Mia sat at the kitchen table, sending a wide variety of curses at herself. Her feelings in particular. She’ll be either straighter than an arrow, have a nasty personality beneath the facade, or both at once if my luck didn’t get any better by some miracle.

She was 24 dammit, well past her years of crushing on every pretty girl that smiled at her in highschool. She touched you for all of a second and then went to take a nap. Monsters probably want to eat you up more than that girl.

Mia ran her fingers over her face, stifling an irritated groan. All this stress and almost-dying was fucking with her head. She was sure of it.

I’m sure I read somewhere that almost-dying makes you horny. It was probably some pseudo-psychology blog, but it might have a tinge of truth to it. Mia considered, glanced at the blissfully napping blonde, and narrowed her eyes. Well, she was her type, all things considered.

Mia banished the thought of it. Her life was a fucking mess already, and she had more than enough problems already without factoring in her … crush? No, her hormones must be out of whack and messing her head. She knew the woman for all of five minutes.

With a decisive huff, she let go of those thoughts and returned herself to the present and the real world. The world where she was going to be responsible for protecting people from bloodthirsty metal birds. Joy. She hated being responsible for people.

Be it being a team leader at work, or being responsible for protecting these gardeners — who could really get a damned move on and start working already — which was a billion times worse. Mia groaned and tore at her hair in annoyance. She should have just kept to sniping goblins.

“What got your panties in a twist?”

Mia glanced over at Lina, who now had one eye cracked open and aimed at her way.

“I hate this,” Mia said, hanging her head limply, only holding it up by the two fistfuls of hair grasped in her hands.

“What do you hate exactly?” Lina asked, propping herself up with a groan. “The monsters? The magic? The alien super AI that shoved something into our souls and gave us both?”

Mia flushed at the question. Sure, she was stressed out about those too, but not nearly as much about the possibility of having another human’s blood on her hands should she fail to do what was asked of her.

I should have told Jeff to swallow a bag of dicks instead of going along with his stupid idea. Fuck.

“Hmmm?” Lina drawled and Mia was sure she raised one of her dainty golden eyebrows even as she didn’t look up from the table. The blonde let out a huff before slumping back on the sofa again. “Fine. I’ll let you brood in peace. Wake me when they finally get started down there.”

Mia made a noise of acknowledgement.

A deep breath in through the nose. Count to three. Hold the breath. Count to four. And a quick breath out through the mouth.

Mia repeated her tried and true calming exercise twice before she felt the bubbling anger and mortification fade. ‘Brooding’. Her eyes twitched.

At least her idiotic infatuation with the abrasive girl went away with it. Mia rubbed her face. She hadn’t been this moody and angsty in well over half a decade. Her time in highschool was an… interesting part of her life, filled with many memories that still haunted her, the sheer embarrassment she felt at the time sticking the events into her memory like superglue.

Mana slowly trickled through her channels and Mia focused inwardly, letting her mind be occupied by the simple task of following the ephemeral sensation. Mana was immaterial, as were her energy channels. She was sure of it, even Lara said she couldn’t feel anything like them in her body with her Skill.

Yet Mia felt it. It was foggy and a bit distant, but unmistakable.

It was supernatural. Just like one of her Traits {Spirit Sense} described.

That prompted another question though: was she the only one who could feel mana? Or see it even? Could others even see the glimmering spell circles when they cast spells?

I can’t imagine managing to cast a single spell without actually feeling my mana. It’d be hell and I’d have blown myself up a dozen times already. They probably have a weaker version of my Spirit Sense. Or just a mana sense? Mine covers every supernatural energy type supposedly …

Stimulating her dry channels was relaxing in a way she was growing to love. It was like a thorough full-body massage, but on her Spirit and Mind too, not just on her physical ‘vessel’ as the System called her Body.

She couldn’t wait till she could do it through all of her channels at once instead of controlling a tiny trickle of mana to course through her. Something to look forward to.

Mia’s ears twitched. A door creaked open a floor below and a gaggle of noise, voices, sounded out.

The young Halvyr tilted her head to the side and drank in the sounds.

“ …sure it’s really safe?” An elderly male voice sounded out, hesitant and afraid.

“I’d rather get eaten by a monster now than wither away from starvation. Move your bony ass Herman.” A stern elderly female voice barked back and Mia stopped herself from chuckling as the man gave a resigned sigh.

“If you say so dear.”

“Wake up!” Mia said, standing up. “Lina.”

“Urggghh,” the blonde groaned, blinked confusedly, then rolled off the sofa. Mia didn’t know what she expected, but the woman flipping to her feet with a sort-of-cart-wheel was not it. “Finally. Took them long enough.”

Mia shrugged, her eyes following the small group of ten people walking through the garden. They stopped at the newly made crater, one of the armed men carefully sneaking up to it and poking something inside with his spear before visibly deflating.

“It’s dead,” He said, Mia’s ears easily catching the shout even at this distance.

The group itself was made up of the elderly couple, two men with makeshift melee weapons — guards assigned to them by Jeff, probably as a last line of defence — and three men in what looked to be denim overalls. The last three were also the ones lugging around copious amounts of gardening tools.

“How likely are you to miss a diving bird?” Mia asked, sending a worried glance at the sky.

“I should feel the air moving from far away in an open space like this,” Lina murmured. “But I should make sure. Just to be safe. Uh, this will probably tire me out quickly though, what do you think?”

“Me?” Mia raised an eyebrow. Lina didn’t strike her as the type to take input from other people very well.

“No, I was asking that antique vase over there in the corner.” Lina rolled her eyes as Mia once again reaffirmed that her taste in women was maybe not the best. “Yes you.”

“Let’s start out on maximum awareness then,” Mia shrugged. “We’ll see how eager the birds are to get a bite out of them. If they leave them mostly alone, you can go back to passive sensing afterwards?”

She tried to frame it as a question, though she wasn’t sure she succeeded.

“Alright,” Lina said, rolling her shoulders before her silky smooth mana once again brushed up against Mia’s awareness. “I’ll make a film of mana spread out like a spiderweb and freeze any birds that try to pass through. The stopping itself is what drains me the most so if you could take them out quickly, that would be greatly appreciated.”

Mia nodded, watching as the white mist burst forth from the girl’s fingers and rushed outside to form said spiderweb just a metre above where they stood on the first floor. Mia had a clear view of the entire thing.

Her own mana raced to her fingertips and Mia gave her runic model a once over to make sure it made the spell circle correctly.

Her ‘Novice’ level knowledge was spotty at best, but inside it was a rather severe warning about backlashes of failed spells. The more mana a spell used, the more severe the backlash of a failed or broken casting.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Arcane Blast uses a fuckton. Mia steeled her resolve. Not only could her mana blow her organs out if she grew lax with her control, but since Arcane spells were all rather mana intensive, even the mildest backlash would send her into a dreadful migraine and the worse ones would have her brain trickling out through her ears.

Mia checked the spell circle for the third time and still found it to be perfect. Well, not perfect, but castable. She didn’t know why, but her nascent runic theory knowledge nudged at her about the spell circle being far from optimised.

“Okay, I’m ready,” Mia said, gaze roaming over the misty white veil that draped over the garden like a blanket. No birdies yet.

“Good,” Lina murmured absently. “How are they doing? How long do you think I’ll have to hold this?”

Mia glanced at the group below. The three overall guys were flitting about with buckets full of various seeds, but the real wonders were being done by the elderly couple.

The man, a wiry older man hunching over a bent wooden cane, was a one person earth working company. He walked with a lazy gait, cane tapping against the dirt and with each tap the earth shifted and reformed.

A path formed under and before his feet, made of compacted dirt as around him the grassy field was upturned to give way to fresh soil. The few trees dotting the garden shifted, the earth around them swelling and carrying them out to the sides and deposited them next to the walls.

Meanwhile the elderly woman followed behind the three seed wranglers. They laid the seeds meticulously into the rows of ditches made by the elderly man’s earth shaping.

She crouched down every two metres, waving her hand over the uncovered seeds and Mia caught flashes of gentle green light dripping from her fingers. Once she was done, she covered the seeds with dirt and moved over to the next patch.

The old man is using Earth magic for sure. And on a stupidly high level for someone who only had it for a day or two. What the hell. Mia couldn’t help but be awed at the lazy ease with which he shaped the world around him. And that woman. I don’t know for sure, but that might be Nature magic.

Mia’s breath hitched at the thought. Her mind recalled the few short entries in her Elements book about the reclusive druids and the wondrous things they could do with their Nature magic. One example the book mentioned was that even Rank 1 Druids could make an entire field of wheat grow from newly seeded to harvestable in just a week. If even a fraction of those things are true, she might just single-handedly feed the entire apartment complex.

Plus, Nature magic supposedly included weather manipulation at higher levels. If the woman could call rain whenever she wanted, water wouldn’t be an issue either. We’ll just have to survive until she can get there.

Unfortunately, that book also talked about Water magic at length. A simple fact of that element was that it belonged to the Negative half of the spectrum. That meant it could only control the element, not create it like the Positive elements of air and fire.

Drawing water out of ambient humidity was the best they were going to get, even if by some miracle, a genius Water mage just spawned into their building.

Of course, food wouldn’t be a problem if they could eat the meat of monsters. Mia’s entire being was revolted by the mere idea when Mark mentioned the possibility before, and she’d been resolved to starve rather than to eat even a single bite of monster meat.

Her instincts had been proven correct when Mark looked into it and realised that the broken mana suffusing the monsters’ bodies made it inedible to anything that didn’t want to have magical indigestion or something much worse. After all, broken mana supposedly corroded Bloodlines. It wasn't dangerous when it was just in the air since everyone's personal mana protected their bodies from contamination, but ingesting condensed clumps of it in the form of monster meat was another thing entirely.

“They are much faster than I thought,” Mia murmured, finally remembering Lina asked a question before she got lost in watching the show below. “I think twenty minutes at most. Maybe a bit less or more depending on whether they run out of mana.”

“I think I’ll be able to hold it that long,” Lina said, brows creased in uncertainty. “If we don’t have more than a handful of birds trying their luck and you take each out in a second at most.”

“I’ll do my best,” Mia said, tearing her gaze away from the magical spectacle and refocusing on her task. “Shout if you feel one coming. A bit of forewarning will do wonders.”

“I’ll try.”

As it turned out, staying perfectly alert for minutes on end for someone who never had to do such a thing before was … challenging.

That cloud looks like an elephant. Mia stared up at the sky, bored out of her mind already. She gave a glance at the garden and eyeballed that they were about a fifth of the way done with the renovation.

“Incoming,” Lina said in a strained whisper, and Mia jumped.

Her gaze snapped back to the translucent veil of mana just as a part of it broke from a bird pushing through. The veil around gave way, bending like a trampoline before encasing the monster in a spherical cage and constricting it.

The moment it slowed enough that Mia could make out the individual feathers on its body, she sent the spell flying.

This time, there was no struggling, as her spell hit it right in the head. The bird dropped like a rock and smacked into a newly made line of dirt.

“Got it,” Mia said, making sure they hadn’t accidentally dropped the bird on someone.

“This,” Lina wheezed, fingers trembling. “Is a pain. I might not be able to hold out for all that long.”

Mia squinted up at the veil and grimaced as it jerkily shifted back into how it was. Threads of mana working to repair the gaping hole the bird’s passing left behind in its fabric.

“Should we try baiting them out?” Mia wondered. “Take out all the ones around here while you’re still standing?”

“The only bait we have are the people down there,” Lina said with a grimace. “And they only attracted a single bird over how many minutes? Ten? Fifteen?”

“Right,” Mia said, eyebrows creased in worry. “How dependable is that passive detection thingy you mentioned?”

“Better than leaving them undefended when I eventually drop,” the blonde said.

“We could just tell Jeff to bring them back inside to let you rest up before they continued.”

Mia liked that idea. Less danger, slow and steady. They still had food. There was no need to rush and put people into undue danger.

“But-“ Lina started, then grimaced as the veil outside trembled. “Shit. Another one.”

Mia thankfully had mana at the ready at her fingertips and her runic model wouldn’t unmake the spell circle inside it if she didn’t command it to, so the only thing unready was her mind.

Mia went to search for the bird with a start, finding it already held by Lina’s magic. Her Arcane Blast shot off and caught it in the flank.

“Shit,” Mia cursed, hurrying the next glob of mana along as she watched the monster thrash around as Lina’s magic weakened.

The veil of air magic wrapped around the bird trembled, a moment away from shattering, and Mia rushed her mana to its destination, leaving her entire lower arm feeling as if lava was flowing through her veins instead of blood.

Still, the spell circle burst to life not a moment later. This Blast struck a wing, just like with the first bird they’d killed today. It also shattered Lina’s magic the moment the two powers touched.

The bird fell with a shriek, right towards the older man. Mia didn’t have time to worry about him though as Lina’s knees gave out on her and only Mia’s reflexes saved the girl from smashing into the ground, unconscious.

Mia wrapped her arms around the blonde’s waist to steady her, but the girl’s weight almost took Mia along for the fall.

“Oof,” Mia took a strained breath, then with her legs trembling like a pair of leaves in the wind, she laid the blonde down as gently as she could, then collapsed next to her.

Mia spent an embarrassing five seconds just staring at the ceiling, trying to catch her breath. Damn, she knew she didn’t have much muscle fit for lifting heavy stuff on her, but she’d almost knocked herself out by letting Lina’s momentum smack her into the ground.

And that would have left the gardening guys undefended, without them even knowing it because both of their defenders were out cold.

“Shit, the old man,” Mia startled, then struggled for a bit with extracting her now bruised left hand from under Lina. “Please be safe.”

She rushed over to the window, cradling her aching arm and found … the bird crumbled next to the wall with a guard experimentally poking it with a spear and the old man patting a pillar of stone next to him, the top of which was covered in blood.

Mia glanced up at the sky, bereft of Lina’s detection net. She took a deep breath. “JEFF!”

Her cheeks coloured a bit as she shouted into the ether, seeing some of the people in the garden twitching.

When the man didn’t miraculously materialise out of thin air in the next three seconds, Mia got angst and went the other route.

“Get inside the building!” She shouted out the window, and saw one guard stare up towards her, then nod.

The man then quickly nudged everyone into the building.

Mia kept alert, her heartbeat pulsing in her ear. If she had even the slightest nick of a chance to hit a bird before it struck at one of them, she had to be ready. Thankfully, they made it inside safely and Mia slumped in relief. Almost collapsing atop the now snoring blonde.

Which was when Jeff came bursting through the door. Mia opened her mouth to speak, but the man took one look at her gasping for breath and at her snoring partner before leaving with a nod her way.

Mia didn’t know what to think of that interaction, so she just slumped atop the sofa and got to gently caressing her abused energy channels with tiny trickles of mana.

She twitched and grimaced every other second as spikes of pain shot through her, but fought on. The pain lessened with time, but she now had two nearly ruptured channels in her two arms.

I won’t be casting any more spells today. Mia realised, biting her lip in frustration. Well, not if she wanted to cast any magic with either of her arms again in the future.

Healing ruptured channels was possible, according to her spotty knowledge, but extremely time- and/or money consuming.

I need to be more careful. If I hurt myself, I’ll be back to being powerless.

And if she was powerless, who could say what would happen to her? Jeff certainly only wanted her for her magic, which was also the only reason she and Mark still had their bathtub of water, she assumed.

If she was powerless, not only the monsters, but everyone else too could just walk all over her. Magic was her way to power, to regain some control over her fate. She couldn’t cripple it even if-

Mia took in a shuddering breath. Staring listlessly at the ceiling.

If I want to be strong enough to get through the monster infested city and save mom, I have to put myself first.