"Stop the car!"

Upon Fay's shout, Makary's vehicle swerved on the road a bit.

I was too late to stop Fay's shout, sensing her distress a mere instant before she actually called out.

Still, Makary wasn't the kind of a driver who would panic when put on the spot like that. After a moment of desperate breaking, he quickly countered with the gas, throwing the steering wheel to the side to make up for the car sliding on the somewhat wet road.

"Can you see it?!" Fay quickly corrected with another shout while tugging on my shirt to attract my attention.

And yet, rather than just staring at the terrifying sight outside, I gritted my teeth and took a shallow breath.

"Drive slightly drunk!"

The worst thing we could do was attract their attention. And while the courtesy of the tinted windows kept our faces away from Cassie and her bitchy friend's eyes...

Would someone capable of casually wielding an aura many times greater than Madam could harness really be obstructed by something as simple as that?

Still, those tinted windows gave us a tiny bit of leeway. The obvious high class of Makary's personal car only added to the premise of a drunk nouveau-riche crashing through the city streets at night.

"Okay...?" Makary, having no clue what we just saw, sensed that it wasn't an act. And following my request, he swung the car to the other side, nearly crashing into the nearby sign pole.

"Haaa... haaa... haaa..." The sound of Fay's heavy breathing filled the otherwise silent car.

Right, as the child of the forest and someone who lived with the aura her entire life, she had to be much more sensitive to it than me. And with how I felt like throwing out right this very moment after just a single glance at this repulsive, thick, and oily aura of darkness...

I could only imagine how shitty Fay felt.

"A normal human goes up to an average of three points. A professional can reach six while a master, an absolute elite, can reach up to nine. Levels ten and above are pretty much beyond the human realm."

Hearing my recap of what I said just a fewteen minutes ago, Makary simply nodded his head.

"This time I won't be speaking with averages... Or at least, not in the sense I did when raising this topic the last time," I started with yet another preamble, something I was growing strangely fond of doing.

"My number should be within the upper teens, just shy of twenty. Fay's number..." This time I hesitated for a bit since I wasn't sure which of her average attributes should I provide. The one she boasted while in her human form? The stats she enjoyed while in her ascended, kitsune form?

Or maybe the stats I saw appear on her status when we joined in this strange union, locked within the domain of her hair and aura?

"Fay's number would be around the middle twenties," I spoke, settling on describing Fay's ascended but not promoted form.

"The powerhouses I talked about..." I took a short pause to try to give it an educated guess. "Around sixty, I believe?" I muttered to myself. "Somewhere within of forty through eighty points, I guess. But in their case, those points hardly even matter anymore."

"And?" Makary asked after I turned silent for a short while. "Why are you telling me all of this?"

I took a deep breath to sort my own thoughts.

What was just an after-through, an issue to investigate along the leisure of free time... Now turned into something quite possibly much more important and dire than whatever was going back in Fay's world.

"One of the two girls, either my ex or her bitchy friend..."

I pressed my lips into a thin line, struggling to even get the next piece out of my mouth.

And right as Makary drove towards the massive, metal gate to an ancient-style plane's hangar and stopped the car, I finally gathered my guts and spoke.

"To my understanding, one of those two boasts a number well past hundred."