The words shot adrenaline through me like a spike in the heart. I couldn’t feel the pain from the impact and had no idea how bad my injuries were.

All that mattered was keeping whoever it was from getting my satchel.

Just as that thought flew through my mind, the strap tightened against my chest as someone pulled at it from behind. A boot slammed into my stomach in a kick that was more soccer than any sort of martial art.

I grunted, fighting shock as my insides recoiled, wrapping myself around the leg, trying to shield myself from a slow downpour of kicks and blows.

Wait for an opening.

told me there were more than five of them. Their blows weren’t remotely similar in strength to the Matriarch, or either of the gnolls I’d fought, but they still had the ground advantage. A nice, expansive surface of asphalt served as a backboard, ensuring every inkling of energy from their strikes rattled my body.

“Fucking give it up!” The man I’d been clinging to tore his leg free and rose up, with the clear intention of stomping on my face.

I declined his offer.

Now.

In the split second he was off-balance with the others hesitant to get in his way, I pulled from my inventory and jammed it behind his knee-cap. He screamed and toppled.

A stream of something dark and viscous bled from the knife and the terror in the man’s scream escalated as Talia half emerged, only the top-half of her body formed as she chomped into the man’s side like a carnivorous genie.

Two men and a woman rushed me at the same time. Considering the situation, I couldn’t blame them. Real life isn’t an action movie. In an actual brawl, the mooks aren’t going to line up and take turns. They were far more likely to use the numbers to their advantage and amp up the brutality.

I had to do the same.

I shrugged the coil of rope off my shoulder and threw the bundle of it up in the air. Audrey extended out horizontally and snared two men, wrapping her vines around their necks and torsos in seconds and binding them together. Exposed skin bulged out of the tether. When they struggled, Audrey’s thorns dug in tighter.

guided me. I swiveled beneath the woman’s wild lunge, only realizing after the fact that she’d had a garden-variety utility knife in her hand, and drove two lightning quick punches directly into her jaw with the same hand. She spun like a top.

That should have been enough. Between the horrifying entry of the two summons and the brutality of the conflict. It wasn’t. Perhaps, given the context of what was happening, and the sheer quantity of monsters these people had likely seen in the last few hours, an oversized wolf and a plant simply weren’t intimidating enough.

An explosion rang out, and I felt like someone had slapped me in the forehead. I staggered backwards, feeling more surprised than anything else, and blood began to run freely into my eyes.

Shot. I’ve been shot.

The sluggish thought rattled in the back of my mind as I tried desperately to get a better perspective on what was happening.

Reeling, I grabbed the woman by the convenient handle of a tightly bound ponytail, yanking her over, so her body covered mine, hunting for the source of the gunfire. I pulled from my inventory and held it to her neck. As the woman’s organs lit up, and I roughly wiped the blood from my eyes, I got a decent view of the scene for the first time.

Five of them were on the ground. Two more waited toward the back. One with a golf club, the other with a gun. A small crowd of nearly a dozen people were farther back, expressions terrified. The one with the gun was staring off into open air, looking at nothing, and still confused at what he saw.

Civilians. Except the gunman. He’s a User looking at a warning message for the first time.

Both Audrey and Talia had looked up from the people they were preoccupied with on the ground, startled by the sound.

It was like there was a resistant mental switch I had to toggle in my mind. I’d reacted entirely on instinct, as if I was being attacked by monsters in a dungeon. Even now, I was fighting the urge to dispatch the woman in my arms as she clawed at the back of her head where I still gripped her, shouting obscenities.

”Don’t kill them if you can manage it.” I sent the mental message to Talia and Audrey. Talia released the throat of a man who immediately scurried out from underneath her and bolted. Audrey opened her mouth, releasing a half chewed hand of an unconscious man as it plopped onto the ground.

”And if they die of blood loss?” Talia asked.

”Because they pushed this? Their problem.”

Aloud, I spoke to the man with the gun. “You stupid motherfucker.” I used to amplify my voice in his mind, tagging it with as much fear as I could heap on. He took a step back. His expression and bedraggled appearance gave the impression of a person who’d been living hard far before the system ever came into being.

The man shifted backward slightly. The ample use of suggestion wasn’t enough to scare him. He was used to conflict, used to being scared. He jutted his chin towards me in defiance.

“Big strong man, hiding behind a little girl like that.”

“Little?” She was a head taller than me, with strong arms, and extremely sharp nails. Between her broken jaw and my bleeding forehead, it was hard to say who was more damaged. “Keep fighting.” I whispered into her ear, pressing into her neck. “See if I don’t carve you open to send a message.”

That, tagged with a healthy dose of terror, seemed to get through. The woman stopped fighting.

In the back, I could see some individuals from the crowd beginning to flank out, opportunistic eyes glittering beneath the blood-red sky.

”Control the crowd.”

They made a decent effort. Talia had far more success with a rapid series of throaty barks, but they didn’t seem to recognize how dangerous Audrey’s vines could be and began to skirt around her.

This isn’t working.

I directed my attention to the gunman. He had some experience. With the way he sighted the gun, keeping his stance firm, I could tell he would likely fire at the first opportunity. “Alright. Listen up, dipshit. You just shot a User. This is clearly your first rodeo, so I’m going to make it easy for you. That system text on your left? That’s your only goddamn warning—“

As soon as he looked away from the gun at the system text, I fired. I’d pulled my hand crossbow and kept it hidden, nose shoved up against the woman’s back, aligned in a place the shot would miss any vital organs and pass through without impacting bone.

I was aiming for his stomach. A gut-shot could easily be fatal in normal circumstances, but it was a slow enough death that health potions would make a difference. Brutal, but I needed to scare the hell out of the crowd to keep them from rushing me. I wasn’t even sure it would work. I’d only used the crossbow on monsters before, never humans. They rarely penetrated deeply, but then again, I hadn’t really spent much time fighting fleshy, easy to target monsters.

The bolt shredded through the woman’s side and landed—

Well. With the diminished speed, it hit lower than intended. The man’s scream was around an octave higher than his previous bristling baritone, more a wail than shout as he collapsed to the ground, hands clenching wildly as he dropped to the ground holding himself.

I targeted four different individuals in separate sections of the crowd, stoking their already ample terror with sending them horrifying images of crossbow bolts leaving gaping wounds. Sensing what I was doing, Audrey and Talia amped up their theatrics until the entire crowd was all but sprinting away. All-too-mindful of the time I was wasting, I went through the inventories of the injured people on the ground, checking for health potions. Thankfully, I found nearly a dozen, and administered one each as quickly as possibly—except for the gunman, who was still presiding in the gray space between blissful oblivion and a metric fuckton of pain.

“You… gonna… kill me?” He asked between hissed breaths, each word a labor.

I reached up for the first time and touched my head. Some part of me had feared the wound was serious, and I’d been afraid to check it. There were countless stories of people who were shot in the head and remained conscious until the shock and adrenaline wore out. What I found was a tender groove where some of my hair had been stripped in an extended line.

Graze.

“Really should,” I said. My heart, which had slowed, now hammered at the prospect. He was a User actively hampering the Lux gathering process. In a state of emergency like this, there was no question it was justified. Something about that line of thought gave me pause. Like it was too easy. I held the knife in one hand, a potion in the other. “Why the hell are you and your people out here playing Mad Max?”

He peered at me, brow furrowed in pain. “Have you looked around?”

“Your Users—“

The man laughed in frustration, then cringed. “G-gone. There weren’t many to begin with. As soon as shit started coming out of the ground, they left for the outskirts. I’m the only one who stuck around—Oh god… oh fuck that hurts.” He curled up into a fetal position. I studied him. Before he folded like a wet paper bag, there was a hint of pride there, the neighborhood level of loyalism that, in my experience, tended to be stubbornly resilient.

His radio chirped, followed by a scratchy voice. “Jake, half your people just ran face-first into the region wall. What’s happening—“

I reached over and rotated the dial for the radio mounted on his hip, until it clicked off.

With that done, I looked at my map. Balancing staying out of downtown with a time efficient route, I’d more than likely have to pass through here again. There were other routes, but each presented complications.

“Region fourteen, right?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“How many of you are up to this shit?”

“Most of us. The ones who aren’t cowering in their homes at least.”

“Kinda fucked up, Jake.”

“Try watching Users speed by with Lux for hours and tell me you wouldn’t start to panic. And it ain’t Jake. It’s Jacob.”

“That last part really pertinent information right now?”

“If you’re gonna kill me, it is. I hate it when people call me Jake.” His face was growing paler, jaw rotating in small, circular motions. I was losing him.

Resilience could be useful. But if this was going to work, I would need to lean hard on Suggestion. Which meant I needed a way to make him as agreeable as possible.

“I have a question, Jacob.” I began. “And the way you answer will drastically affect our relationship in the near future.”

“What?” He asked. No idea if that was his answer, or if the pain had grown so badly he missed what I said.

I held the potion up to his face. “Just trying to get a rough estimate. On a scale of one to ten, how motivated are you to undo the mess you’re clutching now?”

For the first time, he stopped moaning and looked straight at me. “That’s gonna be a ten.”