Cameron Jones normally wasn’t one for computers. They were fragile, finicky, and you practically needed to be a rocket scientist to use even their simplest functions.

But this “System” malarkey, even if it looked exactly like those computer games his grandchildren kept wanting him to play, that he could get behind.

It did what it was supposed to, it did what it actually said on the tin, no “press Start to shut off” nonsense, you could give it verbal commands and it didn’t have a million tiny little clicky things that looked the exact darn same and you had to hit them just right to get anywhere … no, it worked.

He’d told it to stop using that weird Japanese letter-grading System and now displayed numbers, it explained his powers in ways he could understand. And it even acted as his doctor, tracking his health, while also curing many of the aches and pains that plagued him in his old age. Hell, it even told him when he needed water. He’d stopped really feeling thirsty, oh, five years ago and had to force himself to just drink water in set intervals to avoid getting dehydrated after winding up in the hospital once.

He’d customized it as much as he wanted, and it even had features like letting him adjust where his reinforcing power went, whenever he wanted. Well, there was one small limitation of him not being allowed to mess with that when he was actively fighting something.

Name: Cameron Jones

Race: Rank 2 Human (Path of the Elements; Monarch of Motion)

Enhancement Distribution (Mind/Body/Magic)

35-20-45

Physical Status: Healthy, Tired

Progress to next Rank: 37%

Abilities

Kinetic Empowerment

Kinetic Redistribution

The first time he’d shot a monster, that screen had popped up in his face, declaring that he had enough mastery of moving stuff to get related superpowers.

And then it had actually asked him if he wanted them. Of course he had.

His powers were pretty simple. He could make his projectiles go faster, hit harder, and once he’d advanced to the second rank, he’d been able to slow stuff down if he sped other stuff up, or redirect projectiles by removing motion in direction and adding it to the side of the bullet.

Life this last week had been insane, and weirdly fun.

His farm might have been iced over in a way he’d never seen, but there were a lot of rich idiots willing to spend money on monster corpses once his grandson outside the snow zone had gotten the word out and it wasn’t like he used any of the fancy doodads that had stopped working when the world had changed.

The generator worked, the lights worked, the water heater worked, and he had the world’s biggest ice box sitting right outside his window. What else did he need?

Oh, right, he was out of meat. Time to go hunting.

Cameron had his hunting rifle slung over one shoulder, a revolver securely tucked into its holster, a hunting knife on his belt, and enough supplies to let him wait out a blizzard in his pack. He was well prepared for an expedition out into the magical world of ice and snow.

Of course, he was well aware of the fact that none of this was safe, but he was accustomed to danger like this. It was manageable.

And now that he was at Rank 2, there was once again a human on the top of the local food chain!

He moved through the strange patchwork fusion of cornfields and frozen trees, but for once, there weren’t any critters to be found. Just ice and snow … and a strange tinkling sound.

What was that? Were two of those icicle foxes messing around, or were random chunks of ice being banged together randomly?

The figure could be felt before it could be seen, but when he saw it, his blood ran cold. Literally.

It was as tall as a telephone pole, made from ice so clear it might as well be the purest crystal, and had an impassionate face that looked like something out of one of those alien invasion movies his son liked so much.

Cameron didn’t even hesitate, his hunting rifle snapped up and he pulled the trigger, hurling lead at the monster.

As it flew, he continued to pile on more speed. The longer the range, the faster his bullets flew.

A simple hunting rifle could crack an engine block in half at twenty meters, and probably destroy two at a hundred and fifty meters. At almost three hundred meters?

That monster’s chest should have exploded like a rotten pumpkin he’d run over with his tractor.

But it didn’t. In fact, it barely even seemed to notice. Its head didn’t turn to face him, it didn’t draw any weapons, nothing.

And then he heard it.

A sigh, interspersed with the sound of tinkling crystal. And along with that sound came a wave of deathly cold, hitting Cameron like a physical thing.

He ran.

Leave that monster to the army, he’d stick to the outermost reaches, or even resort to spam if he had to.

And even with his immediate response, he barely managed to return to his home and plop down in front of the oven, and stayed there for almost three hours, until the tip of his nose gained first-degree burns from sheer proximity.

Never again.

***

Colonel James Hunter, USMC, once again visited the beached Amphibious Assault Ship that had gotten stuck in the suddenly appearing mangrove forest while it and the rest of the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit had been traveling through the southern Pacific.

Thankfully, the change had been gradual enough that the ship had merely been bogged down and eventually come to a stop instead of running aground on land that had simply not been there a split-second previous, but the situation was still plenty bad.

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The collection of vessels under his command had been traveling along during their regular circuit, ready to put boots on the ground within at most seventy-two hours should an incident take place within their area of responsibility.

And then the exact sort of thing they were supposed to be to before anyone else had found them first.

Only a single ship had managed to avoid getting bogged down and was currently mooring right off the “coast” of the new land while the marines under his command were busy digging the ships out, using explosives when possible, shovels, and axes when not. At this rate, it would take another week or so for the first vessel to get free.

Of course, James worked out of the not-stuck ship since it was the only one that still had working long-range communications.

At first, they’d assumed the magical forest had fried all electronics, but that had rapidly proven false. It was just the fancy pieces of gear that failed, radios, computers, and the like, flashlights, and other simple stuff had kept working. They’d eventually managed to narrow it down further to the fact that anything with microchips had gotten fried. Somehow.

That was a lot of stuff that’d have to be fixed once the ships had been dug out.

And until then, everyone would be tired, muddy, sore from freeing the ships and the best thing he could do was stay out of the way of the people on the ground.

It was boring work and it was monotonous, but at least it kept them busy.

After all, any given Marine was an elite soldier, and any given group of Marines with a mission was an elite group that would finish said mission come hell or high water, but put more than one Marine in a room without anything to do and they would come up with the dumbest shit you’d ever seen.

James gave a short snort as he recalled some of his own shenanigans. They hadn’t been bad enough to make it into his file, thankfully, but they’d happened.

Of course, unlike most people who got up to nonsense armed with assault rifles and within reach of high explosives, Marines survived said nonsense, but it was still not good if it happened a lot.

And it was only a matter of time until someone decided that tear gas made a good replacement for bug spray.

At least the locals were friendly. Unlike some of his previous deployments, when it had been a fifty-fifty chance whether a given piece of advice was life-saving sage wisdom about surviving the desert or part of a nasty trap that would eventually get you killed.

Like, for example, when they told one of his men that a totally not dangerous scorpion would make for a perfect pet, when, in fact, the creature in question did not only possess a sting capable of killing a man but also had a nasty temper that would see them either chase or track you down if you were less than two miles from them.

Luckily, they’d figured that out before anyone got hurt and dumped the critter out in the desert well outside the radius where it might come back for revenge. Arabian Fat-Tailed Mankillers were no joke.

No, the locals were perfectly nice, polite, and decidedly not human.

They were manatees, for all practical intents and purposes, though they could speak. At first, the assumption had been that they were literally telepathic, but eventually, a decibel meter one of the combat engineers had squirreled away somewhere had proven that they were simply creating soundwaves from nothing.

It might as well be magic, and considering where they were, that was even an actual possibility to be considered.

So yeah, the locals were cool and all, but the baby manatees were so cute. Positively adorable, really, but that was a problem. After all, they looked like cuddly animals despite being so intelligent. Also, they were a curious lot that loved to come up to the Marines, right within petting range, and that made them hard to resist.

However, petting the cute baby manatees when the opportunity presented itself was no different than walking through a random city and patting random kids on the head. Best case scenario, people would think you were a creep, but more likely, you’d find yourself on the business end of a shotgun in short order.

Down below, he watched as a marine leaped out of the water like a porpoise, mud splattering everywhere as he hacked his axe into a thick tree trunk to avoid having to later dig it out of the bog.

And, oh yeah, the manatees had a way of granting superpowers, as part of a certain “system”. To start with, it gave perfect water adaptation, including the ability to breathe underwater, ludicrous swimming speed, immunity to the pressure of the depths, and so on. And later, it would bestow the same sound manipulation ability the locals used to communicate, though it could supposedly pull triple duty by also serving as a magical, built-in sonar and even a weapon, once its wielder got powerful enough.

However, any bestowals outside the initial group of volunteers would require a proper treaty. Apparently, the manatee people, who had declined to give any proper name for themselves and were more than willing to let themselves be referred to as variations on the phrase “intelligent manatees”, were more than aware of how messy the world situation was. And they wanted assurances. Smart, that.

But the weirdest part of it all was the fact that there were other Systems out there. Apparently, the British police had gotten their hands on something similar, and the winter wonderland in the Midwest had apparently used to hand out elemental superpowers to anyone who showed they could use said element until that particular system had apparently realized that just because someone had a lighter didn’t mean they were a master of fire or some nonsense like that.

And then you had four more magical areas, maybe five.

The 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit was currently watching over a crumbling patch desert that had been dumped in the Southern Atlantic, with sand collapsing into the ocean and causing huge algae blooms that were already causing trouble with the water purifiers. No “system” as far as anyone could tell, just a whole lot of sand, magical desert critters and someone had supposedly even seen a few creatures of living sand, wind, and even, once, fire.

The Brits had their own mess, of course, with their capital having mostly turned into a jungle, and Siberia had turned into even more of an inhospitable mess than it had already been when it had gotten transformed into a crystalline landscape full of what basically amounted to golems.

And the perfectly circular area of land that had appeared in the Indian Ocean appeared to have come straight out of hell itself, a fire-blasted landscape inhabited by literal demons, or at least that was what it looked like.

Which just left the two patches of discolored ocean.

One in the northern Atlantic which people were claiming contained Atlantis but had thus far produced precisely nothing, and the other was a few hundred kilometers off the coast of Japan, a giant hole filled with all sorts of creepy crawlies currently being guarded by the Chinese navy.

***

Captain Tao Wen glared at the depth charges cluttering up the deck of his destroyer. And “clutter” was decidedly the correct term for this mess.

They were largely obsolete by modern standards, replaced by various torpedo- and rocket-systems that were far more capable of sinking submarines than big bombs randomly thrown over the side, but that had been before the current crisis.

Many monsters were hard to see with radar and even harder to track down with sufficient precision to target them with modern smart weaponry.

If they had enough of the old-style munitions and sufficient forewarning, taking down individual beasts was perfectly doable.

But the weapons were also very much in the way of normal operations, precariously perched wherever there was space available. And even with all that effort having gone into it, his ship’s arsenal was nowhere near enough to kill anything even remotely near the apex of the strange, alien, foodchain down below.

The area that had simply appeared in international waters in the northern Pacific was like nothing he’d ever seen.

It was like the ocean had no bottom here, just an endless black void of black water as cold as the Arctic. And it wasn’t like he was unfamiliar with deep waters, the Mariana Trench might be the deepest part of the sea but there were plenty of other deep areas.

But this one … this one was special in ways that went beyond the insanity of its bestial inhabitants.

Once you got twenty meters deep, the water pressure just … stayed steady. Constant. Oxygen consumption for divers didn’t increase, the risk of decompression sickness didn’t change, and one could treat a dive that had gone five hundred meters deep as though the diver had never gone deeper than twenty.

At least that was the assumption, no human had ever managed to get deeper than three hundred meters. Submarines attracted the biggest beasts in the strange void ocean and while scuba divers drew less attention, eventually even they drew ire if they got deep enough.

But unmanned vehicles had confirmed that even two kilometers down below, water pressure was still impossibly low.

Eight parts of the world had been transformed, but there was only one being watched over by the People’s Liberation Army Navy.

It currently didn’t have a name, though the current most likely candidate was “void ocean”. That being said, “Devil’s Aquarium” wouldn’t have been an inaccurate name either.

And one of his more religious subordinates claimed to have seen not just the biblical Leviathan, but two, swimming side by side. Not only that but he’d also quoted an old piece of writing that claimed that if the leviathan had ever been able to breed, the world as a whole would be consumed.