A glowing blue hue rapidly spread across his skin as it cracked and tore. This pain he felt with maddening clarity, but it only served to fuel his rage to even greater heights. As if underwater, his hair flowed with thousands of motes of toxin that weaved through the strands.

  Suddenly, Frank’s focus switched completely to the figure of light, several daggers rocketing forth with deadly accuracy, their perceived speed nowhere near what it had been.

  With a snarl, Eik maneuvered Viper Fang up to deflect the three first projectiles with now incomparable ease, the deafening clang of metal a testament to his unbelievable strength. Hastened by Movement Boost, he launched into the air as if by a trebuchet, the fourth dagger chasing him like a homing missile.

  A smirk snuck onto Frank’s lips as he watched the impending hit but it transformed into pale dread when Eik whirled around and snatched the weapon right out of the air.

  “Wh—” he gasped, unable to believe his eyes.

  Eik didn’t answer as he sailed down and landed right in front of the bandit leader, his irises glowing bright blue when he looked up at the man. Those weren’t the eyes of a person. There was something otherworldly behind them. Something primal that wasn’t supposed to be here on Earth.

  Extreme speed causing him to practically flicker out of existence, Eik appeared behind the heavily mustached and stabbed a long, slender spike of toxin into his rotator cuff. With a howl, Frank delivered a kick that sent Eik stumbling as the man himself activated the movement skill that resembled Sonja’s Disengage.

  He used the same moment to throw a dagger bathed in transparent energy — this ability, too, resembling one of Sonja’s, but this time Boosted Arrow. It spun and flew at twice the velocity of the other knives but Eik still managed to knock it away.

  Even before Frank could touch the ground again, Eik was there again, flipping several times through the air as he built momentum to slam his foot into the butt of the toxic spear in an axe kick that plunged it forcefully down through the bandit leader’s upper arm. The penetration was just deep enough for the bloodied tip to poke out near the elbow joint.

  Frank shrieked in unbridled agony as shock and pain drained his body of energy to the point where he sunk to his knees. His wailing continued until Eik placed a finger on the butt of the spike and triggered Acceleration.

  Overwhelming fear joined pain as Frank watched his skin become permeated by the glow of the spear impaled in his arm. Frantically, he attempted to yank it out but with the angle of the insertion and weakness hindering his every move, his desperate efforts proved futile.

  “No, no, no, no, no, no! Please, please, don’t do it!” he begged, finding no sympathy in Eik’s cold eyes. “Greggers! Merchant Lord Greggers hired me! That’s what you wanted to know, right? I swear it’s him! Merchant Lord Greggers is my employer! He’s the one you really want, not me! I’m just the guy taking the order!”

  “Too… late… for that now,” Eik said, finding it difficult to gather his thoughts enough to form a coherent sentence. The blue spike was already revving up for a violent detonation, seeming to almost vibrate inside Frank’s arm.

  “No, stop, please! You can’t do this! You said you would make the world a better pla—”

  His words were cut off when his entire arm, including part of his torso erupted into red mist with a violent blast. The bandit leader was thrown sideways, spinning a couple of times before he came to rest against the outer wall of a dilapidated building.

  He lay silent, arm completely gone at the shoulder.

  Eik felt the presence of his toxin in a couple of systems closer to the entrance to the Black Fang hideout. Growling, he launched himself toward the sensations, preparing to invade. Both hosts were unmoving on the ground but that didn’t matter much. The pull of the toxin was too strong to ignore.

  He touched down near one of the hosts and reached down, Profound Toxin swirling around his hand with eagerness to complete the invasion. A noise reached him and at first it held no meaning at all.

  Incessantly, the noise repeated itself, again and again, until he finally stood up and looked around. Something was moving around over there. It was a person. That’s where the noise was coming from.

  It was a voice. Eik it shouted. He was Eik. The person was Michael. Michael was shouting Eik’s name. Michael was calling for him.

  As if a veil fell away from his eyes, Eik snapped out of it. He dashed for his friends, both Heath and Sonja clearly going downhill fast. “Mikey! Mikey, what happened?” Eik asked. In that same moment his legs failed him and he crashed to the ground, the momentum carrying him the rest of the way to the team.

  “You released Backflow and then just went cray! What happened?”

  “I… I’m not—” Eik tried but his memories felt opaque. “I’m not sure…”

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  “Whatever!” the healer shouted. “Get over here and help me. We need to get the both of them better help than I can provide here. And it needs to be now!”

  Eik stumbled over and tried to get Sonja onto his shoulder. He was in marginally better condition than he had been after using Backflow in the fight against Rock Fist Bart, but his knees and thighs still felt like jelly as he tried to stand with Sonja’s weigh added to his own. With the way his head was swirling, it seemed a miracle in itself that he wasn’t unconscious on the ground right now.

  “Frank is…” he mumbled, eyes wandering to the collapsed man.

  “Dead? Yeah, that seems pretty likely. He’s missing half of… a bunch of different parts. Come on, we have to go!” Michael said hurriedly and hauled Heath onto his back.

  On the very first step Eik crumbled over with a grunt of exhaustion, Sonja’s body tumbling back down. Every muscle fiber in his body felt stretched and torn beyond their limits. “Mikey, get me—” he huffed, breath ragged. “Get me a potion, will you? I can’t move…”

  “Is that going to do anything for you in that state?”

  “It better… I feel like I’m about to keel over and die,” he breathed, clenching his eyes shut as a surge of agony ripped relentlessly through his body.

  Michael stuck his hand into the rucksack of holding. It was so compact and well designed, that even wearing it during a fight wouldn’t be too much of a hindrance, although Eik would prefer to get his hands on another bag of holding that fit on his belt where he could keep the rucksack of holding. If that was even a possibility. “There’s nothing in here.”

  “What?” Eik asked, still lying with his face in the grass.

  “It feels like a normal rucksack. The bottom is right here where it’s supposed to be.” Michael scratched the inner lining to prove his point.

  “I think Mikla did say something about it being bound to me only or something like that. Grab my hand.”

  “What?”

  “Just grab my hand, dude,” Eik repeated and Michael did. “Alright, now stick my hand into the rucksack.”

  It worked and soon Michael was pouring the green liquid of Potion of Mighty Strength class 2 into Eik’s mouth. Power rocked through him like always but if anything the pain only became worse. Physically, he could now force himself to his feet even under Sonja’s weight, but the pain alone made it an extremely difficult task mentally.

  Biting back pain, they jogged out of there, stepping over a couple of Black Fang bandits. Some of them had wounds and cuts from Heath and Sonja’s weapons, but many of them also had clear traces of the aftermath of Profound Toxin.

  Eik couldn’t help but stare. He hadn’t exactly meant for it to go this far. “Was this okay? That we came after the Black Fang like this?” he asked the air.

  “I don’t really know,” Michael said. “That Jane lady said they would come after us for going against them, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve heard of them doing stuff like that before. Do you not think they would have done what she promised?”

  “No, they probably would have.”

  “Then that’s just how the world is now, isn’t it?”

  Eik shot him a glance. “Didn’t really expect something like that to come out of you, Mikey.”

  The healer shrugged as much as he could with Heath’s massive body slung over his shoulder. “It’s become painfully obvious that we’ve been living in a bubble here. Even with all the monsters and super powers and shit like that, I’ve been thinking that our lives were more or less stable. But that’s just not the case, is it?”

  Eik let him continue.

  “Nothing is fuckin’ okay, man! We’re living in the freaking apocalypse and I’ve been pretending like everything is normal! Well, it’s not! And now some crazy gang wants to kill us? This is just how things are now, as far as I’m concerned!” He was getting increasingly agitated by the second.

  Eik took another potion as he felt the effects wane. He couldn’t exactly disagree with Michael’s sentiment. “Let’s hurry back,” he said and increased the pace.

  ***

  Sonja didn’t wake up for almost two and a half days. Eik had managed to pull some strings to get a high-ranked healer to come in and work on her and while they managed to get her into a stable condition pretty quickly, the healer wasn’t medically knowledgeable enough to explain why she still remained comatose.

  A swift tourniquet along with medicine and Heal from Michael had staunched much of the profuse blood flow from Heath’s leg wound. It had been a very bad wound but he was already feeling a lot better.

  Eik injuries were… extensive. Although not as severe as the first time he’d used Backflow, his skin looked as if it had been flayed in a medieval punishment performance. Somehow, despite the madness that had overtaken his mind, he’d managed to hold back somewhat on the Profound Toxin he had pumped into his own body.

  The Potions of Mighty Strength class 2 he had used to push through the weakness to get the team home had not done him any favors either. Weakness addled him for a number of days after and the crutch he used for the first two days made him feel decidedly not very D-rank-like.

  Hopefully the practice with Backflow inside the realm of Profound Toxin, that he had every intention of working into his schedule, would make it possible to fine tune the doses well enough to not put him at the brink of death every time he used the ability trait.

  By the time the departure for the Championship tournament at the Nidafjeld Alliance headquarters came around, they had all managed to recover well enough to go. Heath and Sonja weren’t going to be fighting but Eik was luckily more than well enough to fight at full strength.

  On the day of departure, Eik, Olivia, the team, and all the Championship participants met up at the Central Square where Mikla and Atla waited, the rolling fracture waiting patiently to take them through to another world.

  All of the first time travelers looked very nervous about the thought of stepping through one of the portals that had been notorious for allowing the monsters to invade Earth for years. It would be fun to see them stumble around, fracture drunk, after being warped through space time for the first time.

  Countless people, arguably a majority of the population of Forest, had shown up to see them off. Their entry into the Championships would be the first step of a hopefully safe and stabilizing relationship with the alliance. This could be what saved them from certain doom down the line. What secured Earth’s future.

  They waved to the crowd, many of who were cheering, although many looked uncertain about what to think about it all. Before they could step through, a voice suddenly reverberated across the square, drawing all eyes.

  “And thus, ladies and gentlemen, we see them march forth, ready to defend you all from the darkness out there. Now, let us all thank the defender of Earth and his companions as they set out to protect,” the voice bellowed, some kind of sonic boost at work. Eik craned his neck to get a look at the speaker. What the hell was going on here? “Everyone, Eik Magnasen, the proud hand of our great city of Forest!”

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