The forest welcomed them with the subtlety of a closed fist. Up front, David’s group moved with their living hobgoblin thrall walking point, its sword held low and ready, their single zombie warg padding silently beside the main cluster, while the imp scuttled through the shadows ten yards out on their left flank. Ten yards back, Corbin’s group's colossal zombie lumbered at the head of their formation, pulping ferns and snapping low branches with each step, their own zombie warg positioned at the rear of their defensive half-circle around the civilians. The ten-yard gap was the only real tactic they had; if something hit one group, the other might have a chance to recover before getting swarmed.

  Corbin's group’s oldest member, the pensioner had, against all odds, made the smartest choice: a long, heavy spear he could plant in the dirt and brace behind, a weapon that acknowledged his lack of speed and put a sharp point between him and anything that wanted to bite. He now used it primarily as a walking stick, which was the first genuinely intelligent application of a weapon anyone had seen since they'd entered the forest. Chloe, the healer, carried a mace, a brutal, close-range weapon that made no sense for her apparent healing skills. Harris held a scavenged spear from one of the abducted. The girl, Mia, clutched a short-sword, using the flat of the blade to press the housecat she was holding against her chest. It was a spread of basic, brutal logic that emerged when people stopped thinking about heroes and started thinking about leverage, reach, and not dying in the next five seconds.

  David walked among them, letting the nervous chatter of the group become a distant mumble. His real focus was on the demonic energy circulating inside him, a constantly circulating current he’d been fine-tuning for about thirty-five minutes. He’d been circulating the entire time. The goal was to keep it in a specific, perfect zone where it worked, but didn’t rage—not too little, not too much. That sweet spot where the energy reinforced his body—making his flesh denser, stronger, and his bones harder—without boiling over into something uncontrollable that made his teeth ache and his veins burn, like it usually did when he fought.

  To make the process automatic, he’d multitasked. While circulating, He ran multiplication tables in his head. He counted different types of ferns. He swung his weapon in the same simple pattern over and over, counting the swings. It was the mental equivalent of doing paperwork while learning to ride a bike.

  Eventually, it clicked. The energy settled into a steady, low-grade hum in his veins. It became background noise, like the perfect, unnoticeable drone of a refrigerator in another room. You only remembered it was there if it suddenly stopped.

  One problem he faced was interruptions. If a bird took off too fast or someone stumbled, the energy would spike violently, jumping from ‘fridge hum’ to ‘angry hornet’s nest.’ Then he’d have to waste a solid minute mentally wrestling it back down to that useful, distant background drone.

  With that hum now steady, his mind calm, and his Battle Sense switching on to quietly flag that the next phase of their walk was statistically hazardous, he began a new experiment. He tried to push the demonic energy out of his body.

  He started with his hands, the same focal points he used to push out energy with Infernal Thrall. A faint, dark fiery mist coalesced over his fingertips. He pushed the feeling further, spreading it up his arms, across his shoulders. Soon, a thin, shivering haze clung to him, hovering about three inches from his skin. He looked like a bad Photoshop, a man standing in his own personal, faint aura. Trying to push the mist any further out than three inches made the back of his eyeballs throb, his vision blur at the edges, and his head swim; so he locked it at that maximum, queasy range.

  Mara, walking a few feet ahead, glanced back. She stopped and stared, her expression flat, like she was examining a malfunctioning appliance.

  David met her gaze. “What?”

  “You’re doing something,” she said, her voice flat. “It’s… grating.”

  “Grating how? Unpleasant grating, or ‘I’m about to have a seizure’ grating?”

  “It’s a pressure. Behind my eyes. Like chewing foil. It’s in my jaw.” She turned her head away, dismissing him. “Stop.”

  “Noted,” David said. He didn’t stop. The mist stayed up. He watched the way it made the light bend around his knuckles. A personal, sort of forcefield. He wondered if it would make eating less messy.

  Alright, David thought, the energy haze clinging to him like a second skin. Aura points. Plus one thousand. Good for me. I’m a living mood ring that screams ‘back off.’ It was just energy sitting there, doing nothing but making Mara’s teeth hurt.

  So how could he use it?

  Everyone had energy—mana. David had it. Mara had the same basic fuel and used it to make dead things do chores. Rhea used hers to be a psychic crowbar and a set of really long-range binoculars. Jamie turned his into winter. We’re all just different brands of weird battery. His own battery seemed wired to blow holes in reality and make people his permanent, cranky employees.

  The fuel itself was the interesting part. It was versatile. If you had enough of it and applied it in a specific way, you could probably do anything. Like maybe ripping a hole between worlds and shoving a seventy-ton airliner through it into a forest full of monsters. If that was true, it could mean that theoretically, there was an early way back. The problem is that the required dose for interdimensional travel is ‘catastrophic,’ David thought.

  Or maybe it was a matter of application?

  David recalled the ogre reappearing in the clearing. His energy-sight had gotten a front-row seat during the part where he was mostly focused on not having his head popped like a grape. The thing had been wrapped in a dense layer of power that coiled in on itself in a tight spiral, and the space around it had crumpled like a piece of paper before snapping straight again somewhere else.

  He tried to make that happen now. He’d already figured out the aura, so why not? He concentrated, trying to bundle his own energy into a similar inward-turning spiral to crumple the air in front of him. The air declined the invitation. He remained firmly, undeniably in the same patch of dirt. A flawless execution of the stand very still technique.

  Right. Teleportation was on hold.

  He considered his skill list instead. One skill stood out just for its name alone. The skill was called Portal ‘Magic.’ Magic—not mastery, but an entire field. That was a clue. He’d gotten that skill after he’d experimentally punched a hole through the world without meaning to. The system didn’t just give it to him. It was more like ‘acknowledgement’. He’d basically discovered it by performing unauthorized reality vandalism. The magic part of the name was the entire clue. It meant the system expected him to provide his own wand and his own rabbits.

  Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

  His current rabbit was refusing to leave the hat.

  He went back to the haze of energy clinging to him. Sticking to what he knew, he tried to expand his circulation. Instead of a static field, he started circulating the energy he’d pushed outside his body. The aura. He imagined it like a set of rings spinning around him, a carousel made of angry smoke. The haze obeyed, beginning a slow, rolling flow over his skin. It did nothing except make him look like a walking fog machine. He kept at it.

  David started pushing it, slowly trying to increase the speed, making it flow around his body in a wide, continuous circle. It moved obediently. It also accomplished precisely nothing. He pushed it faster. The energy stretched thin from the speed, pulling the whole field out another few inches like taffy, the speed causing it to stretch, rather than expand through volume. It stretched to inches, constantly spinning. This time, the motion didn’t make his vision wobble.

  The grey Scottish Fold cat wove itself in a figure-eight through David’s legs as he walked. David ignored it, keeping the slow circulation of his demonic energy field steady. The faint haze around his calves didn't deter the animal. It moved through the energy like it was just unusually thick air. A cat, David thought. The local wildlife is terrifying, my aura makes Mara’s teeth hurt, and a housecat just uses it as a leg warmer. The animal completed its circuit and trotted away towards Mia, its duty apparently done.

  David concentrated, and a portal sprang into the air in front of him.

  Trying to open a small portal ten inches from me, David thought. Works better inside my personal spinning demonic weather system. The field is acting exactly like a weapon does—as a conduit. Like a ready-made barrel.

  Mara suddenly looked back at him, turned forward, and walked further ahead.

  [Demonic Energy Mastery Lvl 4 ? Demonic Energy Mastery Lvl 5.]

  A little satisfied but far from done, David fell into step beside Evans, his eyes on the trees ahead. “Time for an inventory check,” he said, his voice low. “How’s it going? How many of those little copper arguments do you have left in your pockets? I’m talking bullets, and is the number more than ‘oh shit’ or less than ‘maybe we’re okay’?”

  Evans just looked at David, a single eyebrow raised.

  “Look, I’m trying to budget for our ongoing survival, and the ‘armed professional’ column is looking a little thin,” David said, eyeing the dagger handle protruding from Evans’s shoulder. “When you signed for the job, did they issue you spare ammo, or are we down to whatever’s in the pipe?”

  Evans shifted his weight, eyeing the trees. “I’ve got rounds left, we’re good.”

  “That’s a relief. Is ‘some’ a technical term? Like, enough to win a bar fight, or enough to make a monster reconsider its dietary choices?”

  “Sure, man. I can tell you.” Evans let out a deep breath. “The way we’re set up, it’s usually one magazine in the weapon and one spare on the belt, sometimes two if you feel like it,” Evans said, his breathing a little shallow around the words. “The pieces are compact, easier to manage in a cabin. They hold ten, maybe fifteen rounds if you’re lucky. So you start with maybe thirty, forty-five total if everything’s maxed out and you brought the extra.”

  David nodded slowly, his eyes tracking the grimace that tightened Evans’s face with every shift. “So the optimistic math says you each could’ve walked off that plane with forty-five pieces of persuasive argument. The pessimistic math says more like thirty. Now, I’ve got a really important follow-up question about your retirement plan for those bullets. I saw you do the reload shuffle back when everything went to hell. Corbin did the same little number. So that’s one whole magazine per person already spent—gone, donated to the cause of not being immediately stomped. Did you finish the second one in the fight with my sword guy? It looked like you were out.”

  “I had to stop shooting,” Evans said, the words clipped. “I didn’t run the magazine dry. He was smart. He kept the kid between us, moving him every time I tried to line up a shot. Then he put his blade right on the kid’s wrist. I wasn’t going to shoot through an innocent to maybe hit a target that quick.”

  David was quiet for a beat, his gaze drifting past Evans to where his thrall stood motionless. He sized up the situation, identified the gun as the primary threat, and implemented a perfect countermeasure using available assets. That’s some pretty impressive tactical understanding for a caveman. My new hire has a real resume. He looked back at Evans. “So you lowered your weapon with rounds still in it. You didn’t fire again.”

  “No.”

  “And Corbin? He was shooting at the big problem until he had to switch to the stabby stuff. He burned through his second magazine completely, didn’t he?”

  “He stopped too, It was ineffective.”

  “Right. So, current inventory. You’ve got a partially-used magazine in your gun, and one full spare on your hip. Corbin has a half-empty gun, and one full spare on his hip. Assuming you both started with the full optimistic loadout—one in the gun, two spares, fifteen rounds each—you’ve each got between fifteen and thirty bullets left in the world. One magazine’s worth per person is already just a memory in something else’s hide.”

  “That’s not how you manage the ammo in your magazines,” Evans said, voice taut. “You always fill up the magazine in your gun and keep the remainder in your spare. Or, if you’ve already fired half the rounds, you swap it with a full one and keep the half-used magazine in reserve. But yeah… that’s the situation.”

  David kept his voice low as they moved, watching as the group of newcomers twitched at every rustle in the ferns. "So our total strategic reserve for the next existential misunderstanding is a few handfuls of bullets between you two, and a choir of whimpers from the backup singers." He nodded toward Evans, who was moving with stiff, careful steps. "If you keel over, I’m donating your spare magazine to Jamie. He’ll probably try to freeze the bullets for later."

  He just laid out his whole ammo count. Handed it over like a menu. Why? If I were planning to take his gun, that was a really helpful guide.

  The idea had its appeal. A gun was a direct line of persuasion.

  But David’s aim was a public hazard. He’d be more likely to ventilate a tree—or the pensioner—than anything actually trying to kill him. Guns already weren't the ultimate answer. Jamie's ice could stop a bullet right now. It was a tool with a shelf life.

  A clean shot to the brain would still end him. Probably. But anywhere else? The demonic energy circulating through him was changing his density, hardening tissue. The reservoir of heat energy banked in his chest could cauterize a wound from the inside out. If he saw it coming, a well-placed portal could send the bullet somewhere else entirely.

  So the guns stayed with them. Every bullet Evans or Corbin fired was a bullet David didn't have to waste, and those guys could actually hit what they were aiming at. Let the professionals handle the fancy, dwindling ammo. David’s survival odds went up more with two competent shooters covering the group’s weak spots than they did with him fumbling a reload and accidentally giving the pensioner a new breathing hole.

  David glanced over at Evans, who was still scanning the still forest. "How's the pensioner holding up? Do we need to stop, let him catch his breath?"

  Evans shook his head slightly, his eyes still on the trees. "Mia checked him before we left. He said he takes daily walks, longer than this. I saw him doing laps in the plane aisle a few times after the crash. I think he's good for another twenty minutes, at least."

  A sharp yelp cut off their conversation. Someone behind him hit the dirt with a grunt. The whole group froze.

  David’s Battle Sense, which had been a quiet hum, rose in volume.

  Thirty feet ahead, the mossy bark of the massive tree no longer looked empty. Two creatures stepped from behind it.

  They looked like someone had taken a giant rhinoceros, carved it apart, and stitched it back together in the rough shape of a person. Their bodies were built from thick panels of flesh sewn into heavy, plate-like layers with a tendon-like texture, giving them the bulky solidity of crude organic armor. Horns jutted from their shoulders, forearms, and the mask-like slabs that formed their faces, arranged with the blunt practicality of something assembled to break whatever stood in front of it.

  David’s vision tagged them as they emerged fully into view.

  [Flesh Golem lvl 5]

  [Flesh Golem lvl 3]