Now that I know about the Town Hall, now that my team knows I’m going, and now that I’ve opened the gates of other magics people might have, that’s literally all I can think about. I barely sleep that night, tossing and turning as I wonder how many people will be there, who’ll be running the event, what their plans might be moving forward.

  I think about the, as Nancy called it, magical commune. What would a truly safe community look like, filled with other magic users? When everyone has their own magical task and we all help each other out. Would they all have to be Party Members? That might get too much, but maybe if I can find people with the right sort of magic without needing to join the Game—like how Nancy could already heal, even before she became an official Party Member.

  What sort of magic users would we need? Someone who can cook, for one thing, who can be in charge of all the food. And someone with ice-based powers, to create a fridge. Is there someone who can be a magical fence? Is that a thing? And we’d need someone with actual projectile weaponry—poor Ryder just can’t get his fireball to actually leave his hand, even though he can get the fire itself fairly large now. But that doesn’t have to be a magic projectile, I guess; someone with a gun could be just as effective.

  It would be nice if I got to spend my Rank Tokens on levelling up my telekinesis, and not just the Compass Ability and my strength. Maybe there’s someone else who can help fight, or who can be a more reliable compass, and I can work on being magic, which still makes me giddy when I let myself think about it properly.

  That’s about when I start to feel guilty and sad, because the world sort of ended and the apocalypse happened, and life as we knew it will never be the same. My friends were more or less gone as soon as I was no longer a fiancée, taking Alex’s side in the breakup, but my parents are gone. The work that I spent a decade working towards is null and void. The life that I had built had fallen apart when Alex and I ended things, but any life that could have survived that died for good when the faux-rapture happened.

  And then I think about the new life I’m building out of the ashes and I start my cyclical thinking all over again.

  I’m not quite at my best the next day. Still, with a fully gassed up car and a newfound appreciation for our lives, my Party and I head out for another full day of chasing monsters, avoiding humans, and ranking up. And topping up our gas stores, though we check the station’s attached convenience store first this time.

  We chase three different magic surges. One of them we can’t get to once it’s settled. One, I fend off the monsters and end up outside of the surge centre, but Ryder and Nancy each get one Token. And one, it’s only Nancy who gets one, with both me and Ryder needing to hold the more mutated monsters back.

  Though the Game still rewards us for that:

  Congrats! Your Party strength is now at 10!

  New Achievement! Party Strength at double digits—a Rank Token for everyone!

  We’re sprawled on a patch of grass in front of someone’s house after the last surge. Well, not a house. A verifiable mansion. This thing has to be on dozens if not hundreds of acres with only a couple barns nearby, and the almost-castle has three floors and an actual gate at the road. The rolling hills spread out around us, and I can see the cityscape in the distance. The CN Tower stands proud at the heart of the city, the Survivor Identification and Reunification Program starting to get set up in its shadow.

  “Party strength at ten?” Nancy asks, lying on her back, holding a towel to a long gash along her arm. She’s now a lot more fearless about getting involved in the fights, which I’m proud of, but it also means that she’s at a higher risk of injury. “When did it hit nine? Or two, for that matter?”

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  I bust out a laugh, feeling all patched after Nancy’s healing but trying to safety pin my torn sweater back together. I nearly stab myself as I jerk my head to Ryder. “Wait, I remember two! It was right near the beginning, wasn’t it?”

  He nods, never taking his attention off the fire in the distance—still unable to throw a fireball, he’s taken to trying to snuff fire out. So far, it’s not working. “Right before we fought Elsa,” he adds, and I nearly laugh again.

  “Who’s Elsa?” Nancy asks.

  “Monster cat,” Ryder and I answer at the same time. This time, he whips his head toward me and he joins me in laughing.

  “I think,” I manage to say, finally catching my breath, “that the Game makes some stuff up. In our favour, which is nice, but still. We might have gotten a ‘party strength 2’ notification, but nothing else between that and this ten.”

  “So it just… gives us stuff because it likes us?” Nancy asks.

  “Regular video games just give you stuff. But that’s because you’re playing, not because it likes you.” Ryder returns his attention on the fire.

  “Well, this isn’t like any normal video game I’ve ever played,” Nancy says.

  “No, it’s definitely not a normal video game,” I agree.

  “A normal video game would let me throw a fireball,” Ryder states, the last part very clearly directed at the Game.

  A notification box pops up in our vision, and all three of us jump at that. The Game doesn’t always talk to us without a direct question being asked first. We wait to see what’ll pop up.

  It takes a second, and then:

  Party Member Ryder, would you like to designate 1 of your 2 unused Rank Tokens for the Magical Ability Fireball [Projectile]?

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Ryder laments. “That’s why I haven’t been able to throw a damn fireball yet!?”

  The Game doesn’t answer, its prior question still overlaid on all our visions.

  He lets out a groan. “Fine, yes, give me the throwable fireball.” The notification box flits away. A moment later, Ryder lights up one of his little fireballs and lobs it. It goes about three feet before it splats into the grass. “I guess levelling up that Ability will make me throw it farther and with better aim. I wish I knew this two days ago.” He gets up, stamping out the little fire, and then comes back. “Hey, Game, is putting out a fire also a separate Magical Ability?”

  Correct.

  He groans again, though Nancy and I are laughing. “Yeah, I’ll take that one, too.”

  I turn to Nancy. “You got four new Tokens today,” I tell her, though no doubt she already knows. “What are you going to spend them on?”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” she says, and offers no other information.

  I slot my last one into my telekinesis and then pull up my profile, since I haven’t looked at it in ages. And I say, “Holy shit.”

  “Language,” Ryder and Nancy say together, immediately.

  “No, guys. Look at your profiles.”

  A beat, and then: “Oh,” Ryder says, voice full of wonder.

  “Language indeed,” Nancy says softly.

  Because all of us went up a level. It hadn’t moved since Ryder first asked the Game to give us a levelling system. One day 1, we were the levels of our ages. The next day, when our Ranks were introduced, Ryder and I were both level 2.

  Now, Ryder and I are level 3. Nancy is level 2.

  “We got a new level,” Ryder says out loud. “Why did we get a new level?”

  The Rank is indicative of magic evolution. The Level is indicative of human evolution.

  “That makes no sense,” I say. “By getting magic, we’re evolving as humans.”

  “Maybe it means evolving by humans,” Nancy says, her sweater cuff between her teeth and her thinking face on. “By facing humans.”

  Ryder gets what she’s saying a second before I do. “We got a new level because we lit that guy from the gas station on fire?”

  “Game?” I ask it. “Is that what happened?”

  Correct.

  “Just when I think I’m getting a handle on things,” I mutter to myself. And on that ominous note, we collect our stuff that’s strewn around us and head back to the car, parked down at the road—finding a spot in the gate that’s broken to get through.

  “I wonder who lived there, before,” Nancy says as we drive away, breaking the silence that had descended since the latest whiplash from the Game. “I heard that Elton John had a house in this area. Maybe it was his.”

  “Maybe,” I say, though it’s a cool thought. Would we have seen a piano and some signed posters on the wall if we had gone in? Irrelevant now; Elton John is probably dead. “Are you going to tell us where you’re putting your new Tokens?”

  “Maybe,” she echoes. I stick my tongue out at her.

  From the back, Ryder asks, “Who’s Elton John?”

  Nancy and I react with appropriate outrage. We listen to Your Song, the only one of his songs I have saved in my phone’s memory, on repeat the whole way home.