In front of the watching crowd, Danny took off his bag and retrieved the rifle. Smith had also provided a belt with a few magazines, but he wouldn’t have extensive ammunition for the coming fight. Not that he was going to rely on it. He just wanted the gun to provide a different kind of damage for dealing with Fighter.

If Fighter were built like he was, he would be resistant to magical attacks. Fighter also had much more mana than him, allowing it to reinforce itself further. Danny couldn’t count on his magic alone to defeat this monster, he was sure of it. He hoped that bullets would at least do something.

Once he was ready, he stood before the dark entrance to the tunnel and stared into its depths. The darkness called to him, beckoning him to delve into it. Danny’s mana sense told him that the mana in the tunnel was normal, but the slight disruption around the entrance told him to doubt that.

Danny took a deep breath and stepped over the boundary. Immediately his suspicions were confirmed. The mana was anything but normal. The environment was thick with familiar mana, it choked the space. Hot mana hung heavy in the air, so thick that it was palpable. There was a faint orange glow about the atmosphere itself. He inspected the tunnel entrance and found small markings circling the entire structure.

He was completely uneducated in the meaning, but he could infer that it was some sort of array that was hiding the mana from the outside world. “Well, that explains how it's being hidden. Magic.” Danny said to himself. Now he just needed to find out what was happening and why it was being hidden.

Danny suddenly felt something new. It was similar to the feeling he got from the other beings, which immediately put him on guard. He didn’t think he was ready to face Fighter, but he wasn’t sure he ever would be. Then he noticed that the feeling wasn’t exactly the same though. Danny took a moment to focus on the connection, exploring what it was.

He was struck by a hunger. It was a creature, more mindless than the beings. It was a zombie, a very hungry zombie. It was shuffling its way down the tunnel toward him. It wasn’t thinking. It was just hungry and searching for food. The other beings, before Fighter had killed them, were emotional creatures, fueled by desires. This was something far lesser, like an empty shell of a being, just filled with hunger.

It continued its shambling toward him, eventually coming close enough for Danny to see. It was a twisted warping of a human. What had once been a person had been reduced to a wounded mess, weeping glowing fluid. Its face was contorted in pain and anger, with glassy eyes that held no focus. Its jaw hung open, with bits of flesh still stuck in its teeth.

The zombie dragged itself further down the tunnel, eventually noticing him. Danny readied a spear of sand. He would make it quick. Then he stopped himself. The zombie was watching him, not with hunger, but with caution. It was reaching out to him through their connection. It was asking for direction. It wanted guidance. Danny’s stomach turned.

He willed the zombie to walk in the other direction and it did. Danny’s stomach fell further. He could command the zombies. If he could, that meant that Fighter probably could as well. A super zombie that controls other zombies that spread whatever it is that makes a zombie? Yep, this is apocalyptic. Was Tamm building an army? That was what immediately jumped out to Danny. If these zombies could be controlled, then they would be a very dangerous fighting force.

That then raised another question; what was the difference between the ‘normal’ zombies and the beings that Danny was connected to? Then what was the difference between Danny and the other beings? Why had he retained his humanity when the others had become far more animalistic? The questions were only growing. At least he now had three levels of classification. The zombies, the super zombies, and himself. It might have been egocentric to put himself at the top but he felt like he was allowed to be, it was his system of classification after all.

Something important that Danny noted was that he felt no desire to consume the zombie now shambling away from him. Something inside him told him that he would gain nothing from it, unlike he would for the super zombies. So, there was another clear distinction between the normal zombies and the super zombies. The super zombies could grow by eating each other, but it didn’t look like the normal zombies could. They were just hungry.

Danny now had a connection to the zombie he directed, he could feel it. He would vaguely know where it was and that it was following his command. It was a proper mindless automaton, a minion with limited capability, but a minion nonetheless. Danny let it clear the tunnel for him and he followed cautiously behind it.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Danny then realised he had made a rather grave error. He had no map of the tunnels, no way to properly orient himself. He was wandering aimlessly. Tamm had said to head “deep enough”, whatever that meant. It made Danny think that there was more to the tunnels than just some abandoned tracks.

They came up to the open space where a number of tunnels crossed. The space where Danny had found the zombie when he had first entered the tunnels. The scene was shocking. There were torn-apart bodies littering the floor. The smell hit a second later. The hot and humid atmosphere of the tunnels had done a number on the decaying flesh. Danny couldn’t stop himself from vomiting.

It was a pure assault on his senses. With only the thought of making it all go away, Danny summoned a wave of sand which blasted everything loose, leaving only bones in the room. Danny’s mana subconsciously took on the properties he had learned while breaking down demonic items. His sand destroyed the matter it touched, imbuing matter with his mana and then reducing it to whisps that dissipated into the atmosphere.

The new application of his mana gave him pause. The smell was also gone, so he could stabilise himself a little. Hang on. Danny summoned some of his mana and directed it to imbue a loose brick from the wall. It took a bit of effort and a lot of mana to imbue something of that size, but once he had, he then manipulated his mana to begin dispersing. It was the same process as destroying the demonic objects, but slightly less mana-consuming.

In a minute the brick was gone, converted to mana that now was dispersed through the ambient mana. Well, that’s going to have some implications. Danny kept this new form of spell-work in mind moving forward. At the very least it would make cleaning easier. Yeah, being able to reduce things to metaphysical dust will only have applications to cleaning. Sure.

From what Danny understood of the process, as Smith had explained to him, destroying objects with mana was a very costly and time-consuming practice. It had to be done for demonic objects because the mana was dangerous to be left alone, but it wasn’t generally used. Danny’s enormous mana pool removed one of the limiting factors. The time factor seemed like a hard cap, increasing the amount of mana didn’t reduce the time it took to destroy something. It was something for Danny to play with moving forward.

Danny then realised that in his hasty response, he had also reduced his zombie scout to bones as well. The entire room was filled with polished-white bones. There were at least a dozen mostly complete skeletons in the room, with a number of other bones lying about. Danny was concerned about where they had come from. He wanted to call Anton to ask if they’d been pushing homeless people into the tunnel, but he had no reception. That, and he wasn’t sure he wanted an answer.

Danny had done his best to turn a blind eye to Anton’s illegal activity. He never wanted to be involved and the man had respected his wishes, but it wasn’t like he had been ignorant. It grated at his conscience but he hadn’t been in a place to say anything, he still wasn’t. Yeah, of course, crime was bad, but would Danny complaining about it have changed anything? Danny wasn’t naive enough to think that the guilty conscience of a young man would influence a family deeply rooted in organised crime.

Without his minion around to lead the way Danny had to walk through the tunnels by himself. He took a moment to choose a new tunnel, but it was practically random. He took a guess about what would take him deeper and kept walking, putting the image of the room of corpses as far behind him as he could.

It wasn’t long until Danny came across more zombies. This time there was a group of them. They were eating each other. Danny watched in abject disgust as they acknowledged his presence and sought his command. Danny completely destroyed two of them, bones and all, and took one under his command to lead the march deeper into the tunnel.

In his destruction, Danny learned a few more things. Mana was the hardest thing for him to destroy, luckily the zombies’ mana was almost identical to his own which meant it didn’t fight against him like the demonic mana had. The zombies also had no control over the mana at all. It was like they were creating it, but it wasn’t theirs. It was an infection that destroyed them, not a fuel that nourished them like it did for him.

That gave Danny some clues about what was going on, or at least a hint to what might be happening. He remembered his experience of being ‘poisoned’ and how refreshed he had felt after waking up. It seemed to him like he had been a step away from becoming one of these zombies but for some reason instead of being destroyed by the mana he had absorbed it, or something like that. After his apparent death, he had further merged with the mana, becoming what he was now.

So, the question became what separated him from people like Claude or the others who had become zombies? What then separated him and the zombies from the super zombies? There were clear tiers at work here and it felt like it would be important to know what was happening. Danny was quite chuffed that he was getting some answers finally. Perhaps Tamm wasn’t lying when she said I’d find my answers down here.

Danny knew he was on the right track, or at least a track when he felt the mana around him get denser. He was heading deeper into whatever this place was. They came across more zombies, usually alone or in the process of eating each other in groups. They clearly didn’t differentiate food sources, anything went. Danny collected five of them, building a group that cleared the tunnel in front of him. The rest were reduced to mana. The cost was high, but something felt right about it. That and his mana regeneration was more than enough to cover the cost.