10. Reunion After Five Days

Reunion After Five Days

“Okay,” I whispered.

I forced back the tears that were about to fall and followed my two friends into the sewer.

Cheng Rui seemed to be struggling beneath the weight of the weapon in his hands, so as we moved into the dark drainage tunnel, I used my free hand to take it from him.

“Thanks. It’s light enough when I’m in armor, but the armor can’t fit into the sewer,” the boy said. He gave me a tentative smile.

Then he noticed the state of my battle-damaged suit.

His eyes nearly popped out of his head. His neck made an audible crack as he turned away in a hurry.

“I, uh…”

“It’s fine,” I told him.

The sentence meant more than one thing. Maybe a week ago, I would have cared more about being seen almost naked. But that was before my Spirit attribute had gone up by six points, and before more than a dozen suit malfunctions.

“If they follow us into the sewer, what do we do?”

“They won’t,” Chi Li said decisively.

She patted the brick wall, burning a complex glowing symbol into it.

“This trap is made specifically for monsters. If they get too close, they’ll—”

Before she could finish, the obviously magical symbol flashed.

The sphere in my free hand, full of the trapped shadow, exploded.

“What in the world made you decide to capture a Black Hand and keep it as a prisoner?” Chi Li asked while trying to wipe soot and dust from her face. “Did you not see how many forces were chasing you?”

“Nice to see you too, Chi Li,” I shot back.

But at that moment, relief left me with no real appetite for sarcasm.

Even though we were crawling through the city’s storm drains, even though an entire undead army was surging and searching barely thirty feet above our heads, for the first time in a very long while, I felt something other than anger, frustration, fear, exhaustion, or emptiness.

I had found my best friend.

Both of us were alive.

And neither of us had met an even worse fate.

Because things could always become worse.

“What’s a Black Hand? That thing I was holding?”

“They’re the enemy’s hunters and assassins,” the red-haired girl told me.

Her slender fingers traced along a chain of carved symbols someone had etched at eye level on both sides of the storm drain.

“They’re sent after people whose powers are interesting enough, or destructive enough.”

She stopped before a crack in the brick wall. The crack cut through several carved symbols. Her palm swept over it without touching the surface.

Brick and mortar hissed, melted, smoothed themselves over the fissure, and hardened. While the material was still red-hot, Chi Li tapped it lightly, and the damaged symbols reformed without burning her fingers down to the bone.

“That’s why we keep the wards here in good condition.”

“A lot of us vanished on the first day the fog descended,” Cheng Rui added.

His fingers twitched toward the weapon I was carrying, then stopped.

“More than a dozen survivor groups disappeared completely within a few hours. The enemy is eliminating resistance in an organized way.”

Clearly, the situation in the city center was entirely different from the relatively safe area around the university, where most of the monsters had been mindless.

In just a few sentences, my friends had revealed the existence of organized attacks and organized resistance.

Of course, during my own exploration, I had at least seen the attack part. But in the days they had spent inside the city, they had clearly seen far more than I had.

Still, the thing that immediately caught my interest was neither the enemy army nor whatever magic Chi Li used to keep the undead out of these tunnels.

“You’re in contact with other survivor groups?” I asked.

With communications blocked and that damned fog everywhere, finding people you knew should have been almost impossible.

“How?”

“Obviously, magic,” Chi Li began explaining as we crawled down a narrow tunnel that looked newly made.

“The enemy summoned the fog to hinder communications and surveillance. I’m not sure whether they understand modern technology, but the most common divination spells on their side are blocked by certain materials. So they gave the fog some of the metaphysical properties of lead. It was much faster and cheaper than trying to ward an entire city. It just happens to interfere with technological devices too.”

“And Superman,” Cheng Rui cut in.

“Nerd!” Chi Li snapped back immediately.

Her tone was light and familiar in a way it had never been at school.

“We were just invaded by a magical world,” the skinny boy insisted, with the tone of someone repeating an argument he had made countless times already. “For all we know, there could be all kinds of aliens out there too.”

“Guys. Focus.”

I interrupted their easy banter with a feeling that was… unease? Confusion?

That relaxed exchange did not truly include me, and I did not like it. Even though I understood. Who knew what enemies they had faced together?

“What about the other survivor groups?”

“Right.”

My best friend nodded and continued her explanation.

“After people survived the first portal attacks and realized communications were cut off, some started organizing. Small survivor groups formed one after another, but not everyone was capable of fighting.”

“The whole situation was a mess,” Chi Li cut in. “Monsters and powers don’t work anything like we expected. Not at all.”

We all had to hunch awkwardly to crawl through a tunnel roughly four feet high and three feet wide, made even narrower by pipes and cables running through it.

Even though I was the largest of the three of us, and was also carrying Cheng Rui’s semi-portable laser turret, I had the easiest time. I could basically glide through the air as if swimming.

“Didn’t you think it was strange that the two of us have completely different power systems, while Chi Li doesn’t have a power system at all?” Cheng Rui asked.

Seeing him up close in the glow of Chi Li’s fire, I could tell how much the boy had changed in the five days we had been apart.

He was taller now, still thin, but with a lean strength rather than the sofa-potato softness most of the class nerds had carried. His body was compact like an Olympic athlete’s, mixed with the supple movements of a professional gymnast.

“I was more worried about the way killing monsters seems to make nearby monsters stronger,” I said.

I was “swimming” backward, using the laser turret as a floating pillow. It felt wonderful to relax without monsters trying to eat my face.

“Is that really what’s happening?” Cheng Rui asked.

The certainty and anger in his eyes and voice startled me. He was no longer the awkward boy I had known a few days ago.

“The zombies we killed on the first day didn’t have that effect. Not even on the second day. The mutations only started later.”

Somehow, I felt that the psychological change in him was much greater than the physical one.

“Can we skip the preamble and rhetorical questions?” I asked. “We haven’t seen each other in five days. Someone carefully engineered this disaster, and all of us have almost died multiple times.”

Maybe it was what I had experienced at school. Maybe it was the five days of searching with nothing to show for it, only for them to appear suddenly without warning.

I was tired of secrets, awkwardness, and vague hints.

“Can we get to the point now and save the cryptic implications for later?”

“Sorry,” the red-haired girl said, looking away. “It’s just… outside safe places, we’ve had too many brushes with death to relax.”

Even as she spoke, she kept scanning the space around us.

Cheng Rui did not even allow himself that much distraction.

“You wouldn’t believe how many tricks the enemy has come up with to hunt us down, or even just gather information.”

“…I understand.”

If what they had gone through was even a little like my own experience, I could understand why they did not want to make small talk while monsters might be nearby.

“The last five days weren’t easy for me either. But we must be close now, right? We’ve been walking through these tunnels for ages.”

At that moment, an invisible knife stabbed into my stomach.