The walk down the hill was considerably slower than the walk up had been.

My NVG and helmet were currently on Leo’s head, which meant the forest had reverted to what forests were supposed to be at night, dark, quiet, and full of things that could plausibly decide to bite someone.

My primary navigation came from Awareness sweeping fifteen meters outward in all directions with every careful step I took.

The hill sat completely quiet after the explosion as every animal with even a drop of functional self-preservation had already evacuated several blocks in every direction.

[I’m min-maxing the shit out of Telekinesis the moment I get back to base...]

The thought arrived with absolute certainty and zero hesitation.

I had possessed Telekinesis for roughly a day.

And despite being weak and barely explored, it had already contributed to almost everything that went right tonight.

Floating grenades around corners during Kara’s rescue.

Rigging the entire Civil & Electrical Engineering building with C4 without once setting foot inside the building.

Telekinesis had possibly become as valuable as the System itself in the span of a single very productive evening.

[Okay. That’s an overstatement. The Shop buys guns and ammo... and C4...]

My eyes drifted to the DDM4 and stayed there for several steps.

Within a few days, the infected would develop the first stage of their Non-Newtonian defensive layer.

Once that arrived, 5.56 to the face would at best stagger them.

The M110A2 would become the primary weapon.

And the only real threats that required specialized firepower would be alpha variants, and those were weeks away from appearing.

But then again, the shit-show was not supposed to happen for 15 more days, and yet...

I can’t be one hundred percent certain about anything now.

Telekinesis still remained the priority.

[Maybe I buy a dumbbell...]

Telekinesis developed through repeated use, same principle as any physical capacity. The more I pushed it, the further it would grow.

Tonight barely scraped the surface of what the ability could eventually become. The Awareness component alone might be the most valuable part of the entire package.

After all, even tonight’s hill crossing would have been considerably more unpleasant without it.

[Maybe I can eventually fly too...]

I chuckled quietly at the trees and kept walking.

Halfway down the slope, a different thought surfaced.

Nora was sitting in the Cybertruck at the base of this hill.

If something attacked right now, the probability of me reaching her in time was essentially zero.

And I was completely at ease with that, which I found mildly interesting.

[Leo’s with her...]

I still remembered the first day Nora introduced him.

Nora stood at 5’4’’ and Leo at 6’6’’.

The size difference had been difficult to take seriously for the first thirty minutes, until it became clear that the enormous nervous farm boy was trying desperately to make good impressions.

Honest. Direct. Mentally tough in the way that came from having worked since childhood. His family had farmed for generations, and the tanned skin and the callused hands were proof of that.

He had come to the city to study Civil Engineering because he wanted to eventually start his own construction company and build something with his name on it.

Kara and I both liked him within an hour of first meeting him.

From a survival standpoint too, Leo was close to ideal.

Strong, reliable, followed clear instructions without requiring them repeated, and carried civil engineering knowledge that would become increasingly critical as time passes.

Agricultural knowledge too. He had worked fields since childhood. Rooftop farms and portable gardens were already on my list of early investments, and Leo’s background made that significantly more realistic.

Nora herself brought electronics, drone operation, and technical aptitude to the table.

Kara would handle medicine, veterinary care, and the pantry.

With my Cybersecurity background, I’d cover networks, systems, and now apparently demolition.

"The group is shaping up to have real potential..." I muttered as the Cybertruck came into view through the trees, "And once the OGs join in, no alpha variant would mean shit to us... Okay, maybe not Alphas."

A small shiver ran down my spine as their image came to mind. It was an Alpha Variant that had ended us in the previous timeline.

Leo was already out of the driver’s seat by the time I reached the vehicle. He had been sitting behind the wheel the entire time, ready to move if they were about to be surrounded.

And that alone said everything about how the man thought under pressure.

"You don’t look so good," he said. "Want me to drive?"

"I can handle it."

He nodded once and moved to the passenger seat.

The man knew when not to push a point. Another quality worth recording.

I got behind the wheel and started driving, and the silence lasted under two minutes before Nora’s head appeared between the front seats.

"Nikki, w-what’s happening? I heard explosions, a-and there’s blood on the car, and t-those people..."

"Did you develop a stutter?" I raised one eyebrow in her direction. "Am I gonna have to find you a therapist now?"

Nora’s expression shifted immediately from frightened to personally offended, which was exactly the shift I was going for.

"I do not stutter." With a humph that combined frustration and dignity, she sat back firmly.

And the atmosphere in the car improved roughly thirty percent on the spot.

"To make a long story short," I said, eyes on the road. "An airborne pathogen had been going around for a while now... the infection is global. Makes people aggressive, cannibalistic, and completely stripped of self-preservation instincts. The infected basically become monsters out to eat you..."

"Airborne..." Leo said carefully. "Are we..."

"Yep... Everyone’s infected. Has been for some time. But approximately ten percent of the population carries immunity to the airborne strain. You two included, seeing how you’re not trying to take a bite out of me..."

Complete silence from both of them.

"Any government response?" Leo asked after a moment.

"None."

"At all?"

"The virus had been dormant in the global population for some time now before activating today... so nobody got a warning period, no one could assemble a staged response, no window for anyone with authority to coordinate anything before they joined the infected."

Leo took in a sharp breath, eyes slowly drifting to the dead body lying on the side of the road, lit by a street light.

"Look, I’ve already explained everything to Kara," I continued. "All you need to know is... their saliva carries the second variant, and no one’s immune to it... so don’t get bit."

Nora broke the following silence.

"How do you know all this? And why do you have these weapons? And this car?"

I let a few seconds pass.

"I’m a government agent..." I said, completely straight. "The classified off-the-books kind. Cybersecurity student was just a cover identity... I was on a local mission when I got the intelligence about the pathogen, and immediately went MIA to get you guys..."

"Really?" Leo turned toward me, eyes wide.

"No." I laughed at his face.

Nora joined in loudly and immediately.

"We met him yesterday, Leo," she got out mid-laugh.

Leo immediately turned to look resolutely out the passenger window, ears going distinctly red.

"Alright," I said, still grinning. "The actual answer is that I came from the future.... Already lived three years of this. And I just came back this morning. Also received a magical game-like interface with a shop built in. That’s where the weapons came from... and I also got Telikenesis."

"Right," Leo said, still looking out his window.

Nora leaned forward from the back seat.

And from the corner of my eye, I saw her studying me with her brows pulled together before-

"He isn’t lying..." she said, quieter than before.

Nobody responded to that while the road rolled onward.

Nora flinched when the headlights caught an infected banging on a car at the roadside, before sprinting after us in a mad dash.

She even turned to watch through the rear glass as it disappeared behind us, before slowly facing forward again.

The second sprinted at us a few minutes later, and she looked at it and kept looking, without flinching.

Leo stared out his window the entire drive, processing it all in complete silence.

After all, they just found out the old world is now gone for good.

The penthouse street sat empty when we arrived, exactly as planned. The drone had done its job; the entire horde was still behind the building.

Its battery was probably long dead now. I had left it hovering over the horde along with the speaker, sacrificing it to keep the horde entertained. But I was pretty sure the speaker would still have enough juice to keep going for a few more hours. I wasn’t worried about it breaking from that 10 meter fall either, after all, Infected heads make for pretty great cushions.

Stopping the car, I got them out, placed my hand on the hood, and sent the car into my inventory.

Nora just stood there with her mouth agape, while Leo turned very slowly toward the empty space where a literal car had just vanished.

"Right," he said again, in a tone suggesting he was updating his entire understanding of how the world worked.

"Follow me... Leo, you’re at the back, Nora behind me..."

Leo raised the shotgun immediately and kept it up the entire crossing, eyes sweeping the streets without any prompting, while Nora stayed close enough to brush my arm.

"There are infected sounds over there..." she whispered.

"Uh-huh..."

"Close sounds."

"Sure..."

"Nikki..."

"Don’t think and follow me..."

The silence following this statement expressed more than words.

The fire escape got us to the eighth-floor roof without incident, and I pulled out the Atlas kit from misc. chest, and began fitting Nora while she absentmindedly cooperated as she looked at the rope stretching diagonally upward across the open air between the two buildings.

"No," she said.

"You’re already wearing the harness."

"I didn’t agree to the harness."

"You let me put it on you."

"I didn’t realize what it was for..."

"You don’t have a choice here, kid. Now I’m going to tell you how to use it... so pay attention."

I ran through the full demonstration. Harness, carabiners, lanyard, ascender, trigger operation, emergency stop, everything. Then I rode five meters up the rope and came back down in under twenty seconds.

Leo watched once and clearly understood.

Nora looked at the eight-floor drop below the rope and began a continuous and very thorough sequence of objections.

"I cannot do this."

"The fire escape does not have barriers of any kind..." I said. " The Infected can climb upward at any moment... if an Infected comes up right now, we won’t have anywhere to run..."

"That’s manipulation."

"It’s a fact..."

And she damn near cried right then and there.

Before clipping in, Nora checked her harness five separate times. Then the carabiner twice. And then the harness a sixth time before the ascender started moving.

"Nikki!"

"Yeah?"

"If something goes wrong..."

"The rope is rated for forty kilonewtons. You weigh less than sixty kilograms."

Halfway across, she made the mistake of looking down.

And after that, she closed them shut and dedicated the remainder of the ascent to what sounded like every prayer she had ever learned, delivered quietly and with absolute sincerity.

Leo went up next, after handing me the shotgun and clipping in, expression perfectly neutral and steady.

Though his hands were shaking visibly.

"You’re shaking," I said.

"It’s getting cold."

"Fair," I chuckled.

He made it across with his expression essentially intact and his dignity at roughly sixty percent, which was frankly more than most people managed.

I went last, my heart skipping once as I went off the edge.

Some physical responses were simply permanent.

Kara and Nora were already hugging it out on the balcony by the time I came up, while Leo stood three steps away, not knowing where to place his hands as he looked at both of them.

[Classic Leo...]

"Alright..." I said, my eyes barely open at this point. "I’m going straight to sleep..."

And with that, I walked straight inside without waiting for replies, to the only one inside who had probably been waiting specifically for me.

Tikki was on the sofa with his cast visible under the warm light, and the moment he heard my footsteps, his eyes snapped open.

"Meaaa!" He tried to get up before the cast reminded him why that was a bad idea.

"Hey there, Booger," I smiled, picking him up and keeping the cast clear. "Missed you too..."

After the injections Kara had given him, he should have been unconscious long before I even reached the university.

But he had stayed awake anyway.

Waiting for nobody else but me.

Tikki was asleep against my chest within a few seconds, while my eyes landed on the bottle of Jack Daniel’s inside the glass cabinet above the bar.

[Gets stronger the more I use it...]

And the very next second, the cabinet opened, and the bottle flew out and floated right beside me.

Tikki’s food and water bowls followed right after, all three floating steadily beside me as I carried a sleeping cat toward the master bedroom."

The booger opened one eye at the floating bowls, registered them with complete indifference, and closed the eye again.

Reasonable reaction, given everything he had personally witnessed today.

[Big day tomorrow.... Hopefully not as big as today.]