Past Life Hero, ch 8

He did a double take, but the sky was truly red.  A deep crimson, like fresh blood.

"What the..." Max said. He stopped the car, put it in park, and stared upwards. This wasn’t night time with a red moon. No, this was just afternoon and the sky had just gone all nightmare colors.  Max's heart quivered as an ancient memory arose in his mind. He'd seen a sky like this before, but it hadn't been on this world.  That had been one of the scariest moments of his past life.

"No way," he muttered as he saw a blue disk form in the air. Max knew exactly what it was, even though he'd never seen one that big before. "A portal?" he breathed. "What the hell is going on?"

Portals were magical.  Earth didn’t have magic.  This shouldn’t be possible.

And then, out of the portal came a flock of wyverns, each one over twenty feet long. Hungry, flying, fire-breathing lizards. Another portal popped up on the other side of a nearby building. Max could see the glow. But could he really? Seeing its glow should be impossible; it was daytime and the portal was on the other side of the wall. But then his shocked mind moved and he realized the truth: he could feel it.

With growing horror and a touch of excitement, he opened himself, reaching out for mana…and found it. The mana in the land and the atmosphere were still weak but were rapidly rising, like an old man who'd woken up and begun stretching before getting out of bed. That was a terrible analogy, thought Max woodenly, even as he watched everything unfolding before his very eyes.

At some point, he realized he'd gotten out of his car and was standing in the parking lot. With a start, he went to get back into his car and drive, maybe back home. He wasn't sure. But at that moment, he heard a scream. Then another scream. Vicky and Nasheer, two of his coworkers who were staying late, ran out of the building, and behind them came monsters that Max had never seen before.  They were similar to some of his past memories, though.  Instead of the big armor-wearing lizard men from Albion, these were shorter, more bestial.

Another way these creatures differed from lizard men was their lack of intellect.  The only thing he could see in their eyes was hunger with no reason. Three of them were racing after his co-workers.  Max didn’t feel any particular loyalty to these two, they weren’t really friends.  But at the same time, he wasn't going to stand around and watch them be eaten by monsters. Besides, even though he'd started a new lifetime, old habits die hard. At one point in his life, he had been called the hero. Not a hero, The Hero.

And Max hated when regular people were killed by monsters, inhuman or otherwise.  Always had.  It offended him at a primal level.

He reached into the back seat of his car and grabbed a tire iron. Then he ran towards Vicky and Nasheer. The two of them were screaming for help as Max ran up. But Nasheer stopped in open-mouthed shock as Max ran right past him, wielding his tire iron. The first lizard-man-thing didn't know what hit it. The creature jumped, taking an awkward, opportunistic leap. Max bashed it with his tire iron, using his superhuman strength, and the lizard creature was almost instantly dead.  There was a noticeable dent in its head where its skull had been crushed.

The next lizard man swerved, changing its target from Vicky to Max.  He barely even slowed down. Max grabbed the lizard man's wrist with snake-like reflexes at the same time as he hit the thing on the side of the mouth.  The blow prevented the monster from clamping its jaws on his wrist. Then he whirled the creature around and threw it directly into the concrete. Its head hit hard.

A lifetime of battle instincts made the back of his neck prickle.  The third creature was almost on top of him by the time Max turned. He briefly, but deeply wished for a proper weapon before slamming the tire iron into the lizard man's throat and kicking it away with his full strength.

He whirled, wasting no time, and returned to the one that was still on the ground before it could get up. His tire iron fell once, twice, three times on the creature's head and spine before he was satisfied that it wasn’t going to get back up.  Then he turned, barely panting, and saw his two coworkers staring at him in absolute shock.

The two of them weren't processing what was going on, weren’t reacting fast enough. Max could hear destruction from inside the store and saw shadows playing from other lizard men as they rampaged inside. He heard a scream that could only be his boss Tony dying. "Get your asses in gear," he said, and he pointed at his car.

Then, without waiting for his two shell-shocked co-workers to respond, he hopped in the driver's seat and drove the car up next to them. He rolled his window down and screamed, "Move your fucking asses!" Luckily, Nasheer got it together and opened the door, all but throwing Victoria in before him. The moment the man had the door closed, Max was accelerating.

He didn't head towards the main road or the highway, figuring that with a calamity like this, joining throngs of frightened people was a great way to get stuck in traffic and possibly become wyvern food. This was a terrible situation for humanity, and Max couldn't even really help . Sure, he was a better fighter than ninety-nine percent of the world, but that didn't matter very much. It wasn’t enough.  He was still woefully inadequate to deal with a flock of wyverns, much less whatever else the portals might be disgorging onto the planet.

Max took back parking lots and alleyways, moving to streets that people almost never traveled. He didn't have any particular destination in mind but was just trying to get away from the city as much as he could. In the backseat of his car, Nasheer was anxiously looking out the windows, his hands flexing open and closed. Victoria was crossing herself and mumbling incoherent prayers.

Matt decided neither one of them was going to be much help, but at least he could help them. He took a turn as fast as he possibly could and almost ran into a group of goblins as they crossed the street. They threw knives at him as his car went down a hill, and one actually hit, breaking the back window. Victoria screamed.

At that point, the old dormant beast in the back of Max's mind began waking up again, growling. Running away from monsters fundamentally pissed Max off, especially knowing that they would be trying to kill other people. Unfortunately, Max didn't have many good weapons in his house because real weapons cost money, and he'd always had higher priorities.  Owning real sword at home hadn’t been a concern in a relatively safe world like this one, at least up until this point.

He thought of his training weapons.  All of his training swords and his two only real weapons were all at the dojo, where they were used for cutting practice and such. The only thing Max actually had in his house was a baseball bat. After all, he didn't have anything worth stealing to protect anyway. Maybe if he had a nicer house or a pot to piss in, he would have cared more about weapons up until now. And he desperately regretted not keeping more than a tire iron in his car. A new lifetime full of peace and money problems had made him complacent.  Max was definitely not naive to how the world worked, but he didn’t have much that others would want, and he could kill most grown men with his bare hands.  That had always been enough.

But he knew a place he could get weapons. Most people, if they went to get supplies during or after an attack like this, would probably go to department stores or grocery stores. But Max had a new destination in mind. He knew how to use guns, but guns weren't the answer right now–at least he didn't think so. Maybe if he had a house full of guns and piles and piles of ammo, they might be an option.  But that was also only if guns would even be effective against some of the stronger monsters, which he doubted.

Max was an expert with blades, and since mana was coming back, he'd be weak right now but should be able to use some of his old skills soon.

He took a turn heading towards a hardware store. Right after he took the turn, a blue screen suddenly popped into his vision.  He almost jerked the wheel, plowing the car right into a guardrail.

“What the hell!?” he shouted.  In the back seat, Vicky wailed.

Max slowed the car and struggled to see around the screen. It said:

Congratulations, you have been chosen as a candidate to become a warrior. Do you accept?  Yes or No.

Max cursed and gunned the engine, swerving to miss a minotaur in the middle of the road that was just turning its head.  The huge monster eyey Max’s car even as it crushed another.

Nasheer yelled, “Shit!” as the minotaur threw a crushed motorcyle at Max’s car.  The improvised weapon missed, slamming into a store front and shattering glass.

Max sped up, trying to crane his neck around the screen in his vision.  Suddenly, the prompt in the window changed.  Now it read:

If you accept the summons to become a Challenger, a warrior of your world, you will be transported to another place, an instruction world for training. During training, your body will not age. And when you are ready to return to your world, you will reappear exactly where you left it from.

“Wait, what is this!? What does that mean?" Max yelled. Behind me, Victoria started crying louder, and Max didn't blame her. If she couldn't see what he was seeing, it probably seemed like he was hearing voices or having a panic attack or crazy episode. He cursed and found a side street before pulling down it and stopping the car.

“What are you doing!?” hissed Nasheer.

"Nasheer," said Max.  "Get out of the car, get in the driver's side and go.  Hurry."

"What do you mean?"

“He’s leaving us!  He’s leaving us!” Vicky was near hysterics.

"Yeah," Max muttered.  He turned to see around the blue creen in front of him.  Then he growled, "Nasheer, get out of the fucking car and start driving. Drive my car.  Take Vicky the fuck out of here."

"But–" he started.

"Now!" ordered Max.

Nasheer climbed out of my car, scrambling like a crab on the beach. Max held the door open for him, and seconds after the man got inside, Max was watching his car accelerate away.

He turned his attention back to the screen in his vision and noticed something new. There was a countdown. He didn't know how many seconds it had started from, but I was only at fourteen seconds now.

"No use making this more dramatic than it already is," Max said out loud, and hit “Accept.” The next thing he knew, his world turned upside down, and he vanished, no longer on Earth.

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:)