As Mia stepped through the portal and felt her surroundings change through her Spirit Sense, a sudden bout of vertigo struck her for a short moment as she reoriented herself.

  Taking in a breath of fresh air, not tainted by either the smell of death or the broken mana of the Rift, Mia sagged in relief and wandered forward to where the rest of her team was waiting. As the last two members stepped out behind her, the archway shattered into glittery dust, fading out of existence before touching the ground.

  The soldiers waiting around the Rift cheered at their triumphant return and Mia could hear even a crowd of civilians beyond echoing it. She gave a small, tired smile at that.

  Which was when she went sprawling, a sudden force smacking right into the centre of her chest like a runaway truck.

  Her Lesser Ward shattered, her Amulet following suit after some resistance, all the while her Kinetic Energy Assimilation skill was working in full force.

  Her world went white as she struck the grassy earth, gasping as the breath was knocked from her lungs. A thunderous crack reverberated in the back of her bones, making her ears ring painfully and she moved to cover them instinctively.

  The by now familiar burn of her overheated Amulet brought her back, sizzling against her chest as Her ring’s automatic healing function kicked in.

  She stifled a scream as the piercing agony in her chest radiated outwards, but a small part of her was glad. The pain meant she was alive — despite whatever the hell had attacked her.

  Shouts, screams and magic mixed together in a cavalcade of panic around her as her mind snapped back into reality with the pain quickly dimming.

  Helene was kneeling next to her pushing an Elixir to her mouth while Lina and Clive stood above her like a pair of vigilant guardians against whatever the world might throw her way.

  Mia took a deep breath, no pain. She flexed her muscles — still no pain. Just a buzz, an itchy buzz tingling across her body but primarily concentrated just above her solar plexus.

  Ignoring everything else for now, Mia pushed away her mother’s proffered Elixir and propped herself up to a sitting position. Still no pain, that was good.

  Looking down, she saw blood, her own blood coating the chest section of her shirt and reached over to check. She was almost mechanical, her heartbeat racing while her mind was cold and analytical, unnaturally so.

  I must be in shock. She thought, running her fingertips over the tender skin of her chest, new skin. Then reached down and grabbed the warm something she felt, the something that her healing ring’s magic pushed out of her body. A bullet. Someone shot me.

  That realisation stumped her for a bit, and she just stared at the large lead projectile. It was a big one, well above 9mm.

  ”MIA DRINK THE DAMNED POTION!”

  Mia flinched, shaking her head a little as the Elixir was practically forced into her mouth, vial and all.

  Unwilling to waste it, despite rationally knowing that it was already wasted — seeing as she was perfectly healthy and wasn’t hurting anywhere — Mia drank it down as she slowly tried to make her mind take in all the chaos around her.

  The first shout she heard though, more of a growl than anything made her jump to her feet. “Get OFF OF ME!”

  A hand pulled her back before she could see for herself why on earth Carmilla was shouting. Mia found herself facing an angry Helene, but before the woman could speak Lina spoke over her.

  “You have to stay in the bubble,” the blonde Air mage said, and only now did Mia notice the thick layer of air magic making a dome of swirling air around the four of them. “The shooter could be out there still, you are safe in here. Stay put. Please.”

  “But what about the others?” Mia asked, arcing her head over Clive’s shoulder to catch a glimpse at where Carmilla’s shout was heard from.

  It was just in time to see Brent being sent flying and subsequently smacking into the earth and stopping only after rolling another three metres.

  Mark was there, trying to look placating. Carmilla, furious, had the side of her jaw barely hanging on—a mangled, bloody mess of ligaments and bone.

  The vampire wasn’t seeing him though, her eyes shone red as her flesh re-knit itself. She stared up at a nearby highrise building with murder clear on her mind.

  “Carmilla?” Mia called out, trying her damndest to ignore the panicking crowd of civvies and the soldiers trying to swarm the delving group and drag them off.

  Just as the vampire pushed past a trio of soldiers, sending them all bouncing off of her like children, she froze and looked over at Mia. She blinked slowly, then her eyes sank down to stare at the bloody splatter across Mia’s torso and her murderous expression came back with doubled ferocity..

  “Sit tight,” the vampire said, growling in a tone that could have frozen over the sun. “I’ll go find whoever did that.”

  The burst of motion that followed was almost impossible for Mia’s slower mind to comprehend, but she saw Carmilla turn into a blur and then heard her bounding leaps racing away and out of her range of hearing.

  “Shit,” Mark mumbled under his breath as a squad of ten soldiers formed up around him, forming a wall of flesh to shield the dwarf with their rifles aimed outward protectively.

  A similar scene played out around everyone who’d been in the Rift with Mia and the soldiers even formed up around Lina’s little air bubble.

  Brent was being helped up, and was by the sounds of it fine as was almost everyone else aside from some bruising.

  Christine was gone; Mia assumed the sneaky woman had slipped away at the first sign of danger.

  After a quick check with her hearing, she deduced that only she and Carmilla had been hit. The rest were fine, if scared and angry.

  Nobody wanted to get shot at right after they’d saved this city from a damned army of greenskins, especially not right after when they were all dead tired.

  “Well, fuck,” Mia said smartly, still just blinking around at everything like she was an outside observer. She felt like she was watching a political assassination happening on live TV.

  It didn’t feel real that the target had been her, maybe still was. Mia idly scratched the inwardly wailing pink cat, sending apologetic, ashamed feelings through their bond at its inability to protect her from the bullet.

  The cute little munchkin was crestfallen, its form halfway into melting from shame and almost slipping from Mia’s grasp like some liquid arcane goop. It was cute, and more importantly, it distracted her from everything else. Mainly, that she’d been shot at, by a human, and almost died.

  Fluff. Focus on the fluff, even if it's fake arcane fluff that zaps you when you fluff it too much. Mia decided that once she had the adequate spell crafting skill, she’d improve Mana Familiar enough that the summoned arcane constructs could serve as emotional support fluffs, not just as autonomous murder machines.

  In a whirlwind of activity that Mia only half heartedly followed, the whole delving team was led into a nearby building with the thickest walls and were led into abandoned apartments that only had windows facing an inner garden.

  The soldiers who were there swore to heaven and back that they’d find the culprits and that they’d secure the building they were in.

  Mia was … doubtful of their ability to do so, with sneaky Classers like Christine skulking about in the wide new world, but she was far too tired and in need of a bath to care. A place to crash in was just what she needed right now, and she’d idly noted that all eight remaining members of the delving team accepted the accommodations too with little pushback.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Brent just asked that they all be allowed to rest in rooms next to each other, which the commanding officer was only mildly reluctant to allow, citing security concerns, to which Brent simply replied that his own security concerns included being separated from the rest of his team in case of a more protracted followup attack.

  Whatever. Mia wanted a bath and a bed, and Carmilla to cuddle with. But nooooo, the latest had to go off on a stupid wild goose chase.

  A part of Mia was angry, sure, and wanted the attackers brought to justice … and maybe stomp them in between the legs for their trouble, but what she wanted much more at the moment was to snuggle with her vampire and sleep.

  They settled in, and Mia quickly shrugged off everyone hovering over her worriedly and scrubbed herself as clean as she could manage with one of the wet towels that were provided to them, and then crashed into the nearest bed after recharging her Familiar with all of her remaining mana.

  The pink cat’s standing orders were to disable any soldier coming into the room and kill anyone who wasn’t one of Mia’s delving teammates or wearing a soldier uniform and yet dared to barge into her room while she slept.

  After her last nap getting interrupted by a goblin trying to gut her and that other assassination attempt, she was not taking any chances. Still, she’d made the soldiers standing guard near the door of the apartment aware that they should only enter her room if they were willing to lose limbs.

  With all worries put out of her mind, she crashed into her chosen bed and fell asleep the moment her head sunk into a far too fluffy pillow.

  Anyone sleeping on fluffy pillows and overly soft mattresses is a psychopath … with that last thought, she fell asleep.

  *****

  Greg wheezed, his legs trembling from the exertion as he leaned on the wall of the alley for support.

  Josef cursed a few metres away from him, throwing off his bag and shoving it, along with his clothes, under a garbage heap.

  “We should go,” Josef said, his voice trembling with something between contained anger and terror. “Everything has gone to shit. Fuck! We need to go, hide … fuck I don’t know where. Think that monster is still following us?”

  Greg felt miffed at the dread he heard in his comrade’s last question and looked up with a glare.

  “There’ll be another chance,” Greg grunted, pushing off the wall and straightening his back. “We just need to get to the hideout.”

  He sent a lingering look towards the trash heap, which now hid a perfectly good marksman rifle underneath. He shook his head, not even knowing why they were following their … benefactor’s suggestions for discarding it.

  It was a good weapon. It would have been useful in a second attempt.

  “Move,” Greg said, pushing some energy into his fatigued leg muscles and forcing them to move.

  The hideout, they had to get there. If the benefactor was correct, there would be no freaky magical tracking that would be able to find them once they were inside the … ‘formation’ protecting the place.

  “Fuck,” Josef said, stumbling after Greg. The safe house was only a few streets away, an ex-abandoned basement retrofitted for their needs. “I should have told you to eat sand, crazy bastard. Fuck! You saw it too, didn’t you? I blew the bitch’s jaw right off, and she just pushed it back together. It healed! IT HEALED Greg, did you see?!“

  Greg turned and backhanded the idiot, glaring furiously as he shushed the man. Furthermore, he was trying really hard not to remember that … thing.

  “Fuck,” Josef swore, stumbling into the wall at the hit and spat. “Fuck you! Fuck you and your bullshit!”

  I should have looked for someone better. Greg winced inwardly. Josef had seemed like-minded enough at the start, but it was starting to look like seeing those freaks in action was too much for the ex-soldier.

  Unlike Greg, Josef had the expertise and skill to shoot a rifle with some degree of accuracy and his Class only enhanced that. Apparently, he even had some weird magical bullshit that allowed him to make bullets fly straighter and with less air resistance.

  He was the perfect sniper, in theory. The only problem was that he was showing cracks now that he’d been put under pressure.

  The only saving grace of this shitshow was taking down that pink-haired little whore. Greg thought glumly, thinking back to the moment the first bullet sent the petite elfling sprawling in a fountain of blood. There was so much blood, just so much. Greg never thought a human body could hold that much of it.

  “Come on,” Greg said, turning to leave and motioning for the man to follow. “We can talk it out once we’re safe, let’s get to the safe house first- “

  “I’m not going to your shitty safe house!” the man said through gritted teeth. “That shitstain knew this would happen, I just knew it. That thing was a fucking vampire and we tried to shoot it with lead bullets, of course we fucking failed. Shit! I’m not going anywhere that the bastard arranged for us, I’m not walking into another trap. Not again.”

  The man was increasingly incoherent with each word spoken, his eyes dilating and turning bloodshot as he glared back at Greg. There was panic in there, dread too and some buried trauma this experience has ruthlessly unearthed if Greg had to guess.

  Shit.

  “What will you do then?” Greg asked, faking nonchalance as his every instinct just told him to leave the idiot behind. He knows where the safe house is, I can’t leave him behind to be interrogated “What if the ‘vampire’ can track you wherever you go? The safe house is safe, at least. We. Need. To. Get. Going.”

  There was one alternative, but Greg refused to even entertain the thought. He was not going to sink so low as to kill his fellow human for something as flimsy of a reason as convenience.

  “I’m running for the hills,” Josef said, his voice calming to normal levels, but there was still a near feral glint in his eyes as he stared unblinking at Greg. “I’m not stopping until I reach Vienna. I can survive in the wilds, with some luck I won’t stumble across any monsters too dange-“

  “That’s what they call jinxing yourself, isn’t it?” A feminine voice whispered from above, sultry and with more than a hint of malicious glee dripping from each sound rolling off her tongue. “You haven’t even left the city yet, and you’ve already run into a monster you can’t handle. What poor luck.”

  Greg mechanically tilted his head up, his heart beating out of his chest as he recognized the vaguely familiar voice. He didn’t want to believe it, but as he saw that mane of vibrant crimson hair and the pair of ruby eyes glowing in the darkness, he couldn’t deny it anymore. He couldn’t deny what he was seeing.

  She was there, perched on the railing of a low balcony just a few metres above the alley’s floor. Not a single sound gave away her presence, not her breathing, not the rustle of her clothes, not whatever stunt she’d used to get herself up there in the first place. Nothing.

  Josef screamed, a sound similar to a pig’s whine and the roar of a cornered animal as he leapt for the trash heap hiding his rifle underneath it.

  The monster in the shape of a girl dropped, landing with a feline grace and without making a single sound. She watched Josef scramble under the heap of garbage for his weapon, her back facing Greg in a show of absolute disregard for the danger his existence posed.

  It irked him, but after what he’d seen, it scared him even more. His survival instincts kicked in, not letting him move a single muscle. They spoke of death, a swift and brutal end that’d make him regret being born if he as much as made a squeak in the presence of that … thing.

  Still screaming, Josef whirled around as shouldered his rifle, his butt landing in the heap with the quick turn of his body.

  Greg blinked, the monster was gone, now standing before Josef with crimson talons for fingers wrapping around his throat.

  The rifle clattered to the ground.

  “I’ve been listening for a while,” the crimson-haired monster said offhandedly, though Greg didn’t fall for the nonchalant veneer. He heard the boiling rage simmering just below the surface. “If you’ve been wondering. See, I was going to just kill both of you for what you did to my M- , my Friend. But I caught an interesting little tidbit in your conversation.”

  Greg stiffened up as the woman turned, clicking her tongue as she let Josef hang limply in her arm. As her attention focused on him, Greg felt every instinct in his body scream at him to run like he’d never ran before, but his survival instincts screamed harder that doing so would mean death.

  Dragging Josef behind her like a small girl dragging her oversized teddy bear, the monster walked over to Greg with a ‘smile’ on her face.

  “‘Benefactor’ you said,” the monster spoke, her eyes squinting at him dangerously. “Now you see, I’m a vampire, but I’m not a monster. So, I was just going to kill you for what you’ve done … but back then you didn’t have any information I wanted.”

  Greg stared, trying to get his body to work with an increasingly frantic need to get away from the monster.

  “See, I have options in my arsenal that would give the both of you pathetic lowlives fates far worse than death,” the monster said. tilting its head. “But I’d really rather not use any of those, not even on you. So. Wouldn’t it be better for both of our sakes if you just … told me what I wanted to know and I could be happily on my way back to my friends. Hmmm? Doesn’t that sound nice? Maybe we can even do away with hanging you by your entrails, and I’ll just make do with dropping your sorry asses off at the military?”

  Greg trembled, whether from fear or from rage, he didn’t know. Those scarlet eyes glowing faintly in the evening gloom promised only pain, and he could see the reluctance in them to even offer him that much of a concession.

  Gulping, Greg realised he might have bitten off more than he could chew.

  ‘They will die from a single good shot to the head’ my ass. He grumbled, his thoughts spinning a thousand miles a second. If throwing that bastard trying to use us to take care of his dirty work under the bus is what it takes for me to live …

  It wasn’t a tall price, he just had to try to make sure he didn’t get scammed. He’d have a second chance, a third and as many other chances to accomplish his goals as it took. All he had to do … was to stay alive.

  Which seemed like a pretty iffy proposition with the bloodthirsty vampire grinning at him with its fangs barred and eyes alight with naked hate.