As we’d left the outer limits of Sevenum, I felt suddenly possessed of a need to defend myself. I don’t know whether it was the knowledge of the surroundings now we were back out in the open, the knowledge of my pursuers looking to find me and/or the volunteers on my list, or a combination of the two, but I felt an urgent need to be able to defend myself more competently than I had been doing so far. Hopefully, Eveline would agree. She was clearly a formidable fighter, and I knew I could learn a lot from her.

“Hey, Eveline?” I asked, somewhat nervously, though I’d no notion as to why I should be.

“What is it?” She asked, clearly not interested in conversation.

“Can you teach me combat techniques?”

She stumbled, evidently surprised at my request. “What?!”

“Teach me how to fight effectively?” I clarified.

For some reason, she seemed to find my request offensive. “Are you playing a joke on me?”

Wait, what?! “Why would I do that?!”

“Did I imagine you throwing me to the road and sticking your combat knife at the back of my neck a few days ago?” she scoffed, her tail swishing angrily. “Or did that actually happen?”

Ah. Now I got it. “That happened,” I began. “I learned that move in self-defence classes when I lived in the old world,” I told her, rubbing the back of my neck. Did it feel warm out here, all of a sudden? “But that was all I had. You could have done anything at that point, and I’d have struggled to defend myself.”

Her tail slowed down considerably; the twitching barely noticeable apart from the occasional flicker. “So, you don’t really know how to fight?”

I slowly shook my head, feeling embarrassed.

“Good,” she sighed explosively, some tension leaving her body. “I thought he was lying for a moment.”

“He who?” I asked, surprised at her look of relief.

“My father,” she replied with a shrug. “He told me that being recently awoken from the old world, you would know almost nothing about how to fight. When you had me pinned at sundown yesterday, I thought he might have deceived me.”

“And it’s important to you that he doesn’t,” I stated, not intending it as a question. “So, will you help me learn how not to be completely useless in a fight?” Despite my attempt to be self-deprecating, I’d earnestly hoped she would say yes. Not only would it save me time with training in the limits of a town or city, but it might also help us to get along better and bridge this gulf between us.

Don’t ask me why because I couldn’t tell you, but that was incredibly important to me.

“As you wish,” Eveline said flatly, though she nodded at the same time. “I won’t make this easy. You’ll have to earn every skill I teach, practice every move until you can do it in your sleep, and when we do spar, and we will spar, I’m not going easy on you.”

“That’s fair,” I nodded to her. “When can we start?”

“After we break to eat. Speaking of, I'm going to hunt. I'll catch up to you when you find a good cooking spot.”

"Understood," I quickly told her, nodding. I learned not to argue with her when she declared she wanted to run off, not that I could stop her even if I wanted.

Frowning in confusion, she paused, shrugged, and turned to leap and jump her way to a nearby grass clearing, where she soon disappeared into the tall grasses.

I shrugged and kept walking.

True to her word, Eveline appeared about twenty minutes after I struck a cooking fire.

“You like Hare?” She asked.

I nodded. I’d hunted more than a few such creatures back in England. She dropped two hare carcasses near the cooking pot, shucked out of her backpack and started digging inside of it for something. “You do the skinning, and I’ll grill them,” I suggested. “Sound good?”

Eveline gave a simple nod, pulled out a long blade and set to skinning the hare carcasses.

After we had eaten, Eveline stood and shook herself out, grabbing a branch of timber and sitting back down to work with it. After breaking it down into two pieces, she used her apparently extremely sharp claws to chip away at the soft wood, quickly fashioning two practice knives that were about the same rough size as my combat blade. I took the knife out of my belt and jabbed it into the dirt, so I knew where to get it, and stood, stretching myself out.

As I finished, Eveline stepped to my side, extending the wooden practice blade hilt first. I took it with a grateful smile, while Eveline remained stone-faced.

"Let's start now," she remained curt with me. "I want to see how you handle a combat stance," she tossed her head behind her to a patch of ground near the fire.

I stepped where she indicated, then waited. When it became clear she was waiting for me to assume a stance, I shrugged. "I don't know any combat stances," I half-spoke and half-laughed.

Eveline rolled her eyes in exasperation. "You really are new at this," she sighed, stepping by my side.

She dropped immediately into a drill-instructor’s manner (at least I thought so, anyway), barking out instructions for me to stand straight, arms up, head ducked, slight crouch. I did my best to comply, gripping my blade downward as that would allow me to plunge it into someone’s neck if they got too close.

“You’re slouching like a horse with heat stroke,” she told me in a disinterested tone. “I told you to crouch, not slouch. Straighten your back and bend those knees.”

I did, remaining as still as I could while she walked around me. A little adjustment to my right arm seemed to be called for, only for her to bark at me immediately afterwards. “Hey! Pay attention! I’m posturing your arms the way I did for a reason. At least try to hold them still!”

Despite the tone in her voice and the disdain she clearly had for my lack of previous experience in combat, I knew she was taking this seriously, so I made no complaints. I adjusted my arms to approximately the same place I’d had them before, my nanocloud registering the alterations and speeding up the process of recording this posture in muscle-memory for me.

Hopefully, this will accelerate my ability to learn, given I didn’t exactly have years to become a decent practitioner in this art.

Eveline continued to adjust my posture, this time with my left hand, nodding in satisfaction as I held my unarmed hand palm-inwards, closing off any method of attack that might otherwise have gotten through. She then stepped behind me again. I took a deep breath, the unusual way I was holding myself was both unfamiliar, and without my nanocloud to make adjustment, would be tiring.

“Tomorrow, you’ll need to wear shorts,” she announced to my immense surprise. “I need to know how much pressure you’re putting on each leg, and to do that, I need to see your muscles working.”

I suppose that made sense, I told myself. Without speaking, I nodded. She then went silent for a moment, and my mind began to wander a bit. What was she doing back there? To my immense surprise, she grabbed me by the left calf, adjusting its position. I relaxed enough for her to comply, transferring balance to the opposite leg as she lifted.

Did her hand linger there for a moment? Was she doing that deliberately?

Wait… Was she testing me?

She grabbed my waist and tapped my right foot with her own. I lifted it, planting it down a few centimetres to my right. This was starting to get a little too intimate, especially for how she normally behaved, and I couldn’t help but think that if I gave in to the sudden burst of desire I’d felt at those hands grabbing my waist, I would lose respect in her mind.

That was too high a price, so I redoubled my efforts and focused my mind on the task of holding myself as she had instructed. She appeared in my right periphery, her face a mask of irritation and annoyance. Was she hoping I’d be distracted so she could tear me a new one? I decided it was time to call her out, and I did so while maintaining my stance, facing forward.

“You know,” I slowly drawled. “If you’re going to stand there frowning at me, you could at least tell me what I need to adjust so I can hold an acceptable combat stance.”

If anything, she looked even more annoyed, as she stepped back in front of me, putting herself at a fair distance, her stride full of purpose and intent.

Yeah, I knew it, I told myself.

“Now come at me with that blade of yours,” she suddenly ordered.

So I did, trying to hold off on the timing of my attack, so as to catch her off-guard. It was a snap decision, as a moment later, I leapt forward, swiping in with my free hand to distract her. She side-stepped, so I reached around to slice at her, upwards. She blocked the swipe with one hand, while the other swept across my knuckles, and I felt the sting as those claws of hers cut open my skin, causing me to drop the knife in astonishment and pain.

“What the hell did you do that for?” I asked in irritation, shaking out my hand and rubbing the tops of my fingers near the knuckles.

“Lesson number one,” Eveline barked furiously as she stepped forward, grabbing my knuckles so I could see the slight gashes that ran across all four fingers and in rows of three. “Never hold a knife facing down or toward you in a grip like you did just now. You left your knuckles completely unguarded, and if I had intended to, I could have quite easily cut open your knuckles and severed all your tendons. Quickest way for an experienced melee fighter to win against someone as inexperienced as you is to disarm you and prevent you from being able to wield a blade,” she took a deep breath, but her eyes narrowed in anger. “Understand?”

I rubbed my knuckles; the bleeding having stopped already. I nodded once, holding her gaze for a moment, before retrieving the practice blade from the floor.

Eveline stepped back before continuing. “Now, pick up your blade and this time, hold it hilt down, blade up and out, your thumb pointing toward the tip or along the guard. Never hold your knife the way you did a few moments ago. Combat stance, hurry up.”

I shook my hand a little more to dispel the last vestiges of pain and stiffness before gripping my knife again, this time in what she would accept as the correct grip. Once again, she stepped forward and made minor adjustments to the way I held the blade, as well as to my positioning so that the blade better covered the area directly in front of my chest.

“Alright,” she then said, stepping back and dropping into a combat stance. “Let’s go again.”

It took us two days to get to Dusseldorf, mainly because Eveline and I allowed extra time to train my usage of the blade, as well as to perform some combat exercises while she went off hunting. It slowed our progress, but it was still time well spent. By the time we arrived in Dusseldorf, she had deemed my combat stance as acceptable, though not ideal by any means.

To be blunt about it, she had been far more personable toward me during our combat training than she ever was as a simple travelling companion.

Now we had arrived in Dusseldorf, I decided to plan the next leg of my trip. As I consulted my nanocloud for the data files I needed, I also received an alert at roughly the same time.

New AI level reached.

Nanocloud AI Level One is now possible and will automatically be applied.

Deploying nanocloud units for swarm tasking throughout host.

Direct synaptic processing assistance will now be applied.

2 new modules available.

This was a surprise I had not expected. Just when I was wondering about this AI upgrade I’d been hoping I’d be able to obtain soon, here it was. I queried the details on the two modules I’d been given access to.

Emotional Control Module

Dedicated emotional stability system. Can be used in and out of combat. In-combat allows for finer control of emotional state to regulate host effectiveness at repelling or eliminating enemy threats. Out of combat, allows temporary regulation of emotional extremes in addition to directive-driven emotional control. Capabilities will increase as synaptic mapping is completed.

Baseline (no additional levels available)

Function capability and recommended duration/frequency of usage will be increased as synaptic mapping of host is completed and brain chemistry fully understood. Caution is advised on over-reliance.

I then checked out the other module.

Function Builder

Dedicated function builder. Requires technical engineering or code-building mindset. Can use this to build and combine functions into other functions and into modules.

Level 1

This level allows for plug-in module code to build functions and modules. Custom coding requires an additional upgrade.

These two were real game changers for me. I could finally build custom modules of my own to cover areas I felt were lacking. How many others had such an ability? Certainly, if any coders survived from the old world, these kinds of capabilities would be of inestimable benefit to them.

As usual, we entered the city and proceeded to offload any spare supplies we knew we wouldn't need on the next leg of our journey at the marketplace, gaining some data credits, which I left to Eveline to deal with. I had more than enough right now, and I also had a means of scouting out the markets to see if there was a shortage of nanocloud functionality in any given area so I could create my own niche for the market.

It would no doubt make me a lot of data credits and prove useful to anyone who didn't have certain abilities yet.

Shortly after re-stocking our supplies at the markets, Eveline and I found an old Inn and requested a pair of rooms. As this was my first stop in Germany since the outbreak, I wasn't sure what to expect, but it was better than I had feared. The rooms were clean, if basic, and they at least had clean linen, moderately-soft beds, and were sufficiently warm that I wouldn't need to wear any heavy furs or pelts to stave off being frozen, or relying too heavily on my nanocloud to keep warm.

Once I had stowed my travel pack in the room, I locked it back up. It was time to go find my next target.

Klaus Richter was a volunteer for the Synergy project. The guy had been a fitness freak at fifty-three years of age when he had volunteered as a test subject, and was given an injection of nanomachines to see how they operated on a healthy, if ageing patient that could serve as a baseline. His testing, like my own, was so recent that not much data had been recorded before the outbreak.

Like many of the volunteers for the project, he had undergone testing in a facility far from his home base. In this case, like Frederick and Sofia that I would be visiting later on, his test took place at a facility in Hamburg, one that had been set up specifically for the testing, and had been released back to its owners once that phase had been abandoned when news of the outbreak leaked out.

And like everyone that I had managed to find so far, Klaus was still in his home city. After forty-three years, I'd expected more than one person to be elsewhere, but apparently, many of these people liked to stick around.

His appearance had largely remained the same. Less grey hair than his profile picture, smoother, more elastic, more supple skin, but otherwise, Klaus was still the same physically-fit specimen he always was.

He also turned out to be a bit of a knob. When i found him at a residence near the western edge of Dusseldorf, he stood, dressed like a fucking cyclist in shorts, as if he was about to ride in a peloton with a bunch of other cyclists and get in the way of traffic, three abreast on a road. I'd met the type, who thought that they owned the road, that anyone in a car was the scum of the Earth, that regularly ran red lights, and screamed abuse at every driver that questioned them on it. All this guy was missing was the skin-tight lycra top, the sunglasses and the helmet.

Immediately, before I'd even begun explaining why I was there, he cut me off.

"I don't know why you've been asking around about me, but I don't want anything you're selling."

"I'm not sell-" I tried to explain, but he cut me off.

"Not interested. Walk off."

"Your life might be in danger."

"Are you threatening me?" He suddenly asked, and he showed how hot-headed he was in that moment, grabbing me by the throat and trying to throw me to the ground.

I also realised then, he had done little to nothing with his nanocloud. His perceived fitness was a detriment to nanocloud development, because his nanocloud hadn't been given any directives, and he'd never needed any healing or corrective action for any health issues or potential weakness. He'd practically coasted through life on nothing more than his fucking bicycle, and now it showed, as his expression became puzzled and he wondered why it was he could hardly move me, and no matter how tightly he tried to squeeze my neck, he barely made a dent, let alone choke me at all.

"You're the one that's threatening me," I told him in a low tone. "I came here to-"

"I don't-"

"Shut," I said coldly. "Up."

He did.

"I came here to warn you about people trying to find members of the original Synergy experiment. They're harvesting nanomachines from everyone involved. You're next on their list. I suggest you take precautions. Now get. Your. Fucking. Hand. Off of my throat."

Quickly, as if burned, Klaus let me go, but he still had the face of a petulant child.

I wasted no more time on him, and instead walked away, heading back to the Inn I had booked the night with.

I had also decided that for the first time since I awoke from cryogenic suspension, I was going to take the evening to relax, observe, and maybe get some alcohol if that stil existed.

I was in luck.

Back at the Inn, the bar at the ground level had a stock of alcoholic beverages, all apparently having been made recently. I saw no old bottles of anything, just a lot of metal barrels that stored your typical staples like barley and malt whiskeys, beers, lagers and even a variety of apple ciders, all on tap, and though I saw no obvious signs of refrigeration, they were all served cold.

This was nice, I realised. I wasn't a heavy drinker and never really had been, but being able to have a cold one every now and then was a good sign.

It was probably only a few minutes where I'd been sat at the bar, sipping my apple cider, when three people walked into the bar; one human and two foxes.

The human was the first I'd seen in a long time who was blatantly sexually attractive in the classical sense. She had an hourglass figure, a soft face with piercing blue eyes, a dark mane of hair that looked luxurious and was slightly curled, and her bust was more than ample, clearly supported so that her cleavage was on full display, and she had a glorious set of full lips that would attract the attention of any man...

Apparently including myself.

It didn't last long, though. Sure, she was blatantly curvaceous in the way that a lot of Instagram "influencers" were, those that liked to show off their curves to get attention from men and boys, anyway. She was so different from Eveline, and not just because she was human and Eveline was not. While Eveline and this woman shared a waist-to-hip ratio that immediately set pulses racing, Eveline's chest was the epitome of compact musculature, while this woman might well have had implants put in, if such a thing were even necessary any longer. This woman also had a softness to her that would immediately set off anyone she was in the line of sight, or to put it in Eveline's lexicon, she'd cause men all over the place to put out enough pheromones to set off an orgy.

I could certainly see why.

Still, no matter what, if Eveline had shown even the slightest hint of interest in me for anything other than just training me in the use of a blade, then whoever this woman was, she wouldn't get a moment's notice from me.

The problem was that Eveline didn't like me, not even a little bit, and this woman just might.

Why not strike up a conversation?

She apparently noticed, because now she let loose a slight smile and walked over to me, her curves swaying sensuously in a blatantly sexual stride that was intended to make me hot and bothered.

"Hello, stranger," she said, apparently opting for English without even asking me if I spoke whatever language she did. I knew she spoke some other language, because her accent was pronounced.

"Are you Austrian?" I asked, without thinking. Then I realised that hormones made me fucking stupid.

"So smart of you to guess," she spoke in a sensual tone. "My name's Lena."

"I'm Rick," I replied, nodding. I don't know why, but something caused me to hold off on a handshake for the moment.

Nanocloud secure.

Once again, my nanocloud had anticipated my concerns and taken precautions. This exchange had taken place in the fraction of a second it had taken for me to nod, so I held my hand out. Lena took a hold of it, and shook gingerly, her ice-cold fingers almost causing me to feel a shock through my skin, but she released me just as quickly, her hand then going to her chin so she could rest on it as she leaned over on the bar top.

"So, where are you from, Rick?"

"I'd rather not say for now," I told her. I really didn't feel like explaining to a stranger that I travelled from England, and that I was allowed over onto mainland Europe. It took too long and I'd grown sick of it long ago. "But I travel with a companion who's not here yet. We're heading east."

"Interesting," Lena smiled, though I doubt she found it interesting in the least. "I travel with companions as well. Would you like to meet them?"

I shrugged. "Why not?"

Within minutes, I found myself sat at a table, being introduced to two apparently very friendly foxes. The first was a fairly large fox who went by the name Ralf. He was a curious fellow, having a lot of fox-like qualities such as a reddish-brown colouration, a clearly canine aspect to his face, fox ears perched atop his head like a wild fox often had, and chocolate-brown eyes. As he was already seated, I did not get a good look at his body other than he had broad shoulders and muscled arms, with similar hands to most humans except they were covered in fur and tipped with claws. His manner was that of a fairly amiable man, his voice when he spoke was a deep bass, and he wore a stitched leather jacket with the sort of quality and workmanship a tailor in the old world would have charged thousands of pounds for, back in England. I was fascinated that such fine quality existed still.

Suzie was also a fox, with the same canine face, head-mounted ears, same colour fur, but she was a lot smaller. She had the body of a fox in both appearance and shape, except she could stand like a biped, her waist-to-hip ratio was like any human, and like Ralf, she had human-like hands with opposable digits, tipped with permanent claws. Since Suzie often stood, I could see her feet. Like Eveline's, they were bare, no doubt because footwear was more of a hinderance than a help, were wider than a human, were claw-tipped, and were attached to fox-like appendages below the hips.

Her feet and hands weren't like Eveline's retractable claws at all-

Why did I keep thinking of her?

Unlike Ralf, Suzie was rather animated, seeming to enjoy looking at everything, curiosity getting the better of her all the time. She couldn't sit still for five minutes without something else grabbing her attention. Also, unlike Ralf, she wore a crop top, exposing a soft underbelly much like any canine except she only had a single pair of breasts, covered by said crop top. She wore a leather jacket much like Ralf did, but Suzie's was much shorter and far smaller. She wore what looked like Lycra leggings that went down to her upper knee joint, but no further. They looked a lot like shorts.

Also unlike Ralf, Suzie's voice was high-pitched, and rather grating on the ears if she spoke too much, which she did, as garrulous as she was curious, which meant she spoke a lot about many trivial and irrelevant subjects.

It didn't escape my notice that Lena had glanced in her direction for a moment, tilting her head to one side. Almost immediately, Suzie stood from her chair, knocked her drink back in her hand, then turned to Ralf. "You wanna take a walk, you big red oaf?"

Her tone was clearly suggestive, and I cringed in embarrassment, even though I was rarely considered a prude.

Within moments, Ralf and Suzie were somewhere else in the Inn, and it was now just Lena and I. I resolved to make sure that things were kept light and cordial. After all, Lena and I had just met.

"So, what's your story?" I asked her.

The next morning had arrived without incident. I'd begged off spending too much time with Lena, using an early departure as an excuse to retire to my room early, and made sure not to tell her which room I'd stayed in. As a consequence, I'd managed to get a good night's sleep, and was fresh and alert the next day.

Eveline was waiting for me the next morning, apparently displeased. I suspected the reason for her annoyance when I noticed that Lena, Suzie and Ralf were also present.

"So, we have company of our way to Dortmund?" She asked in a flat tone, her tail twitching slightly, her expression frosty. "Was it too much to discuss it with me beforehand?"

What was happening here? I asked myself. I didn't remember inviting anyone to join us, and I knew for sure that my nanocloud would have made sure I had remembered if it had actually happened and I was simply too drunk to remember.

"Before I could discuss such a thing with you," I told her in a light tone that didn't match my anxiety. "I'd have to discuss it with myself first. I wasn't aware that we had anyone else joining us." And now I looked squarely at Lena, who smirked.

Something was odd about her expression, as though she were being smug, but not quite. "Sorry I didn't discuss it with you first," she began, and now Eveline's displeasure rested solely on Lena. "I thought it would be a good idea for us to travel together, considering we were headed that way anyway, and I'm sure you could both use the company."

"Are you?" Eveline asked her frostily.

"I have to be frank with you here," I told Lena. "I think it was a bit presumptuous of you to assume we'd be fine with this. You should have discussed it with me, then given us a chance to talk it over first. Going to Eveline and telling her we'd agreed to travel together before even talking to me about it was a step too far for us."

Eveline's tail continued to twitch in agitation. Suzie and Ralf looked on in apprehension.

At that moment, I saw a few guardspeople running across the opposite side of the street, heading west. Something had happened, and they sprinted at an impressive rate. My enhanced hearing picked up a strident order for a medical team to meet them. The other details were lost to me at that moment.

I waited to see how Lena would respond to my words, focusing my attention back to her.

She shrugged, giving us a slight smile. "You're right," she told us both. "I should have discussed it with you first. Don't you see though, it makes sense? If we're both going to Dortmund anyway, why not travel together?"

"A fine argument," I said placatingly. "You could have made that last night. It's not like I'd had a lot to drink, after all."

"Of course," she told us. "So, how about it?"

Eveline looked sideways at me. "Do what you like," she said flatly. "I'm going to hunt."

"Oh!" Suzie called out in obvious enthusiasm. "Can I come with you?"

"No," Eveline barked, turned to the exit and started walking. "Fuck off."

"Hey!" I called out.

"You know never to question my hunting habits already," She barked at me, her expression angered instead of disinterested like it seemed when she spoke with the others. "I hunt alone."

And with that, she was off toward the edge of town.

Suzie looked crestfallen for a few seconds, then stepped back to join Ralf, who looked like he wanted to say more than just a few words to Eveline. I shook my head at him, adding "I've tried talking to her, but she's difficult at the best of times."

"So it would seem," Lena quipped, smiling at me and stepping close. "So, can we join you on your trip? At least until we get to Dortmund, then we'll see, right?"

I shrugged. I could use some friendly company for once. "Sure, I could use some friendly conversation."