20.

Mana. Magic. A thousand wishes had come true right here on a beach filled with dead monsters. The stench of the area was impossible to iterate, worse than raw sewage and rotting meat. I hardly noticed it as I stared at my stat and the floating number next to it. Some hidden part of me, the last remnants of childhood stirred in excitement. Now how the hell did I use it?

“You good, Billy?” Miguel’s voice chimed in from behind me. I had forgotten he was with me for a moment.

“Perfect. We have to find all of these!” I wanted them for myself, greed warring with common sense. If I wanted to survive this; to claim the top spot and break free from my old life of being powerless, then I would need help. I was no genius fighter, I had no history of warfare, there was nothing special about me now that stats had erased the biological advantage I had. I needed my team to be strong, thus I needed them to have magic and couldn’t keep all of the mana hearts.

I didn’t like logic at that moment.

“Billy. Do you think my mom and sister are here, in the tutorial?” Miguel asked softly, a quiver in every syllable. I turned to look at him, his dark eyes were filled with unshed tears. He had been having a hell of a week and I couldn’t blame him for crying.

“Maybe. We’ve seen that people abducted also had people in their general vicinity come with them. Olivia and Agatha. Dan and his soldiers. There’s six more zones. They could easily be out here.”

“I don’t want them to. I want them to be safe. I…Billy, I don’t know how much longer I can do this. I’m so scared, I want my Mom, man.” Tears were sliding down his face in a stream, his breath hitching and his chest heaving as he was seized by emotions.

Fuck. I hated dealing with emotional people. Was I supposed to hug him? A pat on the shoulder? Comforting words? Silence?

I hugged him. This way I didn’t have to stare at his face filled with grief and terror. He shook in my arms, his tears would have been staining my shirt without a doubt. I was inordinately happy I was wearing armor, it would make cleaning snot and tears off easier.

“We can do this, Miguel. Together. You, me, Bobby, the old lady and Olivia. All of us together. We found Olivia, we will find your mom and sister if they’re out here,” I whispered as I stroked his head. If anything my gentle words had him shaking harder. We stood there, him crying and me petting his head, trying to ignore the stench. The urge to tell him to man up was strong, to push this shit down as deep as possible and have a breakdown later in the dark, like a real man. Toxicity, thy name is Billy.

Eventually he calmed down. The shaking and tears stopped, he was breathing deeply, face mottled and eyes bloodshot. We walked away together through the mess of dead corpses, our eyes peeled on the ground looking for more of the clear mana hearts. We didn’t talk, but there was a companionable silence between us. The emotional catharsis of the moment left us clear minded and calm. Miguel sniffled every now and then, but I ignored him.

My eyes were peeled for the hearts, walking around the spots I recalled the elementals dying. It took us the majority of the morning to find the remaining hearts. By then we were drenched in blood and covered in detritus. The three hearts were bundled up and we started marching back up the beach. I looked back and got my first look at the poisonous gators they had extracted the vitality mana hearts from.

They were albino; twenty feet from snout to tail, with the traditional long jaws. I watched as one walked with treacherous intent, its wide jaws gaping open as it walked up to a dead crab. A spray of liquid burst from its maw, spreading across the shell of the crab with an audible sizzle, even over the sound of the surf. It shoved its snout into the sizzling mess, pushing through the formerly hard carapace like it was wet paper.

“That’s terrifying,” I joked to Miguel, nodding at the feasting monster. The boy looked over with red rimmed eyes and smiled faintly. The emotional moment slowly receded to the background as we watched the beast. A few moments passed in silence, broken by a slew of crossbow bolts cutting across the beach. The bolts dug at the monster's exposed eyes, forcing it back, to snap its jaws in anger as it slowly walked backward.

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

Agatha led a party of butchers across the beach. A handful were armed with crossbows, the rest were wearing raggedy clothes and clutching at butcher blades. Olivia followed in the old woman's shadow, her own crossbow pointed at the retreating alligator. Agatha waited a moment, when none of the others succeeded in slaying the gator, then she fired.

A single bolt punched through the creature's black beady eye. It stilled instantly, legs collapsing under its own weight as its belly settled into the black sand. Agatha was scary. Her prowess with the crossbow was growing by the day, and with her skill she would be a formidable opponent. When we finally used our stat points, I had a feeling she would become a nightmare. I just had to make sure she wouldn’t be visiting my dreamscape when that happened. Really needed to find the other granddaughter, and keep Olivia safe. So many different tethers tugged at me. My goals of growing strong enough to stand alone seemed silly in the face of this, how could a man stand alone? I shoved those intrusive thoughts away and went back to searching for the clear hearts while the butchers began their harvest.

Walking away, we resumed our search with mild results. I hadn’t seen exactly how many of the storm elementals had died. Nor had I seen where they fell. The beach was filled with corpses, body parts, and now scavengers coming from the sea. More of the poisonous alligators, small regular crab like creatures, and seagulls, all coming to lay claim to the feast laid out for them. I couldn’t recall seeing any regular wildlife before this, had the tutorial loosed them to help with the cleaning?

Miguel found the next heart. In the center of a crater of black glass, scorched bones all around it, heat still radiating forth in waves. The final resting spot for the magical creature. Miguel looked at me, then stared down at the center of the crater again, then turned to look at me again. Did he want me to go get his mana heart?

He definitely did.

I scrabbled down the small crater, only four or five feet deep and roughly eight wide. The heat was brutal, sweat breaking free on my brow, my feet baking in their boots as I jogged on the cracking glass to the heart. The heart itself was cool to the touch and I raced back up the slope. I thanked the gluttony of constitution hearts I had consumed as I came out of the crater, only slightly cooked. I wanted to see what the definitive advantage to gaining stats was, to put values next to the numbers. I don’t think I would have been unharmed without the burst of constitution though.

“You have to get the next one,” I told him as I tossed the heart to him. He smiled slyly as he started to carefully crack it. These were the smallest hearts we had seen yet, and even one spilled drop could be the difference between unlocking the stat and not. The elementals would have been impossible to kill in any great number without Agatha’s skill. I had a hunch that the tutorial had left their summoners vulnerable to the scorpion fire as a way to banish the creatures. What was the tutorial training us for? What was the point? Also, weren’t the scorpions overpowered, allowing us to slay monsters too easily? More useless thoughts that I had to shove away.

Miguel sipped from the broken heart slowly, savoring the taste of magic. His dark eyes widened as he drained the heart. If it felt anything like it had for me, I could understand the reaction. His eyes unfocused for a moment, and I could only assume he was looking at his stats. While he reveled in that I took a moment to look at my own notifications.

Three more levels earned. All for just loading the scorpions. My own part in the fight was so miniscule. I glanced at Agatha standing down the beach, guarding the team butchering the boss monsters. How many levels had she gained firing and doing the actual killing? I would have to get the group together to find out stats and levels later. After I found the magic giving hearts, or at least enough to get the rest of the team to unlock the mana stat.

Level fourteen. With twenty-seven stat points ready to be distributed. Could I dump them all into mana? Become a wizard? Or would it be a mage? What the hell was the difference? I was tired, my stray thoughts were growing harder to corral as the morning went on. I still needed to talk to the council, convince them to send people to the forts to finish securing this sector. The longer I thought about it, the more it made sense. A secured sector would stop or at least slow the wave of monsters. It had to. Otherwise we were fucked.

“Get it?”

“Yeah. I have magic now!”

“We have magic now. Come on, let's find some for the girls. I think Bobby would skin us if we didn’t get her a magic heart.”

“Yeah. She’s scary. You should have seen her while you were injured. She was a monster with that big ass hammer. Couple times, the fishes were able to get on the wall, and like, she just went fucking ham on them. SMASH BASH BLAM, you know, just fucked them up. After that, everyone started being really polite to her.” Miguel regaled me as we walked.

That the quiet, inquisitive, wallflower had a vicious side to her, maybe bordering on battle mania was a surprise. Should it be though? I had felt the rush in the fight, my blood howling as we tested ourselves. Maybe that was what the tutorial was doing, imparting a bloodlust on us. Miguel seemed to be ready to go hunt and do battle with those murder rabbits, Agatha was a merciless archer, and everyone else seemed to be sliding into the violence easily enough. Yet another thing to think about.

Despite my exhaustion, we continued to trawl the battlefield. Over the course of two hours we found four more of the mana hearts. One for each of the girls, plus Oliva, and a spare. I was tempted to crack open and consume the spare right now. The memory of the ice cold power racing through my veins was an addiction I wanted to form. I had Miguel carry the hearts in a bag we had stolen from some of the butchers. The large pile of hearts they were gathering as they worked their way up and down the beach was enough to make me salivate. That most of them had to be set aside for the defense of the fort was frustrating.

“Come on. If they find more, they’ll end up in the sacks. Let’s get these to Bobby. Then we need to convince the council to send teams to the keeps.”

“How are we going to do that? They don’t like being told what to do. Took a lot of badgering from Agatha and Bobby for them to take our advice.”

“I’m not going to give them a choice. There’s an option in the owners menu; since I’m the owner of this fort, and they can’t take it from me since they can’t claim a fort since they're not from this region, I’m going to make them swear an oath of fealty.”

“You can do that?”

“Conquer and survive, Miguel. I’m certain that the oath of fealty is supposed to be administered to those you’ve conquered. Allies can take it though.”

“And if they say no?”

“They’re going to get an eviction notice.”