Julianne had had about the worst day of her life. Like for real. First, her mom had forced her to clean the house. Like, the apocalypse had happened, and she still had to clean the house? For real? Then, to top it off, her dad had asked her to run to the store and scavenge for some more food!

She didn’t want to do it, but her parents had pointed out, again!, that this was a different world and that she was supposed to chip in. It was as if she didn’t have stuff to do herself. Like practice magic. Instead, it was ‘do this,’ ‘do that,’ all day long.

She hated it!

But in the end, she had relented and gone to the store down the road. It had taken her a lot longer than usual, too, because she had met Bethany, Josh, and Avindash, the only other teenagers left in town, at the plaza. Normally, she wouldn’t have lingered that much, but with Avindash telling another one of his hilarious tales, she had totally forgotten about the time. When she had realized that darkness was setting in, she had quickly said goodbye and then had hurried toward the two-story house that her family owned, close to the center of the town.

And she had been almost home, too, when she had noticed the group of four bikers approaching her. And that was when things had gotten terrible, really fast. She had known that she should have run, try to get away. But no matter how much her mind had kept on telling her to move, she just hadn’t been able to get her body to respond.

She had just cowered there, hoping that none of that was real, that somehow all bad things would just pass by.

But of course, she had heard tales of the bikers and even seen them do bad stuff.

And then that creep had grabbed her, and she had known that she was in big trouble. The next few seconds had passed in a blur. She remembered flailing around, hitting the creep with a solid punch in his nuts; her stinging face and nausea when one of the thugs had slapped her full force in the face. And then, a shadowy figure sprinting out of the dark, like in one of those Marvel comics. Suddenly, a few inches of cold, shadow covered steel had shot out of scarface’s chest, causing him to collapse in a moaning heap.

And then there had been some quick, brutal back and forth between the shadow figure and the remaining bikers, too fast for her to follow along. What she remembered the most was how a couple of times the eyes of her savior had lit up in a bright silver color, only to fade back into the mysterious shadow-shrouded darkness.

Within seconds all four bikers had been dead, or soon-to-be-dead, on the ground, and the shadowy man stood there, surveying the area. When his silvery eyes briefly focused on her, Julianne felt a shiver run down her spine – it was as if the man could look inside of her, deep into the core of her very being.

And then, suddenly, the shock of the whole situation threatened to overwhelm her. The delayed adrenalin rush left her shaking on the ground, crying.

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‘Well done, Daniel, you scared the shit out of her!’ I chided myself while staring at the sobbing girl.

I mean, I got it. A few guys were about to gang-rape her, and here is another guy. Guilty by association or something. Obviously, she was going to be afraid of me. Plus, I had just killed a few men without any hesitation. Heck, shrouded in the Shadow Skin, she might even think that I was a monster…

So what to do?

Go and comfort? Talk to her? What was I going to say? ‘Everything is going to be alright’? Like in the fucking movies? Yeah, not sure about that one. Sounded too cheesy, to be honest. It was a fucked-up world right now, and I was positive that NOT everything was going to be alright… Hug her? That would feel like really awkward. She was a teen, maybe sixteen. Too old to be hugged like that by someone my age.

Frankly, I was at a loss.

And I still needed to deal with Eddie and get out of there before other people might show up. But what to do with the piece of shit? Let him be? Or kill him in cold blood?

The gentleman thing to do was to let him go, but looking at the sobbing girl’s bruised face once more, I felt pure rage coursing through my body. ‘You reap what you sow,’ I thought, got up, and stabbed the motherfucker through his heart.

Turning to the girl, I just told her gruffly to run back home and not be outside in the dark any longer. Which… sounded weird coming out of my mouth. It sounded too mature, too adult, much more so than I felt I was. But hopefully, she was smart enough to get back home straight away anyway.

I didn’t wait for her to follow my advice, because I figured that I had done my part. The rest was up to her. I wasn’t going to be holding the hand of some teenage girl if she wanted to be stupid…

As I was moving down the dark road, I thought some more about the fight. I had felt stronger. A lot stronger than just a few days ago, and that was despite me having pumped irons for half of the day. Same for my speed and agility. The training I had gone through, even if only for a couple of days had already paid huge dividends. Not to talk about the gains to perception. If I was honest, it had felt as if I had fought against a bunch of oversized children. The way they had moved was… slow and clumsy. There was power there, but they had clearly focused their fighting style, and stat gains on pure strength, neglecting speed and finesse.

Granted, I had had the element of surprise, and even afterward, I had been shrouded in darkness, making it much harder for them to see me. But they had magic too, so that should have evened the battlefield.

The other thing that had struck me was that I had gained mana… it wasn’t much, about on par with killing one of the gars for each person, but it was there. And I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Were others aware of that? If so… it might lead to a few people, those with questionable morals, take advantage of that as an easy leveling opportunity. I didn’t want to imagine the implications…

Lastly, there was the effect of my newest title, Droghul’s Disciple. When I had finished the bikers, I had received a small jolt of soothing energy that had reinvigorated part of my body, probably by repairing, and negating, some of the effects of my workout. I wasn’t too worried about it, because clearly it had been a very minor effect, but it was odd to think that I had benefited from the death of fellow humans in two different ways. I felt slightly sullied by it, to be honest. But that was something I had to accept. There were consequences for going after the bikers, and I’d better be willing to bear those.

Back in the hotel, I used the bucket with water to scrub off the blood I had invariably gotten all over myself. Fighting was gross business. And without a laundry machine and hours at hand to hand-clean stuff, I was going through clothes like no-one’s business. Luckily, my bag of holding had a whole bunch of outfits, some of which even fit reasonably well.

Afterward, I was sitting on the armchair in my room, trying to figure out how to proceed from here. Should I go on a rampage and kill every single one of the bikers? Surely, there were some good guys among them or at least some bikers that simply liked… well, bikes, and leather jackets and whatnot and slid into this whole shebang with the gang, unable to get out at this point. But how the hell was I supposed to figure out who was a good guy and who was a bad guy among the bikers?

There was no good answer.

All I could do for now was keep on training hard, and scout more on the bikers. In the end, it might come down to the question whether I thought everyone was better off without any of the bikers, including the few good guys, or with all of them alive, apart from a few bad apples that I could remove surgically, like, say, Cobra, Lil’Pope, Big Pete, and Wendy.

Mulling over the situation, I eventually drifted off into an unrestful sleep, with images of bloody corpses and the wet, slurping noise of my blade sliding into human flesh, haunting my dreams.

The next morning, I woke up with the taste of bile in my mouth that even rigorous scrubbing with toothpaste didn’t altogether remove. I hadn’t really expected that killing those bikers would hit me that hard. After all, most of them were real scumbags. But there was a big difference between killing humans and goblins or gars. Yes, both were sapient, but the bikers… where real people.

Then again, I tried telling myself, they had no more morals than the gars I had seen, so the difference was somewhat artificial. And now that there were other races to consider, like vampiric elves and who knows what other types of beings, I should get away from feeling attached to the notion of humans being somehow different, being somehow more deserving to live.

But sometimes cold reason doesn’t sound convincing in the face of overwhelming emotions.

Not that I wouldn’t do the same thing again in a heartbeat. They had deserved to die. But I didn’t have to like it. This was, perhaps, a good thing, too, because the moment that I enjoyed killing people for the sake of killing, I was half-way down to hell myself.

Eventually, I forcefully stopped myself from mulling over the events of the previous day and instead got started with my training. Time was precious, and that hadn’t changed overnight. Just the thought of spending another day in a crummy gym, almost made me cry, so I decided that I needed to take some time to work on my magic skills, instead. And it wasn’t all just me being weak… getting into prime physical shape was all good, but I had seen time and again how powerful magic was, even though I only had a handful of useful abilities. It was time to expand on those and make them more effective.

Since I didn’t want to be observed by anyone, I took my bike and went a bit out of town, down one of the hiking paths that crisscrossed the area. I didn’t go far enough to be in the real wilderness but followed the trail until I thought that it would be unlikely that I’d encounter random people or have people observe what I was doing just by happenstance.

I ended up stopping at a bench that was situated next to the lake, providing a beautiful view of the serene water, with the lasts wisps of the morning fog clearing away rapidly. The sunlight glittering on the mirror-like surface of the lake helped me forget the grim images of the corpses of the bikers I had killed the previous evening, and all the second-guessing I was going through.

And I realized that I felt oddly giddy at the prospect of learning more magic. While gaining serious muscle mass in no time flat was exhilarating in its own way, it still paled to the feeling of mana rushing through my veins and changing the world around me in weird and astonishing ways. It had been more than two weeks by now, but I still couldn’t quite get used to it.

Shadow magic had been my VIP skillset so far, with Shadow Skin the most used spell I had. But instead of working on further variations of that, or figuring out new shadow spells, I first wanted to try and develop the fireball spell. It was a fucking fireball after all, even though my excitement had been dampened somewhat after observing the lackluster explosion of the red sphere during Jak’lo’s demonstration. But, at least, I had a fair idea of how it was supposed to work. Of course, the devil was in the detail, and I expected that it would take me a few hours to figure it all out.

At least.

And a fireball would add a much-needed offensive component to my spell arsenal, so it would be totally worth it. After that… well, perhaps I should play around with silver mana and various combinations of other mana types a bit to see if I could come up with more synergies. If I wasn’t going to buy spells and specialize in any one color,… then I needed to make the most of my unique skill set. And looking at Aura of Droghul and how effective it was, I didn’t doubt that combining different mana types would lead to some exciting and powerful new options.

I just had to find them.

Which was easier said than done without knowing much of anything.

Instead of getting upset about that again, I just shrugged my shoulders, figuratively rolled up my sleeves and got to work. The first thing I needed to do was to get the red mana outside of my body and form a sphere. At least, I had some inkling on how to do that, based on my attempt to summon a flame. And while that hadn’t gone particularly well, I had, at least, managed to conjure red mana outside of my body. What was left was to somehow form it into the shape I wanted.

The first thing I noticed was that conjured mana didn’t stay stable. It just, sort of, dissipated. Which caused me a bit of a headache, trying to grasp at the fleeting wisps of immaterial mana until I realized that I had shaped external mana before, with minor healing, at least when used on other people, and Aura of Droghul.

In both situations, I had acted mostly instinctual and under high pressure, so that wasn’t particularly helpful for right now. But after I thought some more about the differences and similarities to my current situation, I realized that in those cases, I had a clear image in mind of what I wanted to achieve. The same was true when I had tried to create a flame at the request of Jak’lo, only that the result had been less than perfect.

With that in mind, I imagined what I had seen Jak’lo do – streams of red mana cycling around each other in an intricate pattern that seemed to give the mana structure and stability. And slowly, but surely, the mana converged more and more closely to the image I had in mind. More often than I’d like to admit, my focus wandered, and the whole thing fell apart, but I just started from the beginning yet again.

After a couple of hours, I finally had something that resembled the fireball I had seen in Jak’lo’s hands, albeit a lot less smooth and even. But the most crucial part… it was relatively stable. I only needed a smidgen of focus to keep the ball floating between my hands, which was essential if I ever wanted to use this in the middle of a big battle.

As I inspected the construct floating in front of me, I could faintly make out a complex runic structure, that, as I understood it, represented what I had formed. It seemed less… elegant and refined than what I had seen when Jak’lo had used the spell, but the foundation was there.

Now, I only needed to get the darn thing to move.

Which turned out to be rather tricky, because I had no real good idea on how to go about that. Eventually, I figured out that I somehow needed to push, while at the same time providing extra red mana to ‘fuel’ the movement. The problem was that I wasn’t able yet to hold on to the sphere while creating enough force to move the thing at the same time.

So what if I focused on something more simple instead for the time being?

Just as a proof of concept, I dissolved the sphere and instead just imagined red, fiery mana gushing forth from my outstretched hands, like a flamethrower. And this turned out to be much easier, indeed. Not that it was easy.

But I didn’t have to focus on maintaining a complex runic construct while also trying to figure out how to make it move where I wanted. A flamethrower was simple. Hold your hands where you want things to go… and push.

Kind of.

It wasn’t as if there was anything particular about hands that made red mana more likely to gush out of them. I could, presumably, have the red mana come out of my eyes instead, or the nose, both of which, frankly, would be looking seriously badass. But having it come out of the hands seemed the most natural location and the one making it the easiest to direct the mana flow.

All I had to do was to make sure that I channeled the mana with sufficient pressure to the tips of my fingers and have it shoot out straight. The reach wasn’t overly impressive, perhaps a couple of yards before the flames petered out, but It was also just the beginning of my experimentation, so maybe this could be improved down the road. The nice added benefit was that by having the flames come out of my fingers, I could spread my fingers and create a wide cone, or align my fingers next to each other to have a more focused beam.