At the beginning of the apocalypse

Few things had scared Jane Dobrowski in her past life; she didn’t know if it had been because of her upbringing or what else. Growing in the campaigns of Poland had meant that she was tough. She had gutted pigs, digging potatoes out of the ground, and went hunting with her old man. Her parents had tried hard to have multiple kids, but they had only made one, Jane.

So, she had been daughter and son all the same.

She looked around the subway, where people were going crazy. The thing had stopped one minute ago, but many vibrations reached them even deep under the ground.

New York was being razed to the ground by Hydras.

Many people were dead, and many more were going to die.

Jane was waiting for the change that she knew was coming.

Suddenly, people started coughing, retching or vomiting.

Unlike her last life, she started having strong spasms and didn’t just vomit, but her skin excreted a black oily film of impurities out of her body.

Jane's eyes went wide while she tried hard not to faint.

This is not my past life talent.

She had all the memories from her past life. She remembered the torture she suffered at the hands of the Necromancer, the incredible pain her Soul had undergone. How her Soul was still unscathed was a miracle.

But as soon as Jane tightened her fist, she immediately felt the cultivation of a 3rd stage of the Cockroach realm.

She looked back and forth.

The first time around, she alone had survived.

She sighed.

Jane hated how unfriendly people in New York City could be, but she still had to at least try and save them, right?

“If you want to live, follow me!”

She wasn’t willing to waste a second more.

Jane went up to the subway train doors and kicked them open. She could have twisted the emergency handle or pried them open with her new strength, but she went for the most showy solution. She needed to look strong in front of these people.

“What’s happening?!” a guy came to her screaming up to her face as soon as they were both out.

“Well, hell broke loose,” she said with her light Polish accent, “we are now in the apocalypse. If you want to survive, follow me and don’t ask questions. I don’t want to die because of you.”

That said, the man started asking some nonsense about this being a ‘prank’ or a reality tv show. She just started walking toward the Ancient Ruins inside the Brooklyn subway system.

The apocalypse had just arrived, but it would soon start changing the landscape, and the Ancient Ruins would not just be a safe spot where to hide but also a way out of New York. Right now, they were in a place with monsters so strong that even their auras could kill humans.

How am I here again? Does the Necromancer have anything to do with this? I swear if I lay my hands on that piece of shit.

She turned her head and saw that around twenty people had followed her out of the train.

Well, better than no one.

Many were still on the train, and they would die soon.

…

Jane had been the ‘Volcano Queen’ in her past life, but after taking a good look at her own new talent, she couldn’t help but have one particular thought.

With a 10th level talent, I could be the Volcano Tyrant.

In her past life, she had had a terrible talent for Qi, and only her resourcefulness and luck had put her in the position of becoming strong. Her Magic talent had been at the 8th level, and she had found a tome with many Lava Spells, exactly what had fitted her Affinities.

Now, this really changed many, many things.

I will hunt down that bastard and burn him to a crisp.

Jane looked at the group behind her. Everyone was suspicious of the skinny Polish girl who had led them out of the train, and more than a couple of them had started regretting their choice.

I wish Jacob were here.

She wasn’t as good at guiding people. Jane was good at making friends and cracking jokes, but she had zero leadership skills. She had focused on Magic and fighting; that was her life. Even after coming to the US, she had always hung up with other exchange students from Poland and Eastern Europe. She found Americans very whiny and always ready to make a fuss about everything.

That didn’t mean she didn’t have friends among other US students, but she just found the majority of them overly sensitive. She got tired very soon of being invited to seminars on inclusivity, gender equality, and so on. And that was apparently what most of her fellow students, especially girls, talked about all the time.

Now, her parents were both quite old. Her father and her mother had their little córka at forty-six and forty-one, respectively.

They had lived through the Soviet Union and told her terrible stories about it. Few people hated communists more than Jane, indeed. When your parents explain to you what living under a communist regime is like, you don’t grow up with a great disposition toward an entitled child who had no idea what they were talking about when spitting idiocies about wanting a communist dictatorship in the US.

“I bet this is some whacky government shit!” a man shouted so loud Jane cringed.

“Shut up,” Jane turned and hissed.

“Make me,” the man told her.

She started conjuring a Fireball in her right hand when she remembered that she didn’t have a weak body in this life. So, she snuffed out the globe of fire and simply went up to that man’s face.

She dropped him to the ground with a punch to his guts.

A woman in the group let out a little scream, and Jane felt a huge headache brew. If they continued making all this noise, some monsters they could not handle would find them and kill all of them.

“Am I going to die because of these American idiots?”