8. Franz Ferdinand - This Fire
Evergreen was a town with a very small main street and a very large set of back roads. Dominating most of the available space in the front range, it’s one of the easiest “let’s get out of town” destinations from downtown Denver, at just shy of an hour away by car. The main street boulevard stretched around the biggest attraction of the town – Evergreen lake. A truly magnificent body of water was held above the town by a small spillover dam, the lake rimmed around the edges by the town’s namesake. Pines littered the ground with needles, but the deep green of the surrounding forestry gave the lake a lively, vibrant color even though it had already frozen along the edges. The highway passed right along the lake, giving an idyllic scene of the valley wrapped up by gentler hills instead of the harsh rocky peaks marring the rest of the journey.
The time of year wasn't there yet, but eventually the ice on the lake would get thick enough to walk on. Traditionally, the town would open up the lake to events like ice skating deeper into winter. There was also a very avid ice fishing community, who would turn out in force during the weekends. Other times of year, you could always spot someone walking along the decently manicured trailhead stretching around the water – and kids straddling the rocks were a common sight to see year-round.
For all of the people coming to visit the lake, there were lines of shops ready to receive them. Bars, mercantile shops, art galleries and all of the artistic talent the mountain town had to offer. I still had several pieces of eye-catching glassware and vivid resin works hogging up space at my little apartment. As much color as the town usually had to offer, it had been drained out by the roots.
A community garden had fallen to the wayside, the usually sturdy mountain flowers wilting as the climate fell deeper into the chill of winter. Like the rest of the town, even they seem to have died.
The streets were devoid of all of the usual signs of humanity, doors to the various shops either hung open, were bolted shut, or had been torn straight off the hinges. Moved by an uncommonly brutal force. The roads told another, more chaotic story of struggle and desperate measures. Streaks of red, flashes of blackened landscape and charred lumps of indiscernible carbon, not dissimilar to our own experiences, if only taken to a further extreme.
Whether you could call it merciful or not, the fires never spread as quickly as they should have. They must have burned fiercely, roaring upwards before starving themselves out, spreading far faster vertically than horizontally. The result – entire blocks of the originally wooden, homey structures turned to carbon and ash, but never jumping the relatively small gaps of streets and alleyways. Some buildings still smoked with the last dregs of embers that must have ignited at the very start of it all. When the smoke spiraled upwards, it seemed to disperse on the winds before blending into the background without a trace.
We wandered into the town at a slow pace, gingerly navigating the truck past vehicles that had stopped dead on the road, black scorch marks marring the hoods as some engines had simply destroyed themselves under the strain of supercharged gasoline. Others had detonated, gouging rents into the body, shrapnel from less-sturdy components piercing straight through the composite plastics, steel and aluminum. Electric vehicles were fairly common in this part of the country, a very unfortunate fact for the drivers and everyone around them, as the huge batteries they demanded converted the world around them into ionized slag. It was thanks to one of these ominous clearings that there was enough space to travel down the road at all. Evergreen was a popular destination for the weekends, and had been filled to the brim even in the late evening when mana first arrived at the tourist town. The silence pervading the town in the middle of daylight was just as unnatural as any sight around us could have been.
“Where are all of the bodies?” Jake broke the oppressive silence with a very appropriate but grim question, mirroring what everyone else had on their minds. I peeked through the rear-view mirror, trying to pressure him to lean back from the window with my eyes. We were passing through a graveyard.
Despite all of the obvious signs of struggle and death, there wasn’t a single clearly human corpse to be seen. There were a few that could have been demons, but it was hard to make anything out of what may as well have been black stone. The sight sent a chill down my spine. I clutched at the battery in my pocket – my only ‘weapon’, if it could even be called that – for the meager reassurance it gave. If it was this bad here, how bad would it have been in Downtown? What would Broadway look like, being the same style of main street as what we were seeing here, magnified times 10? And where were the bodies?
Leaving the buildings aside, they had even been dragged out of destroyed cars on the side of the road, the doors pried open with monstrous strength. But not all of the doors had been forced open with the occupants dragged away. Whatever did this still had the wherewithal to try opening unlocked doors, but was more than capable of breaking them open if they weren’t.
I struggled to believe that a human could have done it, and I struggled even more to see the motivation behind it. The occupants had died. That was plainly obvious from the signs of conflict – a seatbelt torn from the cabin, a steering wheel marked with blood, and doors hanging loosely open that were never shut, something most people did on reflex alone, running away or not. But the way they had died wasn’t obvious at all. Whatever was collecting bodies, it was not for anything good.
The sight caused me to pick up the pace, wanting to get out of the town as quickly as we were able.
If I had really been paying attention to anything other than navigating my truck and maintaining my bubble of mana, I might have noticed the flicker of power lighting up to my senses as we passed by a still-intact alleyway.
For better or worse, I hadn’t noticed the gout of fire until it splashed against the hood of the truck.
Ding!
[Dull Magic (G) – Lv. 0] -> [Dull Magic (G) – Lv. 1]
My concentration snapped, and the bubble collapsed inwards like a straw house, igniting just as easily but taking the suddenly omnipresent fire with it, the flamethrower petering out to mere wisps floating around the truck. Simultaneously, the truck’s radio flared static, and every light on the dash came to life. The horn hid away a series of rapid, staccato snaps from underneath the hood. The battery was exposed once more. The truck started vibrating dangerously, the pressure in the engine rising to an extreme it wasn’t built to withstand.
“Out! NOW!” Moore caught on far more quickly than I did, banging on the back window from where he stood on the cargo bed, seemingly unscathed from the fire and with a much better view of the threat than me. But I had slammed on the brakes, and was far more focused on the problems in the truck than outside of it. Even disengaging the engine hadn’t stopped it, as it gained a life of its own.
Marie practically had to drag me towards her, away from the driver’s side door, before a loud bang threw the truck up, stilted sideways on its wheels, for a few precarious feet before its weight dragged it back down, landing squarely again but grinding roughly on the suspension. My mind turned white for the briefest moment, pain lancing through my left thigh. A strangled gasp escaped my throat, the slight pain from making the unintelligible sound not even registering against the machined steel sticking out of my leg. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I caught the sound of panicked screams.
The driver’s side door had a hole blasted through it, the fireball exacerbating the already-dented door and sending shrapnel into my body at force. The engine pitched, racketing as something internal harshly broke, but my mind had completely left the outside world alone for a moment. There weren’t enough expletives in existence for the nonsense thoughts running through my head to use, trying to get a handle on the pain. My grit teeth and the vice grip I had on Marie’s arm were the only things that saw me through to the other side of the truck.
The moment I was out, I locked eyes with the thing responsible. A skeletal, hunched over impression of a human child, latched to the side of the alleyway wall with hook-like claws. It scarpered up to the top of the building with a hiss, its lithe tail studded with sharpened bone spurs flicking over the edge of the rooftop. What the hell are you? I brushed up against the monster with a thought, tugging on that loose connection with my skill.
[Demon – Hellion (F) Lv. 2]
Stats:
Strength: 7
Vitality: 5
Dexterity: 20-30
Perception: 12
Intelligence: 20-30
Willpower: 18
Skills:
[???] [Demonic Transfiguration (G) – Lv. 2] [Mana Manipulation (F) – Lv. 1]
…Is this bastard smarter than me? I discarded the thought as quickly as it came. Not the time nor place. What’s important was, it was just as physically weak as it looked, about as big as a frail, malnourished seven-year-old.
My initial thought had been that this had to be the demon responsible for claiming all of the bodies, but with its frame and stature… That stopped being likely. One more mystery to solve. We’ll just have to deal with it later. There were smaller fish to fry.
Stephen could probably punt it to the next town over, being the size that he was. Oh shit, Stephen. I quickly looked around for the boy before letting out my breath in relief. Stephen was on the driver’s side too. If nothing else, I figured the demon would’ve targeted him for the second attack since he’d been the slowest of us all to react. Instead, I was the one with the metal in my leg. I had to force myself to be thankful for it, the teen might not have been able to tough it as well as I could.
And tough it I did. I could barely hobble on the leg, but hobbling was faster than standing still as another ball of flame curved around the side of the building, before splashing against the truck on the passenger side, where I’d just left. This one was weak, just enough to leave a scorch mark against the truck and wobble it a little. More than enough to deliver 3rd degree burns, but most of the energy of the blast had been consumed to change its course instead.
I still had the notification from [Inspect] up, and was fairly surprised when I saw the Hellion’s [Mana Manipulation] skill jump up from level 1 to 2. The surprisingly adept trick shots out of the demon's line of sight had missed, but increased its level in the process.
Suddenly It felt like we were being shot at with smart bullets rather than magic, the extra level giving it a more qualitative change to the magic’s momentum. Small scattershot pellets of fire arced over the building, then rained against the road like metalworking sparks, the bullets course-correcting midway and forcing both Marie and I into cover while the rest had already gotten ahead of us and into the nearest building. Moore had been the fastest to get moving away from the vehicle, only needing to jump out of the cargo bed and make a break for it, but had to turn around and grab an increasingly pale Sarah by the wrist. Somewhere along the way, Stephen had picked up his brother and was carrying him away at speed.
Not fair, System. Where’s my damned skill levels. Then, I remembered the notification I’d just received. Dull magic. Not ‘nullify magic’, or ‘barrier’, but ‘dull’, huh? So, there were no guarantees that forming a bubble again would save me from a direct blast. But it sure as hell increased my chances. I shifted the mana around me again, expanding the soap-bubble sphere of magic to be as tightly packed as I could make it. Something told me trying to make it larger would only make it easier to pop, so I kept it arms-length around me instead, and tightened the boundary as best as I could.
It felt more isolated than before. It was a strange thing, I hadn’t realized how much I could feel the mana around me until it became thin, my bubble not being nearly as airtight as I’d initially thought. Like I’d been shoveling away sand, moving a good portion but some still slipping in to replace what I’d taken away. Getting an actual skill for it felt like I’d upgraded from a handheld trowel to a proper two-handed shovel. It would be a while before I could totally remove the mana around me.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
My newly constructed Dull Magic sphere was put to the test as fast as I’d made it. Another bolt of fire streaked out from inside the building, this time shot from a window with a straight path to us. I barely saw the Hellion slip deeper into the building before the bolt impacted against the bubble, the edge of agitated blue light smothering some of the fire and slowing it just enough for me and Marie to get out of its way. The bolt of magic singed the sidewalk, catching fire to the concrete and burning for an unnaturally long time, but snuffing out before performing any other impossible actions. I could very easily account for some of the charred ruins and remains around me, now.
Physically slowing the balls of flame shot my way was a pleasant surprise. I was in no condition to rapidly dodge anyways, and not being able to tell where the Hellion was or where it would try and shoot me from next was not going to help that at all either. I tried to look for its mana, searching it out as best as I could, but all I got back were hazy flashes of crimson in the demon’s general direction.
Dull Magic probably wouldn’t be helping me there. I was barely trailing behind Marie as she helped me up a short but painful couple of steps, trudging into the same building the others had fled to. We slammed the door shut behind us, a thick wooden thing that had miraculously survived the last few days. Two firebolts plowed into it simultaneously, sending the wood crackling as the flames ignited. The fires stopped spreading as I expanded Dull Magic to cover the door, instead steadily dying out as the regular embers had far less fuel to consume.
I had to sit down somewhere. My left leg couldn’t bear the weight I’d been throwing on it trying to get out of the road. But once Marie brought me to a rickety wooden chair, my thoughts quickly turned to the magic. There were a lot of things I wanted to try, right then and there. What would happen if I fed the artificial flames more mana instead? I know it would burn more intensely, just like the gasoline had, but how far could I take that? If I used enough mana, would it explode? Snuff itself out? How would my mana work against the mana in the Hellion’s spell? All of the adrenaline had given my thoughts a dangerous edge to them, and with this being my third near-death experience in the span of as many days, I was starting to get sick of just running away.
After all, this was just day three.
At day three, a demon was already faster than a car. A demon could light me on fire with a thought. Hell, on day two, an Elemental could completely flatten me, not even realizing I was underfoot. I thought elementals were supposed to be weak, low-level guys like slimes. All of the games had slimes as your first enemy. I wanted to fight level one slimes, dammit.
What was going to happen on day four? Or day five? Or day three-hundred-and-sixty-five? I completely ignored the situation to start with, approaching things with the same level of naivety as hoping the whole thing would be a dream. The shard of twisted metal drawing blood from my thigh said that this was very much not that. I was behind. I was so behind, I didn’t even know how behind I was. Compared to Marie, or Moore, or Stephen, or anyone else who had been thrust into this before I had been, I may as well have just started.
Marie was panicking, throwing her hands up in pointed gestures and switching between calming assurances and shouted orders, trying to organize the chaos and get someone to barricade the door. Moore was nowhere to be seen, having gone deeper into the building – a local bar – presumably looking for some miracle item to help in a bad situation. Or to run away, I wouldn’t have blamed him for doing so. Even with Marie talking them down, the teens looked scared, except for Sarah. She was excitedly following her mother’s instructions, seeming to be getting supplies at a camping trip rather than trying to fortify a worn-down bar that could be burned to the ground at any moment.
Stephen was a different kind of scared, one that I couldn’t quite place in the moment. Determined, might be a word for it. He kept himself between the door and everyone else, watching the outside from a set of covered windows. His brother was nearly attached to his hip.
I sighed, the empty breath not producing any sound. I really didn’t want them to have to protect me like this, but at the same time, I was suddenly useless to everyone. All I was doing was preventing the building from catching fire, snuffing the firebolts that kept pounding into various spots, probing the limits of my skill. I had to switch from a sphere to a more generic, undefinable blob, smothering the side of the building wherever the sparks were flying. The Hellion was going to burn us out, rather than trying to come down and break in.
[Dull Magic (G) Lv. 1] -> [Dull Magic (G) Lv. 2]
The skill was a stay of execution. I was starting to believe that there was no such thing as running out of mana. No matter how many fireballs were thrown our way, or how much I used my skill to dampen them, we were just splashing water at each other in a lake full of the stuff. What was the difference between the mana I had stocked here, in my core, versus the mana in the outside world? After seeing the Hellion’s magic, I was starting to get an idea.
And this was going to go down on record as a very stupid idea. I dropped my skill, reversing the push into as strong a pull as I could produce, sucking mana into the furnace of my core as rapidly as it would take it. In my concentration, I hardly noticed Moore returning with gauze wrap and a bottle of Everclear, produced from the back of the bar. He asked me a few words that didn’t register, focused as I was on trying to replicate an idea I’d caught by the tail. Jake yelled out a warning once he’d seen what Moore was doing.
A wrenching torrent of pain and blood stole my attention away as I looked at Moore in shock. He was already bandaging the newly opened gash in my leg with some gauze that had been heavily drowned in a drink as close to pure alcohol as you could get.
“Not like that! You’re doing it wrong!” Jake pushed Moore aside, the larger man gently giving way to the boy half his height.
“No worries, he’s all yours.” Moore flashed me a wink, setting my grimace deeper than it already was. He flicked the metal fragment away, setting it clattering on the floor. I could understand trying to help me out, and I was grateful for it, but why’d he let Jake take over? The kid frightfully looked over my leg, unwrapping the hastily made bandage and looking like he might pass out just from seeing the blood. He got up with a pale expression and left, making me question Moore’s decision even further. I held down on my wound, trying to stem the blood flow but wincing from the pressure.
“Hey, give me a hand, this thing’s heavy!” Sarah called out to Moore the moment he was free, and they got to work propping up a table to jam the door. It wouldn’t help if the demon burned the building down, but was a solid plan otherwise. I’d been here before. The bar had a back door leading to an outside patio by the creek running through town. A nice spot, in different circumstances.
Jake brought a few less-than-clean dishrags that had been on a table in the bar, halfway through cleaning. A worker had left their shift midway through, clearly in a hurry. My thoughts got a bit fuzzy as they drifted to wondering where the worker might be now. They sharpened again after Jake scrubbed the wound out with more alcohol, and probably more roughly than he intended.
“I need you to pull down your pants for a second.” I obliged, with a bit of a struggle while he helped. The stickiness of the blood caught in a few areas, sending my head reeling. He padded the tear with the thicker cloth before wrapping it tightly with gauze, gathered from some basic first aid kit Moore had found in an office. Jake tied off the bandage surprisingly quickly. Better than anyone would expect from someone that wasn’t trained. I remembered that he had the Initiate Mender class, but was frankly expecting something a little more… magical? Certainly not actual medical skills. It got me wondering exactly how those types of system-granted skills worked.
“Mr. Moore shouldn’t have pulled it out until we were ready. It’d be better if we found some cotton balls… Just don’t move for a bit! Keep pressing down here.” He moved my hands onto the wound, holding them down and applying pressure before getting up and racing off into the bar once more.
[Jake Salazar]
[Basic First Aid (G) Lv. 4]
It was a high level for a skill, mirroring his older brother’s high class level. Stephen didn’t look to be injured anywhere, though. I could only hold out hope that recovering from injuries took less time, now. Otherwise, it would be hard to get to Denver on a bum leg. The shard of metal had been sharp and narrow, severing a lot of tissue on the outside of my left thigh but not getting anything important. If it had hit the inside of my thigh on the same spot instead, I might be down one major artery too many.
All that to say, I was losing blood, but not enough to be a greater threat than the demon that was still skulking outside of the building. Ever since I’d dropped Dull Magic, I could more clearly feel the Hellion, and I realized that it could also feel me. It was targeting me, after all. I might have been the only other creature with a core that it’d met over the last few days.
But now that I’d been filling my core to the brim, compressing it with as much mana as I could fit in there? For some reason, it hesitated. At first, it hadn’t moved from where it had been safely nestled in the building across the street. I could feel it preparing itself. Charging itself with mana, stealing it from the surroundings as best as it could, mirroring me. It was on the roof of its building now, staring at us.
I got up, wincing as I tried to keep the weight off the leg. There was something important that I needed to see. The base level of the bar had windows that were dark and nearly impenetrable to the outside light, most of which had already been covered with anything Marie could use to cover them with. But through their smoky tint I could see the Hellion from where I was. I watched it, half of my perception in reality and half in my mind’s eye as it prepared another one of its firebolts, feeling how it used mana to create the concentrated heat.
It gathered mana – not the mana from the outside world, this time, but taken from its own core that shone brightly to my eyes. The crimson-tinted rope of light twisted in on itself, grasping at the air around it with a physical force. It tore at the air, grinding it together with enough strength to ignite the oxygen in the atmosphere. Then it fed the spark with its mana, pouring in all of the contents of its meager core, pulling it together and enacting a change to create a much, much larger ball of fire than any it had prepared earlier. It hovered over its hand like a miniature sun, the Hellion struggling to compress it while almost everyone inside our building remained oblivious to it.
“Can you block this one too?” Stephen had locked on to me at some point, the only other person cognizant of the demon’s attack. I shook my head. Barely dispersing the magic wasn’t something I intended to do, this time. His face turned grim. He reached out to grab me, probably to drag me through the back entrance of the bar, before I stopped him with a gesture.
It was a crappy one, but I had a plan. I really wanted to test this out with a less-lethal example first, but this wasn’t the time to second guess myself. I just had to gather more, faster than it could.
The Hellion launched its spell, a soft whoomph the only indication something had changed. Stephen hesitated for a moment too long, before gathering himself and rushing to the back of the bar with a shout. I closed my eyes, and focused on this other, new sense of mine.
When the fireball – a true and potent one – passed through the middle of the space between me and the demon, I reacted. A lance of blue light coiled out of my arm, passing straight through the wall as though it wasn’t there. It hit the fireball right down its center, and a strange kind of contest started. The fireball lost all momentum, kicked back from the collision like it had crashed against a brick wall.
In a way, I’d just won. The gamble had paid off. The fireball was something of a last-ditch effort when the Hellion couldn’t break through Dull Magic and simply burn down the bar around us. With even the fireball stopped where it was, its only other options were to either run away or try and fight us up close. I couldn’t say for sure, but I had the feeling it would lose in either case. I had a faint impression of stopping firebolts while Stephen or Moore kicked its ass, both much more solidly built than I was.
But that wasn’t the result I wanted. It could mean that the Hellion would get away and hurt more people, or that it could still try to chase and hurt us. It could go after Sarah or Jake instead. Those claws… could make short work of a lot of things. Rather than disengaging though, it doubled down. The pressure on the conflict skyrocketed, the physical form of the magic pressing down and concentrating past where it started, dropping from a beach-ball sized orb into a baseball of pure white flame.
I matched it as best I could, and forced together every scrap of mana I could gather and threw it into the fireball. The Hellion was locked in place, just as I was, pitting its mind into trying to force the magic down on top of me. But it was a mental arm wrestling contest that it was losing, surely and steadily. The fireball started to drift upwards, the lance of mana rotting it from the inside out as it lost its structure, dragging flames into the column of light. What would happen next was the part I’d been iffy about.
In a panic, the Hellion straddled together other cantrips without being able to use mana from its spent core, remnant sparks spattering against the bar and setting it ablaze. It got what it wanted in the end, I supposed, as the flames spread fast. But by splitting its concentration like that, it lost the war.
The fireball detonated like a shaped charge, the shockwave flattening my poor truck and shattering windows. My amalgamated spell continued onwards, slamming into the Hellion and burning a hole through half its torso, with it failing to dodge at the last moment.
Ding!
You have slain a [Demon – Hellion (F) Lv. 2]!
Experience awarded!
Experience has been reduced from acting in a group.
Experience has been increased by defeating a higher-tiered enemy!
Experience has been increased from strategic action [Spell Reversal]!
Level Up!
[Initiate Mage (G) Lv. 1] -> [Initiate Anti-Mage (G) Lv. 2]
Your Willpower has increased by 2 from a special action.
5 Attribute Points available to distribute.
[Concentrate Magic (G) Lv. 0] -> [Concentrate Magic (G) Lv. 2]
[Shape Mana (G) Lv. 0] -> [Shape Mana (G) Lv. 3]
A certain kind of lethargy caught me as my mana dispersed back into the air. Instantly, I knew I overextended. Massively. Shoving mana into my core like that, haphazardly and continuously, damaged me in a way that wasn’t clear. And pulling it out just as quickly? I’d shredded something delicate. But the mana wasn’t mine if it didn’t come from my core. If I had reached out and tried to dampen and pull apart the Hellion’s fireball, without the catalyst of my own mana? My efforts would be brushed aside, and I’d be roasted alive. That was a fact that I’d known bone deep.
Originally, I’d thought to somehow take control of a regular firebolt and throw it back. That would be a handy experiment to see what I was capable of as a freshly minted mage. What ended up happening was… of a different scale. With worse consequences.
My core, completely emptied, radiated a blue film like a shattered nuclear reactor, leaking something that shouldn’t be leaking. My leg was bandaged, but injured enough that I wouldn’t be going anywhere anytime soon. Also, the building was burning down around me.
Lets hear it for day 3.