98. The Final Project

The Final Project

It had been this way from the beginning. Even though they had slaughtered tens of thousands, the monsters had never been individually threatening.

Looking back, they had never coordinated. They had never shown aggression. They had never used any of the tactics I now knew they could have used.

If those monsters had fought properly from the start, all of us would have died dozens of times over.

Only now, seeing the blood-red rain and feeling it seep into my battle suit, warping emotions that had already grown far too accustomed to violence, did I finally understand the enemy’s full intent.

By now, every person who had survived the monster attacks had spent weeks fighting them.

We had been forced to accept violence in order to survive, because killing monsters was the only way to gain enough strength.

So what happened when teenagers who had grown used to violence—and used to drawing power from violence—were dosed through the air with something that made more killing feel exciting and irresistible, while the ground sprouted endless targets to attack?

I blasted into the sky with a sonic boom and ignored the monsters completely.

More than ten kilometers to the north, Mort’s overpowered replacement body was moving farther and farther away, but that was not what worried me most at that moment.

The only reason I had snapped out of the bloodlust was my high Perception and Constant Force, which gave me resistance against this influence.

Even then, it had not been easy.

Could the others do the same?

I searched the area frantically for signs of other survivors.

The crimson rain made everything difficult. As far as my normal vision and enhanced senses could reach, I saw only ruins, glowing green slime pools, and constantly growing plant monsters.

With enhanced Perception, Agility, and Reason, I combed through the chaos around me, slowly matching this new hellscape against the city in my memory.

Once the two maps in my mind aligned, I finally found the right direction to fly.

At the same time, my inner ears finished regenerating, and a wall of noise I could not even begin to understand crashed into my eardrums.

There! That light!

On the western horizon, a silver glow pierced the red curtain of rain in a way natural light never could. It refused to be stained blood-red or poison-green, and the closer I came, the more it seemed to drain those colors from the surrounding area.

The living plants trying to grow in the same direction first withered and yellowed as if beneath brutal summer sunlight. Then they began to sizzle, until the portions stubborn enough to keep spreading suddenly caught fire and crumbled into ash.

The rain weakened into a drizzle, then stopped entirely, until the quarter-kilometer ring of ruins around the source of that safe light was dry. The silver glow shone in the middle of it all.

A huge crowd had gathered inside the area—not in twos and threes, not even by the dozen, but hundreds of survivors packed together among the ruins.

As I flew over them, flashes of light marked more and more people being teleported in from every corner of the city.

The tendrils of malicious growth wrapped around them turned to dust. Madness and rage drained from their eyes as quickly as the red slime dried and flaked from their clothes and skin. Bleeding wounds scabbed over and slowly began to heal.

Near the center of this miracle stood two familiar faces.

“Hey, stranger,” one brown-haired supermodel called brightly, waving at me.

“Long time no see,” said the other identical brown-haired girl, and then both of them went straight back to work.

They were duplicating school cafeteria trays, each one piled with enough hamburgers, fries, and soda to feed an entire football team.

Every so often, a nearby soldier would gather as many trays as they could carry and run off to distribute them among the starving survivors.

“Xia Xinglan… or should I call you Double Trouble now?” What were you supposed to call a girl who had permanently duplicated herself?

“What is going on? Who are all these people?”

Xia Xinglan’s presence already gave me some clues, but knowing was better than guessing.

“Apparently, every survivor in the city,” said the two girls, both unfairly and absurdly beautiful.

“When that huge demon was about to step on us, everyone from our school was teleported here in a flash.”

More trays appeared one after another. This constant material creation did not seem to tire either of them at all, which was quite a change from the last time I had seen them.

“As soon as we arrived, some little girl put everyone to work.”

“About seven to ten years old, black hair, black eyes, enjoys meddling, and talks in riddles?”

“Oh, so you’ve met her,” the first Xia Xinglan said, then took a bite out of a half-eaten cheeseburger sitting on a three-legged, wobbling table.

“What is that kid’s deal?” She pointed at me with the burger, and a fat drop of mayonnaise “accidentally” flew off it and splattered across my battle suit.

“In the past half hour, I’ve heard people call her Lia, Vera, Tomomi, Satya, and Makoto.

“And often the same person switches between those names in the same conversation.”

“I guess she likes having lots of names.” Given her illusion abilities, interfering with what people said or heard would not be difficult for her anyway, so why commit to only one?

“Have you seen the other usual familiar faces?” Because while watching magical twins hand food to nearly a thousand people might have been interesting, I was still worried about my friends. I also wanted to avoid any further mayonnaise attacks.

“We saw them, yeah. They all walked into the light,” said the other of the magical twins.

Then she abruptly found herself hanging upside down in midair.

“I suppose you thought that sounded clever,” I said pleasantly, while crushing the first Xia Xinglan into the ground under ten times gravity. She made a deeply satisfying crunch and sank halfway into the mud.

“Now, consider that some people today may have been fighting for their lives. They may have been electrocuted, burned, poisoned, mentally attacked, had their bones broken more than once, or been swatted by a six-kilometer-tall incarnation of evil.

“They may have seen fellow survivors injured, nearly killed, or been forced to abandon companions, or trick those companions in order to save their own lives.”

I took a step forward with every sentence until I was looking down into the face of the Xia Xinglan hanging upside down in the air.

Then the false smile on my face twisted into a scowl.

“Maybe, just maybe, you should joke less and provide more useful information before the people who have already had enough nonsense decide to twist your head around a few times and see if that makes you smarter.”

“The little girl really did take them into the giant glowing beam, okay?” the second Xia Xinglan stammered, her face pale. “She said it was the final project.”

“Much better,” I snorted, and released them both.

Maybe treating them that roughly was an overreaction, but after everything that had happened, I found I did not care very much.

Or maybe that was the magical influence talking.

“And Xia Xinglan? Next time you feel like being clever, don’t.”

I flew into the silver light at the center of the survivor encampment. My senses insisted that this was a completely natural light source and that there was no need to investigate any further.

The closer I flew, the stronger that feeling became, until I had to struggle for every inch forward.

Somehow, I knew that if I looked away for even a moment, or took a single step back, I would become convinced that feeling was true and never try to enter the light again.