A complication arose before he’d even managed to exit the storage unit. He took it slow, rolling the garage door up inch by inch, crouching down to peek through a small gap to make sure nothing was waiting outside to ambush him. No monsters lingered around, to his relief, but any positive feelings were short-lived.

  -100 Aura

  “What the hell?” John yelped. He looked around. Seeing nothing, he sputtered angrily to himself, “Why?! There aren’t even any monsters around!”

  -100 Aura

  “Are you serious? Just talking to myself—”

  John shut his mouth, forcing the words back down his gullet like they were rotten meat. They pooled in his belly, burning, and he spent a moment glaring at nothing. He must have been subconsciously working under the assumption that the Aura mechanic only applied to situations directly involving monsters, since gaining and losing it had seemed to always involve them somehow, but that was evidently not the case. Unless…

  His heart skipped a beat and his eyes sharped.

  Unless the Aura system was inadvertently giving him a hint that there was a monster waiting nearby that he couldn’t see.

  With a frustrated growl, John threw caution to the wind and snapped the garage door open. It wasn’t like it was particularly loud anyway, he’d just been erring on the side of caution. As soon as it was open high enough for him to walk through without stooping his head, he strode out into the garage lot, a new golf club resting against his shoulder. A sand wedge this time. He had the rest of the set of clubs in the golf bag strapped diagonally across his back. A veritable arsenal, in this situation.

  “Show yourself,” he snarled with what he hoped was a menacing tone. His voice had never been particularly deep. “I know you’re there.”

  Only the wind answered him, kicking up puffs of dust and detritus. The eyeball monster’s corpse had almost entirely melted away now, leaving only a foul purple-ish black puddle and a few chunks of meat and other gross internal bits behind. The rest of the scene was the same as he’d left it.

  There was really nothing else here.

  -100 Aura

  For fuck’s sake! Now I’m back to zero!

  John clenched his jaw, tightening his hands around the grip of his sand wedge until his knuckles popped. The unfairness of it all clawed at his gut, but he had no choice but to endure it stoically. Apparently, he’d be deducted Aura for embarrassing acts even if there was no one there to see it—human or monster.

  And the system seemed to have strong opinions on what constituted embarrassing. He was just surprised he hadn’t been penalised for testing out the upgrades back there.

  Silently seething, John shoved one hand into the pockets of his jeans while the other propped his golf club up against his shoulder. As he listened to the endless sounds of carnage echoing from all around London, it started to hit him how insane this entire situation was.

  Putting aside the Aura for a moment, the capital city of one of the wealthiest countries on Earth was under attack by hordes of monsters. If it was happening in London, it was surely happening everywhere else, too. The fiery sky surely most likely stretched all around the globe.

  How many people had died in the time it took him to escape the restaurant? How many lives had been snuffed out between him charging out the back door and throwing himself into a wheelie bin? How many innocent people had faced final moments of pain and terror while he was fighting the eyeball monster?

  A lump lodged itself in his throat as John wondered whether anyone he cared about was still alive. There weren’t many even before all this. Mum and Dad, of course. Gran, his one living grandparent. Sophie, as much of an annoying little TikTok zoomer normie shithead as she was. There were a few people he could probably call friends, too, though they hadn’t kept in touch much since school. Ben, Max, Joe. Some of the guys online he played games or talked about nerd shit with, though he didn’t know their real names.

  It was a heavy realisation. The chances that any of them had been gifted some kind of special ability like his were impossible to guess. He was yet to interact with another human being in any significant capacity, and for all he knew, he was the only one who’d been granted this kind of reality-hacking cheat code. Conversely, it could be that everyone had been given power.

  He’d need to investigate. Which would require talking to other people. Strangers. Why did that sound more daunting than fighting monsters?

  Whatever the case, all those things were a question for later. John had become pretty good at compressing his emotions into a tiny little ball and locking them away deep inside himself to deal with later—AKA never. These were admittedly quite a bit more serious than usual, but he managed to get them nicely compartmentalised after a minute or so of breathing deeply and fighting off tears.

  Right now, he needed to build up Aura. Now that he knew he could lose it even with no monsters nearby, he had to make sure not to act like a dork at any time, even when he was alone. Easier said than done, of course. Being cool didn’t come easily to him, to put it mildly. It hadn’t gone well the few times he’d tried. Those memories were thoroughly suppressed, but the shape of them was enough to leave him in mild astonishment that he’d acquitted himself so well against the eyeball monster.

  Figuring he’d just fuck it up if he tried too hard, John settled for the aloof, mysterious archetype. Stuffing his sand wedge back in the golf bag, he pulled up his hood, shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans, wiped his expression so he looked utterly uninterested in the end of the world, and ambled towards the exit of the storage unit lot with an unhurried gait.

  +100 Aura

  He held back a sigh of relief at that small bit of encouragement.

  The residential street was still abandoned, and he decided to head in the direction less noise was coming from. It was a little hard to tell when the air was constantly filled with a dizzying cacophony of sirens, explosions, distant screaming, and more unintelligible mayhem, but some concentration combined with a dollop of logic led him to believe it was better to head East, away from the more central areas of the city. He figured more people meant more dangerous monsters, while he wanted weaklings to farm Aura from.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  Reaching the end of the street without incident buoyed his confidence. He turned left this time. He walked slowly in the middle of the road, since he couldn’t hear any sign of active vehicles, and it would probably make him look more mysterious and uncaring, like the apocalypse was just another day for him.

  +100 Aura

  It was hard to keep his expression unbothered as he passed the houses, with their ruined doors and windows. Bloodstains were everywhere. Still no sign of bodies. He didn’t know whether to be relieved by that or not.

  Turning the next corner presented him with his first problem. He came to a halt barely beyond the threshold, caught in indecision.

  The moment he saw the monster halfway down the street that loomed taller than a transit van, every instinct screamed at him to run away.

  It was red as exposed muscle all over, long and skeletal like a stick bug but walking like a biped creature. Its head was a red skull with fractal horns extending its height by a good two feet, and its arms had too many pivot points, letting it retract them like an accordion. Every few moments, it would snap them out to grasp onto something at random, faster than John’s improved reflexes by far. It had to be twice his height.

  Most importantly, it was facing away from him.

  His rational mind sympathised with the emotional-instinctual side of him, thoroughly agreeing that there was no chance in hell that he was fighting that thing.

  The only question was how to avoid it without losing Aura. It hadn’t seen him yet. If he ran away, he’d undoubtedly be deducted—even though it was obvious he wasn’t strong enough to fight a thing like that yet. He couldn’t get around it by using the same tactic he’d employed on the eyeball monster, either, because he had no intention of luring it to another area he could fight it in.

  An idea came to him, and he put it to the test. He figured if it failed, he could just run away anyway. Losing Aura was preferable to dying, but avoiding both was the ideal scenario.

  With a sigh, he shrugged his shoulders and turned away from the monster, casually continuing on as if he hadn’t been about to turn that corner. His hands remained in his pockets. “Man, I don’t feel like wasting my time on such a weakling right now.”

  +100 Aura

  Elation filled him as he strolled away, making sure to look unhurried and unconcerned. It was all he could do not launch into a little victory dance. He’d done it! Now he had a technique for avoiding fights against scary-looking monsters while gaining Aura. Sure, it wouldn’t work every time, but he had a tested method, and that knowledge gave him a lot more confidence.

  Enough confidence that he tried to inject a bit of swagger into his walk and adopt a cockier expression as he continued on. It made him feel like a total fucking douchebag, considering all the evidence of carnage and mortal struggle that surrounded him, but what choice did he have? This was his best chance of survival. At least no one saw him acting like this.

  The next monster he encountered didn’t seem so bad, relatively speaking. Not compared to the slenderman stick insect with its retractable arms. The sight of it still made him want to cry and run away, though.

  About two-hundred metres along the road, it was crouching in the ruined doorway of a three-story detached white house that had probably been quite expensive before the end of the world almost certainly crashed the property market. Red stains coated the walls in great splatters on either side of the door, as well as the monster itself, which was a metre-tall humanoid rat creature with matted and mangy pale fur. It was chittering as its long nose tested the air, sniffing at the blood on the walls. Its eyes were oddly reptilian

  John stared at it for a long moment, distantly wondering how many people’s blood soaked its fur. A single person could produce a lot of gore, he knew. This thing hadn’t necessarily killed a lot of people. While monstrous, it didn’t appear anywhere near as dangerous as the upright stick insect thing back there or the tar-goat from the restaurant. Those things had probably killed a lot more.

  So, even with the indignation roaring through him, he couldn’t attribute his decision to slay it to some kind of moral righteousness. It was a factor, certainly. But the truth was, he fancied his chances against it, and he needed to gather more Aura.

  John reached blindly for a club. His fingers closed around the hefty head of a driving wood. Perfect.

  Then, he took a deep breath, pausing to consider how to play this. It was possible he’d get penalised for attacking a monster so soon after disdainfully declaring another clearly more dangerous one as not worth his time. In that case, he’d need a better justification than moral umbrage.

  Looking at its rat-like face with crooked buck teeth and squinty yellowed eyes, an idea occurred to him.

  Stepping onto the driveway and approaching the monster, he growled, “Oi. Your ugly face makes me sick. I can’t allow you to breathe the same air as me.”

  +100 Aura

  Eugh. I don’t know what I’d do if anyone heard me say that…

  Luckily, no one was around to hear him. On the other hand, the rat heard him perfectly fine. With a warbling screech, it spun to face him. Its yellowed eyes went wide, and it wasted no time in charging right at him. Upright. On two legs. It was really fucking weird.

  John’s upgrades hadn’t suddenly turned him into a gigachad superwarrior, but Agility, Mind, and Strength had done enough that it wasn’t through complete luck that he timed his full-power swing just right for the head of his driving wood to slam right into the rat monster’s temple as it came into range. It collapsed bonelessly to the ground. The blow had left a clear dent in its skull, but it was still trying to push itself back to its feet, feverish eyes swivelling towards John.

  John spat to one side. It seemed down for the count, but not out. Might as well take the chance while he had it. “Damn. That just made you uglier. Makes me want to kill you even more.”

  +100 Aura

  He grimaced. Only one hundred? What was governing how many Aura points he was awarded, anyway? Were those last quips not cringe and cheesy enough? Was there not enough danger? No obvious way to test it jumped out at him right then, so he lifted his club above his head, then brought it down again in a brutal blow, like he was wielding a sledgehammer. It hit with a meaty thud. The rat monster squealed and collapsed again, but it was clearly still trying to move.

  Three more blows interspersed with corny one-liners insulting its appearance dealt with that, and soon the monster was decaying just like the last.

  +100 Aura

  +100 Aura

  +100 Aura

  Once it was over, John checked up and down the street to ensure the little altercation hadn’t drawn any unwanted attention, then took a moment to catch his breath. He was back up to 800 Aura now. Conflicting desires started to prepare for battle within him; on one side, the part of him that wanted to pump up the tangible stats he already knew for the sake of survival, while the other side wanted to see what he could actually get from Spells or Skills. Just 200 more. Tantalisingly close.

  A sigh marked his decision, or lack thereof. For now, he’d keep hold of the Aura and do his best not to lose any. Gathering 200 more shouldn’t be too hard. If the situation called for it, he’d pump Aura straight into upgrades before he could risk losing any.

  The club he’d used to bash the rat to death was now bent and hopelessly gory, so he made sure to look casual as he tossed it away. It gave him no Aura, unfortunately, but it was best to stay in character, so to speak.

  Leaving the house behind, he set off down the street once again. He made it all the way to the end before he spied another monster. This one was more problematic.

  Mainly because it didn’t even give him a chance to banter.