. Not really. Only about how long it needed to charge... as an experiment, he sent a thought to Three to trickle charge the disc, assuming the building could do so...

"Uncle Lee," Gabriel said from across the room while holding his gift gingerly at arm's length. "What does this do?"

Going by his wariness, Lee was guessing the kid had picked up enough of what it did, and he liked the caution. He'd been ready to pull the runes if things had gone another way, but his apprentice was still proving himself, and this was a good test. "What do you think it does?"

Gabriel looked closer, though still holding the staff as if it might explode, which it very well might. He finally let go with one hand and pointed at a particular part of the rune. "This will make a shield like Nita's, right?"

"Yep. What about the rest?"

"I think this is a battery..." he said after pointing at another spot before trailing off. "But this... this will... it's very dangerous. It will... shoot mana..." His eyes widened. "A lot of mana... from the end?"

"Yes," Lee said, trying not to wince under the glares coming his way. Well, glare, singular. "It will fire a mana beam like mine. It's a weapon. A very dangerous weapon, and I'm glad to see you understand that."

"But... why?" The kid really wasn't a warrior. He didn't want to fight and only wanted to create. Lee was more than fine with that. Unfortunately, reality wouldn't conform to their wishes just because they wanted it to.

"For emergencies," Lee said. "You're a big brother. If you or Anita is in trouble and there are no adults to help you, don't you want to protect her?"

Gabriel didn't want a weapon, but he was a good big brother and his hands tightened around the staff as he pulled it closer. "I will protect her."

"I'm not in trouble!" Anita exclaimed. "I'm always good!"

Lee finally met the gazes of the parents. "I talked with Martin already, and he agreed to give Gabriel some extra training in a safe environment."

Alejandro was already on board, but his wife was still resisting the idea. They both knew it was a good idea, but she just didn't want to admit it. Lee understood and wouldn't force anything, but he also had to try.

"We will discuss it," Alejandro said, earning a glare from his wife but at least taking the heat off of Lee. "Later. Right now, it's bedtime."

"But I'm not tired!" both children chorused in unison.