I awoke to pain. My legs, arms, and back were stiff, my hands felt like they were on fire, and to top it all off I had a killer headache. I struggled to open my eyes, but when I did, I saw light peeking through the canopy of trees above me. I groaned as I tried to sit up, making the mistake of trying to use my hands which sent a fresh wave of pain shooting up my arms and into my brain, falling back down to the ground with a thud. I heard movement off to the side and felt two sets of hands gently help me into a sitting position. Randy and James entered my view, both looking pretty concerned.
"How are you feeling?" Randy asked, "That Husk fucked you up pretty bad."
I looked down at my blistered hands, and at the scratches on my chest visible through my tattered shirt.
"Well," I replied, "I feel like shit, but I don't feel like i'll die. Where are we, and what happened after I passed out?"
"Well," James interjected with a grin, "After you melted that Husk and flopped over, Randy and I decided that it wasn't a good idea to stay there, just in case the van blowing up attracted more of them, so we took turns piggybacking you."
Randy stepped in at this point and explained a little more. "We figured that more Husks would come in from the road and not the woods, and a higher vantage point would give us some sort of idea as to where to go. We're about three miles into the woods dead on from where the road stopped. There's a mountain behind us that should let us see pretty far, and a stream about fifty yards away, so we won't have to worry about water. Food is a different story."
"I already set up some snares around," James stated enthusiastically, and then added under his breath, " if I remembered how to do them correctly."
Randy looked over and shook his head a little, chuckling, then looked back at me and added, "I'm pretty sure that the stream is big enough for some fish to live. We can set up some fish traps pretty easily, I have a good idea of how they were done. Once you get a little more energy we should walk down there so you can grab a drink, I'm guessing you're pretty thirsty."
I nodded in response, going quiet, taking a mental inventory of my well-being, as well as the events that happened last night.
"So, Ken... How'd you do it?" James piped up, earning him an elbow to the ribs from Randy. "Ow! What? I think its a valid question!"
"He's right Randy," I said, giving him a placating gesture, "It's hard to describe, James. Its like I wanted to kill the Husk so bad, I thought of how the fire did it so easily, how it consumed them. I saw the fire for what it was, and what I wanted it to do. My desire to live, to kill the husk and consume it like fire does wood, made something click. It wasn't just the mental image of fire, it was also the emotion connected with it, the raw feeling of flames. Of burning things away. It was like my intent was the catalyst for it, but my desire was the fuel."
James and Randy were both silent after that, mulling over my words.
“That’s… pretty intense.” Randy stated, sitting down across from me, “Do you think you can do it again?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, “I don’t think the fire is what blistered me. The Husk’s skin melting is what did it. Let me try it for a few minutes, if I can pull it off then we won’t have to worry about starting a campfire.”
“I figured I'd be stuck rubbing sticks or banging rocks together to try to pull it off. Freshwater sushi or raw rabbit doesn’t sound very appealing… Or safe.”
“Yeah, I agree, give me a few minutes and we can head down to the stream, I think I’m up for a walk. I’m pretty thirsty anyways.” I confirmed, looking over at James, who’d been uncharacteristically quiet. Randy decided to practice his mana shaping, James and I had a leg up on him since he was stuck driving the van.
James had sat down with his back against a rock. I could see the mana around him moving and shifting. It looked a lot like a form of meditation, his eyes closed but his appearance focused on the task. Instead of the rounded amorphous shapes we had been making, he formed a rather roughly shaped cube. Not perfect, but definitely not a blob. He held it there for a handful of moments, before slowly draining it back into his body. He looked up at me with a grin. “Did you catch that?” He asked.
“Yeah, that was impressive man, how’d you pull it off?”
“Well I thought about what you said about understanding the fire. I tried just envisioning a cube, but I could feel that I wasn’t getting anywhere with that. Then I thought about what a cube was: At its core it’s just a formula. Since I was trying to fill up a space with my mana, I went with volume, and that felt like it worked pretty well. How close was it?”
“Pretty close actually. It was a little rough around the edges, but it was definitely a cube. Did you make it absorb back into yourself after?”
“Yeah, you caught that too? It was actually a lot easier than pushing it out. It felt wasteful to just release all that mana our bodies spent time absorbing, so I gave it a shot. There’s a limit to how fast it’ll transfer back in though. Feels like roughly twice as fast as our bodies naturally absorb it.”
“That makes sense. I haven’t noticed any downsides to just releasing it yet, but if it’s something our bodies naturally do it could be something that costs calories. Same with moving it around, and I feel like restaurants won’t really be open, so we’ll have to pay attention to that. Starving to death after all that’s happened would be a bummer to say the least.”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“Speaking of food,” Randy interrupted, “ let’s go take a look at that stream, Ken.”
It took me a second to get to my feet, but with Randy helping steady me I pulled it off. We asked James if he wanted to tag along, safety in numbers and all that, but he waved us off.
“If you hear a bloodcurdling scream, then you’ll know I’m in trouble. Plus, I feel like I’m making some progress with the magic stuff.” He explained, shrugging and settling back down in meditation, the mana around his body shifting with his thoughts and focus.
----------------------------------------
Randy and I began to make our way down to the water, the walking really helped ease the stiffness in my legs, it felt good to move. Birds fluttered through the canopy of the trees above us as sunlight streamed down illuminating the forest floor with large beams of light which let off a pleasant yellowish mana which only added to the effect. Occasionally we’d hear a rustle of leaves near us as the smaller inhabitants of the woods dashed around looking for food. The first few times it made us tense up, preparing for a bloodthirsty Husk to burst out of the undergrowth, but nothing approached us. After a minute of walking Randy spoke up.
“Do you think we’ll make it?” He asked, his tone somber.
“Back to Dillon? Maybe. You heard James, Dillon might not even be there anymore. I mean, this mountain wasn’t here before, who knows where it came from, or what took its place.” I sighed, shaking my head, “We have to find some place to go though, none of us are really the wilderness-survival type.”
“I meant through this in general. We barely survived three of those things, I don’t want to think about what would’ve happened if they didn’t focus on the van instead of us, or what would’ve happened if it didn’t explode and take out most of them.”
“We got lucky, that’s for sure. Figuring out how to use mana should probably be one of our priorities. We’ve figured out we can use it to fight the Husks, and that was mostly an accident. Imagine what we could do if we applied ourselves? It might even get easy at some point.”
“I don’t think it’ll ever get easy, not for me. I mean, those were people, Ken. Living, breathing, humans with lives of their own. Fuck, there could even be a way to turn them back.”
That was a chilling thought. If they could be turned back, then we basically murdered them. In the same breath though, we didn’t know how. Not yet at least. The only way we could figure it out was by unlocking the secrets of our new abilities. I told Randy that, he agreed.
“Why do you think this happened,” he asked, “Not the how, but the why?”
“It could be anything, I guess,” I replied, “An angry god, an alien invasion, a science experiment gone wrong? If I really had to say it was anything though, my money is on sheer cosmic coincidence. None of that really matters though, does it? What matters to us is surviving. Trying to decipher the reasons doesn’t really help us get through this, all we can really do is keep moving.”
We fell into silence after that, slowly ambling towards the creek. We could hear the water long before we saw it. When we broke through the treeline onto the shore of the stream, it was a strange form of relief. There’s only one word I could really use to describe it, idyllic. Looking at it in that moment it was like the world hadn’t gone to shit, like we were taking a normal hike through a park on a day trip. But that wasn’t the case.
We were stranded over a hundred miles away from where we lived, in a forest that didn’t exist here two days ago, having to forage for food and drink from running water so we didn’t die. All while avoiding things that used to be people that wanted to eat us for lunch. It was a pretty sobering thought.
I crouched down next to the water, putting my hands under the it’s cool surface. I took and splashed some on the cuts I sustained fending off the husk. The last thing I needed was an infection, it would be a death sentence.
Randy busied himself gathering up smooth stones from the shore as I quenched my thirst. He took off his boots and socks and waded into the stream. It was about three feet deep in most places and fifteen across, large enough for fish to live in for sure.
He began stacking them in a rough funnel shape, making semi-isolated pools of water with a large mouth that tapered down into one much smaller that opened into a completely enclosed pool of water. The entire process took about an hour, Randy having to set stone back up as they shifted and fell over in the current.
I sat off to the side on a boulder watching him work, feeling rather useless due to my injuries. I wagered it would take a couple of days before the blisters healed enough to regain use of my hands without risking agitating the wounds. I had to trust in James’ and Randy’s abilities to gather food in the meantime, and I felt confident in them.
It was a trust built not only on a couple semesters of friendship, but also on surviving close encounters with death. None of us fled when confronted with the Husks back at the van, trying only to save themselves, and they both carried me miles through the woods at night when I passed out. I felt like my trust was well-placed.
As Randy waded back out of the stream onto the shore and began to put back on his shoes, we heard a large animal move in the trees on the other side of the water. Randy began frantically tying them as a large form walked out of the treeline. We both slowly stood up as a bear walked to the opposite shore, about 40 feet down-stream and began to drink from it. I say a bear because that’s what it had to have been before, but that’s not what it was anymore.
It seemed to be three times the size of a grizzly, its fur had been replaced by broad plated scales which rippled with it’s shifting, bulky muscle. My mana-sight showed me it exuded dense brown mana which seemed to roll off it’s body like mist.
We watched in awe as it walked further downstream to a large boulder placing a large paw onto its surface, the clacking of it’s claws on the rough stone audible from where we stood. The brown mana concentrated on its gigantic limb, condensing to the point of completely obscuring its paw. With a low growl from the bear’s mouth that seemed to shake the earth the mana flooded into the large stone, causing cracks to web across the surface, breaking it into hand-sized chunks. Which it then began to eat.
Randy tapped me on the shoulder, both of our eyes the size of saucers, frantically pointing back towards our camp. He didn’t need to explain, I didn’t want to stick around either. As carefully as we’ve ever done anything in our lives, we slowly crept back back into the woods having the presence of mind to watch where we placed our feet, having no desire to draw the attention of that thing. After what felt like hours of creeping through the undergrowth we made it back to where we left James. He was still sitting with his back against the same rock, in a deep state of focus.
He held a fist-sized rock cupped in his hands. Neither of us willing to interrupt him and break his focus, I watched as he fed blank mana into the stone causing the rate of dusty brown mana exuding from it to emit much faster than its natural rate. It drifted roughly six inches above the rock in his hands, coalescing in a spherical shape until it was the size of the original rock. It then shifted from spherical into a cube shape, at which point it began to condense until it appeared solid. Then something interesting happened. A cuboid rock appeared in the place of the dense mana, roughly half the size of the original rock, dropping into his hand with the other rock. James jumped up excitedly, finally noticing our presence and running over to us, waving the rocky cube.
“Guys! Guys! I figured something out! If you inject mana into a material, you can increase the rate it produces a certain type of mana! And~ I thought ‘How did Ken make fire from nothing?’ That’s when it hit me, blank mana goes in, aspected mana comes out, so something’s different about it, right? That’s because the mana is like a blueprint for whatever material it came from, and you can use it to recreate that material! Ken being able to see the fire-aspected mana let him skip using fire to get the fire mana, his brain acted as the ‘fire’ and converted it for him! This is incredible guys!”
We both nodded in agreement, both actually rather impressed with his breakthrough. We then told him about our encounter with the ‘Rock-Bear’, realizing that it probably wasn’t safe to stick around here.
“I mean, it was eating rocks.” I predicted, “It probably was just eating the rocks to get earth-aspected mana, and still eats meat for calories.”
Randy and James both agreed, so we decided to aim towards making our way to a better vantage point closer to the top of the mountain before night fell. It had the added benefit of putting more distance between us and the bear.
We assumed that if people were around, they’d be making fires at night, letting us be able to see them much easier than during the day. So we began to make the hike upwards.