I was feeling better about myself. I had my weight vest on with 10 full crystal batteries in them, all of my weapons that I had enchanted with durability, my small pocket generator, and some bone and stone armor to cover the rest of me. So why the hell was I so damn afraid? All I had to do was walk outside and plant 4 acorns, link them to the preset enchantment on the last generator, and then secure two graveyards. All I could think about was how unprepared I was. I have flesh magic and I haven’t enhanced my body in any way. I have sorcery over mana itself and I have no epic magical weapon. I have nature magic and no badass creature to slay my enemies. Hell, with a few spiders and one zombie, this almost seems a bit gentle. A gentle apocalypse. Who would have thought. Not me, for sure. One of mine and Sarah’s favorite pastimes was to talk about various apocalypses while we drank and what we would do. Her family has a cabin deep in the West Virginia mountains that we could live happy hippy lives at while the world burned. Now that she’s a tree however, that ain’t happening.

  [Breathe in, breathe out]. I can do this. Someone has to. I should probably check on my neighbors and see if they’re still alive, or even if they know what’s going on. Part of me is kinda freaking out. I expected much more violence from we humans. Shaking my head to concentrate just a bit more, I planned my strategy, with some testing along the way. Zombies tend to kill humans due to endless endurance more than anything. I don’t have that, but I might be able to mimic it. Concentrating on the pocket generator, I altered the enchantment to have two flows, one to keep my personal mana well full, and one to send me healing energy, and a valve so I could alter the size of each flow. My theory is that the healing energy would keep stamina up. The sprint to the graveyard would prove my theory. Another issue to fix, my pocket generator is small, giving a small but constant feed of energy, but I can only handle a small flow right now and I need to figure out why and how to change that. I don’t seem to have a problem manipulating the already present mana in the batteries, just as long as it’s not in me. Problems for another time.

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  It took me two minutes to quietly navigate to the closest graveyard. It’s very small, maybe thirty yards long and wide. I think some old money families have their dead here. Peeking from behind a tree, I only saw one disturbed grave. God I hope that was the dude I buried yesterday. I counted twenty graves. Easy. I went to the first one and reached out with my earth magic. Yup, there was a coffin in the dirt, and turning that dirt into stone, also pretty easy. I didn’t even need to dip into my batteries to seal all the graves. I turned the dirt all around each coffin into stone, and put a stone cap on top of that for extra security. Now that my theory was correct and easier to pull off that I had originally thought, time for the next cemetery. As I made my way over there, I picked up the pace bit by bit. By the time I got there, I was sprinting my ass off and not even winded. I could feel the healing energy removing bodily fatigue, lactic acid, and carbon dioxide. I could make the average man a marathon runner if I wanted. So caught up in my own thoughts and accomplishments, it took me a second to realize that I had stopped my sprint in front of a horde of zombies.

  “Fresh meat for my army I see!”