The lack of monsters around in an urban setting was almost eerie. Felt wrong, somehow. Far more so than it had when they'd been running through fields. It made him twitchy.

Perhaps it said something about how the apocalypse had rewired the functions of his brain, but the fact that not a single monster pinged in his Mana Sense's range after the column had passed on to the west made him more paranoid than when there'd been hundreds of monsters around. He'd grown used to their presence, and now that there was nothing around, his brain refused to believe it. Part of him expected a monster with some kind of mana dampening ability to jump out at any moment.

So he was on high alert as they moved along the suburban outer neighbourhoods of Watford as a group, keeping up a light jog. Doug was in the lead now, owing to the fact he knew his way around the town, and had a mental list of portal locations, with the other three following behind, huffing and puffing away, and the birds flying their own adjacent route, going from tree to tree. They anticipated that lone blue portals would be dealt with much easier than a trio of blue, green, and yellow, and the goal of this diversion was to shut down as many of those as possible.

John hoped the portals wouldn't give them as much trouble, and it wouldn't take too long. Portals filled with blue monster would, on paper, be easy. The bus depot itself hadn't presented much trouble, after all. They hadn't actually run into any significant danger until they reached the interior of the bus kraken thing. He was hoping for more experiences like the rows of buses: a good opportunity to farm more Aura.

The differences between Watford and London were immediately stark. Back in London, the monsters hadn't devoted much attention to property damage beyond battering down doors and smashing windows, generally leaving the interiors of buildings intact, aside from anything that was knocked aside on their way to murdering the inhabitants.

Here, the waves of monsters were leaving no stone unturned. Every building they passed was wrecked. Many had even collapsed. Those that were still standing were ravaged on the inside, with barely anything recognisable as furniture or decoration remaining in any of the ruined houses they passed.

The same could be said for gardens, streets, pathways. Everything. It was like the monsters in this town were going out of their way to sow destruction on the place.

But there was one aspect that was exactly the same as London.

Blood stains everywhere.

Luckily, he'd pretty much trained himself not to pay too much attention to those, at this point. It might have been too much to bear, otherwise.

Apparently this area was technically called Bushey, and before the apocalypse it had been exactly the kind of boring sprawling estate with cookie-cutter houses and their copy-and-paste orange-red brick designs he couldn't stand. Morbidly, he recalled driving past an estate not too dissimilar to this one, and thinking to himself that the ugly place deserved a meteor strike. It didn't feel so funny, now.

The streets curved and wound around like they usually did in British towns, but their group didn't bother following the looping routes, instead opting to cross straight through gardens, mostly moving as the crow flies. It was simple enough, since most of the fences, walls, and other boundary markers had been destroyed. Those that still stood were easily traversed, too.

Doug vaulted seven-foot-tall fences with the same ease as someone hopping over a waist-high wall, and John was forced to do the same, thankful for Skills like Ninja and Catfall that pretty much prevented him from stacking it and looking like an idiot—the same couldn't be said of Chester, who crashed to the ground multiple times in their fence-hopping exploits, forcing the entire group to wait for him. John had to hide a wince every time. The second-hand embarrassment was palpable.

Their first stop wasn't very hard to find. John had been somewhat worried that they would get turned around and lose out on the opportunity to search for it, but the great black gouges dug into the ground spanning across several front gardens were impossible to miss in this hollowed out shell of a town.

It seemed the battle had taken place at the end of a cul-de-sac, right in the front gardens of the houses. Molten scorch marks and black gouges marred the street, covering both the ground and the houses like an evil god had gotten drunk and tried to draw a grid with a beam of hellfire. Several houses had collapsed in the commotion.

They approached slowly, cautiously, with every available supernatural sense trained on their surroundings, but the false night was eerily still and silent. Even the roar of the burning sky seemed muted.

They fanned out Whoever the winged katana wielder had been fighting, very little of them remained. There were traces of fabric and metal and hints of viscera, but nothing in the way of loot, and very few clues about the katana wielder that they couldn't already surmise from what they'd seen of the fight. Evidently, the slashes of his katana were powerful enough to cut at several metres deep into the ground and burn the wounds black.

"Brutal," Doug commented neutrally.

"Effective," John said, eyeing a shard of something white-ish sitting at the edge of one of the gouges. He couldn't figure out whether it was a bit of bone or magical armour. In the end, he decided he didn't want to know, turning away.

"So this is the kind of thing that's going down here," Jade muttered. She spat to the side. "The world is ending, and people are really killing each other."

Chester was at the very edge of the battle site, facing away, but his voice still carried. "Of course they are. People are dicks. The monsters didn't even need to enforce some weird death game scenario thing."

"I know that." Jade sighed. "I'm allowed to be disappointed."

"Seeing it is different from knowing it," Lily agreed.

"What do you think the winged bloke got out of it?" Doug asked no one in particular. "It seems he was pretty thorough. Not even a corpse left behind."

"Probably after the XP, not the loot," John said.

"XP?"

"Experience points."

"Wouldn't that be EP?"

John rolled his eyes. "Whatever the guy's system equivalent is. We should operate under the assumption that you can get points for fighting other humans—and native Earth creatures—as you would for monsters. They don't necessarily need to have, like, murder-reward systems or something."

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There was a moment of silence.

"Honestly, it might make me feel better if they did," Jade said.

They moved on after that, no one saying another word. They'd decided on their next destination beforehand, so no further discussion was needed, and it seemed no one felt like talking if they didn't have to. It took them less than five minutes to cross town, what with how few obstructions there were in their way.

John did his best not to get stuck in his head, but it was hard. He couldn't help replaying the image of that man with the giant wings rising into the sky, wielding a blade that gave off a black and red aura. It was a disturbing sight. The visage of a killer. But he found it wasn't the murder that bothered him—or, at least, it wasn't the paramount problem.

The real issue was how fucking cool that guy looked. John needed to get a way to fly ASAP and make sure he was well-practised in case he ever had to face that guy, lest he get brutally mogged.

Lost on thought despite his best efforts, when they arrived in view of the first agreed upon target and Doug let out a quiet, "Damn it," John was taken a little off guard. He was kind of surprised he hadn't been penalised for the flinch, actually.

"What is it?" he asked, hoping his irritation wasn't audible in his voice. There was always a few seconds of irrational anger after someone made you jump, and he couldn't afford to show it. "Is that the place? The country club?"

Doug nodded slowly. "No portal over the door, you'll notice."

John blinked, then activated Eagle Eye. They'd emerged onto the edge of a main road that gave them a distant view of a stately white mansion sprawling across three floors at the edge of town before Bushey gave way to a wide park that separated it from the bulk of Watford. Much of its roof had caved in, and a solid chunk of the building looked like it had had a bite taken out of it, leaving only rubble strewn across the front car park. Given all that, it was actually one of the more intact buildings, so far.

Most importantly, the front doors were caved in, and there was no blue light marking a portal.

"Someone already destroyed it," John surmised. It wasn't a particularly surprising revelation, but they'd been hoping most of the combatants here would be more focused on fighting each other than clearing out the portals. Disappointment suffused him. "I was looking forward to that one."

+400 Aura

He'd been imagining a Resident Evil 1 scenario, fighting their way through a mansion filled with monsters. It would've been awesome.

Some day, he told himself. There'll be more mansions with portal worlds in them out there. There's so many creepy old buildings in England, it's inevitable.

Doug nodded. "There could be more portals around here. It's a decently sized town. But I don't know of 'em for sure. We weren't around these parts long, and didn't exactly explore the place in depth."

"This could mean that all the portals are cleared, and we're wasting our time here," Jade pointed out mildly.

"I don't think so." Doug was rubbing his chin as he squinted at the country club building in the distance. "This is just speculation, but if I had to guess at the rules of this place, I'd say we wouldn't be seeing any more of those monster waves if the portals were all down."

"The monsters have to come from somewhere to feed the waves," Lily said, catching on to his point.

Doug pointed at her. "Exactly. Destroy all the portals, kill off the current waves, and no more new waves will spawn. Conversely, leaving the portals active lets more waves build up."

John's Mana Sense pinged, and he looked to the north with a frown. "Speaking of waves. There's one coming from the north again. Just entered range."

"We move south then?" Chester asked quickly, wide eyes turning north as if he'd be able to see the oncoming wave through the rows of houses.

"Not necessarily," Doug said, looking at John. "We don't want to be herded back to the edge of town, where one of the other waves will trap us in. Best to go east or west and flank around the wave. They never stretch all the way across the span of the town; there'll be a gap we can slip through." He paused, tilting his head. "Unless you want to just punch straight through them? Or, hell, we could even try to take them all out?"

John gave that some serious consideration, but ultimately shook his head. "Better off focusing on the portals, I think. I want to close down at least five before we move out from Watford."

+400 Aura

If quests were actually a thing, then he'd just set himself one. If not, he was keen to challenge himself anyway. It would be a good test.

"West it is, then," Doug said, grinning.

They moved out without further conversation, crossing a few streets over to get themselves away from the exposed main road before heading directly west. The narrow street curved around a bit north, but they were fine with that, as the south-moving horde wasn't moving fast enough to cut them off, at the pace they were going—as Doug had claimed, it wasn't wide enough to completely sweep through the entire width of the town, so there was space to avoid it.

Still, they moved faster than they had been before. Not quick enough to make it look like they were rushing, because John refused to let the Aura system think he was worried about facing some mere blues. He even told the others they were only doing this because he didn't want to waste his time on trash monsters, a boast that was getting more and more true as his power grew. It wasn't completely honest in this case, since he definitely wasn't keen to face a horde of giant insects, but that didn't matter.

For a while, there were no issues. Mana Sense showed nothing nearby. The streets were clear. The sky was still burning, though veiled a bit by darkness, and John longed with all his being to see familiar baby blue for just a moment… but nothing was out of the ordinary, as far as the end of the world was concerned.

And so it came with no warning. Later, John would lament the stupidity of getting too comfortable with nothing pinging on his Mana Sense. Just because there were no monsters nearby, didn't mean there was no danger.

It all went wrong, of course, outside a school. He should have been suspicious the moment he saw it. Nothing ever went right for him in the vicinity of educational institutions.

A few hopped fences and crossed gardens put them back on another main road briefly, since they didn't have much choice in the matter when crossing from Bushey to Watford's main area. Sitting at the end of it was a secondary school which John only got a few moments to register: a modern main hall of metal and glass surrounded by more squat traditional brick buildings, with fields stretching from the front and back, the grounds lined with trees that shouldn't have been that dead in the early weeks of March. He catalogued the details and summarily discarded them, letting his vision tunnel on the three figures who were just emerging from the front doors of the main building.

One wore ruby red armour with a black cape. Another was decked out in a hooded white cloak with golden adornments, their face shrouded beneath the voluminous hood. The third appeared to be wearing nothing at all, a featureless living mannequin made of sparkling diamond that reflected the angry red of the fiery sky even with the black shroud veiling the world.

None of them had eyes to meet. Their expressions were all hidden. There was nothing to read in their body language, since their outfits covered everything up. They didn't say a word. Nothing about them suggested hostility to John's untrained eye.

But he didn't need training. He had Skills. Insight and Intuition flared to life at almost the same time, at his command, and the two abilities confirmed what paranoia had whispered into the back of his mind the moment he laid eyes on these people.

The former made a bunch of astute observations about the trio's appearance, noting the discolouration on the armoured man's ruby-red gauntlets, the too-pristine appearance of the white robe, and the faint smudges on the mannequin's diamond skin.

Intuition took that information and concluded that these three had all been covered in blood, at some point. Monsters didn't bleed red.

John didn't need to know anything else. He activated Accelerate even before the one in the white robe lifted her hand, moving to point a jewelled wand at them. His skin was already shining steel before the knight in stained ruby armour started charging forward, appearing to him to be moving in slow motion. A bolt of light was already manifesting above his arm before the mannequin's sparkling skin started brightening to a dazzling sheen.

From there, it was just a matter of choosing which one to attack first.

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