With limited time and mana, Alex knew that he had to make every trace count. That meant going back to the basics. Accuracy over power. Surgery over butchery.

  The first fire arrow hit the red-skinned beast right as he lifted his arm to strike down. It didn’t seem to do more than prick and lightly burn the mace-wielding Kruwal, but it distracted him enough that Orson, slow and weak as he was now, could land a knee-busting blow with his wooden pole.

  The Kruwal cried and fell awkwardly to the ground. Alex could see the shattered bones of his knee sticking out, but he didn’t give the monster’s pain any consideration. He shot another fire arrow at the felled Kruwal, aiming at the face. The monster only crossed his arms in front of his head and weathered the spell like it was nothing more than a bee sting. Another two warriors quickly took his place, pushing Orson to defend himself instead of finishing off the downed Kruwal.

  MP: 25/160

  Alex clicked his tongue. It seemed that despite his jump in power, his simpler spells weren’t enough to outright kill the Kruwals. It made sense too. He’d felt the gravelly skin when he grabbed Scarface. That thing was tough as leather-hide. He didn’t imagine the other Kruwals were any weaker.

  He couldn’t let that stop him, though. If I can’t pierce the skin, I just have to target something else. Heat coursed through his good arm as he prepared another pair of fire arrows. Slowly moving forward, he watched the fight for a moment, watched how the Kruwal using an axe tried to flank Orson, before letting loose.

  The spells zipped away and his aim proved true as one of the arrows struck him dead in the eye. The Kruwal dropped limblessly like a marionette with its strings cut, axe clattering to the ground.

  MP: 20/160

  Alex fought back the urge to pump his fist in the air. Bee stings or not, a shot to the brain seemed to do the trick. If he ever learned how to control his powers from far away, the fire arrow could prove to be one of his deadliest traces.

  He formed another spell, ready to keep the momentum, only to drop it as the mayor’s body entered his line of fire. Annoying, but he couldn’t waste his mana without the certainty of getting a kill. Not if he wanted to walk himself out of this situation.

  All around, the sounds of fighting rang loud in the air, metal clanging against metal, wood splintering. Valerian and Cedric seemed to have gained the upper hand in their own battles, but he forced himself to do what was in front of him. One thing at a time, man.

  Hobbling, Alex came up behind Daven and Diana, who stood on the road just a step beyond the bridge. He leaned against the last railing for support, trying to look better than he felt. His whole body was throbbing like an ingrown hair gone nuclear.

  “Diana, how much longer can you—”

  As if set off by his voice, she toppled forward onto the dirt.

  “Er.”

  The constant low rumble of sand and soil pushing against each other from Diana's earth trace suddenly died down. At the giant pit further down the road, the horde of Kruwal seemed to gain a second wind as the roiling trap became inert, the sand no longer actively pulling them down. They growled and roared in their harsh language as they slowly trudged through the thick sand, pulling at each other to be the first one out.

  Dropping the rock he was about to throw against the Kruwal fighting Orson, Daven rushed to Diana’s side. He knelt beside her and turned her over. Alex sucked in a sharp breath when he saw her. She looked half-dead, blue-lipped and white-faced. A thin trail of blood ran down from her nose. Her red hair that had once been pulled into an intricate braid was a sweaty mess matted against her forehead.

  Putting his ear against her chest, Daven waited a second before breathing out in relief.

  “She’s out, man. Mana blackout,” he said. The archer looked around at all the fighting going on and the dozens of Kruwal still struggling in the trap. “We got to go before those guys get free.”

  A heavy grunt pulled his attention to the mayor and his opponent just as the Kruwal scored a deep cut on Orson’s chest. Alex tried and once again failed to find an angle that wouldn’t put the man in his crosshairs.

  He’d thought it had been simple bad luck at first, but now he realized how the Kruwal always made sure to keep the mayor’s bulk between them. They're smarter than they look.

  Behind them, though, he spotted the Kruwal with the busted up knee dragging himself away on his elbows. Dark blood stained the ground where he’d crawled. Without hesitating, Alex let a fireball fly from his hand. The trace sped through the air, passed the downed Kruwal just above his shoulder, and exploded against the ground not a handspan from his face.

  It came to his mind that a few days ago he’d never gone beyond trading a few punches in the courtyard of the orphanage, and now he didn’t think twice to finish off an injured enemy crawling away from the battlefield. Was this what war did to the people back on his earth? It just ground them down until killing became as mundane as blowing your nose or pulling on a trigger from hundreds of yards away.

  Or using some fancy magic. He pushed that thought to the back of his mind. No time for that.

  He waited a second longer, expecting the ping! from leveling up, but it didn’t come. Frustration bubbled up inside him, threatening to spill out.

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

  MP: 15/160

  “Really?!” He swore and turned back to Daven. “Listen, take her back and I’ll get the others. Tell the villagers to pile up anything flammable they can find up on the bridge. Do it quickly. I have an idea on how to hold them off for good.”

  Daven’s pock-marked face scrunched up. “Uhh. By that, you mean…”

  Alex rolled his eyes. “Anything that burns, Daven. You know the hot, orange thing I can make with my hands? I’m going to do that to the bridge.”

  “Oh, yeah, flamebabble, o’ course, gotcha,” Daven said, picking his sister up. He shifted her on his shoulders and took off toward the barricade, muttering under his breath about stupid big-city words.

  Shaking his head, Alex turned to the task at hand. A sharp spike of pain flared up from his ankle as if to remind him on the stakes, but it only served to irritate him further. Instead of thinking up some strategy, he simply started forward, trying to put as little weight as possible on his bad leg.

  It didn’t stop the ankle from racking his brain with agony.

  "Hey!” he yelled at the smart Kruwal.

  The duo had moved closer to the bridge as they clashed, and he limped after them. The fight had turned into a brutal melee where the warrior clearly had the upper hand, and Orson was left wielding the wooden pole almost like a shield as the Kruwal hacked and slashed at him with a crude sword.

  “Hey you big sack of rotten meat!”

  Despite calling out for the Kruwal, it was Orson who heard him first. In the next exchange, the mayor let the blade bite deep into the pole and pulled, only to quickly let it go in order to grab onto the Kruwal’s sword arm with both of his hands. Then he yanked the monster to the side.

  It should’ve been a suicidal move, as he’d done nothing more than to shove the Kruwal one step to the side in return for losing his only weapon. Alex saw as the Kruwal raised his other fist to pummel Orson in the face, but by then he wasn’t even five yards away.

  The fire arrow struck him on the side of the head, just missing the eye. The Kruwal stumbled and went down to his knees, stunned. Orson also fell back in surprise, letting go of the monster’s arm.

  MP: 10/160

  Alex took the last staggering step in a falling jump and hurled himself against the Kruwal’s chest. The two went down in a heap, and the dagger in his good hand sunk deep into flesh.

  The monster let out a pained gurgle as he hit the ground. He swung a massive red fist up and missed by an inch. On top of him, Alex pulled on the dagger and struck home again, just as another punch managed to smack him on the shoulder. He cried out, staggered, but held on to the blade. Even from his back, the Kruwal warrior hit like a sledgehammer.

  “Just die already,” he growled, and the dagger went up and down again. Up and down, up and down, until the Kruwal finally stopped moving beneath him.

  Ping!

  The pain vanished in the next heartbeat. From his broken arm. From his mangled ankle. Everything washed away as if he’d been dunked in a giant vat of liquid painkiller. The relief was so great he fell back on top of the Kruwal, dagger still clutched desperately in one hand. Blood soaked his shirt through his open jacket.

  It didn’t bother him at all.

  “Finally,” he let out.

  Alex felt a sort of clear-minded drunken haze settle on him. You couldn’t tell how much pain affected you until it no longer did it, and a man could get addicted to that feeling. Not quite the lightning in a bottle effect of jacking up the power stat, he thought, but damn it if it isn’t amazing.

  Who cares about bridges and injured innkeepers and potentially cannibal hordes when your ankle doesn’t feel like a wet rag that’s been twisted one too many times?

  A meaty hand dragged him up by the collar of his new coat and out of his little bubble of pain-free happiness. Expecting Orson, Alex was surprised to see Valerian staring back at him.

  “Oh hey.”

  “We’re falling back to the barricade,” the man said.

  A childish part of him wanted to fire back that he’d been the one waiting for them, but when he caught the first Kruwal climb out of Diana’s sand pit, Alex decided to settle for a simple nod. He could take out all his frustration on the real monsters instead of Valerian. The reality of having his mana back and fully functioning limbs was invigorating. And despite the deep ache left behind by the level up healing, he was still up for a good fight. Especially if it meant getting more experience and possibly leveling up again.

  But the Kruwal didn’t charge at them like he expected. Instead, he turned and started growling out at his comrades, gesticulating wildly toward the bridge and back at them. He even went as far as physically stopping the next Kruwal to escape the sand pit from running toward the bridge. Squinting down the road, Alex noticed something hanging from this Kruwal’s neck. A horn, he realized. It was the hornblower Kruwal, the one who’d been beside Scarface when the horde first noticed them.

  “What are they doing?”

  Alex swiveled his head. Cedric was jogging up to them, using his glaive as a crutch whenever he stepped with his left foot. Kruwal bodies littered the riverbank behind him, the turf there stained red with blood.

  As he approached, Alex saw that his leg wasn’t the only injury the crew leader had accrued. Aside from a general dishevelment of torn clothes and dirty skin, there was a deep cut on his right shoulder that left a red line on his shirt, and the whole right side of his face was bruised purple and starting to swell up as if someone had dashed his head against a rock.

  Noticing his expression, Cedric tried to give him an assuring smile as if this was just another day at the office. It didn’t work. His eyes were red and bleary, shoulders slumped. Even after getting beaten by the Enhanced in the dungeon, he hadn’t seemed so defeated. The crew leader looked like a man hanging on to his confidence by a fraying thread.

  “They won’t attack until the new leader of the war band is chosen,” Valerian answered. The paladin sidled up to Mayor Orson and put the man’s arm over his shoulder. “Can you walk?”

  “Aye, son.” The mayor let out a watery cough then. “Just a tad out of practice, you see. Nothing that a mug of my stout ale won’t heal.”

  A quick scan of Orson’s figure told otherwise. The mayor looked to be fighting to keep his eyes open. His face was drained of color, his white whiskers black with soot. Blood had pooled through his shirt in a diagonal line where the Kruwal had slashed him across the chest. If they weren’t in the middle of a barbarian raid the likes of which even the Romans would balk at, Alex would insist on calling up an ambulance and rushing Orson to the nearest hospital. But they were in the middle of a barbarian raid, with no phones and no hospitals to speak of.

  “I guess that’s our cue to leave, then,” Cedric said, trying to sound chipper.

  Despite itching to attack the distracted Kruwal for the sweet EXP, Alex couldn’t disagree. Riverbend had been sacked. People had died. And the crew was in no condition to fight on. They had to leave while they still could.