Isabella was already waiting for me in a black Porsche.

  When I exited the elevator, she graced me with a glare and started the engine.

  I rushed to the passenger’s door and hopped inside.

  Before I even managed to buckle up, she stepped on the gas. She drove out of the garage, drifting through the exit.

  We entered the street on the red, and I held myself with both hands by the board, so I wouldn’t fly due to how fast she made the car move.

  I couldn’t even enjoy or look at the insides of the car, which looked more like a plane cockpit than a car.

  Isabella slammed the brakes, and we stopped. Inertia threw me forward, making my head crash into the windshield.

  I grunted with pain and fell back into my seat, just as Isabella had already left the car. She slammed the door shut.

  We weren’t half a mile away from her mid-rise. Hell, I could see the building when I got out of the car.

  I caught up with Isabella just as she strolled into the steakhouse.

  The staff perked up, half of them paling.

  Isabella had been here before.

  That made me smirk. Misery loved company, and no one spread misery like Isabella.

  We crossed the restaurant and sat at a table for six by the window. With a view of a construction site, where no one worked anymore, I couldn’t help but smile.

  Only a few people occupied the restaurant, likely due to high prices and late hour. A few couples scattered in the large hall, and one family of four with a huge mastiff, barely a third of the restaurant’s capacity.

  Isabella sprawled over the chair, crossing her legs, redirecting her glare at the staff.

  A waitress rushed to us, a woman my age with tattoos on both hands. “Welcome to the Sunrise Steakhouse. Here are the menus.” She placed the menus on the table for us. “Today’s specials are—”

  “Don’t care,” Isabella snapped. “You are already so slow that it makes my hair turn gray. Two dark beers, the best ones you have, two rib eyes, the best cuts you have, both rare, with salads.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I would like my steak medium—”

  The words died in my mouth as Isabella’s death glare pierced me.

  “What she said,” I corrected myself, and shut up.

  The waitress still managed to smile. “All right, and would you like—”

  “No.” Isabella slowly turned to her. “Have the drinks and food delivered by someone less yappy, and more competent.”

  The waitress left, and I apologized to her in my mind.

  I glanced at Isabella, who started tapping her shoe against the table’s leg. “You really hate people, don’t you?” I asked.

  “You’ve got no idea.” She rolled her eyes, but moved her chair closer to the table. “Everybody thinks they’re a good person. Most people try to act like good people, but it all goes away the second they have less than they think they should. They don’t have to starve, they don’t have to be homeless, all it takes for people to find the worst in themselves is to have less stuff than they think they should.”

  I paused. My instinct was to argue that she was wrong, but I’ve taken more than enough shit from people for absolutely no reason, so I saw what she meant.

  “And if everyone has it in them, then are people really good? No, they aren’t. We are all rotten to the core, many of us just have learned to not show it.”

  “That’s depressing.”

  “It’s freeing to me. Since everyone is shit, it doesn’t matter how I treat them, because they all deserve it.”

  A waiter brought us the beers, slid them on the table, and vanished like steam above a pot.

  Isabella grabbed her beer and took a sip. “Tastes like shit. But I won’t even try to get a decent beer here. It’s pointless. Anyways, where was I? Right, questioning you. How many girlfriends have you had?”

  I blinked a few times and took a long swig from the beer. That wasn’t where she was, but this also presented an opportunity to find out more about her. Maybe somewhere deep inside of her, there was a decent person. I just had to do a bit of digging. “One, but I’ve dated about four other girls.”

  “So, zero, and you’ve dated like three, but never got anywhere.” She chuckled. “Who’s that girl you tried to carry in through the portal?”

  Could she stop changing the topic? I frowned and started sweating slightly. “What about you? How have you been with serious relationships?”

  She drew a sharp breath, instantly glowering at me. “That’s not how this questioning works.”

  “Why not? You need me for the portal, and you are effectively my mentor now as you’ve been training me, so we might as well get to know each other a bit. And you’ve read a file on me, which I don’t even have access to. You know my whole history while I know nothing about you.”

  “Well, let’s review, so I got raped by three different men in my early teens. They all paid for it with their lives. Then, I met my master, who picked me up for the Secret Societies. The fucker shagged everyone that had a useable hole, spawned like sixty children with fifty different women, but never had anything with me, because I was his apprentice. He used to have orgies with succubi, but he wouldn’t even let me participate.” She reached for her beer.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  I drained mine. This got really serious out of nowhere.

  “Also, my master vanished, and with how much of a mage he is, there’s no way to find him. But then I got myself a vampire girlfriend. Well, she saw me more as her pet, but she was hot enough for me to not care. If you think you’ve seen a hot girl, you have seen nothing in comparison to a high vampire. There’s precisely three of them, and I had a lot of kinky fun with one… until she came up with a brilliant plan to implant me with her boyfriend’s seed, so I would be an incubator for their child since vampires can’t do that.” She finished her beer and threw an angry glare at the staff.

  One of the waiters was already rushing to us with fresh beers.

  “God, I wish I had the position to authorize a genocide. I would have had every single bloodsucker annihilated and made a curtain out of their fangs. But no, I can’t do that, because some of the oversized mosquitoes work for us.” She rolled her eyes.

  Another waiter arrived, bringing us the steaks, a pair of wagyu rib-eyes that looked and smelled like a monthly wage.

  Isabella picked up a fork, stabbed the steak, and lifted it up like a specimen she was about to incinerate. “What is this?”

  “It’s an A5 wagyu rib-eye steak, madam, as you have ordered.”

  “I ordered a steak, not a pile of fat. If I fed this to a dog, he would get a heart attack.” She flung the steak across the restaurant. It landed on the face of a mastiff, which was resting on the floor four tables away from us.

  The dog jumped up and then pounced on the meat, hungrily devouring it.

  Isabella turned her gaze to the waiter. “Bring me a steak for humans. Now.”

  Pale as death, the waiter bowed slightly and reached for my plate.

  I stopped him with my hand. “I’m fine, thanks.”

  The waiter scurried off.

  Isabella turned towards me. “Your taste disgusts me.”

  I cut into the steak. I would have had it medium, but this was literally from among the most expensive cuts of meat that existed, so I wasn’t going to miss it. It tasted divine, melting in my mouth, the sear adding a brilliant texture. “How did your life get so fucked up?” I asked, misdirecting.

  “Being born in Venezuela does that to people. My mother owed money to a terrorist cell, so she effectively was their slave. By being born to her, I was born to be a property. What saved me from being just a piece of meat was that one day, when I was about twelve, they were interrogating a particularly stubborn policeman. They had had enough of torturing him, and I asked if I could help. I tortured the man to death, earning the first warm meal of my life by doing so.”

  How did this get even more fucked up? I focused on the wagyu.

  “You know what was funny? The man who ran the terror cell, Mauricio, used a bakery as a front. To most people, he was a kind baker who gave kids old bread for free. Behind the front, he sold me to an international terrorist ring for an operation in the States, and the rest is history.” As she spoke, she kept glaring at the staff, most likely to motivate them to deliver to her another steak faster.

  Charming, but I was curious about other things. “How do you see the System? What’s your agent like?”

  “As my master, obviously. The System shows itself to people in the form they would find natural, supposedly, and it works for me. Though, I’ve got no idea how it works for people who started with the System, as I’m a late joiner.”

  “How come?”

  “Because I’m old. Now, a bit of a history lesson since your life is mine to do with as I please, anyway. The System, technically called the Hell Gate System, didn’t exist until about thirteen years ago. There was this mage, widely called Lucifer, who happened to be the greatest mage to ever walk the Earth, and also possessed less than strict morals. About twenty years ago, he died, went to Hell, didn’t like it there, and returned through the first-ever Hell gate.

  “He built a whole lot more of those gates, covering the entire world with his portal system, which he also hooked to a portal network that surrounds the world in the Void, and catches souls for his demons, and connects all the way to Hell. About thirteen years ago, the rest of the world caught up on this being a problem, and a conflict erupted. He won, crushingly, but he also left for another plane of existence. As a parting gift, he blew up his portal network.

  “Except that blowing up a system like that wasn’t exactly harmless, and the System got created as a side-product of that. Hence, the Hell Gate System. We haven’t figured out how it works, what powers it, or what’s even the purpose, if any. But it’s here, and it’s not going anywhere. Now, what specialization have you picked?”

  “None,” I admitted, thoroughly enjoying the steak. “I want to gather a bunch of skill points and some experience before I decide.”

  She rolled her eyes. “How boring. Can’t even poke you about picking a shitty specialization when you haven’t chosen any. Well, time will force you to pick something anyway. And then I’ll let you have it ten times worse.”

  Another waiter brought her a new steak, a really nice-looking rib-eye with a new salad.

  Isabella picked up a fork, again, and stabbed it. She rolled the fork, a bit, watching juices leak out of the steak. “It doesn’t bleed enough, but I would to starve to death if I were to wait for you to get the steak right.” She dismissed the waiter with a wave of her hand.

  He vanished like a ghost.

  “What are some good builds?” I asked.

  “Well, there’s the dexterity, willpower, and speed build that I’m running. The usual fifty-thirty-twenty ratio. Need to get some skills that are fast with it. That’s the most popular build. Then there’s the same thing but with intelligence, so intelligence, willpower, speed, also usually with the same stat ratio.”

  Well, damn. “Does nobody go for endurance?”

  “No. Shields protect better at the same stat investment, especially against conventional weapons. Endurance is great at high values, especially against dexterity. But that’s far, and people usually focus on not dying early and then stick to their build. Then there are pure charisma builds, which are a total pain in the ass to deal with, but somehow bad at the same time. Strength is weird, because it’s theoretically the greatest offense as nothing counters it, but it’s horrible defensively, because the main advantage of strength is that you can wear armor. Good luck with that in today’s society.”

  “What about speed?”

  “Speed is weird. Technically, it’s the greatest stat… but in practice, everyone who focuses on speed dies in the early levels because they literally kill themselves by tripping over something or crashing into someone, as you can’t have high speed and the strength, dexterity, and endurance to make it useable at the same time.”

  I cut a part of the steak and conjured the attribute tree in front of me. I gave high endurance perks a quick look and saw what she was talking about. At three hundred points, one unlocked immunity to critical hits. And dexterity focused on critical this and bypassing shields, so having a ton of endurance completely countered high dexterity builds.

  But three hundred points were sixty-levels spent on a single, non-offensive attribute. Way too much investment.

  “Thanks. That really helped me.”

  “No, it didn’t.” She tossed the fork on the side of her plate. “Because no matter what build you choose, you will wind up in situations where it’s useless. By the way, want to finish this?”

  I glanced at her steak. She ate barely a third of it and a tiny bit of the salad. I reached with my hand for the plate but froze. This was a trap. In no world would she not whip the shit out of me for taking second-hand food. I withdrew my hand. “Thanks, I’m good.”

  She smirked. “You’re starting to get it.” With a flick of her wrist, she lobbed the steak at the mastiff, who caught it mid-air and started chomping it down. “You’re a dog only if you act like one.”

  I smiled and finished my beer. “Have you had many apprentices?”

  She snorted. “No, and you aren’t worthy of it either. You just stumbled into my magnificent tutelage by sheer luck alone.”

  And by surviving it.

  “Anyways,” she rose. “We’re heading out. Time for you to level up.”

  Isabella marched to the bar and was paid by the first waiter. I caught a glimpse of her paying a four-digit sum, so at least she left some decent tip, and apparently paid for both steaks she fed to the dog.

  Slightly tipsy from the beer, I walked to her car and got inside when she unlocked it.

  Once inside, Isabella revved up the engine and stepped on the gas. The car bolted forward, straight into the opposite direction on the street.

  She drifted among the cars and almost spun the car to get back in the correct direction.

  Color withdrew from my face as I realized she was drunk. That’s what made her so unusually talkative.

  Then again, with her size, even a single beer was a decent dosage of alcohol.