For once, there was nothing I could really do but remain hidden, watching my companions fight. It was, strangely, quite interesting, not to fight alongside them allowed me to focus on observing them. I could see a rather impressive difference in Lia’s performance, compared to our usual training, a sharp, almost cruel, edge that seemed to propel her to rip into her foe. If I had to guess, it was because her foe was made of flesh, allowing her to spill the Scorched’s blood, letting it paint her claws red as she savaged its body.

Or maybe there was simply more adrenaline involved in this fight, allowing her to push herself further. Or it could be instincts or about a dozen other explanations, either way, I could see a distinct difference in her style.

Maybe I should try finding a way to help her train like this, allowing her to wield her entire strength and skill with that glee. If she could find joy in battle, wouldn’t that motivate her to perfect her ability even further? Sure, it might bring trouble one day in the future, once the need to battle for survival faded away and civilisation established itself again, but really, how long will that take? Would that even happen at all, especially considering that Lia was a vampire with an innate need to take Astral Power from somewhere? Sure, she might be able to feed on livestock and cattle, anything living really, but would she want to? Or would she seek to prey on humans, as the fictional vampires had? I knew that, if I had gained her powers before the change, I would have preyed on humans, simply for convenience. There were just so many of them, it was far easier to look for a human nobody would miss than to hunt enough cattle or worse, feed on rats and similar vermin.

My musings were interrupted when the Scorched tossed another fireball into my general direction, almost singing my hair. Gritting my teeth, I pushed a little testing how much power I had to play with and let one of the Icicles still lying in the street crash into the Scorced from behind, hitting the knee. My attack was just in time to disrupt the thing's balance, allowing Lia to carve deep gauges into its skin, drawing copious amounts of blood and dying the tattered rags it wore red.

My interference meant that the Scorched tossed even more fire at me, forcing me to take full cover, something I readily did. I had no desire to get scorched by the thing, nor did I have the will to force myself to fight more, I was just too tired.

Soon, a lot of notifications blimped through my mind and I briefly checked them, nodding to myself. Another level, bringing me to thirty-six, in addition to skill-points in Ice Rune Mastery, Ice Magic and Astral Meditation, bringing them to thirty-one, thirty and twenty-nine respectively. It was quite interesting, Astral Meditation was one of my strongest skills, despite being a skill mainly used outside of combat. But then, I had used it to drag my students into the Astral River repeatedly, gleaning insight into their magic and helping them develop so it saw a lot of use.

Once again, I began to wonder just how the time spent working on different skills was weighed in their advancement. However, it wasn’t something I could be bothered trying to figure out at the moment, maybe not ever. Instead, I pushed myself up from the place I had taken cover and moved over to Lia and Silva.

“So, everything okay?” I asked, looking at the two. Lia had a few holes in her clothes, showing angrily red skin beneath, while Silva had lost some fur, making her look a little pitiful. Luckily, the Scorced was the worst off, it wasn’t just covered in bloody gashes from Lia’s claws, it had literally lost its head, likely thanks to the cleaver she used. Or maybe she had managed to use the meat-hook, by now it was sharpened into a rather lethal edge, allowing her to cause all manner of destruction with it.

“Yeah,” Lia nodded, taking a deep breath, “Do you want to try getting into the building now, or should we wait for tomorrow night?” she asked, eyeing the complex I had lived in for so long. It truly didn’t look good and we had only so long until the sun would come up.

“Eh, let’s take a look, maybe see if we can find shelter in the cellar. I think there was a utility cellar, I never had to go there,” I shrugged, slowly making my way towards the house.

“Shouldn’t we wait for you to rest a little? That blizzard was…” She just shook her head, her expression once again warring between awed, scared and exasperated, a rather amusing mix in my eyes.

“True, there might be enemies within. Though I’m pretty sure the Scorched over there was the toughest foe in a wide range,” I nodded, walking over to a bench and taking a seat. It wasn’t the most comfortable, but it was better than sitting on the cold ground.

Replenishing my Astral Power took a little longer than Lia and I needed to catch our breaths, but not prohibitively so. Both of us agreed that heading into a potentially dangerous situation in suboptimal condition would be foolish, so we took the time before moving into the building.

It was incredibly strange, familiar in an eerie way, to enter the lobby I had walked through for almost a decade. Little had changed in all that time, only that now, the doors were broken, every surface covered in black soot with some of the signs turned into sludge. Not molten, I was relatively sure the fire-exit signs wouldn’t melt, but just… dissolved in a manner that looked incredibly unnatural to me. I didn’t want to think about what a human body would look like if it underwent such a process, there were things even I didn’t want to imagine.

Quietly, and very carefully just in case there was danger lurking, we moved through the lobby, towards the stairs. The door there was still intact, only completely blacked out, hiding conditions on the other side. We had to force the heavy fire door open, something that required a lot of effort from all three of us working in tandem, but with some work and leverage, we did it.

Only to stare at a pile of rubble, where the stairwell above had collapsed, leaving me at a loss. We might be able to climb up a little way but I had no idea what was waiting for us further up. The only thing I could say for certain was that getting there wouldn’t be easy.

“Let’s retreat for now, we can check the fire escape on the way out,” I told Lia, a small part of me amused that my steps vaguely retraced the way I had taken when fleeing the building right after the change. Back then, a burning monster, what I now knew as a Scorched, had set the street out fron ablaze, forcing me and a few others to flee through the backdoor. The fire escape was also back there, secured a few metres above ground so people couldn’t easily use it to enter the building, only exit it.

The area we moved through was partially collapsed but we could just squeeze past it. We kept moving slowly, I readily remembered the one door I had slammed into a Shattered’s face during the escape and a small shudder ran down my spine as we moved past it.

Outside, the situation didn’t look better than inside. The fire escape, supposedly designed to withstand any fire so that people could escape a burning building had partially failed at some point, half of it crashing onto the rest, turning the entire thing into a jungle gym of twisted metal, sharp edges and deadly points. Lia and I studied the thing for a bit, before deciding that it likely could be climbed but that it was dangerous, not something we wanted to attempt as our time was running low.

Retreating from the partially burned building, we looked for a good spot to spend the day. We went with the easiest solution, picking the least destroyed building we could see and check it for an outside door leading into a cellar.

When that first building didn’t have one in evidence, we moved on to the next and by the third attempt, we found one.

Cracking the door open was trivial, it only had a simple lock that I could fill with Ice, giving me a perfectly fitting key. Once inside, we quickly checked for danger, searching for possible enemies, making sure that there were no glaring holes anywhere that might expose us to the hateful sun or structural weakpoints that would bury us, if anything went wrong. Luckily, there were none of those, only a few more or less demolished washing machines and stuff like that. While it was far from our usual lair, it would have to do for the day.