Without waiting for her disciple's reply, Kyra jumped up to meet the troll warlord.

  There was no question that this was the dungeon boss. It was the same size as a pack leader and stronger still. But more than that, it was far smarter than its underlings. It could plan and strategize. That's why it had decided to stay behind and guard the portal, which was its only source of reinforcements.

  Kyra leaped at it from a girder. The troll prepared to meet her attack head-on. When they made contact, she used it as a springboard to launch herself up toward the roof before it got a chance to bring its strength to bear.

  The higher she went, the thicker the smoke seemed to get. She scrambled from beam to beam, searching about for the portal. It would have been easier if she could fly like Lori.

  She could hear the metallic groaning from below as the troll climbed its way up to her. She didn't want to fight it just yet. Not when it had fire resistance—it would take too long. Closing off the portal was more important.

  But it was impossible to find anything in all this smoke.

  She followed the grid of steel girders until she reached a window. Through the glass she could see the clear sky outside. Bracing herself against a girder, she pushed her feet against the pane until it popped out of the panel.

  It was like someone had turned on the suction. The smoke billowed in her direction, rushing to escape.

  She pushed against the next pane and popped it out the same way.

  She couldn't get to a third one before she was grabbed from behind.

  She squirmed out of the creature's grip and used levitation to guide her way to a safe landing.

  Unlike most monsters, trolls didn't have any real combat abilities. Their place in the pecking order came from brute strength and sheer survivability. This meant that when fighting one, you had to prioritize twice as much on not getting hit or being held down. Luckily this was easy to do even for a low-rank hunter, and it was absolutely no problem for someone like Kyra.

  Enough of the smoke had cleared out for Kyra to spot an unnatural glow up toward the roof. She nimbly made her way up, leaving the troll behind.

  The portal was behaving erratically. When it was open, the outline of the deep blue hole dithered like lake water in an unsteady wind. And then it would abruptly snap shut into a shimmering portal anchor before opening again at random.

  She tried to stabilize it with her mana, and the ripples seemed to slow down.

  But the troll wasn't about to let her interfere. It came at her fast, launching itself up from a level below.

  Like a gymnast Kyra swung herself around a girder to gain momentum and caught the creature in midair with her legs, completely stopping its upward trajectory and then kicking it all the way down to the lower floors.

  The entire building shook as it just lost another layer of flooring.

  This bought her the time she needed to finish stabilizing the portal. Her mana pool was deeper than Lori's, and she was able to feed it in a lot faster. At last the portal settled into a perfect sphere and then shrank down into a closed anchor. And there it stayed.

  The monster reinforcements were cut off. All that remained was to eliminate the ones that had already broken through.

  With her three disciples working together, not even the pack leaders would last long. The only one that could give them any problem was the warlord. That's why she had to kill it here, before it escaped outside.

  Luckily the troll didn't seem interested in escaping. It was climbing its way up to her, intent on getting even.

  There was also the problem that the building could come down at any minute. This meant that a battle of attrition of out of the question. Whatever she did, she had to do it fast.

  But how do you kill a troll that's resistant to fire?

  She checked the creature's status again in the hope it had been her imagination. But the resistance was as real as the ease with which it had crawled through the fire when she kicked it down.

  Except there was a small detail that had escaped her notice earlier, and with the burden of the portal lifted from her mind, she saw it now. The fire resistance wasn't innate.

  It was easy to spot now that she knew to look. The glint of gold amid the forest of hair on its fingers.

  Of all the items a troll could spawn with.

  Kyra flung herself at the troll, drawing her sword from its pocket dimension along the way. The creature responded in kind and they collided in midair.

  Neither was concerned about the fall. Their only focus was on each other. Kyra wrestled with its oversized fist, slowly prying its finger open so she could get at the ring. At the same time, the troll managed to wrap its other hand around her head and began to squeeze.

  If a B-rank pack leader had the grip strength to swing a car around like a club, an A-rank warlord with somewhere firm to anchor its feet could pull down a plane. All this pressure was now concentrated on her skull, and even with the enhanced physicality of a hunter, it wouldn't be long before she popped.

  But she'd already isolated the finger with the ring and had the wrist pinned with her legs and just had to get her sword into place and the ground was coming up so fast.

  Kyra managed to get both hands on the hilt and at the exact moment of impact, drove her sword down with all her might. The concrete held against both their weight and left the finger with no escape.

  The enraged owner of the severed digit, still having an iron grip on her head, forced her down with its full weight.

  The world went dark and her face was pain but she was still alive, and she wasted no time in summoning her fire. The troll let go as the flesh melted from its palms, but she wasn't about to let it get away. Still blind, she clung to its arm and pulled her way up toward its head.

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  The troll tried to shake her off. It beat her with its other fist. If it still had fire resistance, it may have tried to peel her away, but though its finger had already grown back, in amid the frantic struggle the ring was forgotten on the floor.

  She was at its neck, and then her hands were cupped around its skull. Her eyes had regenerated, and the first sight with her visioned restored was her flames snaking down the creature's mouth to seal its breath when it tried to scream.

  From landing to death, it was all over in a matter of seconds.

  Kyra found where the severed finger had fallen among the rubble and removed the ring. A-rank rings made for rare and valuable treasure.

  Next she tossed the finger onto the corpse and burned it all down to ash, leaving nothing to chance when it came to the outside world learning about her involvement here today.

  Then she hastily made her way down and exited the burning building.

  The streets outside were deserted, the battles moved on. It was all in the hands of her disciples now. Her part in this was over.

  While moving through the streets, she passed by a gym. The front windows had been smashed in and the equipment left in disarray. From the looks of it, the unfortunate occupants had caught the attention of a regular troll. From the absence of bodies, it looked like they'd all managed to flee out the back, where the emergency door had been left wide open.

  On a whim she entered. It was dark inside as the power was still out. The bathrooms were at the back, and the showers still worked. She indulged herself for a moment, allowing the soothing water to wash her worries down with the soot.

  Afterward she switched out her clothes with a spare set from dimensional storage. She deserved to feel clean after saving the city. With these clothes, she could blend in as a confused civilian, and it was a relief not having to cover her face anymore.

  Before leaving, she checked herself in the mirror. Everything had grown back the way it was.

  She slipped out the back and carefully picked her way through the quiet streets, no longer needing to rush. Everything around her was the crisis Benny wanted her to stop from spreading around the world. The cars strewn all about, the debris littering the ground, and . . .

  The bodies.

  So many bodies.

  She didn't have time to take it all in earlier, on her way to shut down the portal. But now all she had was time.

  Benny had said that she wasn't the sort of person to care if the world ended, and he'd been right. Had he asked her help under any other circumstance, she'd have walked away from the weird man. Even the promise of magic wouldn't have been enough to make her deal with this mess.

  She was the sort of person who just wanted a comfortable life. Who wanted to leave the war zones and diasters of the world for other people to clean up. She didn't want to get stabbed or burned or have her face mashed in concrete. She shouldn't be trusted with the responsibility for anyone else's wellbeing. Not even a little dog's.

  As she stepped carefully over the bodies, she couldn't help but check every single one. It was super easy with appraisal. She didn't even have to touch them.

  But it wasn't about how easy it was.

  These people were all dead because of her. She had the power to stop this. To do things differently. But she didn't because it had fit so well into her plans.

  There's such a big difference between knowing what the consequences of your decisions will be and actually seeing it with your own eyes.

  If there was ever a time she was tempted to make use of Benny's powers . . .

  A couple of blocks into her contemplation, a woman emerged from an independent grocer and waved at her.

  "What are you doing?" the woman said in a loud whisper when she approached. "It's dangerous! Come, come, hide in here with us!"

  She welcomed any excuse to step away from the carnage.

  Once they were both inside, the woman closed the door very gently behind them, as though afraid that the click of the latch could attract monsters.

  There were about a couple of dozen other people huddled among the cramped aisles, and behind the front counter was a young lady who was presumably the woman's daughter.

  "Do we know how many monsters are left?" she asked the woman in perfect Nivian.

  "What do you mean is left? There is only one."

  Now that the woman was speaking normally, Kyra was able to place her accent as Govinian, a culture that existed as two separate countries to the south. It wasn't such a surprise to find a Govinian in Nivia, as Govinian immigrants could be found all across Concordia, and many operated independent grocers in their chosen homes.

  "There was more than one monster," she told the grocer.

  "No, no," the grocer replied. "I saw it. Ran past up there, right? Big and tall, real giant. It threw a bus! How are the police to stop it? No, too much of a problem if there's more than one."

  From the direction the grocer was pointing, this was a different pack leader to the one her disciples were fighting earlier.

  "I don't think the monsters will limit themselves on the basis of what's convenient for us," she pointed out.

  The grocer shook her head. "No, it's too big. Where would it come from? No way they hide more than one."

  "They'll have to call in the army," the daughter said, speaking in perfect Nivian without a trace of accent. "Send in tanks or something."

  The grocer jabbed her daughter in the shoulder. "Tanks? Did you see the way it threw that bus? No, not tanks. They need rockets."

  "Tanks aren't as easy to throw as buses," the daughter replied. "They can't just shoot rockets into the city."

  "Guided rockets. Avoid all the buildings. No collateral damage. You'll see. It'll be on the news, I'm sure."

  "How are you getting the news in here?" Kyra interjected. It looked like they were still in the power-outage zone.

  "In the back with my husband." The grocer pointed to a door at the end of the very last aisle. It was propped open with a heavy box stained with grape juice. "But very crowded. Everybody wants to watch. Better to stay here and someone will come tell us anything important."

  Kyra wanted to go see what was being broadcast, but first she had another question for the grocer. "You saw the monster with your own eyes?"

  "Yes! It was bi-i-ig." The woman stretched her arms out. "And wide! I've never seen anything like it!"

  "Were there people chasing after it?"

  "Why would people be chasing after it? No, they were all running away. Even the police, they run away. They were shooting with their guns and it did nothing."

  Kyra looked over at all the people sheltering in the aisles. You could tell which ones had been in the shop when it all started and which ones had been pulled in off the street from how much they were shaken up. There were a couple of families huddling together and one child rocking back and forth on a stool while a concerned older lady tried to soothe him with a juice box. The lady didn't seem to be related to him.

  She turned back to the grocer. "Is anyone here injured?"

  The daughter replied, "Are you a doctor?"

  "I can help."

  "There's someone in the back who's in a pretty bad way." The girl turned to her mother for approval.

  "Go, show her," the grocer said. "I'll keep watch."

  Kyra followed the daughter to the back of the store. They squeezed their way between stacks of boxes until they reached a group of people crowded around a solitary desk.

  On the desk was a tablet tuned to a livestream of the local news channel. It was playing aerial footage from a helicopter while a newscaster spoke over the top. It was impossible to tell from all the little pixels who was involved in the battle.

  The daughter led her on to a corner of the storeroom where they had made some space and laid out a dissassembled cardboard box as a mat. Lying on the mat was a boy of about ten, ghostly pale and unconscious, and next to him was a teenage girl crying into her knees.

  The daughter touched the girl on the shoulder. "This lady here is going to try and help your brother."

  When the girl looked up, Kyra gave her a reassuring smile and asked, "Where are your parents, sweetie?"

  The curl of the girl's lips gave away the answer before she managed to choke out, "They're gone."

  Kyra knelt beside the boy and placed a hand on his chest and the other one on his forehead.

  Internal bleeding. Easy enough to fix.

  She closed her eyes, wondering what she should do. Would it be too much of a risk? But risk was abstract, and the girl's sobs were biting into her heart.

  Her fingers made the decision for her, as mana ran down through them and the boy's breathing eased. Gradually his complexion improved. She cut it off short so as not to arouse too much suspicion.

  "Feels warm . . ."

  The boy's murmuring brought his sister scrambling over and grabbing at his face. Kyra pulled back and gave them some space.

  The grocer's daughter was staring at her.

  She shrugged and said, "Looks like he didn't need my help after all."

  The young woman opened her mouth but didn't get a chance to say something before a great cheer erupted from the crowd gathered in the middle of the storeroom.

  The two of them rushed over to check up on the news broadcast. It was showing a closeup of a slain troll pack leader. The reporter declared that it was the last of the monsters being tracked through the streets.

  The camera panned to Tristis's exhausted face as he pulled his sword from the monster and the chyron on the screen identified him as the Hero of Teelameer.