Piece Keeper.

I saw the flash of light from the explosion on Mars just before Magic came back to Earth.

Tony MacEntyre had hired me as an overnight caretaker to babysit the old factory he had bought to film his Youtube videos in. Not as a Security Guard, that job title was regulated by the state government and would have required licenses and insurance, but under the caretaker job title which was something nice, ambiguous, and without regulations.

So I normally did a walk around the place outside with a big flashlight to let anyone looking for a place to crash for the night know that someone was keeping an eye on the place. That and binding up all the gaps in the fence with some old wire hangers to make getting in more work than it was worth meant I could go ahead and sleep on the clock for the rest of the night.

It wasn’t like Tony was expecting a lot out of me, he just knew I needed a place to stay after my last girlfriend kicked me out of her apartment. Well, to be fair, it was more like I was sleeping on the couch until I found a new place to live after a pregnancy scare made us realize we didn’t really want to be together, and moving into the factory instead of being roommates made the situation a lot less awkward for everyone.

So anyways I was outside and looking up at the stars to see how many I could spot in the glare of the city's lights, when a bright red one, Mars, seemed to flare up for a moment.

Two minutes later the headache started as the Magical energy from subspace flowed back into the universe around our solar system, or at least that’s what I’ve been told how it worked.

I’ve heard some people slept through it, but I’m not sure how. It hurt like hell.

Then like everyone else, I was pulled into the Great Big White Room

I don’t see any reason to repeat the information I got verbatim. The Tutorial told me the same thing everyone else was told.

We were always supposed to have Magic, but someone put a pyramid shaped blocker on Mars to deny Magic to us back when we were still learning to chip rocks for tools. Which meant that even now we were hopelessly backwards compared to the rest of the Universe.

That blocker had been destroyed by a group who called themselves the League and to help us out, they had set up a learning aid, the Tutorial. We would go through the Tutorial to help us pick out our starting template before the raw Magic now pouring into our solar system staring manifesting things from other worlds and our collective unconsciousness into living, breathing, and often killing creatures.

They also told us that many races would take advantage of our world now being open to travel by Magic to establish somewhat regulated colonies on our living world or look for things they could claim as salvage.

At least they did warn us, even if they downplayed how bad it would be.

I had guessed we were going to get hit hard by opportunists, and historically Colonization never worked out too well for the people already living there. Ask the Indians, either kind.

We were each given a choice of difficulty for our Tutorials on a scale from one to ten.

Most people choose difficulty one, either because they wanted something that they felt they had the best chance to survive, or they just refused or were unable to make a choice and got difficulty one by default.

I chose ten.

Chances were that ten would kill me, but if it didn’t, it would make me strong. If me and the entire human race were about to be victimized, then at least I wanted a chance to make the ones who came after me regret it. So I took a chance.

I wasn’t alone in that choice. About three percent of us made that choice worldwide.

My class got started as Guardian, I guess from the job I was doing when the Magic came in. By the time I was finished with the tutorial, the class had changed to Slaughterer.

Of my group of one hundred in my Tutorial, only I survived. It was just luck on my part, at least at first. A lot of others who were more prepared, tougher, or even just better trained were not as lucky.

But they helped me survive and to learn. They deserved better, we all did.

So everything else in that Tutorial, everything that had tried and succeeded in killing a human, died. Along with every last member of their races I could find, down to the last living member of each species.

I think that Tutorial broke something in me, something that the man I am now would regard as a weakness, but I don’t think I would have survived unbroken.

Most people figured out at some point that the Tutorial had become a spectator sport for voyeuristic aliens at some point, or maybe it always had been. But mine lasted longer them normal until I got the notice that I had finished off the last Horned Reaper in the Tutorial and had gotten another Genocide achievement.

Then I was right back where I started, standing outside of the factory only minutes after I had left. At first, all I did was stand there and breathe in the polluted air while wearing the rags that were left of the clothes I had put on that afternoon, Earth time, and the tanned and worked hides of several beasts out of the devil’s own nightmares.

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Seventy two percent of humanity survived the Tutorial. Almost all of them from Level One.

Fifty seven percent survived the first week.

Magic pulled our nightmares out and gave them shape, everywhere, including in our own homes. We didn’t have any Wards set up to stop it from happening, not at first. Compared to the Tutorial, Earth was at a Seven out of ten.

I level up twice that week.

More importantly, I saved lives. At first, running around and killing things one by one. But I also told people to get organized into hunting parties, with both skilled killers and support classes that needed to level up. I got hunters to bring back live prey and hold them down while the surviving children and the elderly finished them off.

I beat the crap out of people who had decided they were in charge because they were stronger than others and showed them that I was going to decide who was running things. Which was a guy people were calling the Mayor who ended up being in charge because he was trying to help as many people as he could and was succeeding.

I applied my Slaughtering skills to harvest skins, bones, horns, and other parts needed for crafting weapons, armor, and other enchanted items.

That's when they started calling me Piece Keeper.

Then the Colonists began to arrive.

The ones nearest us. Elves.

Or at least that’s what we called them with their thin builds, pointed ears, and pleasant nearly human features. The pale blue skin, the extra set of eyes, and their lack of a nose were no worst than a Star Trek episode with bumpy forehead people as aliens, in fact, a lot of people thought they were cute.

The Elves also really liked trees, at least the ones they brought with them. Almost like pets.

The people now in charge, the Mayor, the Council, and the other survivors wouldn’t let me kill them.

The people who I had sent myself to hell to help, who I had spent the last week teaching how to survive, told me I wasn't allowed to kill the invaders.

I tried to tell them. Half the human race just died in the worst disaster in our history, and these people didn't send anyone to help, instead, they sent people to take over our land, and steal the homes and resources from our dead for themselves, unearned.

Looters are supposed to be shot for a reason.

They told me the Elves were immigrants, not invaders, and that I was being racist.

Yeah, I was. I explained that I was as racist as the Arawak Indians who took a disliking to European explorers after Christopher Columbus chopped their hands off for not giving him their weekly quota of gold.

Then they called me unreasonable.

I agreed, you just can’t reason with people like that. So instead I waited, watched, and prepared. After all, I could be wrong, the people who waited until another quarter of humanity died off before they showed up may have sat around waiting for enough of us to die may have had good reasons.

No matter how much I hated them, I would not be the first to use violence. That’s reasonable, right?

For a time they didn’t show their true faces, so me and some others who wanted to level went out to help others with more obviously hostile Mythoes, people from mythologies, moving in on them. We wiped out the ones who had decimated the humans near when they made their colonies, as well as those humans who decided to play warlord and target other people.

It took years and kept us busy, but then the Elves finally showed what they really thought of us, and how they always meant to treat us.

They wanted to expand their groves where some of the people back home had not only survived but thrived. The people didn’t want to move, so the Elves drove them out, killing some of them in the process.

After all these years, everyone else was finally ready to treat our “Good friends” the Elves as the cold hearted, murderous, opportunist scum they were.

Some people claimed it was just a misunderstanding, a one time incident, and would probably keep claiming that up until they had the blade of an Elf scythe staff slicing their throats.

Those people were not the ones that had just survived seeing their families killed, and the Elves went right ahead after the “misunderstanding” and planted their trees on the blood stained ground. This was not abandoned land they had taken, this time they choose to kill us for what they could take.

No, never again. I let myself get talked into giving them a chance once and people died for it.

The bones of the creatures called Gear Wights that had been born of Magic and our stories were made of Living Iron. Which grew from their bodies rather than being forged. The gears that we worked into armor stopped the Glamour magic of the Elves' cold.

We could see them with clear minds then, and now they hardly seemed as cute, or their presence or actions as reasonable.

Oil from the skins of the things we found swimming in the fuel tanks below gas stations burned down their trees, burned them right through their wards.

They stopped me from finishing off their children, not that it was hard, the ones that young, all they had ever known was Earth.

We moved them and the surviving adults to some land in Wisconsin that a race we called the Headhunter had killed all the people in before we did the same to them. The Headhunters didn’t have anything we regarded as children.

I know the Elves will grow up hating us for generations, but by the time they grow strong enough to be a problem, they will face a Humanity united in a state of strength, not as shell shocked survivors of a disaster.

Let them try again then.

After years of fighting to give people breathing room, we now had the numbers to start taking back what had been lost.

Chicago had been overrun with something they called Goblins. No one has trusted the little green man eating monsters, but they came in such numbers they had taken the city.

Elven weapons salvaged from the battlefields worked just fine in human hands, and with the abilities granted by my class, I learned that the remains of being who had traveled the stars worked just as well for material as monsters to craft weapons and armor.

Bullets made from Elf bones were easy to enchant to punch right through the protective wards and needled into Goblin skins with human blood. The long azure Elven hair, faintly luminous even in death, made some great bowstrings and thread.

We didn't clear all of North America. A few of the invaders had made themselves useful enough to humans near their colonies that people stood between us and them.

Too little, too late I claimed, but those Invaders got to live. We weren't going to kill humans just to spill filthy Mythoes' blood. But we killed enough of the rest of them that the new American Commonwealth would be a human civilization and the Mythoes would know their place.

Tolerated intruders, as long as they stayed on the land we choose to give them.

Maybe that will change with time, in a few generations the last of those born off of Earth will have died off and the only ones left would be Earthlings, even if they weren't human ones. Maybe then I could see them as people rather than invasive, grave robbing scum.

But I don’t think I’ll live long enough to see that day.

There is a whole world of humanity out there that got wiped out by the invaders, enslaved, or even used to implant eggs into until the newly hatched Waspling ate their way out.

And some of us just aren't willing to stop killing the bastards who came to us when we were at our weakest, to steal from us, to kill us, or worst. We won’t stop until either they are all gone, dead, or we are.

This world belongs to us. Even in the places where humans died out all on their own, those places and everything at them is rightfully the inheritance of other humans, not whatever gets there first and calls dibs.

I don't know what their plan was for coming here. If the places they came from were so bad to make it worth the risk, or if they thought that not enough people would survive to reclaim our world. But they chose to treat us like inconveniences to their plans, or resources to be used. If they wanted to live here, they should have asked, or at least offered to help.

Call them bad guests, or intruders, either way, they had to know they weren't welcome. And I'm more than happy to be the one to show them the door, throw them down steps to the pavement, and introduce their teeth to the curb.

As I finished striping the flesh from what we decided to call an Orc’s skull down in Brazil for my new shoulder guard, I did realize that I was wrong about one thing, the people who came here right after the disaster that befell humanity did unintentionally helped us after all.

Every last bit of them.