It was hot. Too hot. Blindingly, blisteringly hot. Ragged gasps escaped my lips as I desperately dragged oxygen into me. Fifteen, I thought to myself as I struggled against the pain. This makes fifteen.

The three in front of me were powerful. Not on Owen’s level, but leagues stronger than the average mage. They certainly knew how to fight – street-taught judging by the way they fought. I would be able to take them on one-on-one easily, but the three of them together put quite a bit of pressure on me. It seemed Owen was finally sending up the heavy hitters of his gang.

The three, two men and a woman, all clothed in semi-formal dress, sported smug grins as they studied me. The woman had snuck in a blow to my ribs while I had been busy with the two men, and she struck with force at odds with her small form. I had been quick enough, however, in initiating another Revive.

The fact that they were confident enough to wait for me to rise to my feet again made me furious. It might have saved me from more pain, but it was humiliating. Especially since I knew I could beat them into bloody pulps if they didn’t outnumber me. Or if I was fresh, and had not been constantly fighting for so long.

Still, the only way to reclaim my dignity was through properly educating them on the difference in our skills. Through a thorough, hands-on demonstration, of course.

To do so, however, I needed a better strategy. Throwing myself into the fight like usual wasn’t going to work. The two men were skilled enough to keep me busy, and the wily woman was too dangerous to be left unchecked.

In the few seconds I had as I brought myself up to my feet, I scrounged up the best plan I could think of. Ren would be of no help at the moment, caught up in his own fight, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t bother him.

“Ren!” I yelled over my shoulder, reaching out my hand backwards without even looking. “Stick!”

Immediately and wordlessly, I felt the cool sensation of his walking stick slap onto my hand, a thwack sounding out as it did. With a grin, I gripped the stick and swung out with all the force I could muster. The stick was a brown blur as it sped through the air and collided with the closest man’s arm, which he had already raised to block his face. The sudden range was unexpected, however, so the attack threw the man off balance. His partner, immediately realizing the danger, rushed at me to stop me from going after the first man.

However, I had been expecting that. The three’s strength had been in their ability to stick together and cover each other’s openings. The moment one had stepped out, he had provided me with a few seconds to dispatch him. No more than five, but no less than three. More than enough, I thought viciously.

I swiped swiftly at his shin as he ran, but the man was not fazed. With his large stature, he could take a hit to the shin, painful though it may be, but I certainly could not afford to take the full-powered swing he had also prepared for me.

The man’s swing, however, was aimed at an opponent almost a meter away from him. Cancelling my swipe, I swiftly stepped closer to the man, enough to throw off his stance. The move was a personal favorite of mine, since it used my relatively smaller frame to my advantage. With it, I was perfectly positioned to launch a fierce uppercut to the man’s jaw.

I had mastered the uppercut by now, using not only my arm but my legs to propel my entire body upward. My knuckles crashed into the soft spot right under the man’s chin, snapping his head backwards.

Feeling like the world had almost slowed down for me, I brought my hand over to the stick in my other hand, clenching it tightly in a two-handed grip. The man was still moving back, giving me a clear window to attack his head. A good swing to the side of his temple and he would drop like a rock. But I was still incensed, and not quite done with him. By now his partners had already begun moving towards me, but I didn’t care. I swung with all my strength twice within a second, the stick crashing into the man’s side again and again, each time with a thoroughly gratifying smack. With one last kick to his gut, I sent him sprawling backwards. Like a bowling ball, he crashed into the woman - his large frame giving her no room to dodge - and dropped flat on his back, trapping the woman under him.

With a grin, I turned to face the last man as he came at me. He seemed to have realized that he was now alone in the fight, but he knew better than to retreat. Carrying forward with his momentum, he launched a flurry of punches and kicks at me, his blows wild and unrefined. Not that they lacked skill, only grace. As I ducked and blocked, I couldn’t help but muse about the man. He was not unlike me, clearly having had no proper teaching, yet he had developed a fierce style of attack – no doubt the product of innumerable fights. Still, I possessed something that he lacked, and that was what gave me the edge in this fight. And that was my pain tolerance. Or more specifically, the Revives I had put myself through.

I knew from experience just how much of an improvement Revives had on the body, and after fifteen of them today, I knew my body was in the best shape it had ever been in. And this man would be the first to get a taste of my improved strength.

His fierce barrage of attacks was unrelenting, not giving me much of a chance to go on the offensive. Still, despite his attacks, I was able to slip through almost all of them – the ones I couldn't, I'd have to block – and I was just beginning to grasp what Ren seemed to do so effortlessly. The slight adjustments in movement and body form, the snap judgements to predict the next attack. It was almost like a dance, one where a misstep would mean a lot of pain.

After almost half a minute of fighting, with no major blows landing on either side, I finally saw the chance I had been waiting for. The man had thrown a straight jab, and I was perfectly positioned to respond the way I wanted to. Mirroring his stance, I threw exactly the same punch right at his fist.

Thwack!

Our fists met, a small wave of Flux dispersing at the impact. It only ruffled our clothing and my hair a little, but it was still the biggest shockwave I had ever gotten in a fight on the car. Owen and I had occasionally had larger ones, though I usually lost horribly any time we met head-on.

But this time, the opposite happened. The bones in the man’s hand could not handle the combined force, and with an oddly satisfying crunch, they broke.

The man stumbled backwards a few steps, letting out a scream of pain. I stared for a few seconds, caught off guard by the effectiveness of my punch. Up until now, I’d been relying on technique and precision to slip attacks in through the defences of my sparring partners – which meant that most of my attacks landed on places that could absorb a lot of damage – so I had no idea just how strong my body had gotten. I was probably underestimating myself because the only person I had for reference was Owen, I realized.

Giddy with my new discovery, I unceremoniously rolled the other two mages – both of whom were now unconscious – off the car roof with my foot, eagerly awaiting fresh dreams to crush.

However, to my surprise, no such opponents rose to meet me. Instead, the entire crowd, the once rowdy group of mages that had cheered and booed so enthusiastically, was now utterly silent, gazing upwards and behind me with abject horror in their eyes. By now, I had realized that the sounds of fighting had stopped from behind me as well.

I watched the crowd, with their agape mouths and faces warped in terror, unable or perhaps unwilling to turn around myself. Every self-preserving bone in my body was telling me that I needed to run, run without looking back, run until my feet turned to lead and then some. The danger pressed down on me, like a physical weight. It was leagues beyond what Owen or Ren had ever exuded in front of me. In fact, I refused to believe a human could make me feel that kind of danger.

I would soon realize how right I was.

The nervous tension that had frozen the atmosphere was finally broken by a man, a very intimidating man. With snaking tattoos running along the length of his arms and bare chest, and more muscles than anyone really needed, he looked every bit the gangster he was; a true poster boy for street thugs. However, the scream that escaped his lips was a pitch high enough to shatter glass, and had I not seen him, I would have assumed that it had come from a child not possibly more than nine.

The man’s scream did not shatter any glass in reality, but it certainly did shatter the freezing fear that had gripped everyone. Immediately, a stampede shook the streets as people ran helter-skelter for their lives.

Slowly, with dread I could not express in words, I turned around to face what was most certainly the most bizarre sight that I had ever beheld in my life.

A mantis. That’s what it was. A bug. Just a bug, yet so much worse. Unimaginably worse.

It was massive. Far, far bigger than it had any right to be. About the size of a normal sedan if I had to guess. It hung off the side of a glass skyscraper like some sort of knockoff, insect-y King Kong. Its four hindlegs were stuck into the glass of the fifth floor, its sharp forelegs curled around the corner of the building.

Adding on to the chaos of the streets, the residents of the building soon came out screaming, running for their lives.

Although most of the people here were mages, none were brave enough to keep their composure in front of the bizarre animal, let alone face it. After all, most of them were from wealthy families who had never actually seen much combat. As for those who had, like Fight House’s combat force, they were actually able to feel the danger of the mantis, so they had even more reason to run.

The mantis itself, however, seemed content simply to study the world with its bulbous eyes, standing so still I would’ve doubted if it were alive had not my instincts been screaming at me to run.

Soon, the street was devoid of life aside from Owen, Ren, the mantis, and me. The mantis and I had been staring into each other's eyes for an awkwardly long time – or at least, I felt awkward. The mantis was still perfectly unbothered as it bore its eyes into mine.

Just as I had begun to think that the mantis was not planning on moving at all, it did. And it moved very quickly. In an instant – I would say the blink of an eye, but it had moved before my eyelids could even close – it was in front of Owen, the closest to it.

Owen, to his credit, did manage to react in time. Instinct honed through decades of combat kicked in at that moment, and he threw the fastest punch I’d seen him throw all day. Gray smoke rose furiously from his fist; the force contained within was not to be taken lightly. For me, anyway. The mantis, on the other hand, took the punch in stride.

Owen’s fist landed on the face of the mantis, a direct hit not many in this city could shake off. The strike landed, and yet nothing happened. Like hitting cement, the enormous force behind the strike simply vanished into the mantis’ head, and did not shake it in the least. The fist, on the other hand, was not so lucky. The rebounding force was more than what Owen’s bones could handle, and the crack that sounded out as they broke was audible even from where I stood.

Suddenly, the two forelegs of the mantis vanished, like they’d turned invisible. Owen was blasted backwards, the force caving his chest inward. A kite with cut strings, he flew back for at least a dozen meters before crashing through the glass door of the building across the street from Owen’s building. He vanished into the darkness of the room without a scream or yell, providing no evidence of life.

Shock numbed me, and a part of me began to passively mull over whether I should feel bad for Owen, considering he would have loved to have seen that happen to me. Despite that knowledge, deep down, I hoped he was still alive. It was a tendency I’d had since as far back as I could remember: an innocent, childlike concern for the wellbeing of anyone in my life. It was a feeling I’d had to stifle on so many occasions I’d lost track. Yet still, it persisted; like sap between my fingers: irritating but ignorable. Perhaps it came as a part of the package that was my ability to wholeheartedly believe that I would achieve everything that I wanted to – my lack of cynicism.

While my mind drifted into philosophical ponderings about the nature of my self, the rational side of me kicked in, the side rightfully concerned for my own well-being. With a glance over to Ren, I understood that we had both arrived at the same conclusion: this was now beyond our fight.

Given the strength of the mantis, there was absolutely no one in the city who could contain it. The only thing we could do now was to wait for the IG to dispatch some higher-up to come and deal with it. Until then, this city would be unlivable.

At least, that’s what would have happened. But as Ren and I jumped off the car roof and ran as fast as our legs would carry us into the Fight House building, making our way out from the other side, I quickly realized that the future would look nothing like what I had imagined.

The metal door of the back fire exit pulled away to reveal a world in flames. Hordes of people ran amok as literal flames licked the sky somewhere on the horizon. Massive bugs of all kinds roamed the city, from centipedes to spiders to flies. Each was at least the same size as the mantis, if not bigger.

And the people ran for good reason. The bugs seemed to have no motive above simply hunting humans; as if they were trying to avenge the centuries they had spent oppressed by us. Screams ran out as unfortunate men and women were caught as they ran, some impaled on the stingers of wasps, others wrapped up like mummies by centipedes. Blood had already begun to flow down the streets.

Fortunately for me, life had tempered me in the flame of bizarre realities that made no sense to my mind. Boxing my mind in a cage, safe from questions like ‘What in the world is happening?’ and its ilk, I focused first on survival. Grabbing Ren by the sleeve, I ducked behind an overturned trash dumpster, and not a second too late. A spider, the kind with tiny bodies and very long, thin legs, just came into view. Only, unlike any others that I had ever seen, this one would not be squashed under a heel. Unless the heel were the size of a bus, nothing would be crushing the monster that it now was.

Its maw was dripping with a viscous red. As tall as a lamppost, each of its spindly legs carried enough force to crush the asphalt underneath it, leaving eight small craters wherever it went.

Thankfully, with the massive hustle and bustle of the streets – cars desperately trying to drive out of the city while dodging insects and people running for their lives – it didn’t notice the two small humans hunkering behind a rusty green dumpster.

“Ruby,” Ren hissed, making me wretch my gaze away from the chaos of the city. “Look,” he said simply, shoving his phone into my face.

It was a video, grainy and shaky, of a situation much like what I could see over the edge of the dumpster. In fact, I would’ve thought that the video had been taken in the city had not a geolocation been stamped onto the corner. ‘Hong Kong, China,’ it read. All the way across the globe.

Ren thumbed down to the next video, showing almost the exact same scenario, only with different details. ‘Cairo, Egypt,’ said this one. ‘New York, America,’ said the next. ‘Helsinki, Finland ’ came after.

Shaking my head, I whispered back to him. “So the worlds gone to hell all around, then?” I tried to keep my voice light, in line with the feeble humor I was attempting, but the tremble in my voice betrayed me. “We should get to higher ground,” I continued, accepting that I was not going to make the situation better with jokes. “From what it looks like, nowhere in the world is safe right now, so there’s no use running.”

Ren considered my idea for a second before nodding. “Yeah, that makes sense.”

Quietly making our way back into the exit, we began to make our way up the ruined staircase. The building was now utterly empty, devoid of any guests or staff. Clearly, the disturbance had made itself known to the people, either through the internet or the window.

“What a day, huh,” Ren sighed as we made our way up the winding steps, our shoes making muffled thumps as we walked. His voice still hadn’t lost its usual cheer, though how he still had the energy was beyond me.

I smiled grimly. “I’m trying not to think about it,” I said, not bothering to try and hide the exhaustion in my voice. “The direction of today has shifted so many times, and so randomly I can’t even begin to…” I trailed off, unable to finish the thought. It was too much to think about, and survival was more important.

I heard a small chuckle of agreement from behind, but it seemed even Ren didn’t have it in him to continue the conversation. A silence settled over us as we moved, strange but still companionable.

Eventually, we arrived at the broken door of the party room, room 99. I finally had a chance to see the carnage that Ren’s fight had unleashed on the room. It was hardly recognizable now. Everything, from the bar to the dance floor to the DJ station, was utterly trashed.

“Ruby!”

Accompanying the sudden shout came a foot that swept my feet off the ground, throwing me face-first onto the floor. Thankfully, my hands were fast enough to stop me from breaking my nose against the ground, but that wasn’t what I was concerned about.

What did concern me was the sudden rush of wind that hit my back as I fell, like something very fast flying right over me. Not to mention the new threat my mind was warning me of, the familiar feeling of oppressive danger.

Getting back up, my eyes did not leave a darkened corner of the room, my gaze trying to pierce through the cloak of shadow that covered it. Whatever else was in the room was in there.

“Ruby, look,” Ren said, pointing to the floor a little ahead of me. Following his finger, I spotted something I hadn’t noticed before: a dash of brownish-red blood on the carpet, like someone had spilled a bucket of red paint a while ago.

“Now that I think about it, where are the ten mages that you fought?” I asked Ren, my gaze not leaving the ominous stain.

Ren chuckled, but it was different this time. Nervous. “I left them right there, on the floor. They were all unconscious.”

Suddenly, there was a blur of movement from the corner, the corner that I had not stopped monitoring in the least. So this time, I was ready.

Or at least, I thought I was.

The full-powered swing, with all the Flux I could mobilize, I launched in the direction of the blur – the thing was so fast I couldn’t aim anywhere, only blindly throw a punch – met the head of whatever it was. And, unfortunately, my punch lost. Badly.

The opposing force was overwhelming, not to be denied. Fractures spread through my arm bones instantly as I was blown backwards. My flight felt instantaneous, my head banging against the doorframe of the room almost immediately.

Dimly, I registered that somehow, I had managed to stop the flight of the bug as well, which now sat in full view right where I had stood. Not a meter from where Ren currently stood.

It was a cockroach. Not as big as the rest of the mutants, however. It was only about the size of a backpack, its outer shell an ugly, brownish-red. I say only the size of a backpack, but that didn’t make it any less disturbing to behold. It was still the largest insect I had ever seen before today, and its many legs and weird mouth were stuff I’d never once wanted to see as closely as I could at the moment.

Studying the creature did not help in reducing the pain, and I realized that I had to Revive before the thing decided to come at me again. In my current state, it would mean certain death. However, the shattered arm and bleeding at the base of my skull were undoubtedly the worst injuries I’d received today, so Reviving was much easier said than done.

Thankfully, I wasn’t alone in this. Ren, not wanting to let the bug have another chance to launch an attack, quickly swung down his stick at the head of the cockroach. The bug moved fast, turning its body around in the fraction of a second that it had, taking the blow on its shell. Ren’s stick rebounded off the thing with a loud thwack, leaving the shell completely unmarked. The cockroach jumped away in retreat, back into another darkened corner. Its ruddy shell glinted ominously in the darkness.

Ren gripped his stick tight, every muscle in his body taut as he waited for the bug to attack.

And attack it did. Almost silently, a blur flew out of the darkness again, rushing towards Ren. But he was ready, readier than I had been. Instead of foolishly taking the force head-on, he swung his stick like a bat, hitting the thing squarely on its side. The force was enough to redirect the bug, sending it hurtling into another corner of the room.

“Ruby…” Ren whispered, anxious.

“I know, I know. I’m working on it,” I responded through grit teeth. I clenched my hands – or hand, since one did not care to obey – willing myself to Revive. But I couldn’t. Every time I got close, I would shrink away in fear, the pain too enormous of a deterrent. I hated myself for it, for my cowardice.

I squeezed my eyes shut, picturing her face in my mind. “Look at me,” she would say. “Look into my eyes,” her voice low and soft, soothing and calm. And I would, and so I did, peering into her vast expanse of hazel and soft, caramel brown. I felt joy bloom on my face as I did, memories rising to greet me like old friends I hadn’t seen in years. And in their embrace, I felt the sudden rush of pain, the spike in temperature in my body. Like a fire lit in my veins, scorching every part of me. But I did not focus on that, I would not allow myself to. Instead, I lost myself in those eyes, those eyes of compassion and kindness the weight of which I had never, and likely would never, understand.

Ocean.

“Ruby?” Ren’s voice came again, worry tinging his question.

I opened my eyes, my pupils liquid clam. Power coursed through my body, filling me with a cool sense of awareness and refreshment. “It’s underbelly,” I said, voicing the idea that suddenly struck. “That’s probably the only place we can actually damage it.”

Ren didn’t respond, his focus unerringly locked on the hidden cockroach, but he nodded in understanding.

Suddenly, the bug once again rushed out of its hiding place, rushing towards Ren at inhuman speeds. This time, Ren tried a different approach, swinging his stick upwards instead, from underneath the incoming bug.

The bug was smarter than we had given it credit for, though. It knew its own weakness, and immediately moved to protect it. Twisting its entire body in the air, it managed to once again take Ren’s swing onto its hard shell instead, letting the force propel it up to the roof.

It clung to the roof for a second, its sharp legs cutting into the metal, before darting back into a corner.

“We’re going to have to attack it together,” I said as I got up and made my way over to where Ren was. “It's too quick and smart.”

Ren nodded again. “If it consistently does the same move to block an attack from underneath, then all you need to do is attack it from the top in that split second.”

“Easy peasy,” I said, a smile tugging at my lips. This fight was no less dangerous than the one I had fought against Owen, but it seemed I had a chronic inability to take life-and-death situations seriously. An affliction shared by Ren, as he laughed freely at my joke. “It's almost too easy, isn’t it?”

“Totally. If only the thing had more overpowered advantages over us, y’know. Besides overwhelming speed and power and defence.”

Before Ren could add on, the bug came at us again, unrelenting in its attack pattern. It seemed that it was convinced that we would slip up at some point and fall to the same trick that it kept trying. An entirely possible, and quite likely, scenario.

Ren swung upwards once again, his timing impeccable as always. The stick’s arc perfectly intercepted the insect, and it knew that. Like before, it twirled in the air, leaving its belly exposed to the roof.

In the fraction of a second that I had, I leapt towards the bug, my fist smoking black as I prepared to give the monster a blow it would remember.

But, impossibly, in the time that the bug had as Ren’s stick launched it towards my fist – a fist that was simultaneously speeding down towards it – the thing managed to flip over once again.

Undeterred, my fist collided with the hard shell of the cockroach with a bang, the force finally managing to crack the carapace – though it was only a tiny break. As the force of my blow threw the bug back downwards to the ground, a wooden pole came from the left once again, knocking into the side of the bug.

The force was enough to launch it all the way across the room, sending the bug hurtling toward the panoramic windows of the room. Immediately, almost acting on instinct, I bent down and picked up a small stone debris that lay on the floor, about the size of a hamburger. Like a baseball pitch, I threw the stone as hard as I could, sending it right on the heels of the bug.

The cockroach crashed into the already cracked window, but the window held on until, not a second later, the stone collided with the soft underbelly of the bug. The jagged edges bit into the skin, leaking out blood.

The force of the stone was the last push that the window needed. It shattered into a million pieces and blew outwards, falling to the ground. Following it came the cockroach, stone still embedded into its belly.

A beat of silence passed after the cockroach fell, as if we almost couldn't believe that we’d made it out alive, before the room was flooded with sound as we simultaneously fell into laughter.

“Man, it feels good to finally win a fight today,” I said as our waves of laughter subsided, my hands still clutching my stomach.

Ren laughed in response, already lying down on the floor, gazing up at the roof with a twinkle in his eye.

Letting him rest, I curiously walked over to the broken windows, wanting to get another look at the chaos outside. Maybe it was all just a hallucination, I thought to myself in scrabbling hope.

One look over the edge snuffed out that hope like a candle. If anything, the situation had deteriorated even further. Dead lined the streets, painting cars and the street in bright, candied-apple red. Massive insects crowded the city now, present everywhere I could see. They vastly outnumbered the human population left out on the streets, and I knew it was just a matter of time before they were all wiped out. If the smallest I had seen was so difficult to deal with, then the average citizen couldn't possibly fight back against any of them.

The bloody scene brought bile to my throat immediately, and I had to pull myself away from the edge, scrambling back on all fours, to keep myself from puking.

I turned to Ren, who had now sat up in worry, wanting to articulate what I had seen, but no words came to my tongue.

Then, suddenly, the room around me got darker, as if the sunlight from behind me had been blocked out. Still gazing at Ren, I watched as his expression warped into one of surprise before settling into a resigned determination.

“I’d tell you to run, Ruby, but I think I know you well enough to know that you wouldn’t. So get up, Ruby. Stand up and fight, ‘cause we’re gonna be needing that unbreakable will of yours.”

I smiled at his words, despite the horrible feeling of fear that coiled in my gut. Slowly, I forced my body to move, to stand up one more time.

I was beginning to understand a new dimension of fighting with Flux. It wasn’t the physical exhaustion that got you – physical exhaustion had ceased to be a problem with Revives – it was the mental exhaustion that weighed on you. My mind could not be rejuvenated like my body, and today had been pulling at my sanity since it started.

Still, I pushed my feet down and brought myself up, turning around to face whatever new monstrosity today had brought forth.

It was the cockroach. Exactly the same in every way, except that it was bigger. Far, far bigger. Its head took up the entire window, blotting out the sun completely.

The backpack-sized cockroach had given me a closer look at its face than I had ever wanted to see, but the cockroach in front of me was much, much worse. The jagged edges of its mouth were terrifyingly sharp, each spike the size of my leg.

Judging by the way it hovered outside of the window, peering emotionlessly into the room, I assumed that it could fly. As if the fight wasn't already impossible enough.

“So the damn bug called his mommy,” I said, unable to resist making another, and possibly my last ever, joke. “At least the fight’s fair now.”

Ren let out a surprised cackle beside me, his lips pulled wide into a grin. “Finally,” he said, mock satisfied. “A challenge.”