The world was a pencil drawing rendered in the oily darkness of John's own making. Within the shroud of his Shadow Stream, sound was a muffled, distant thing, and the cloying air of the office labyrinth felt strangely still.

Jade moved through this pocket of manufactured night like a phantom, her plate armour making no sound as she crept up behind their target. The bee monster was blissfully unaware, its attention fixed on methodically tearing pages out of a shredded textbook.

It was taking a lot of effort to curve the darkness in a way that let everyone see what they were doing while blocking the world out. It left John standing there, looking like a wraith of shadows, watching with his arms crossed from a few metres away, a silent observer in his own spell.

Beside him, Doug stood with a restless energy, his massive fists clenching and unclenching. Lily was a statue of focus, her crossbow tracking the creature's every minute twitch.

It was overkill, bringing the whole team for a single green, but their slow, methodical clearing of this bizarre, non-Euclidean office space had bred a cautious routine. They had learned the hard way that these portal worlds often saved their worst surprises for moments of complacency.

Jade raised her machete. The golden projection flickered into existence, smaller than usual, fashioned through the increased control she was getting from focusing on that one spell. She was a breath away from the kill, a hair from drawing the projection across a bug monster's throat with the practiced efficiency of someone who'd done the exact same thing a thousand times in the last hour.

And then the world ended.

Well, the world had already ended a week and a bit ago, now. That was just what it felt like. The sound that hit them couldn't be described as anything other than apocalyptic.

A deep, bone-jarring vibration that pulsed up through the soles of John's boots, making the floor tremble like the skin of a massive drum. It was a pressure that built in the air, a presence so immense it felt like the entire office was being squeezed in a giant, invisible fist.

Then came the sound itself. A shriek of tortured metal and a bone-shaking boom that tore through the muffled quiet of his Shadow Stream as if it wasn't there. John's enhanced hearing, a passive benefit of his high-level stats, was a curse in that moment. The noise hit him with a spike of pure sonic force that made his teeth ache and his vision swim.

Before he could even process the assault on his senses, the far wall of the office disintegrated, and the stickbug boss monster tore through the space where the wall had been. Its grotesque assembly of brown chitinous rods moved with a speed that beggared belief, even after everything John had seen. It speared through the air like it had been fired from the world's most powerful harpoon, its legs and antennae tucked to its sides to make it look like a solid brown javelin. He could see ripples of distortion from its passing.

It paid no mind to the labyrinthine structure of the office. Cubicle walls, desks made of bone, shelves stacked with jars of eyeballs, they were all annihilated by its passage. It smashed through them, and in its wake, they simply ceased to be coherent structures, exploding into clouds of shrapnel and dust from the sheer sonic pressure of its movement.

The dozens of green-souled insectoid drones that had been "working" at their desks were obliterated, their bodies turned to a fine green mist without the stickbug ever making physical contact.

John's group had thrown themselves to the floor on pure instinct. He felt the displaced air of the monster's passage, a hurricane of force that ripped at his clothes and threatened to tear him from his spot on the floor. His Shadow Stream was shredded, the darkness torn apart and scattered like smoke in a gale.

For a single, terrifying, heart-stopping instant, no more than the blink of an eye, the stickbug was there, directly in front of them, not ten feet away. The world seemed to snap into a moment of perfect clarity. Like he was in Accelerate, but fueled by nothing but adrenaline, not a pinch of mana needed. Its head swivelled. Its two bulbous black eyes, devoid of any light or reflection, fixed directly on John.

There was no malice in its gaze. Not a hint of the anger that had blazed in those eyes just a few hours before when John had shown the audacity to harm it. There was only an alien focus, an awareness so intense it felt like it was touching him. It saw him. It registered him. And then it dismissed him.

The moment was gone as quickly as it came. The stickbug vanished, continuing its rampage down the corridor, its passage marked by a trail of utter devastation. The boom it left in its wake was a secondary explosion, shattering the remaining windows and sending a fresh wave of pressure that made John's ears pop. He felt a trickle of warmth run from his nose.

Silence descended, thick and absolute. For a long moment, none of them moved. They just lay on the floor amidst the wreckage, the dust of pulverized office furniture and monster parts dancing in the air. The bee Jade had been about to kill was gone, vaporized in the boss's wake.

Doug was the first to push himself up, his wide-eyed expression a mask of grim disbelief. "What in the bloody hell was that all about?" he growled, spitting out a mouthful of dust.

"It was the manager," Lily breathed, her voice trembling as she pushed her helmet back. "Seemed like it was in a rush."

John didn't answer. He was still staring down the ruined corridor where the monster had disappeared. His gaze was fixed on the far distance, but his awareness was stretched to the limit by Mana Sense. The signature of the stickbug was already a faint, rapidly receding pinprick at the very edge of his range, and then it was gone. Two-ish kilometres in seconds.

Jade got to her feet, her armour clinking softly. "It looked right at us," she said, her voice low. "It looked right at you, John."

He nodded slowly, wiping the blood from his upper lip with the back of his hand. The feeling of those fathomless black eyes on him lingered, an icy phantom touch on his soul. It hadn't ignored them out of contempt. It had ignored them because something else, something far more important, had its absolute, undivided attention.

Before anyone else could speak, a new sound arrived to fill the silence. It started as an almost subsonic rumble, the same kind of deep vibration that had heralded the stickbug's arrival. But this was different. It wasn't the sharp, focused pressure of a single entity. This was a wave. A tide.

The floor began to tremble again, growing in intensity with every passing second. The rumble became a roar, the sound of a thousand stampeding animals, the sound of a rockslide, the sound of an entire city collapsing in on itself.

John's eyes widened. He didn't need Mana Sense to know what was coming, but it was already active anyway, and the view it provided in his mind's eye was a vision of pure, overwhelming chaos. A solid wall of mana signatures was flooding down the corridor the stickbug had just carved. Not one. Not dozens. Hundreds.

Thousands.

They appeared at the far end of the corridor, a seething, chittering tide of monstrous forms that filled the space from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. They were the grunts, the cannon fodder. The same greens they had been methodically exterminating for hours. Giant beetles, scuttling cockroaches, spindly spider-creatures, and a hundred other varieties of insectoid horror, all moving as one.

They poured into the office space, their collective momentum a force of nature. They flowed over the wreckage, a river of black and green chitin, their countless legs making a sound like a million clicking castanets.

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And just like their leader, they paid John and his team no mind at all.

They stood in the open, fully visible, a small island of stunned humanity in a raging river of monsters. The creatures swarmed around them, their bodies sometimes brushing against John's legs, their foul stench a suffocating miasma.

But not a single one attacked. Not a single one even seemed to register their presence. Their multifaceted eyes were fixed on the distance, their bodies driven by the same overriding purpose that had propelled the manager.

Doug, in a fit of bewildered frustration, swung his fist at a passing beetle the size of a small dog. His blow, which could shatter stone, connected with its carapace with a sickening crunch. The creature was sent spinning into its brethren, but it just righted itself and continued on without a single backward glance, a trickle of green ichor leaking from the dent in its shell.

"They're ignoring us," Lily said, her voice a mixture of awe and trepidation. She loosed a crossbow bolt into the swarm, and it embedded itself in the head of a spider-creature. The monster stumbled, fell, and was immediately trampled into a paste by the unceasing tide. Not a single other monster reacted.

John's mind raced, the pieces of the puzzle clicking into place with a dawning clarity. The stickbug. The stampede. The singular focus that overrode all other instincts.

"Chester," he breathed.

The others turned to look at him.

"What if it's him?" John said, his voice gaining strength as the theory solidified. "What if he's doing this? What if he's alive, and he's drawn the attention of every monster in this entire bloody portal somehow?"

The implication was staggering. If Chester was alive, if he had somehow gained enough power to become the single most important target for an entire army of monsters, then their lost comrade was in the deepest trouble imaginable. But he was alive.

There was no time for debate.

"We're following them," John declared, his voice cutting through the roar of the monstrous river. He looked at the others, his gaze hard and determined.

Without waiting for a reply, he plunged into the tide of monsters, letting the current of chitin and fury carry him forward, deeper into the heart of the labyrinth. Doug, Jade, and Lily exchanged a single glance before following him into the chaos.

As soon as he was within the flow, the noise was incredible. Inside was a deafening surge of chittering, clicking, and the thunderous beat of a million tiny feet. It was like being inside a collapsing building made of insects. John quickly realised they were moving too slow. The current was powerful, but his own two feet couldn't match the frantic, unified pace of the swarm.

"Doug!" John yelled over the cacophony. "Give me a hand!" He motioned to Lily and Jade. "We need to move faster. You take Jade, I'll take Lily."

Doug nodded, his expression grim. He moved with surprising grace through the swarm, scooping Jade up and settling her onto his broad shoulders as if she weighed nothing. Jade, for her part, simply adjusted her grip on her machete and held on, her deadened eyes never wavering.

John turned and knelt slightly. "Hop on."

Lily didn't hesitate, clambering onto his back and wrapping her arms securely around his neck. Her crossbow was still in her hands, held tight against his shoulder. "Just try not to drop me, alright?" she shouted into his ear, her tone wry despite the situation. "My armour's good, but I don't fancy my chances as a speedbump for ten thousand giant cockroaches."

"Wouldn't dream of it," John yelled back, a grim smile touching his lips. He pushed off, his own enhanced strength allowing him to easily carry Lily's weight. Now they could move, weaving through the gaps in the monstrous horde, their speed matching the frantic pace of the stampede.

For a time, they just ran, carried along by the single-minded focus of the swarm. The path the stickbug had carved was a straight line of devastation that ignored the portal world's insane architecture.

They passed through what might have once been a breakroom, where a coffee machine perpetually dripped a thick, black substance like tar that formed into tiny, writhing shapes before melting back into the puddle on the floor. The water cooler beside it was filled with a churning, milky fluid where pale, lidless eyes would occasionally surface to stare blankly for a moment before sinking back into the depths.

They sprinted across a vast open-plan office where skeletal figures in rotted business suits sat at desks, their bony fingers still typing on keyboards made of yellowed teeth. One skeleton was locked in a silent, eternal pantomime of a phone call, its jawbone clicking open and shut, while another methodically fed shredded documents into the empty cavity of its own ribcage. The monitors on their desks were slabs of polished obsidian that showed nothing but the distorted, screaming reflections of anyone who dared to look.

The path then led them down a corridor that suddenly lurched and rotated ninety degrees, gravity shifting with it. John and Doug instinctively adjusted, their boots finding purchase on what had been a wall. The river of monsters flowed around the corner without a moment's hesitation, their countless legs clicking on the vertical surface as if it were solid ground. They swept past a set of glass doors labelled "Human Resources," through which they could see an entire room transformed into a pulsating organic hive, waxy cocoons hanging from the ceiling as giant wasp-like creatures tended to them.

The whole time, not a single monster so much as glanced their way. An idea sparked in John's mind. This was an opportunity. One they couldn't ignore.

"Don't stop shooting!" he yelled to the others. "This is another goddamn buffet! An even better one!"

Understanding dawned on Doug's face, a savage grin spreading across his features. While still running at full tilt with Jade on his shoulders, he began swinging his fists, his augmented strength turning his arms into pistons. Each blow landed with a wet, explosive crunch, sending monsters flying and surely racking up a steady stream of points. Jade, perched above him, used her golden projection to decapitate creatures that came too close.

John, not to be outdone, let his power roar to life. A pulse of Biomancy sent a warm thrum through his muscles, reinforcing his frame against the strain of carrying Lily while moving at such a breakneck pace. His Shadow Stream cloak billowed out. From the churning shadows, he drew his scythe and katana, the phantom weapons solidifying in his hands.

With Lily clinging tight to his back, he launched himself into the air, becoming a spinning avatar of death. He was a whirlwind of polished steel and solidified night, the long arc of his scythe cleaving through the carapaces of giant beetles while his katana flashed in a dark blur, decapitating spider-drones with surgical precision. Each rotation was a perfectly controlled storm of violence, his body twisting and turning in mid-air in a way that should have been impossible, a testament to the raw power keeping him at his peak.

+1000 Aura

+1000 Aura

+1000 Aura

"Christ, John!" Lily yelled, a laugh mixed with her shout. "You're better than a rollercoaster!" Her arms tightened around his neck as he leaped over a pile of monstrous corpses. "I always threw up on rollercoasters, by the way!"

He could feel her laughing, the vibration running through his back. It was a small, absurd moment of levity in the middle of hell, and he found himself grinning.

"This would have taken us days!" Lily shouted, her voice barely audible over the roar. They had just passed through a twisted mockery of a server room, where wires made of pulsating veins snaked across the floor, and now they were running up a staircase that seemed to be spiralling into an open, grey void. "We'd still be stuck on the first floor, trying to figure out which bloody corridor was which!"

"Just be glad we've got a tour guide!" John shot back, leaping a chasm that had opened in the stairs. The wave of monsters flowed over it without breaking stride, a living bridge of chitin. The warped madness of the place was nauseating, but the path of the swarm was an undeniable truth in the chaos. It was their North Star, leading them through the impossible.

And then, just as suddenly as it began, the corridor of devastation opened up. They burst through a final wall of shattered drywall and twisted metal into a space that made John's brain ache just to look at it.

It was an immense, cavernous chamber, a cathedral of corporate insanity. Walkways and staircases crisscrossed the air at impossible angles, some upside down, others spiralling sideways. Doors opened into sheer drops, and fountains in the centre of distant platforms spouted a slow, constant rain of shredded paper. It was a physical manifestation of an M.C. Escher painting, a place where gravity was a polite suggestion at best.

And high above them, running along a walkway that was fixed to what should have been the ceiling, was Chester.

He was screaming, the shrill sound of it eching through the vast chamber. He was also glowing, brighter than John had ever seen him, a radiant beacon of pure life force. He was moving fast, faster than John thought possible, his legs pumping as he fled from a seething horde of monsters that poured onto the walkway behind him.

Further into the mess of impossible architecture, suspended in the very centre of the chamber like a malignant star, was the portal core. It was a colossal green sphere, at least twenty feet in diameter, pulsating with a sickly light. Across its surface was a black hourglass shape that constricted and dilated like the iris of a vast, unblinking goat's eye. And from all around the chamber, tiny white lights, the same lights he now knew to be souls, were streaming towards it, an ethereal river feeding the monstrous heart of this hellscape.

"Found you, fucker," John growled.

Unfortunately, up above, the stickbug was probably thinking the same thing.

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