Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

"They found me." Mary pushed herself upright, wincing as the wound pulled at her side.

The footsteps stopped. Right outside.

[LEWD LEVELING SYSTEM]

[Multiple hostile ability users detected. Three. Levels: 8, 6, 5.]

[Shadow walking at level 7 may escape. Host may not.]

Well, I thought. That’s specific.

Mary’s shadows thickened around her arms, darker and more deliberate than before. Level seven. Whatever she’d been running on when I’d walked through the door was already a different thing now.

"Can you fight?" I asked, pulling on my pants.

She looked at the door. "I can run." A pause. "You?"

The handle turned. The door opened.

Blonde hair. A mask shaped like a face, covering everything. He moved with the easy authority of someone who had done this many times and had stopped finding it interesting. Behind him, a woman. Blonde braided hair falling at her back. A sword in its sheath. Also masked.

The third stayed outside. Two in the room. One on the door.

[LEWD LEVELING SYSTEM]

[Mary Stam: Years of documented government opposition. You are now categorized as her ally. Do not get caught.]

Perfect, I thought.

"CGI," the man said, with the relaxed confidence of someone who didn’t expect to be argued with. "Both of you are coming with us."

The voice landed somewhere in the back of my brain and stayed there. Familiar in a way I couldn’t immediately place. Something in the cadence. I had heard that specific quality of authority before, in a different context, in a different room. I couldn’t place it with a mask in the way.

Mary didn’t wait for me to finish the thought. She snapped. The lights went out.

"Becky." The man’s voice, clipped and immediate. "Don’t let her go."

The woman, Becky, moved in the dark and I caught something impossible. The darkness itself, the actual physical dark of the room, bending toward her sword hand. Then light came back, and the sword wasn’t steel anymore. It was condensed shadow, solid and swinging.

[Material transmutation.]

She was on Mary in seconds. She hit a shadow. Mary had already moved. Mary came back with a punch that found the leader’s jaw.

I sent the discharge at Becky before I’d made a full decision.

[God-Hand Punch — Electrical discharge]

She hit the wall. Then I watched her make the wall soft, sponge-like, absorbing the impact, standing back up like the physics of the situation were negotiable.

Level eight? I thought. Right.

The leader had done something to Mary I hadn’t tracked completely. She came flying sideways and I caught her, which put us both against the far wall and the two agents between us and the door.

Mary was breathing hard. The wound was worse.

"You can’t win this," the leader said, calmly. The voice again. Something tugging at the edge of recognition. "This doesn’t have to get worse than it already is. Dress and we go."

I pulled Mary close and kept my voice below the room.

"Run. I’ll handle the exit."

She didn’t move immediately.

"What is your name?" she asked, which was, objectively, the least convenient moment for introductions.

"Abram Nadez."

The agents waited. Patient. Professional. Two against two in a room that had already seen enough damage, giving us the space to make the right decision. The third one outside, waiting on the door.

"Thank you, Abram," Mary whispered. "I’ll return it if I make it."

She moved. Fast, low, shadow-stepping in the specific pattern of a level seven who knew exactly how to use what she had. She picked up the gun from where it had fallen at Becky’s feet, turned, fired point blank at Becky’s head.

The leader pushed her back before the trigger finished pulling.

The bullet traveled. I watched it, the impossible slow-motion of a moment that mattered, heading directly for the back of Becky’s skull.

It flattened. Into a coin. Into something rubber. It bounced off the wall. Becky hadn’t even flinched.

Mary Stam walked into the light coming through the window and was gone.

I stood in room 34 of the Post Apocalypse Hotel. A telekinetic man. A material transmuter. Both of them looking at me with the patience of people who had just watched their primary target escape and were now recalculating.

My face is behind a mask, I thought. They don’t know who I am. If I get out of here without them removing it, I’m nobody.

Miss Brown’s words. Clear and specific. This job goes against the government. Which means if we’re caught... we’re not students anymore.

I needed to not be caught. The table launched at me. Not a decision, a reflex on his end.

[God-Hand Punch]

I hit it mid-air. It exploded backward and he moved toward me, and I let him, because I needed him to touch me and he was going to touch me whether I wanted him to or not, so I moved toward him too.

His hand connected. The discharge moved through him into her. Both of them going down, together, the specific violence of unexpected electricity, and I was already past them, already running, already doing the calculation.

Window. Second floor. Glass. The system heals broken bones. The outside taught me to run on broken bones. This is not new information.

I ran. The window came up fast.

And then I watched it happen. Becky, on the ground, one hand raised, and the glass transforming as I hit it, the pane becoming rubber, bending around me instead of shattering, absorbing the impact and releasing me into the night air. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

I fell. Hit the street. Rolled.

The city moved around me, indifferent and bright, music from somewhere above, people on the pavement who had not noticed a masked figure coming through a second floor window.

[Vitality: Impact damage. Closing.]

I got up. Mary is out, I thought. Mira might be with Wells and Annabelle. The mission is almost done.

I ran toward City Square. The male figure’s voice sat in the back of my head, still unresolved, still familiar in a way that hadn’t clicked yet.

Later, I told it. Figure it out later.

Then something shifted. Not outside. Inside.

A pressure I hadn’t felt before, like something had latched on without asking permission.

[Warning: Foreign ability detected]

[You have been marked]

...Right.