Anise:

  [Warning!]

  [Due to insufficient ambient mana, System Core is operating on low-power mode. Some features of the System are currently unavailable. Please relocate to an area of higher mana density.]

  Anise blinked the notice away as she cycled her qi through her meridians in a practiced fashion. The bruises and lesser fractures in her ribcage mended themselves steadily, and she pried herself out of the cracked wall she had been launched into.

  She tried to bring forth a bit of her nature qi to speed up the healing process, but the power guttered and fell apart before she could form the technique.

  [Warning!]

  [Due to low-power mode, the use of skills has been restricted. [Twin Veins] is disabled. [Trifold Veins] is disabled. [Quartet Veins] is disabled.]

  Anise sighed, frustrated by the inability to use more than a single technique at a time. More than that, she regretted her inability to practice using multiple techniques at once precisely because of her Skills that took the load off her concentration. If she hadn’t taken those options in her [Moontide Flow] path, she could’ve trained the ability on her own.

  She hopped on each foot gently, testing her limbs for any weakness she couldn’t feel. Finding none, she let the healing run its course.

  It was interesting to meet people outside the Eternity Labs. Something about a trio of teenagers working to fight off villains just tickled the part of her that had long enjoyed various media intended for teenage audiences. She’d watched as many movies as she could, then found her way into anime. After that, she’d taken a liking to true crime, but she’d largely set to exhausting each genre before moving on, and had spent hundreds of years invested in books and other literature.

  When she had set to curating her own personal appearance and Skills into two unique paths of her own, the concept that had always drawn her romantic heart was vampires. The System answered her fantasy and granted her some of that wish, but her teeth? Biting people wasn’t the best way to get blood. She just loved the romance of it.

  She had to walk a fine line between the horrors of a vampire and the heroism that she laid in front of herself, so she’d gone with heterochromia. She thought it looked cool. And her mom would’ve cried if she’d done away with the beautiful blue eyes she’d been born with. As such, she chose the natural blue of her birth and the pretty green of her mom. When she’d seen them, Sylvia had broken down crying on the spot.

  Tears of happiness, thankfully.

  Anise cracked her neck, feeling somewhat refreshed. She should’ve far surpassed such a creature, but the limitations of the System were keeping her more towards the realm of a level one hundred instead of her full power.

  She snapped her heels together, refocusing on the need to save the sorry butts of the poor classless people she’d met.

  [Springbloom Nectar Purification]

  Anise gathered the power of her external purification Skill, then strode forward in the direction of the ongoing battle. “Here I come, Lizabear.”

  Her steps remained smooth and even, her focus needed for the Skill to manifest, no thanks to the System not helping her out. She had no idea what a crutch it had been all her life. Worse, she’d have to live without it for a long time if she was never allowed back into the Eternity Labs.

  Or she could return to Uriel’s Point. She didn’t think it had been terribly far away. The issue was flying all the way there. It would certainly be a nuisance.

  Anise’s world blurred as pain erupted in her right side.

  Her build made her a hunter, not prey. As such, she was skilled at tracking a single focused target. So when something had struck her as she entered an intersection, she had been entirely blindsided.

  And she had lost her grip on her technique.

  The backlash of energy within her ravaged her senses further, and she missed the creature biting down on her leg. It then proceeded to swing her from its teeth into the ceiling, then the floor, then side to side like a rag doll.

  She was only released when the creature had seemingly driven itself dizzy, and Anise sighed in exasperation at the situation. Sure, the actual bear that had tackled her and thrown her around looked bigger than the Lizabear. Most of that impression was just its fur, though.

  It hadn’t even broken the skin of her leg, and Anise wished she hadn’t lost the ability to age beyond adolescence. Her lack of mass just made things harder sometimes.

  The bear growled at her from a few paces away, and that was all the warning she received before it lunged with its claws, swiping bloody appendages that revealed self-inflicted wounds.

  Anise had smelled it on the creatures. Their blood was foul; filled with the putrid aroma of corruption and sickness. Somehow, the creatures were aware of it enough to use it to spread the illness by leaking their blood everywhere they went.

  The bear’s paws descended in slow motion, and Anise caught them in her own palms. To her amusement, the creature seemed surprised by the turn of events, and Anise turned into a shoulder throw, lowering her body enough to ground her mass before channeling some qi into her arms and enhancing her grip even as her pure System-granted stats made the difference in the rest of her physique.

  The bear went for a ride, and Anise shot forward under it before it could land, stiffening her body and surging upwards from below, blasting the creature upwards into the ceiling with a thunderous smash.

  Anise sidestepped the falling form, then twisted into an axe kick on the bear’s neck as it came down, channeling her qi into the martial art.

  The bear didn’t even make a noise. It lacked the remaining requisite organs to do so. The entire body from the neck up was reduced to a fine mist that actually surprised her.

  When she paused to look more closely, the entire corpse seemed to deflate as the red mist grew more dense.

  “Anise? A little help?” Mari’s voice caused her to look up, and she spotted the red-eyed woman wielding two handguns, one being the high-tech revolver and the other being the weird angled thing Kris had been carrying.

  She was backpedaling through the nearest intersection while the older guy—Relkur, she thought—was carrying the bleeding form of the pink-haired girl. Vilke was nowhere to be seen.

  Before she could respond, Mari leapt to the side as the Lizabear launched into the intersection and Anise received the incoming dodge of Relkur and their wounded companion.

  Without any further hesitation, Anise jumped into action. Literally.

  She leapt over the pair headed her way and landed in an axe kick on the big lizard. The issue she quickly became well-acquainted with was that the creature was more sturdy than stone or metal.

  Of course, she found out the hard way as a hole opened beneath the Lizabear when the floor broke and the monster barely budged before they both fell down to the floor below.

  They landed in a hallway some ten feet wide, and sealed doors lined all along it on both sides.

  The Lizabear wasted no time in trying to tear into her, using its powerful claws and superior mass to try to crush her where she’d fallen on her back.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “I’m so darn sick of you, ya big lug!” Anise met one claw with her right leg and wrapped her left around the same appendage, giving her the leverage to swiftly twist her body and kick off into an aerial spin that created distance and landed her on her feet again. It wasn’t a particular martial art, but fights never really allowed a person to adhere to textbook manuals and styles, so she’d polished her improv routine while sparring with the Overseer in VR.

  Her maneuver left her barely any time to breathe before the creature was chasing again.

  And of course, since nothing could possibly go right, that was when her passive, [Purewater Mind and Body], decided to purge the infection of the earlier bear’s blood. She hacked up a glob of blackened corruption and wasted a split second to spit it out before ducking the incoming claw.

  The large creature was annoyingly cunning, and so it tried to press itself down over her, restricting her escape options as it tried to grapple her.

  Grappling a vampire was generally a mistake, regardless. Even if her fangs were largely an affectation that she chose because they looked cool, she still had a few Skills invested into making them stronger and more sharp than any other option in her arsenal.

  She let the Lizabear grapple her, and then returned the embrace with a bite into its arm. Sickly blood with a texture like tar filled her mouth in a stagnant pulse as her long fangs sank all the way into the artery of the creature. The blood was as foul as it smelled, and she retracted her bite almost as soon as she felt the creature trying to squeeze the life out of her.

  It had been enough, thankfully.

  Anise had delicate, slender fingers. So when she reached around the monster’s arm and sank her index and ring fingers into the holes her teeth had left, and then she tugged to widen the punctures, she grinned despite the nasty taste in her mouth.

  With wider wounds to exploit, she dug both hands in and tore at the arm of the monster, flooding her hands with qi aligned with Spring and purification.

  The muscles softened under the opposing affinity, and the entire arm began to decay as the rot that had enhanced the body of the Lizabear fled her touch. It barely took a second before the Lizabear released her, screeching in pain as she split its arm to the bone in a satisfying display of improvisational combat.

  The Lizabear stumbled back, and Anise drew in a shuddering breath as she assessed the damage she had ignored in her desperate tactic. It had crushed her lungs enough that she was left gasping.

  Still, she had done actual damage, and any progress was good news.

  Mari:

  Things had gone terribly wrong.

  Maybe it was wrong to have entrusted much of the plan to Anise, being an unknown variable in every respect. Still, she was a powerhouse beyond what any of her team could do.

  That had been her rationale for going with the poorly thought-out plan she had made.

  She regretted her decision.

  Mari turned to see Kris out of cover, halfway down the corridor, with no room to escape or dodge the incoming mass of hide and muscle of the behemoth.

  “Kris!” Mari screamed, fear and desperation eating through her as the world felt like it had slowed to a crawl.

  Kris fell backwards, and Mari rushed to reach for her and drag her back.

  Mari could finally see the monster’s deeply clouded eyes, and the look of satisfaction and victory was enough to make her feel like the monster was highly intelligent.

  Claws descended on Kris just as Relkur slid past Mari and caught the pink haired girl by the collar and hauled her backwards. Teeth stretched forward in pursuit of the retreating form.

  Twang!

  A heavy metallic sound rang out as the jaws of the trap snapped closed on the monster’s foreclaw, locking it in place.

  The behemoth just barely missed Kris as the trap held.

  Mari felt relief surge through her, but stifled the emotion as she leveled her gun on it and tugged the trigger until the cylinder was empty.

  Five shots.

  She took cover as the sound of shearing metal pierced her ear plugs. She reloaded as fast as she could, then dropped the speed loader at her feet, unwilling to spend the time to stow it.

  The scrapped remains of the trap sailed by as the monster screeched at them. Mari barely caught the sight of Vilke being caught in the side and thrown into the dead end in a heap. He’d known his weapons would do nothing, so he’d kept an eye out for threats in his direction, and taken the hit when his gaze was elsewhere.

  Mari briefly thought she saw a flash of fur in that direction, too.

  She couldn’t worry about him, because the behemoth was not far behind, and Relkur was trying to tug Kris down the south path while the other girl fumbled with her magic weapon, ejecting a spherical core and slipping it into her sleeve.

  And Mari knew that so long as she was in the line of fire, Kris couldn’t risk using her gun. By the same token, Kris was down range of Mari’s gunfire, too.

  They needed to regroup.

  Mari fired a single shot, stepping backwards down her corridor as the creature thrashed into their intersection. The shot was enough to get its attention, and it turned her way, snarling and lunging.

  She backstepped from one claw and watched a familiar thrusting motion as the other claw aimed to pierce through her, only for Mari to twist sideways and feel the inertial dampener barely brush the strike aside.

  Then it slammed its outstretched arm sideways like a club, and Mari felt the breath leave her as she was forced into the servers on one side of the path.

  She barely glanced up in time to see the jaws descending, and she let gravity bring her down as her legs shoved off, throwing herself a bit further away. Mari just hoped her situational awareness wasn’t too awful. Otherwise, her shitty plan was going to go very poorly for her.

  The behemoth gave chase, lowering to all fours as it slammed the ground where it thought she had fallen. Mari got her legs under herself and jumped backwards just as the creature slammed its own skull into the ground right where her pelvis had been.

  The leap carried her in a flailing manner just beyond the trap they’d set in her hallway. She immediately snapped off a shot from her prone position, angled upwards towards the creature to avoid a stray shot hitting Kris or Relkur.

  Of course, the bullet did nothing at all.

  Then, a hole opened in the creature’s shoulder as it stood upright again, and the blood and gore that ripped out of it nearly doused Mari, instead turning to red mist as the nanites went to work on the afflicted material.

  Mari rolled to the side and pressed into the lower edge of the servers when the behemoth snarled and chased her. Into the trap.

  The metallic sound resounded again as the jaws clamped on a leg. And Mari got a front row seat to the monster ripping its leg upwards and tearing the metal free of the stone in a mangled mess, just like the one that had hit Vilke earlier.

  The jaws lost their grip and fell slack as the metal was snapped, and then the monster kicked backwards. The scrap metal sailed out of sight, but Mari felt the dread as she heard Kris scream in pain.

  The behemoth roared in anger, throwing its arms to the sides and pulverizing the metal racks lining the walls while its head crashed into the ceiling, cracking more stonework.

  Mari took that opportunity to roll between its spread legs, then rushed towards Relkur and Kris. “How bad is it?”

  “Caught her in the head, but she’s only knocked out. The dampener softened a potentially lethal hit.” Relkur’s newly softened voice was measured, but tight with concern.

  Mari turned as the behemoth tracked their voices, turning and bracing to charge. “Over the trap, then we zigzag to prevent it catching up. Find Anise. Nothing else is working.”

  Mari scooped up Kris’ magic weapon, then followed Relkur’s retreat.

  They barely made it over the trap before the creature caught up, and then its wild charge became a frantic tumble when it lost its footing. They barely made it around the corner before the smashed metal sailed past them.

  Mari leaned out long enough to sink a few more shots from Kris’ weapon into the creature, leaving smears of blood behind as it grew increasingly angry.

  When they reached the next turn in their path, the blood trail had stopped, and the wounds seemed to blend into the mottled tones of its thick reptilian hide.

  “We’re not making any progress. Where the hell is Anise?” Mari felt a bit of panic trying to worm its way into her, but Marielle’s steadying influence kept her emotions in check.

  “Saw another creature headed in this direction a couple turns ago.” Relkur briefly replied, his breathing the only obvious tell of his rapid heartbeat from adrenaline. They’d both be flagging soon.

  The behemoth wasn’t around the corner when she looked back at the next turn.

  Staying quiet, they moved on one more bend.

  And her fear went through the roof as the creature was standing barely three meters away when they made their next turn at the final intersection before the path to the south became a dead end.

  Mari stood stock-still as it huffed and swayed slightly in the air, clearly listening for their passage. Thankfully, she and Relkur were quieter than the hum of the servers and distant crackling of the damaged areas they’d left in their wake.

  The behemoth then slammed the metal nearby.

  “Ugh, ouch, damnit.” A faint, disoriented voice came from behind her as Kris chose that moment to stir awake.

  It was enough for the creature.

  Mari sidestepped a descending claw as the creature planted its weight on all fours and tensed its muscles to charge again. She swiftly followed Relkur towards the nearest intersection, and barely caught sight of Anise pulverizing a bear skull as she turned the corner, using cover to peek out for a quick shot from both guns.

  They both missed.

  Because the creature was already barreling into the space beside her, right where Anise crushed it into the fourth sublevel below them.

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