“There’s a monster in the tube,” Daisuke said when Farhad and Maxi had returned. The others were all there scrambling to get ready. Belinda clipped on the folded forms of her clockwork critters. Patti was packing snacks with a healing twist. Flav strapped on his armor. Daisuke loaded rounds into his shotgun.

  “The tube?” Maxi said, confused.

  “The London metro system,” Daisuke said.

  “How much time we got?” Farhad asked.

  “Zero.”

  Maxi and Farhad glanced at each other. They ran to their cubicles and picked up their equipment. Maxi her long sword and belt. Farhad his revolver and a new gadget he’d picked up for the Hacker class. It resembled an old pretablet device called a Palm Pilot. It even had a black and white screen and everything. When Farhad first brought it back from the mailroom and Maxi started teasing him for it, he had said, “Don’t underestimate old technology. Sometimes you need something with a few less security features.”

  Once everyone was ready, they all piled into the elevator. Daisuke hit the button and said something that would have been more intelligible to her if she had been to London more often. After a few moments of travel, they stepped out to a subway platform.

  However the place was a mess. There were dismembered bodies, spilled coffee, trampled food, blood splattered on the walls, and even a few suitcases that people had left behind in the panic. There was also a team of NPC police officers in full tactical gear who were torn apart by the creatures.

  “The NPCs are keeping the place cordoned off,” Daisuke said as they inspected the wreckage. “They think it’s a terrorist attack, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try to send more people down, so we need to move fast before they get another team killed.”

  “Where do you think the beast went?” Flav asked and glanced around. There were two escalators and two tunnels. Not to mention some service exits, and the elevator shaft itself.

  Maxi surveyed the wreckage. The civilian bodies were closest to the escalators as if the creature was tearing through them as the crowd crushed in to get up them. The police force was a little more spread out and there were bullet holes on the wall. She saw a few of the officers on the train tracks too as if the fighting had gone in that direction.

  Here glasses read: Investigation check success.

  “They chased it into the tunnels,” Maxi said.

  “But which way?” Flav asked.

  Maxi looked at the angle of fire and the pattern of blood splatter. She knew there was something to be gleaned from it but she couldn’t figure it out.

  Investigation check failed.

  Maxi cursed but before she could express her thoughts, the elevator dinged and Takeshi and his goon squad flooding through the doors were their swords at the ready and roiling with psychic energy. The man narrowed his eyes on her, and Joaquin right behind him looked apologetic.

  “I should have known you’d be here,” Takeshi said with a sour expression.

  “I should have known you’d steal our technique for defeating the raid boss,” Maxi said.

  Without warning, he launched a Mind Shard at her. She saw the attack coming, his astral body launching out of his body with a massive two handed battle axe and appearing right in front of her. He swung for her head, and psychic energy exploded around her and formed what looked like a blue cocoon or a force field from Star Trek. The axe glanced off the defense and dissipated harmlessly as the astral form of Takeshi snapped back into his body.

  A read out appeared in her glasses:

  LEARNED NEW SKILL: Psy Shield (45pp): Doubles creativity bonus for calculating AR against psychic attacks. Used as a reaction against attack. Always active in combat unless player specifies otherwise or lacks sufficient pp to trigger.

  The entire moment happened in a fraction of a second and was invisible to people without psychic training. Patti would have seen it and squeezed Flav’s arm. The others were unaware that he had just attacked her.

  Takeshi, bewildered by the moment, narrowed his eyes on her, and attempted to charge but Joaquin was quick to react and held him back. “Whoa! Whoa!” the blonde lunk yelled. “We are all on the same side here.”

  Maxi put her hands up and said, “He’s right, and we can work together on this one. They chased the creature into one of the tunnels. It’s hard to tell which one.”

  Takeshi visibly let go of his tension and Joaquin relaxed his grip. Takeshi broke free and hopped onto the train track tracks. “We’re going right,” he called over his shoulder, and his team scrambled to follow. Joaquin lingered an apologetic glance at her, and followed his team leader.

  “Left it is then,” Maxi said, and they all made their way onto the train tracks.

  The lights were out deeper in the tunnels, and Belinda opened her backpack. “Come on, come out. There’s a good boy.”

  Dalek fluttered out of the pack miniaturization. At first, the critter was the equivalent of a star wars figurine from the toy section, and grew to his full fuzzy size as he flew. The creature saw Maxi and flew over stiffing and licking like a dog. The nose as wet as one too.

  “Okay, okay,” Maxi said, stroking Dalek’s fur. “It’s nice to see you too. Is that safe? For him? Won’t he suffocate in one of those?”

  From what she knew of the Backpacks of Miniaturization, they weren’t so good for living things and came with all sorts of warning labels not to put pets inside.

  “He uses batteries,” Belinda shrugged.

  “That’s one way of putting it,” Maxi said while she stroked the fur. Feeding time was a unique experience in the realm of pet feeding though she supposed it was no more weird than a snake owner dropping live mice into the snake cage. Dalek ate a bowl full of batteries every day. Double AA, D, C… the creature had even eaten half a car battery once.

  The food for her pet would have been outrageously expensive if Maxi had been buying it from the NPC store even with the favorable credit to the dollar exchange rate, but Belinda was getting the batteries for next to nothing considering the line item on the Office Pool budget for pet food. Either way, every time Maxi went to Belinda’s workshop to feed her creature, a little locker labeled Dalek’s food always had an assortment of batteries in it.

  Dalek flew overhead and turned on a few lights and swiveled to illuminate the dark corners of the tunnel. They marched forward without much regard to stealth, between the clanging of Flav’s armor and Dalek’s lights, they lost the advantage of stealth. Eventually, they rounded a bend in the tunnel and came across a train with flickering lights and sparks coming off the side.

  The door to the back car was completely torn off its hinges.

  “I guess we know which direction it went,” Maxi said and Daisuke gave her a scowl. He climbed into the car followed by Maxi and Farhad. Belinda was in the middle and Patti and Flav took the rear.

  The interior was chaos: Bags, blood, bodies, bullet holes, and a few more of the soldiers with their limbs torn off. They saw giant claw marks on the wall for the next car over. Daisuke pulled out his shotgun from an invisible holster on his back. She wasn’t sure that the weapon would be enough, but had noticed enchanted rounds among the ammo selection in the Free Market, so perhaps Daisuke had something the poor NPC souls didn’t have.

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Daisuke nodded to Maxi, and she opened the door to the next car over. He pumped the shotgun and blasted. A blur bowled him over and crashed through the party until its charge was stopped by Flav, who had successfully used a skill called Stone of the Earth and his skin turned into rock.

  The next few moments happened seemingly at the same time. Daisuke recovered and jumped to his feet while pulling a sword in one move. The creature was less a solid form but more like a black cloud with claws and the face of a panther. It clawed and bit Flav with such rapid fire attacks it looked more like he had been assaulted by an amorphous blender than a creature.

  Dalek fired the death beam into the cloud, Belinda who had been flung into a seat embank didn’t stand from her prone position but launched clockwork critters that unfurled from her vest and charged the cloud. Patti placed her hands on Flav’s back and healed as chunks of his flesh, that had turned hard as stone, were being chipped away by the flurry like a jackhammer on concrete.

  Maxi fired a Mind Shard at the creature, and lept out of her body into the astral plane with massive angelic sword in hand that rivaled any Final Fantasy weapon she had ever seen. Time moved slower on the astral plane and she realized that the creature was less a cloud but more a solid form. It only looked like a cloud outside of the astral plane because it was so fast.

  The moment she left her body it seemed to coalesce into a large, black, and bone thin cat with slender limbs with large teeth and claws. The feature that struck her the most was the deep abyss for eyes. She had seen eyes like them once before, Yancy.

  Her sword sliced through the hide of the creature and caused a massive gash. It was enough for the creature to yelp and turn to her in a growl. She snapped back into her body and Flav collapsed to the ground, his body shredded and barely recognizable. Patti cried out and knelt by his side. Tears formed in her eyes.

  The creature stared at Maxi and snarled. She realized that she was no longer on the astral plane but in the real world and the creature was completely visible. It was watching her.

  Before she could send out another mind shard, Belinda’s critters had finished their transformation process from the little boxes that she stored on her vest into the racoons, cats, and other creatures that were all jagged edges and sharp points.

  The cat with the knife paws raked the neck of the shadow cat and with another blur, it swatted the critter. The knife cat crashed through the window into the tunnel, and the cloud of black was gone and out the back door before the others could even land their blows.

  “Follow it,” Maxi said to Dalek and she jumped up and grabbed two of Dalek’s arms. Her pet sag momentarily but the rotors blurred and lifted her off the ground.

  “No wait!” Farhad yelled, who at this point only been futzing with his Palm Pilot device ever since the battle started. He jumped just as they were building speed and held Maxi by a thigh. Dalek sped out of the car and down the tunnel at breakneck speeds.

  “Why did you do that?” Maxi yelled, barely audible over the wind.

  “I don’t think you can kill it!” Farhad screamed back. His voice sounding like a distant squeak.

  “I think it’s weak against psychic attacks. We’re chasing it into a team of PIs. We got this.”

  “I think it’s from the dark dimension.”

  “The what?” Maxi said, but it was too late. They were rapidly approaching a orb of floating light in the tunnel that was illuminating a scene where a black blur was bouncing between people in fedoras and trench coats being assaulted by the thing. The creature seemed to be winning even with the full force of their psychic might.

  The cat finished shredding a PI and was weaving its way to another when she launched another Mind Shard and the time seemed to slow again. The creature coalesced into a cat form as it raked the last few few blows and launched off the body of the unlucky PI collapsed to the ground

  She saw tendrils attempting to restrain it and astral bodies with medieval weaponry whizzing blades just barely by it. The creature dodged the attacks and wove through tendrils with skill and grace she had never seen. It was an awesome sight in a traditional sense of the word. The display was equal parts beautiful and terrifying.

  A lance appeared in her astral hand that was massive and silver. She blinked across the battlefield to just before where she thought the death cat would be. She appeared where she had intended but the cat had anticipated her move this time and it juked to the right, her attack missing entirely. The creature slashed her across the chest.

  She was back in her body. Three claw marks had torn through her legendary shirt and blood dripped from the wound. A read out in her glasses said, “Shadow Cat clawed Maxi for 79 damage.”

  “How?” She said as Dalek set her and Farhad down.

  But there wasn’t time to talk. The cat tore through another one of Takeshi’s group. She noticed now that that cat wasn’t only fighting in the real world, but the astral one too. One of the PIs bounced out of his body for a Mind Shard. For the split second he was out, the cat attacked with such ferocity that the silver cord tethering the man to his body was severed. His astral body floated away dissipating into nothingness. At the same time his physical body went limp.

  “Distract it,” Farhad said and dashed around the edges of the battlefield tossing out disks that expanded from his belt to the size of a large body shield.

  Maxi didn’t risk another Mind Shard as she had probably gotten lucky each time she had used it. Instead she pulled out her long sword and did a Leap of Faith in the creature’s path. Rather than putting her astral body in harm’s way, she endangered her physical one and it worked.

  She surprised it yet again as it impaled itself on her sword and knocked her and the creature over. They rolled to stop at Joaquin’s feet who was the cat’s next victim. The beast wasn’t dead. It twitched and jumped to its feet with a sword sticking out the side.

  Takeshi and the other PIs didn’t skip a beat. They all launched tendrils and Mind Shards at the sametime. The thing was tangled, cut, smashed, and otherwise brutalized. However, the advantage was already gone as it snapped free from the tendrils and while bloodied from the attacks and Maxi’s sword still hanging from its side, it charged her.

  “Now Maxi! Now!” Farhad yelled. “Push it to the center.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Farhad pressing a button on his Palm Pilot and the discs he had been placing on the battlefield all opened to a black hole that reminded Maxi of the old cartoons that once only played on Saturday mornings where the character would place an opaque black circle on the ground, and the victim would fall through, often accompanied by a comic screaming noise.

  SIx turrets rose from the darkness and swiveled to the center of the battlefield. The Shadow Cat connected with Maxi and raked its claws against her like it had with Flav. She could see her health bar draining, giving her seconds at most. She twisted so she and the cat were facing where the turrets would converge and pumped all her remaining psy points into a Physic Tsunami that blasted the cat and anyone caught in the wave back.

  The creature flew back through the air as the turrets fired. The PIs who weren’t slammed into the wall of the tunnel by her attack jumped out of the way while hundreds of slugs were fired into a point of the center of the room where the cat was helplessly flying through the air toward.

  The shadow creature passed through the convergence point and toppled to the ground on the other side. It was riddled with so much firepower that it looked more like the remnants of a meat grinder than the beast that almost ended her life.

  Farhad didn’t need to shut down the firing sequence as since all the turrets were aimed at generally the same point, they were caught up in their own crossed fire and looked as if they had been through a junkyard scrapper. Maxi felt lightheaded and collapsed to the ground. She was at 1 life point.

  Joaquin was the nearest. He caught her on the way down and put her gently on the floor. She could feel the pressure of his hands on her as he attempted to staunch the bleeding. Her vision went dark.

  ***

  Maxi woke up on her chair at her desk a few hours later. She wasn’t gasping for breath, which meant she had been breathing and wasn’t dead. Joaquin must have been successful in helping her not bleed out. Her shirt was still torn and slowly mending the fabric and there were red soak field bandages on her where she could feel the wounds mending.

  She heard the clatter of a keyboard and popped up from her chair. Farhad wasn’t at his desk, but Daisuke was, and he looked relatively unscathed. Flav was still in his chair with his crumpled, now useless armor that had been torn apart by the Shadow cat.

  What struck Maxi as odd was that Patti and Belinda were also healing in their chairs. There was what looked like a cage on their heads as if they had been decapitated. Maxi had seen the cage once before. It was when Daisuke had his head forcibly removed from his body, and the cage was used to keep it in place while he regenerated.

  Maxi remembered Patti and Belinda being alright after the attack, so how had they become decapitated?

  “What happened to them?” Maxi indicated to her companions.

  “You should rest,” Daisuke looked up from his keyboard. “You don’t have a lot of strength and the daily raid is coming up soon.

  “I asked what happened to them,” Maxi said a little more forcefully. She wasn’t going to be gaslit. Not now, not with the possibility that he was, what did Farhad say? From the Shadow Dimension?

  Daisuke stared at her blankly for a second and then said, “There was another one of those Shadow Cats. It got Belinda and Patti.”

  “I suppose you took care of it?” Maxi baited him. Judging by the amount of firepower it took to take down one of them, she doubted Daisuke could handle it on his own. Unless he was holding back like Yancy had been.

  “It ran away before I could reach it. Patti and Belinda had just been unlucky enough to be in its way.” Daisuke said.

  Before she could say anything back, Farhad entered with three Bento boxes from the cafeteria.

  “I got us all a booster bun,” Farhad said. “On me, not from the Office Pool funds. Considering the last quest rewards were quite lucrative.”

  Maxi took her box, and Farhad handed the other one to Daisuke. They both sat at their desks. Maxi decided to sit back down at hers and heal. She pulled up the quest results. The rewards were quite lucrative indeed.