Chapter 60: Newborn Power
## Chapter 60: Newborn Power
The first waves were over. Across the ruined district, the scattered groups began to pull back together, picking their way between overturned cars and drifts of broken glass, looking for casualties and wounded, catching their breath and checking the surroundings for any incoming new threat.
A tram had jumped its rails somewhere down the block and lay half on the sidewalk, one door hanging open. Streetlights lay bent at odd angles where something heavy had gone through them, their poles snapped or folded flat across the road. Every storefront they passed had its windows shattered, glass scattered in wide fans across the pavement, crunching underfoot with every step.
At first it had looked like they would emerge from the mini war with zero casualties. For a while it really seemed that they would hold it that way. But it didn’t. By the time the last monster in range went down, eight of the human fighters were dead.
In the old world, society didn’t weigh one life against another. A life was a life, no life was more important than another, and anyone who tried to do the math out loud was rightly seen as a monster themselves. But the old world was gone, and the math didn’t disappear just because nobody wanted to do it anymore. These eight had talents. They had fought and clawed their way this far, further than most, and now they were gone. Every hour spent learning to use what they’d been given, every kill that had pushed them toward the next level — all of it wasted. Whatever they could have become, whatever weight they might have carried against the invaders, was gone with them. Nobody said any of this out loud. Nobody needed to but the smart and farsighted ones between them all knew it too well.
Despite having lost eight members of their group no one was deeply mourning. Some of the survivors didn’t even know the dead and everyone had already seen hundreds of deaths just a few hours earlier and were already emotionally hardened.
On the other side those who survived this battle bloomed in all possible ways.
The twelve who used to make up the core of Michael’s old team — Jakob, David and the others — had all reached at least Level five. Jakob had gone further than anyone and was at Level seven. It meant something specific, something everyone in the district understood by now: they’d all received their classes. Not just talents but classes with real skills. It was true that some talents were already quite powerful and even more effective than skills but most of the talents were either passive buffs or focused mostly on utility and lacked destructive power.
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That wasn’t even the best part of the improvement. Below them, everyone else — every survivor who’d fought in the waves — had reached at least level three. Nearly three hundred people had now awakened different supernatural talents. Three hundred people who were no longer just human in the way they’d been human a few hours ago.
Three hundred people who were, for the first time, not entirely helpless against monster waves anymore.
That was the part that mattered the most. A monster used to mean five, six or even sometimes seven people locked into a formation, spears braced, praying the person next to them didn’t flinch. Now a good chunk of those three hundred could stand alone and win. They didn’t need the formation to survive a single monster anymore — they needed it for the swarms, for the moments when numbers on the other side outpaced what any one person could handle. That was something they desperately needed now because they would need to part their ways soon.
None of them had mastered anything yet. A class or a talent didn’t come with an instruction manual. People were still finding out what their new skills and talents actually did, still burning through mana faster than they meant to, still flinching at the wrong moment because muscle memory hadn’t caught up to whatever their body could suddenly do. But the direction was right. Everyone could feel that much.
They took a short break before moving on, scattered across a stretch of road choked with abandoned, rammed-together cars — some flipped onto their roofs, others crushed sideways into shopfronts, doors torn off and left lying in the wreckage. This wasn‘t even the horrible side of the view. Everywhere, in the cars, on the ground, in the shops, human bodies and body parts were lying lifelessly.
The group was already accustomed to this view and paid no further attention to it. Most of them used this brief moment to familiarize themselves with their new powers. Jakob went quiet during it, running through something under his breath, adjusting his grip on nothing at all, the way people did when they were trying to feel out a new weapon that didn’t exist yet outside their own body.
Then they moved out again, splitting back into their groups, picking a path between the wrecked cars and downed lamp posts, heading further into the districts.
It was different this time. Not the numbers — the numbers were part of it, sure, but it went deeper than that. For the first time since this whole thing started, the hopelessness that had been sitting under every conversation, every glance between teammates, every decision to keep going instead of stopping, was gone. Not faded but gone.
Some of that came from what they’d just survived. Eight dead was eight too many, but it wasn’t the massacre it could have been, and everyone who walked away from that fight carried a little of that with them — proof, however grim, that they could take a hit like this and keep functioning. That counted for something.
But the bigger reason walked with them in the form of what they’d just become. New talents and classes. That meant new power. People who, an hour ago, had needed four others standing shoulder to shoulder with them just to bring down a single monster, now walked into the next stretch of the district knowing they could handle it themselves if it came to that.
They were stronger. Everyone could feel it. And for the first time, they were eager to fight again.