I expected something to go wrong the second we stepped foot outside my apartment building. I mean, Lurch and Mike both looked like they’d been through rough shit just to get to me.

  What I didn’t expect was to run into two unhinged-looking individuals two floors down inside of my own fucking building. Their faces were caught in a rictus of agony and glee as they stood there with some kind of pipes in hand, clothes spattered in blood, and a pulped body between them.

  I stared. They stared. The dead body on the ground stared into nothing with its one remaining eye.

  Then the druggies screamed and started staggering in our direction.

  I fumbled for my gun, cursing the fact that I hadn’t drawn it already. Shots rang out before I could do so much as get it into my hands, though, and the druggies dropped.

  My eyes snapped over to Lurch and Mike. Both were wearing matching expressions of focus and disdain. They had landed perfect headshots, but that didn’t stop them from kicking the druggies over and unloading another shot each into their skulls, just to be safe.

  I must have made a face, because Mike actually chuckled at me. “Gotta make sure, kid. These fuckers sometimes don’t go down even when they should. I swear, they do shit to their bodies that should put them in the ground, and they somehow end up extra resilient, as well as insane. They’re a fucking danger if you let them close.”

  “Saw a guy down a druggie once by unloading an entire magazine into his head and chest, and the fucker still managed to drag himself over and gnaw on our guy’s ankle before expiring.” Lurch shuddered as our feet pounded down the stairs, clearly lost in the unpleasant memory. “Never gonna be able to forget that.”

  “Hey, I wasn’t judging you or anything,” I grumbled. “I just thought it was a waste of bullets, so —”

  “Well, you know better now, dontcha?”

  I did. I really did. The slums were an educational gift that kept on giving.

  I really wished I could kick its face in one of these days.

  Unfortunately, before I could do that, I’d need to live through the current day I was stuck in. And as we emerged onto the street, that looked like a rather daunting proposal, indeed.

  The slums were in chaos. Proper, widespread chaos.

  Fuck, but things looked even worse than they did back when I’d had to drag Mela through the city with Zerx patrolling all around us. Of course, the streets had been relatively empty back then. Most people had fled, hid, and waited until the storm passed.

  Today looked more like every building in the slums had been emptied, and their inhabitants were now running past us in all directions and screaming for their lives. Through the mess, I caught sight of people from various gangs all laughing, cheering, and visiting unbelievable amounts of violence on anyone within reach.

  Is that building on fire*? Yes, yes it is, oh wow*…

  My disbelief had briefly frozen me in place, a problem that was easily solved by Lurch when he gripped the front of my shirt and pulled me along as he and Mike broke into a run.

  The next second, my vision briefly glitched into Clairvoyance. I had to jerk Lurch to a stop so that a man clutching what was left of a bloody nose stump could collapse in front of us without taking either of us down with him.

  Lurch plunged ahead immediately afterwards, and I screamed to be heard over the noise. “What the fuck is happening here?!”

  “Fucking chaos. Pure chaos,” the Kitten snarled, eyes wildly sweeping over the crowds.

  Those crowds weren’t quite as bad as the first impression I got. We weren’t being jostled around just trying to make our way through. Still, the sheer… well, yes, chaos made it hard to focus on any one thing.

  It felt like my mind was getting dragged all over the place. My eyes refused to settle as one tragedy after another begged me to witness it, to sear it into my head.

  Somehow, it was worse than the gang war. There, at least everyone was relatively capable, armed, and willing to participate. Maybe not thrilled about it, but willing. There wasn’t a single Kitten who was about to let Zerx muscle them out of their turf, after all.

  Here? These were just regular people of the slums getting dragged to the ground, brutalized, trampled underfoot, or filled with bullets. It was so… senseless.

  Shocking.

  I honestly didn’t even feel like myself. Only the brief bursts of Clairvoyance dragged me into awareness and stopped me from hurtling blindly into danger.

  Numb. I felt numb. Even when my vision suddenly jumped into the future, and I was treated to the sight of a ganger gleefully shooting our way, I didn’t feel anything. I just lifted my gun and fired. All the training Mela had forced me to go through was paying off, because he went down with a shocked expression etched onto his face.

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  Not my first kill, obviously. But in that moment, I felt the oddest curl of satisfaction warm my chest.

  The fucker had just finished gunning down a cowering, stick-thin teenager. He deserved to die for that.

  “Someone took out almost all the gang leaders in the city. People started finding them this morning,” Lurch informed me, shouting as we ran. “They found their bodies on top of piles and piles of drugs. Just… every kind of drug.”

  What? That couldn’t be right. Who just does something like that and then leaves a ‘present’ for people to…

  Oh. It worked.

  Maybe it was my improved mind stats, maybe it was just common sense, but I could pretty much perfectly picture what had gone down.

  Gangers go in, find their bosses dead, and a ton of valuable drugs are just lying there. Begging to be used, for either profit or pleasure. And this was the slums we were talking about here. Who the fuck ever bothered thinking long-term? Definitely not your run-of-the-mill gangers. Any people with that kind of foresight were leading the gangs, not filling out their ranks.

  Even if someone had protested and tried to do something about it, they’d be silenced quickly, and then… Well, then we had what we got: a drug- and rage-fueled siesta threatening to burn down the entire slums.

  That didn’t explain the why of it all, but it did at least explain the how of the chaos ruling the streets.

  Naturally, I didn’t have forever to stew in those dark thoughts.

  “Oi! Look there!” Some idiot caught sight of us and started screaming, gesturing to his buddies. “Ain’t those the Kittens? Fucking hate those feckers. Oi! Why dontcha slow down, eh? Come on! COME ON!”

  His eyes were wild. He clearly had more drugs running through his system than was ever recommended. I seriously doubted he’d live to see the next morning, but he was apparently content to have his final act in life be provoking everyone into going after us.

  Thankfully for us, they didn’t have guns. The guy I’d shot earlier was an exception, rather than the rule of the current unruly mobs.

  What they did have was all sorts of deadly handheld implements and a drug-rage to make them fast and unrelenting.

  “Fuck! We can’t outrun them!” Mike screamed, though I didn’t need him to tell me that.

  We’d booked it even faster than before for two blocks now, and while my upped stats were pulling their weight, I was already flagging. The other two weren’t, but a quick glance back told me the druggies were still gaining on us.

  “Into the alley! Now! Use the trash and the containers to funnel them! We can’t fucking deal with them all at once!”

  We followed Mike’s plan and more or less threw ourselves into the alley he’d pointed out. Thanks to the amazing planning of the slums, it was blocked off on three sides by buildings, as ‘dead end’ as anything I’d ever seen.

  That had made it the preferred spot for chucking waste, something I did my best to ignore even as I waded through the overflowing trash bags and ancient bins. My left leg squished through a bag. I felt something wet and syrupy drip down my leg and into my shoes, making the material of my pants stick to me in a very uncomfortable manner.

  Better than dead, though.

  I pressed my back to the wall as Mike and Lurch pulled on the containers in a hurry, arranging them to take up most of the space of the cramped alley and admitting maybe two people at once in a squeeze. They even managed to throw some trash bags behind the bins to stop the druggies from just pushing them aside, but didn’t get very far before they were on us.

  My visions twisted and turned as I caught flashes of potential attacks coming at my two allies. I pushed my Clairvoyance actively too, anchoring and keeping it in place to make sure I didn’t miss anything.

  A screaming man took my bullet to the face. Mike bent down quickly under the cover of fire that we gave him, picked up the pipe the ganger had dropped, and started swinging. Lurch reluctantly followed when another dropped a weapon close enough for him to grab, even though his face screamed terror at the world.

  I, meanwhile, focused harder than I ever had in my life, save perhaps during the Zerx gang war itself. My fingers and hands were twitching, eyes constantly scanning over my allies, ready to shoot whenever they were about to be in deep shit.

  I had to shoot six times before the last druggie was down.

  I couldn’t put into words how thankful I was that I never hit Mike or Lurch by mistake.

  The only reason I even managed that was Clairvoyance. It didn’t let me aim better, but it did let me gauge the future. Nine times, I ‘saw’ the moment my bullets bit into Lurch or Mike’s back. I saw the betrayal and shock plain on their features as they went down, twisting to look at me.

  The second I knew we were out of immediate danger, shakes began to wreck my body. I couldn’t get their dying expressions out of my head. I knew it hadn’t really happened. In fact, I knew I was the reason they were relatively okay. I had kept them from being hurt way worse.

  “Hey, kid, hey, it’s fine, you’re fine.” Mike spoke hurriedly, moving over to grip my shoulder. “I know it’s rough the first time you’re really in the thick of it. Not like shooting from the HQ at all, eh? Don’t worry though, you did great. Fucking amazing shooting back there.”

  I couldn’t look him in the eye. My shooting wasn’t amazing. My ability to stop just before I squeezed the trigger and angle my gun better? Maybe. That didn’t erase the sight of his empty, accusing eyes from my brain. I needed it scrubbed clean.

  “Y-Yeah, yeah, I-I’m fine, great even. Let’s go. Mela’s gonna murder us if we’re late,” I babbled, just to get him to stop looking at me. Thankfully, he took the hint. He nodded sharply, then turned and motioned to Lurch to get going.

  I managed to keep my feet under me and my steps steady, even if that did nothing for my shaking arms. Distraction. I needed a distraction. How long had I kept my Clairvoyance up? My eyes were aching, but it couldn’t have been a full two minutes. In spite of nearly twenty people dying with dizzying speed at our hands, not even two full minutes had passed.

  I let out a quiet giggle at that, then winced when my vision briefly glitched into the future. I raised my gun and shot. A woman with a cleaver of all things screamed and went down to her knees, clutching her side.

  I couldn’t help but focus on that cleaver. A ridiculous thing to own in the slums. The fuck was she gonna do with it? Not a lot of ingredients to go around, not for your typical resident. The only thing you could butcher would be…

  My eyes scanned over all the dead, dying, and fleeing people. Oh. Another reminder of how awesome my home was!

  I giggled again.

  “Come on, kid, just a little further,” Lurch’s gruff voice encouraged me, and I shot him my best smile. He flinched at the sight of it and looked away. Rude!

  He was right, though. We were close. We were so, so close.

  I could even see the HQ! There it was, in all its glory, beckoning us with the safety it would provide. With my eyes, I could see the entrance way more clearly than the other two. I couldn’t wait to be greeted by the guards, who would certainly be out in full force in the lobby. They’d rush out to help usher us in, and —

  My eyes focused, and I froze.

  The front doors were cracked open, stuck like that by an arm jutting out of the building.

  An arm that was slowly contributing to a growing puddle of red.