Seeing an army of monsters abruptly change direction and start heading towards him was perhaps the most terrifying sight John had encountered so far, and that took some doing. The chitinous black tide surged like a flash flood that had just met a bend in the riverbed. Even from hundreds of metres away, the noise of their stampede was incredible. The knowledge that those monsters desired nothing more than his and his comrades' deaths was harrowing.

Still, Chester kept his Spell active, and John forced himself to turn his attention away, activating Eagle Eye and watching how the fleeing humans reacted. To his relief, they were pivoting away, moving in almost exactly the opposite direction from the light. There'd been concern that they'd get trapped by Chester's Spell too, somehow.

John activated Accelerate, settled Fireball into one of his Spell slots, then put every iota of his strength into the throw, forcing his body to stretch far beyond its limits. For the first time since unlocking the Level 1 Skill, he managed to activate Limit Break.

The Fireball soared an impossible distance, clearing the length of multiple football pitches at the speed of a cannonball. John's shoulder wrenched, multiple muscles in his arm strained, and his elbow popped, but he didn't care. He had eyes only for the Fireball and its trajectory, and the triumph that filled him when it struck the front ranks of the oncoming horde.

Flames erupted in an immense explosion, engulfing over a dozen insect monsters at once. Spiders, scorpions, beetles, and more caught aflame and began writhing. It was like a swimming pool's worth of fire had been packed into that baseball-sized sphere, and all of it had burst out upon impact.

So, he thought, doing his best to ignore the pain in his arm, this is the power of a Level 4 Spell.

6000 Aura had seemed such a steep purchase just a minute ago, even if he'd still had over 9000 left over afterwards. Now, it undoubtedly proved to be a worthwhile investment.

John wasn't done, though. Rearing back, he launched another Fireball powered by Accelerate and Limit Break. Unimaginable pain ripped through his arm, and he was sure something snapped. Had to bear it. The second Fireball was still flying by the time he launched his third throw.

This time, it was too much. Agony overwhelmed him. John screwed his eyes shut and swallowed back a grunt of pain. It was a good thing he'd already decided what to do beforehand, because otherwise he wasn't sure he would've had the mental acuity to find the right option in his system menus.

Increased Strength Level 3 -> Level 4!

-800 Aura

Blessed relief flooded his body, massaging ecstasy into his battered arm. The pain faded away and was replaced by concentrated nirvana. A deep breath hissed its way out past his teeth. It took some work to unclench his jaw, untense his shoulders, and loosen the grip his uninjured hand had on the previously-injured arm.

Taking a moment to just breathe, John observed the effects of his work. Three bonfires lit up the fields, great pyres eating away at the ranks of the deceased monsters. They seemed to reach up as if to challenge the fiery sky itself, defiant in the face of monstrous tyranny. Dozens of monsters had fallen in a mere three attacks.

John switched to Heat Vision, activating the Spell as easily as if he'd done it a hundred times before. He had no idea how it looked to an outside observer; to him, the world simply turned blue, orange, red, and white—heat vision, in other words, like the Spell name implied. If it had just been that, he would have lamented a waste of 2000 Aura.

But with a mental command, the area in the centre of his vision flashed a searing white. He knew from experience that the area he was affecting was no larger than the width of his iris. That was fine. For his purposes here, he only needed to get things started.

Slashing his gaze across the field drew a burning red line in the grass. He went back and forth, tracing over his line until the entire thing was white as the sun. Then, with Eagle Eye, he curved the ends of his line around the width of the oncoming monster horde, seeking to funnel them in narrower and narrower. The fire he'd created wasn't that big yet, but it would spread.

There were still hundreds of monsters left, and they were all coming for John's position. Many were pouring through the flames. Chester's armour still shone, drawing them all, essentially funnelling them into the narrower path John's flames had created. Flicking briefly to Mana Sense, John felt a few more moving towards their position from within the city behind them, but was relieved to find they hadn't attracted a second horde just yet.

Still time for the next step, then. Let's hope this works as I think it will.

After a quick glance at the oncoming mass of monsters through Soul Vision, John picked out some weaker monsters and reached out, activating Soul Drain. Compared to the skeleton monster with its green soul, absorbing the souls of blues felt like nothing. He snapped his hand closed, and the targetted soul zapped across the distance, its previous host falling limp, dead.

That new number that had appeared in his mind when he stole the skeleton monster's soul ticked up.

17 -> 20

He didn't know exactly what that meant, but he had some ideas. One of those ideas was about to be put to the test.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Unlocked Summon Undead!

-2000 Aura

Knowledge filled his mind, and John had to hold back a smirk. As usual, it didn't tell him exactly what the Spell did, just how to activate it. But he could extrapolate.

Reaching out with the other hand, he aimed for the three burning pyres, mentally targeting the corpses there. A fey awareness appeared, a haptic buzz in his brain not dissimilar to the notifications he received for gaining or losing aura. He gained an understanding of the dead things in his field of vision, their shape, their strength. That number, 20, became highlighted. Whenever he focused his attention on one particular corpse, the number seemed to shift, as if it was both 20 and 19 at once. With another thought, the number solidified into 19, ending its fluctuating existence.

And one of the monsters on the flaming pyre rose. The spider was the size of a calf, surrounded by a faint sheen of sickly purple energy. With jerky movements, it climbed to full height, then manoeuvred itself so its glowing purple eyes were fixed on John. It was still standing in the fire, unbothered by the heat. A connection was established, and a faint consciousness appeared in John's mind, patiently awaiting a purpose.

John looked right at it. "Kill," he commanded, and then he moved on to the next monster beside it, repeating the process.

18.

The number ticked down with every minion he raised.

17.

Every undead underling needed a soul to animate it.

16.

And John was more than happy to provide.

15.

There was a delicious irony in killing the monsters, then turning their corpses against their foul brethren.

14.

It felt good. It felt right. Vindictive pleasure filled John as chaos engulfed the backward ranks of the monster army, his flames and undead underlings working together to sew anarchy.

The reanimated monsters didn't last long. A single soul turned out to barely provide fuel for thirty seconds, and the monsters that had started off as blues were too weak to ever last more than a few moments when they were swarmed by their former brethren. But they were fearless, utterly uncaring about their own wellbeing. In their undeath, they felt no pain or fatigue, desiring nothing more than to carry out John's orders.

And the number didn't only go down. Soul Drain and Summon Undead turned out to have a remarkable synergy, while Fireball and Heat Vision provided plenty of extra material to work with.

With one hand, he either drained the souls of the monsters too weak to resist his Spell or launched Fireballs at the front ranks of the approaching monsters—he no longer needed Limit Break, just his Level 4 Strength was enough to lob the Spell the hundred metres or so to the monster vangard.

With the other, he used those souls to reanimate the marginally stronger green-souled monsters who were being felled by Lily's poisonous crossbow. The strategy might have been ineffective if the monsters focused more on slaying the undead, but they were drawn to Chester's shining form like moths to a flame; only the promise of death distracted them, and by then it was often too late.

John settled into a rhythm of Spells, his head was on a constant swivel, seeking out optimal enemies to fell and reanimate. With Fireball, he launched unholy conflagrations into the monster army, taking out dozens at once as they all packed together, while Heat Vision let him pick out his targets with greater finesse. Blues fell to the flames almost instantly, and greens were generally injured enough to be rendered helpless against his Soul Drain, which granted him the necromantic energy to power his Summon Undead, granting him minions which he used to slow down the few yellows among the horde.

His soul number was fluctuating so wildly while he stole and spent souls—20, 22, 18, 21, 14, 18, 27, 22, 19—that he stopped paying attention to it, throwing all caution to the wind and focusing the totality of his attention on doing whatever he could to thin the numbers of the upcoming army. He was vaguely aware that his Aura was rising rapidly, too, but dismissed that for now.

Fireball, Heat Vision, Soul Drain, Summon Undead, all punctuated by bursts of Accelerate whenever the Skill came off its cooldown. He even spent Aura upgrading them all, outlying a horrifying 12,000 Aura to get Heat Vision, Soul Drain, and Summon Undead up to Level 4, and a further 2000 to take Accelerate to Level 3, giving him ten more precious heartbeats of dilated time. Seeing he still had 6,600 Aura even after all that was harrowing.

Dozens of monsters were dying every second. They were wreaking an unimaginable level of carnage on the horde, more than John ever thought possible, beyond even the madness back at the Underworld train stations.

But the mass was still coming. With a quick glance through Eagle Eye, he saw that the five humans had almost reached the edge of the fields, and would soon be among the houses.

Job done, John thought with a nod. Or part of it, at least.

John waited as long as he dared, but ultimately his nerve wasn't as strong as he'd been trying to present it. Not trusting himself to speak, he signalled Chester with an upraised hand. The light winked out, plunging their back into a peculiar not-darkness. The fiery sky and the flaming fields provided plenty of illumination, even if the latter was throwing masses of black smoke up into the air. But the world seemed dimmer, somehow.

The monsters evidently agreed. They briefly stumbled as if coming out of their frenzy, but it didn't last. Attention-arresting Spell or otherwise, they still wanted humanity dead, and they could evidently see the human-shaped silhouettes awaiting them on a rooftop at the edge of the fields. The front lines of the horde were barely fifty metres away.

However, the monsters were no longer so keen to throw themselves through the fire. The fire that, at this point, stretched far around their number, a giant U-shape bend that covered the nearest field and half of the next one over.

Smiling to himself and giving a haughty wave, John wasted no further time. No words were exchanged as they dashed to the edge of the roof. There were more monsters out there than the pursuing army, and a glance at Mana Sense told him a decent number were closing in. Nothing too alarming, comparatively, but a complication nonetheless. The majority of the insect horde was in his range now, too. He didn't bother trying to count them. It didn't matter. A hundred or a thousand, they were all going to die. Many were going to meet their end tonight, even.

This time, there would be no desperate escape. Phase two of the plan was about to begin.

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