John pushed through the shed door and closed it behind him without looking back.

The air outside couldn't be called clean by any stretch of the imagination, but it was at least free of the tension of constantly feeling like he had four pairs of eyes tracking his every movement. He hopped a small, crumbling brick wall and walked across the car park, putting distance between himself and the wooden building, and stopped when the crunch of his trainers on gravel was the only sound in the world.

Doug's voice was still rattling around in his skull. We should leave Watford. Lily's agreement. Chester's desperate enthusiasm. Jade's silence, because what could she say?

And John had said no.

He'd refused to leave. Refused to abandon his mission. The looks on their faces had been... complicated. He couldn't parse it all, didn't want to try.

His jaw ached where he'd been grinding his teeth. He carefully untensed it, did his best to loosen his shoulders. The frustration coursing through him was helpful to no one. Had to get a handle on it. He activated Draconic Wings before he could second-guess himself.

Power burst from his shoulder blades. It felt like someone had reached into his back and yanked out two handfuls of his spine then stretched them out into two extra limbs that felt like they'd always been there. The wings erupted outward in an explosion of black scales and leathery membrane, each one easily three meters from base to tip. They were massive, heavy. The weight of them should have dragged him to the ground, but instead they felt as natural as his arms, balanced.

Wind screamed past his ears as he rocketed upward. The car park became a grey square, then a dot, then nothing, blending into the landscape. The community centre shrank beneath him. The streets of Watford spread out in every direction, a patchwork of destruction and burning debris under the crimson veil of the fiery sky.

Another beat of his wings and he climbed another hundred meters. The thrust was absurd, far beyond what the physical motion should have generated. Magic, obviously. These wings bent physics to their will.

He rose higher, higher, until the whole town was laid out before him like a map. Then he levelled out and glided, letting the wind carry him. His hair whipped around his face. For the first time since Jade had opened her eyes again, he felt like he could breathe.

No one down there could see his expression. No one could judge whether he was being cool enough or lame or whatever the fuck the System wanted from him at any given moment. Up here, divorced from the ground and all its petty concerns, he could just... exist.

The relief lasted about thirty seconds before his brain kicked back into gear. He opened his Menu again, assessing the main screen while he soared over the ruined town.

Increase Vitality Level 9 -> Level 10: 51200

Increase Strength Level 9 -> Level 10: 51200

Increase Agility Level 9 -> Level 10: 51200

Increase Mind Level 9 -> Level 10: 51200

Increase Arcane Level 9 -> Level 10: 51200

Increase Talent Level 9 -> Level 10: 51200

Current Aura: 437,550

John stared at the numbers. All nines. He was, by the System's own logic, a nearly max-level character. As far as he knew, 10 was the highest it went. There was no higher tier of Skills and Spells to unlock, at the very least.

The fight with the red-souled stickbug should have killed him. Would have killed anyone else. But he'd won. He'd burned through hundreds of thousands of Aura, spammed level-ups like they were going out of style, and walked away.

And now he still had 437,000 Aura sitting in his account. It felt like he'd won the lottery.

It was an insane number. A god-like number. Four hundred and thirty-seven thousand points of pure power, ready to be spent on whatever he wanted. It felt like he could buy anything. Become anything. The solution to all his problems was right there in front of him, quantified and waiting.

John banked left, circling over the town, and tried to figure out what he was feeling.

Invincible? Not even close. Rich? Definitely. But there was something else underneath it all, something that made what should have been a sweet victory taste like ash and blood.

He'd earned this fortune by killing a red-souled monster that had nearly ended him. He'd survived by the skin of his teeth, throwing everything he had at the problem and hoping it would be enough. And it had been.

But that red-souled monster had been one creature. One boss fight in one portal world. And John had needed to go absolutely nuclear just to scrape out a win.

What happened when he ran into another one? Or two at once? Or something even stronger? He only had six more level ups to play with, and then he could no longer rely on their healing effect.

John activated Mana Sense and let the ability wash out from him in a pulse. The world below transformed. Every heartbeat sent another wave of perception rippling through the air, painting the town in abstract blobs of energy.

As always in this forsaken place, there was a pattern in the movement. The monsters weren't just wandering aimlessly; they were flowing, converging, moving in organized waves.

To the north, a tide of chittering, scuttling energy was sweeping through a residential neighbourhood, dozens of signals packed so tightly together they almost looked like a single mass.

A wave. One of the System's tools for corralling the unwilling participants of Watford's death game, for herding players to where the architects of this apocalypse wanted them to be.

John angled his wings and dove toward it.

The descent was faster than the climb. Wind tore at his clothes, his hair, his face. The town rushed up to meet him, details resolving with every metre he dropped. Rooftops became individual tiles. Streets became cracked tarmac. The wave of monsters became visible to his actual eyes.

It was a flood. A literal black tide of insect forms pouring down the street, the smallest of them the size of a large dog, the largest taller than a van, their carapaces gleaming dully under the crimson sky. Bugs of every description, rendered in a grotesquely giant form. Hundreds of the things, maybe thousands, moving in a coordinated swarm that consumed everything in its path. They flowed over cars, through gardens, across fences. The sound of their passage was a constant chittering drone, punctuated by the crack of wood and the crunch of debris.

They looked like an oil slick. A living shadow spreading across the town, devouring it piece by piece.

John pulled up about fifty meters above the street and hovered, his wings beating a steady rhythm. Soul Vision confirmed what his eyes were telling him: almost all blues, with a handful of greens mixed in. Weak. Individually, any one of them would die to a single swipe of his Aurora Blade. Collectively, they were a problem for anyone without the tools to handle crowd control.

John had those tools. He sucked in a breath, felt Biomancy flood his throat and lungs and vocal cords, reinforcing them for what came next. His chest expanded, his diaphragm contracted, and he opened his mouth.

The roar that tore out of him was something inhuman and terrible. It echoed across the neighbourhood, rattling windows, sending vibrations through the air itself.

+2000 Aura

Thousands of compound eyes turned upward, tracking the source of the sound, and Draconic Inferno raged down to meet them.

Incandescent white fire erupted from his mouth, pure, searing, the colour of metal heated past its melting point, the colour of stars. It burst forth in a column as thick as his torso, a roaring torrent of superheated plasma that made the air itself scream.

The sound was apocalyptic. A continuous roar like a dozen jet engines firing at once, so loud it drowned out every other noise in the world. The shockwave from the heat expansion cracked windows multiple streets over, sent debris flying, made the ground itself tremble.

John swept the beam across the swarm in a wide arc.

The bugs hit directly by the flames evaporated. The white fire hit them and they ceased to exist, reduced to ash and then to nothing in the span of a single heartbeat. Carapaces sublimated. Flesh vaporized. The bugs at the edges of the beam died from the radiant heat before the fire even touched them.

The street itself couldn't withstand the assault. Tarmac liquefied into bubbling tar. Parked cars ignited, their paint blistering and peeling before the fuel tanks went up in secondary explosions. A brick wall bordering one garden simply collapsed, its mortar turned to powder by the thermal shock.

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John kept the beam going for five seconds. Then ten. The fire poured from him like he was a broken hydrant gushing plasma instead of water. Biomancy worked overtime to keep his throat from cooking, his lungs from burning, his vocal cords from snapping.

+5000 Aura

+5000 Aura

+3000 Aura

He swept the beam back across the swarm, ensuring complete coverage. Nothing survived. Where the tide of insects had been, there was now only scorched earth. Blackened pavement. Molten metal. The air shimmered with heat, distorting his view of the far end of the street. Smoke rose in a thick column, dark and oily.

John closed his mouth. The roar cut off abruptly, leaving a ringing silence in its wake. Small fires burned across the devastation below, but they were nothing compared to the inferno he'd just unleashed. The entire fight—if it could even be called a fight—had lasted maybe twenty seconds.

He landed on a crumbling rooftop nearby, overlooking the destruction, his shoes crunching on tiles still hot from proximity to his attack. The wings folded against his back as he surveyed his work.

Complete annihilation. Total victory. Hundreds of monsters erased from existence without a single one getting close enough to threaten him. He was at just over 460,000 aura now.

The adrenaline started to fade.

It had been too easy. Absurdly easy. He'd pointed himself at the problem and held down the trigger until there was no problem left. The entire wave, gone. All those monsters, eliminated. And he barely had to think about it.

John sat down on the roof, letting his legs dangle over the edge. The burning sky stretched above him, same as always. The town smouldered below him, same as always. Nothing had changed except for one less wave of monsters and a street that would never be usable again.

His mind drifted back to the shed. To Jade.

He'd just annihilated a monster wave without breaking a sweat. A feat that would have seemed impossible five days ago. And she had nothing. No System. No powers. No way to defend herself or contribute or do anything except exist as a liability that the rest of the group had to protect.

What about the others out there? How many survivors were wandering around Watford—around London, around the world—with no System or a weak one? Completely helpless. Just trying to survive while things like him flew overhead raining white fire on anything that moved.

The System's unfairness gnawed at him. Jade's System had tortured her, rewarding pain inflicted on living creatures, and she'd hated every second of it. Now she was free of it, but that freedom came at the cost of being utterly defenseless.

John opened his Menu.

The Level 8 and Level 9 Spells and Skills were waiting for him, unlocked now that all his stats had reached their thresholds. He scrolled through them slowly, reading each name, imagining what they might do.

Level 8 Spells: Solar Flare: 64,000 Aura Tsunami: 64,000 Aura Vacuum: 64,000 Aura Table Flip: 64,000 Aura Void: 64,000 Aura Aegis: 64,000 Aura Tactile Telekinesis: 64,000 Aura Momentum: 64,000 Aura Resonance: 64,000 Aura Annihilation: 64,000 Aura

Level 9 Spells: Supernova: 128,000 Aura Gravity Bomb: 128,000 Aura Dark Side of the Moon: 128,000 Aura Reaper's Gale: 128,000 Aura Planetary Devastation: 128,000 Aura Null Field: 128,000 Aura Elemental Supremacy: 128,000 Aura The World: 128,000 Aura Reality Anchor: 128,000 Aura Karmic Retribution: 128,000 Aura

Level 8 Skills: Vampirism: 64,000 Aura Kinesis: 64,000 Aura Flow: 64,000 Aura Threads: 64,000 Aura Genesis: 64,000 Aura Sentinel: 64,000 Aura Paragon: 64,000 Aura Slayer: 64,000 Aura Spectre: 64,000 Aura Philosopher: 64,000 Aura

Level 9 Skills: Pure Physique: 128,000 Aura Temporal Lock: 128,000 Aura Rewind: 128,000 Aura Akashic Records: 128,000 Aura Prestige: 128,000 Aura Voidwalker: 128,000 Aura Harbinger: 128,000 Aura Overlord: 128,000 Aura Nexus: 128,000 Aura Catalyst: 128,000 Aura

The names were impressive. Intimidating. Each one sounded like it could reshape reality in fundamental ways. Supernova. Planetary Devastation. The World. Apocalypses waiting to be unleashed.

But the cost was what caught his attention.

64,000 Aura for Level 8. 128,000 for Level 9.

After constant fighting and farming and nearly dying, he had 437,000 Aura. Which meant he could afford... three Level 9 abilities. Or a mix of maybe six or seven Level 8s and one Level 9. Or some other combination that would drain his entire fortune in minutes.

He'd killed a red-souled monster—a boss, a genuine threat that had nearly ended him—and the reward was enough Aura to buy a handful of top-tier abilities. That was it. That was all a red soul was worth. And he'd only won that fight by spamming level-ups, burning through his points in real-time just to survive long enough to land the killing blow.

He had six more level-ups left before he hit the cap. Once those were gone, he'd need to rely on his abilities alone, pushing Cellular Regeneration and Biomancy to do the work by themselves. He was going to have to start rationing them. Spend them carefully, strategically, only in dire straits. No more throwing points at problems hoping they'd go away.

And red-souled monsters weren't going to cut it. Not as a farming strategy. There couldn't be that many of them, and hunting them down would take too long. Not even mentioning the sheer danger of them. He needed something sustainable. Something that could generate Aura in bulk without requiring him to throw himself at near-impossible fights every single time.

John closed the menu and sat there, thinking.

His objective was simple: break the death game. End this nightmare the System had engineered, where people like that ninja PvP asshole and Curtis the katana-wielding shithead who'd killed hundreds to bring back his daughter decided murder was the optimal strategy. Stop the waves of monsters from herding survivors into kill-boxes. Shut down the portal worlds. Figure out what the hell was going on and put a stop to it.

But how?

How could he do any of that if 437,000 Aura—earned from killing one of the strongest monsters he'd encountered—was barely a drop in the bucket?

He couldn't just hunt red souls. It wasn't sustainable. And even if it was, he couldn't be everywhere at once. One powerful guy could still be overwhelmed. Could still fail. Could still watch people die because he wasn't fast enough or smart enough or strong enough. He could revive people with his Souls, yes, but that wasn't an unlimited resource, either. Relying on it indefinitely wasn't sustainable.

The temptation was there. Right there in front of him. He could spend all 437,000 Aura right now. Buy Supernova and Planetary Devastation and Reality Anchor. Rain destruction on everything that moved until there was nothing left to fight.

But that was a dead end. A trap. Because no matter how much raw power he accumulated, he'd still just be one person.

He needed to multiply his force. He needed to be smarter. He needed ways to build, to create, to enhance not just himself but the resources at his disposal. Ways to arm the people around him.

He needed a different approach. A new angle.

He opened his Menu again and navigated away from the Spells and Skills. He focused on the Inventory tab and willed it to expand.

Unlock Armoury Menu: 20,000 Aura

Unlock Crafting Menu: 25,000 Aura

Unlock Market Menu: 50,000 Aura

Unlock Alchemy Menu: 60,000 Aura

Unlock Enchanting Menu: 75,000 Aura

Unlock Portal World Menu: 100,000 Aura

Armoury. A menu dedicated to weapons and armour, presumably. Could he create equipment for the others? Give Jade something to defend herself with?

Market. A place where he could buy and sell items, he supposed. Despite seeming most simple, he wasn't really sure how that would work. Would it be stuff provided by the System, or would he be trading with other people? No way to know.

Crafting. The ability to build things. Make tools. Construct solutions to problems that couldn't be solved by pointing at them and unleashing hellfire.

Enchanting. Magical enhancements. Taking mundane objects and making them supernatural. Turning a normal sword into something that could hurt monsters. Or a normal shield into something that could withstand a red soul's assault.

Alchemy. Potions. Elixirs. Consumables that could heal or buff or provide utility. Ways to shore up weaknesses. Ways to turn average fighters into something more.

These weren't flashy. They wouldn't let him blow up city blocks or stop time or whatever the hell Planetary Devastation did. But they were ways to make sure he wasn't constantly pulling ahead of everyone else. Ways to build something that could last beyond the next fight.

John took a breath. Let it out slowly.

Then he made the purchases. He was up to 460k after his little rampage, so fuck it, why not?

Armoury unlocked! -20,000 Aura

Crafting unlocked! -25,000 Aura

Alchemy unlocked! -60,000 Aura

Enchanting unlocked! -75,000 Aura

Current Aura: 282,550

Four new tabs appeared in his Menu, each one waiting to be explored. Waiting to be understood. Waiting to be exploited. Market and Portal World could come later; he wanted points left over to unlock some abilities for himself, too. The prospect of a Level 9 Spell in his repertoire was too tantalising to resist.

John sat on that rooftop, the burning sky above him and the scorched earth below him, and opened the first tab.

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