Despite the detrimental effects on his Aura accumulation, John deployed the same tactic when he opened the door to the master bedroom. Darkness flooded out into the corridor beyond. Only when it had filled enough of the landing for him to move through did he exit, keeping close to a wall, Spells on a mental hair-trigger. He had his backpack on, in case escape into the quasi-night became his only option. Didn't want to leave his stolen stuff behind.

The mansion was essentially a rectangular building spread out across three floors, each of which he figured was about the size of a basketball court. The master suite with its adjoining dressings rooms, his and hers bathrooms, and safe room took up a full quarter of the upper floor. A long corridor ran from the door of the master bedroom right through to the other side of the top floor, with doors to two other bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a nursery at the far end.

From the security camera feeds and his Mana Sense, he knew there were three monsters up here with him right now. Two things that looked like animated blobs of purple snot were lingering in the painfully pink nursery room, gorging themselves on a pair of bloodstains. The third was the glimmering anti-camera monster. All three had green souls.

Shadows continued to spill out along the corridor, fuelled by his Spell. But it wouldn't be able to fill the whole space in any reasonable time frame, since eventually the darkness would reach the stairs and start to pour down to the lower floors. He could theoretically fill the whole house, but he couldn't afford to wait that long. For all he knew, the three humans downstairs could kick off mayhem at any moment.

The name of the game here was stealth. He had some ideas about how to gain Aura while not being flashy, and turning this thing into an all-out battle seemed like it would be signing his own death warrant anyway. If chaos kicked off, it would only draw more monsters. For now, he had to be pragmatic about it.

Creeping along the corridor, he first arrived outside the bedroom where the glimmer monster waited. He could see its lights beneath the door. In real life, the shimmer was more prismatic, boasting a range of colours that somehow all managed to be offputting, in a way he couldn't quite explain. It was like Cthulhu was throwing a disco party in there. It made him feel nauseous.

But he had to deal with it. If things went to shit, he didn't want an extra wave of monsters pouring down the stairs behind him. Besides, he needed the Aura.

John waited until enough darkness had accumulated to cover him and the world turned grey, then shifted to the side of the door frame and reached over to pull the handle. Unlatched, the door swung open on its own.

From his angle, he couldn't see what was in the room yet, but there were white lines spearing through his darkness. They were constantly moving in a consistent pattern, like whatever was casting them was constantly rotating. They strobed, too. John already had a good guess what he was going to see before he even peeked around the door frame.

The bedroom was clearly a child's, with a race car bed and shelves stacked with expensive-looking replica RC cars and Formula 1 wallpaper, with a life-size likeness of some driver he didn't recognise. Cars here, cars there, cars everywhere.

None of that held his attention for more than an instant. Instead, he was enraptured by the sphere made up of countless eyeballs that were firing eldritch lasers from their irises in every direction. The colours didn't penetrate his darkness, but he could see the tiny motes that wriggled around in the greyscale beams, kind of like bacteria under a microscope. He didn't want to know what would happen if those lights touched him. Nothing good, he was sure.

How did it close the door?

John switched to Soul Arrow and fired, just to see what would happen. The projectile shot through the air in a blink, stabbing right through the disco-eyeball monster and ejecting out the other end with a spray of clear gore. Many of the eyeballs popped like little balloons, disgorging more fluid.

The rest of the eyeballs in view immediately swivelled in his direction, and he had to dart back behind the doorway. He wasn't quite fast enough, though, and he felt the scouring effect of their lights scrape across the skin of his shoulder. A cry of agony escaped his lips before he could stop it. He stumbled against the wall, frantically patting at the affected areas. The light had gone right through his clothes. Only his flesh was affected, and he could feel them there, burrowing deeper and deeper.

It was only a small blow, a scrape covering barely an inch, but it was just about the most distressing injury he'd ever been inflicted with. He went straight to his Aura menu.

Arcane Level 1 -> Level 2!

-200 Aura

To his immense relief, the healing effect of the stat upgrade got rid of whatever the fuck had been happening to him. For a moment, he'd feared it would just zap away the wound, leaving behind the microscopic creatures the disco-eye monster had beamed onto him.

It was also relieving to find that the shadow's effect on his Aura went both ways. If no one could see it happen, then an action was value neutral, whether it was lame or cool.

Upgrading Arcane didn't do much, beyond marginally growing the mana sphere in his navel. It felt denser. Strong enough to power Level 2 Spells, he assumed. He'd have to look into that later; couldn't afford the distraction right now.

Glancing back towards the door, John could see no more sign of the lights. It hadn't been more than a couple of seconds, and he was sure the monster wouldn't have bled out from the wound he inflicted on it. On the contrary, he had the horrible feeling he was going to have to burst all of those eyes before this was done. How many did it have? Dozens? A hundred, even?

Keeping out of the view of the doorway, John started blasting Shadow Stream into the room at maximum volume. As expected, lights started bursting from the room once more. They were concentrated now, multiple beams focusing on one area rather than staring aimlessly ahead of themselves as the monster rotated in place. Judging by the angle of the beams, it had moved a few feet towards the door, trying to see around the corner towards him.

John took a deep breath, then switched to Soul Arrow once he was confident there was plenty of shadow in the child's bedroom. Then he activated Accelerate for the first time.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Time slowed. Increased Mind let him process information far faster than a baseline human being, and Accelerate, as expected, allowed him to physically match it. After images trailed him as he darted across the doorway, ducking beneath the eldritch disco lights with ease. Before he reached the other side of the door, he drew and loosed a Soul Arrow in one smooth motion. A dozen eyes burst as it struck true and pierced straight through.

Lights zapped the place where the arrows had come from, but John was already gone. Accelerate wore off just as he reached the other side of the doorway, and he spent a moment resting against the wall. In the back of his mind, a timer ticked down. 5. 4. 3. 2. 1. Then Accelerate was ready again. It had felt like the Skill had been active for a similar number of heartbeats. Five heartbeats on, five seconds off. A bit unfair in theory, but also exploitable. If he was calmer, it would last longer. No time for that now, though.

John repeated the trick, crouching low to let off a shot before darting away again. This time, the monster went mad. Lasers blasted all over the place, frantically slicing through the darkness at erratic angles. If it had a mouth, he was sure it would have been screaming. He realised it was moving towards the door, and spent the last couple of seconds before Accelerate finished its cooldown pumping more darkness into the corridor with Shadow Stream.

Then, when it reached the doorway, he darted past it into the bedroom, dropping to an immediate army crawl since the darkness in here was barely up to his thighs now. He didn't loose an arrow this time, waiting until he was by the bed, giving him some cover to duck behind.

Looking back, he saw the monster was now in the hallway, throwing lasers all over the place, frantic. It was down to about half of its eyeballs from those three shots. He picked his moment, took aim, and fired. This time, he relied on his own reflexes to duck behind the bed, watching lasers zap by over his head. The monster was clearly approaching him again, and much faster. Another Accelerated army crawl took him back to the doorway. Above him, the monster was leaking clear ichor everywhere. It was down to a fraction of the number of eyes it had started with, and most of them were on two sides of the now-lopsided ball. It was no longer rotating. Instead, it was keeping the side of its sphere with most remaining eyes trained on the place it had last seen one of John's attacks come from. Perfect.

John waited for the right moment, then activated Accelerate once more. This time, he rose out of the darkness in the monster's blind spot.

"Where the hell are you looking, dumbass?" he growled.

+200 Aura

Then his Mana Blade slashed once, twice, thrice, Duellist and Ninja combining with Accelerate so his movements were so fast they blurred. Then followed a fourth, fifth, and sixth cut. Optic fluid sprayed. Eyes burst.

Then the monster was nothing but a lump of gooey flesh, and it dropped from the air with all the grace of one. It hit the ground with a splat.

"All those eyes, and you couldn't see you were outmatched," John said.

+600 Aura

"Not bad," he murmured, then stepped over the corpse and moved on.

After that ridiculous ordeal, he didn't know how to feel about it when his Soul Arrows pierced the very obvious cores floating around inside the slime monsters and killed them easily. It was like popping a water balloon. A translucent membrane around the creatures broke, and purple goo oozed across the floor. There was a strange moment where the second slime rippled and lurched towards the first upon noticing its comrade's death, but it was dead too soon after, and John didn't have time to decide what to make of it.

With the upper floor cleared, he switched back to Shadow Stream and made his way to the stairs. He descended cautiously, making sure to send out pulse of Mana Sense to keep abreast of the situation. Only two monsters lingered on the second floor. Six were at the bottom floor, and there were two more close enough outside to be considered part of this shitshow. Three extra were at the periphery of the mansion's land, and a good dozen more were further out in his range.

For a moment, he was tempted to go back to the safe room. No one else knew he was here. The cloak monster was hardly going to give him away, anymore. Who would blame him?

John sighed. He would. It wasn't even a moral thing. He didn't want to be trapped in this place while a wave of monsters assaulted it. Going back to the safe room held plenty of appeal for many obvious reasons, but if he decided to hunker down after all, he wasn't going to do it in this mansion. If it was an obvious enough spot that another group of people had been drawn to it within hours of him, then it seemed inevitable more would come. It would be a hotspot.

Fuck it. He'd decide whether he was escaping or helping when he got down to the ground floor.

First, he had to deal with the second. Even before he'd made his way down the stairs, he could see it was going to be trickier.

Namely, because a monster was already standing in the hallway at the foot of the stairs, staring at the roiling darkness flooding down towards it with a listless demeanour. It was a tall, skinny monkey creature with sickly pale skin that looked like it had been vacuum sealed to its warped and curved bones. There couldn't be any space for internal organs in there. Even its skull was distorted, like it had been crushed. If he hadn't already known from Mana Sense that these were creatures of magic, looking at this thing would've confirmed it. Necromancy most foul, he reckoned.

The other monster on this floor he already knew from the security feed: it was the giant eyeball, with scorpion tails replacing its eyelashes, while it walked around on red legs that seemed like they would've been proportional on a ten-foot tall man. The eye itself was the size of a monster truck tire. From the one he'd fought before, he knew it would launch itself at him, trying to stab with the appendages atop its mad excuse for a head.

He didn't have line of sight on it right now. It was at the other end of the corridor, opposite from where the master bedroom sat on the floor above. Inching himself down the stairs, he poured more shadow down into the second floor corridor. The monkey monster backed away from the approaching darkness, tilting its head from side to side like a curious dog. John strained his neck, peeking around the corner. The eyeball monster was still looking out the window. At what, he didn't know.

Preparing himself with some deep breaths, John moved forward until he was in the corridor proper, crouching close to the upper side of the staircase. His best bet would be to split them up and pick them off one after the other. The last thing he wanted was to be fighting both at once. That felt like a recipe for attracting attention. He'd gotten lucky with staying undiscovered so far, and he was hoping for that streak to continue.

He switched to Soul Arrow as he considered how best to accomplish that task. With the eyeball monster looking away, it would be best to target the monkey first. His best bet was to lure it to the other end of the house, where—

A resonating boom erupted from downstairs. A whump of displaced air rushed through the house, ruffling John's clothes and hair. The whole house shook. Screams followed. Human ones.

The monkey monster let out a zombie-esque moan as it lurched towards the source of the noise. It moved with surprising speed, leaping for the staircase.

Where, unfortunately, John was crouching. Heart suddenly in his mouth, he activated Accelerate on reflex, but it was only enough to pivot slightly out of the way, so the monkey monster didn't slam into him head on. The hit was still enough to send him spinning away, utterly thrown off balance. He went stumbling, forced to throw up his hands to stop himself from ramming head first into the wall.

He didn't realise he was out of his shadows until the eyeball monster was already halfway down the corridor, running towards him on hideously muscular red legs.

Then the monkey monster leapt on his back and headbutted him.

-200 Aura

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