I chucked another log into the fire, then sat down and checked my interface again while leaning against the brown wall of the tree house. My stats had jumped since I’d gone on a bit of a killing spree during my fever fueled trip from the looks of it. And it was a trip, I never tried acid but now I knew what it felt like. Whether that was an accurate assessment didn’t really matter anymore, not like I’d ever get a chance to find out.

I’d leveled twice, up to seven now, with totals of 10, 24+3, 17, 24, 10 and 42. Magical endurance was really running away with it on account of the hundred-hour head start. I had 31 energy in the tank - I’d been asked to stop calling it mana. It seemed prudent not to argue since Jack, Anne and Raj were the only people I’d met in the past week. Fitting in always paid off, while dissenting rarely did. This turned out to be as true in the new world as in the old.

As evidenced by the last member of the group, Terrence. He was missing and presumed dead on account of being a little suicidal. Dude treated post-apocalyptic life like a video game and yapped on and on about getting stronger and grinding levels, the dumbass. I closed my interface but didn’t get up. Instead I procrastinated by reminiscing and having another smoke. I would’ve preferred conversation but I was alone, again.

The rag-tag bunch had set off in the morning on one of their daily trips towards the north-east, where the pine greenwood bled over into hilly mountain slope. Supposedly Terrence hadn’t been happy about it. Not the trips, those were fine, it was the fact they were too short which bothered him. After waving words of caution and accusations of idiocy away, he’d gone into the forest by himself and never returned. His demise happened before my arrival, so a long while back – by post-apocalyptic standards at least. The band had reasons for their expeditions. It was human nature, they needed more supplies; things like firewood, food, leather and magic metal.

I learned most of this from Jack since Anne and Raj stuck to each other like glue. I judged Anne to be somewhere in her mid-thirties, just like me. You didn’t ask a woman her age after all. She also had a teenage son, maybe. Uncertain, since his last sighting coincided with the end of the world. Raj on the other hand was fourteen and sorely missed everyone he knew. We could all relate to that, but some were better at hiding it than others. Like Jack, who was about a decade older than Anne and adept at taking things as they came.

Then again, his stoicism wasn’t particularly out of place. He looked like a competent guy, knew all about the outdoors and sported the full lumberjack plaid and jeans stereotype too. He hunted, he skinned and he butchered - with proficiency. There was game to be found at the edge of the forest and Jack had made a clever decision, he brought a gun and hunting knife to the post-apocalypse. I should’ve thought of that myself. Although I might’ve be giving him too much credit as he’d been hunting when the change happened. I liked the dude, we’d gotten along well.

I sighed and got to my feet. The gang had left me a bunch of plastic cups filled with water, but chain smoking and thirst went hand in hand so they were due for a refill. I stacked the empty ones and shuffled through the cluttered interior of our residence. At first I wondered how a group of four-to-three managed to build a bulb shaped tree house with stairs in the short span of a week, but the thing had built itself. Admittedly, it was less ‘house in a tree’ and more ‘house built out of tree’ with some unusual design choices.

I leaned against the thigh-thick branches which served as walls and slowly shuffled towards the outside exit. There was another way out, marked by a cylinder of familiar bland grey stone in the middle of our home and a circling stairway leading downwards. A makeshift hatch of nailed together arm-thick logs blocked it off, in the same vein a deer hide covered the open top of our crib where the light outward curve of the walls turned sharply inwards and coalesced in the middle.

The hide tarp helped keep the heat in, not that the cold bothered anyone but me and Raj anymore. Probably because we were mages, as opposed to Jack and Anne, who were both fighters – power and endurance respectively, while Terrence had been an antimage. The information sharing ban wasn’t foolproof, and we circumvented it by referencing the structured order of the classes. It made sense to prioritize such knowledge because of the ever present equally supernatural dangers these days. I should’ve asked more about them as people.

Everything was weird and unfamiliar these days. At least our place was reasonably roomy, despite the odd features. The stony bits had a radius of three meters or so, and the woody part added another two. Fortunate, since it allowed us to keep a fire going. I liked the art-nouveau look, had to find silver linings somewhere. I rounded my way down the spiraling slope between straight branch walls along the extra-thick branch of our unusual winding exit until I hit the tundra dirt, then took a moment for myself. Goddamnit.

It was my first coherent time outdoors, over here at least, and I had a proper look around - for once the surroundings actually varied a bit. A huge river occupied the west, a couple of dozen meters wide at least. It flowed from north to south and had one hell of a current which dissuaded any tempting dips. The rapids explained the lingering smell everyone carried around with them, better dirty than dead. The tundra across it quickly transitioned to a pine forest that obscured any further observation aside from the mountain ridge in the distance.

I circled our house to a stack of trunks and the clean looking spring next to them, where I refilled my cups and took the opportunity to wash my face and slick back my greasy hair with the ice cold water. The terrific trio had a good laugh recounting what a mess I’d been. The innocent blue eyes hadn’t quite made up for my beard and mustache being all bloodied. Early male-pattern baldness announced itself to the world as they stared at the thin spot on the back of my head while I laid face-down in the dirt. In a display of inherent genius, I hadn’t been wearing the hood of my blorange winter jacket while wandering the wastes. The sounds of laughter still echoed in my head, the first I’d heard since the end.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

My assessment of the surroundings might have been a bit premature since the east had the same features as the west aside from the raging torrent, although the woods were way further out. I labeled this one the ‘Forest of Death’. The north sloped gently upward into yet another mountain range while the south inclined downwards into endless tundra, although I saw blurs in the distance. Something about them didn’t seem quite right, but I couldn’t figure out what and headed back inside instead. Maybe the approaching dusk messed with my eyes. Then again, I felt rather off as well.

Upon my return I placed the four full cups next to the exit, since I didn’t trust myself to navigate the mess while balancing them and took stock. For having lost everything, we sure had a surprising amount of stuff. Another revelation was that no one had lost a hand grabbing my weapon and I revised my list of qualities accordingly – it was now my friendly very sharp magic smart sword. Regardless, the group had put their care packages to effective use.

They’d coordinated, aside from Terrence who chose alchemy. As a result they picked woodcutting, mining and smithing. The rebel member of our group insisted on carrying his things with him, pictogram included, but the other three blue sheets remained here and I helped myself to some skills and free stats. I linked mining to physical power and smithing to physical endurance to cover my bases, chopping wood didn’t appeal and I ran out of viable choices since none of the options would link to magical ones. The additions improved my mood a bit, and I sorely needed it.

Green tinting was the theme of the day. The choices had spawned a green axe and pickaxe, which the party had taken with them. Meanwhile smithing received a complete starter set of hammer, tongs and a bowl with foldable standards. The forge was an ingenious thing, and you started by thinking at it. A flat handle went straight through the middle of it, doubling as a smacking surface - one end stuck out and ended in a triangular point. The round trough would fill with clear liquid while the handle took on a hot glow.

Then you needed some magic metal, sourced one sliver at a time from the north-east out of respawning mounds. It was surprisingly malleable when warm and changed the otherwise dark green veins reminiscent of aged bronze patina into a shiny emerald sheen. Afterwards you heated it, hit it, dipped it, and then repeated that until you liked the shape. It wasn’t supposed to be this easy to pull off but in my opinion the whole process was a big step down from simply visiting the hardware store or just ordering things online.

The rest of our riches were decidedly less impressive. We had a pile of jerky, Raj accelerated the drying process with magical fire which was a thing now. Firewood made for the most of the rest - along with some random odds and ends. We also had a metal ingot and some nails that Anne had forged. A debased math textbook sat next to those, written in a language I couldn’t decipher but could read - apparently the System gave us an auto-translate feature. Like always, it was imperfect and defaulted to English for some reason, so I quickly switched away from Dutch to stop sounding like an idiot. For the rest we had a bunch of wrappers and plastic cups, a purple high school backpack, some mobile phones and a supply of energy crystals.

The last were a big deal, since everyone had the junk food cantrip, magic was ubiquitous – never thought I’d see the day. My companions had kept busy, since they had an impressive supply of energy spheres. They each kept a fifty on ‘em as emergency refills and there was another fiddy, a thirty and a fiver back here at the tree house, while my own supply consisted of only 17 in total. It was possible to fuse the tiny fingernails until they reached 10 energy, at which point the shard became a small ball with another shiny white swirly sphere in it. Those fused too up to 5 times, adding another sphere each time. I combined my supply with theirs for a total of 102 and threw a few logs on the fire after pulling the tarp off to let the smoke and light out. It was getting pretty dark and distractions were running low again.

I stared at the shoddy wooden hatch. The stairs led to a T-split; north, east and south. The fauna du jour consisted of ‘unholy centipedes of bone’, so bonypedes. I’d asked and they were 1/3. ‘About knee high and a yard long, with foot long sharp-as-fuck legs o’ bone and a skull to bite you with’. I hadn’t been curious about what they’d turn into, but Jack told me anyway.

Going downstairs in a group was a big no-no. You could wander around by yourself and occasionally meet one of the little shits, but if you brought along a friend or more then they’d start seeking you out with alarming frequency while not cannibalizing each other. The bastards wouldn’t ascend the stairs, but learning that factoid had left them to unionize once the group fled. Raj cleared ‘em out afterwards by blasting them apart somehow. They stopped fighting each other at stage three, which turned out to be nothing special - just bigger, stronger and faster. Raj seemingly went crazy after getting the job done but the group had refused to elaborate further.

For fucks sake, being alone again would suck. I hoped everyone was fine and they’d merely hit a minor snag, delaying them by about 15 hours on what should’ve been an hour-long walk. The days were 30 hours long now, only the System knew why. Eventually I covered the top to hold the heat in and tried to sleep while keeping my shit together and failed at both.

I woke up about ten hours later to absolutely no change in the situation, even if I felt better, physically at least. Mana – didn’t think I needed to mind the groups wishes anymore – sat at 45. Figured I had to do at least something decent for once in my life.

I wasted the nails on three big crosses, then had a last cigarette with Jack - figured he’d appreciate it. Finally I said a shitty improvised prayer since I didn’t know any and followed it with a moment of silence. I couldn’t call it proper but it wasn’t an entirely unmarked set of graves either. Somewhere in between and the best I could do.

After returning indoors I collected all the things in a bug-out bag. Despite my best attempts I couldn’t figure out more shit to keep me busy. Now I had to decide what my plan would be. Not a hard task, south looked like the only viable direction but I wouldn’t head out immediately.

For one, there was still a chance my funeral rites had been premature. I had plenty of food and water here, so there was no harm in naturally topping off my mana either. Ideally, I’d even summon two more swords to complement my current one. Thus a plan formulated itself. I’d take a note from Terrence and Jack, killing beasties underground while staying the fuck away from the forest. I’d also kill some time and gain stats by practicing my drawing skills. The plan was to do this for five days and then I’d have no more reason to stay.

If nothing went wrong.