I lay on my side, my back arching, every muscle in my body drawn taut. My teeth ground against each other, grinding away the scream that wanted to blast past my lips.

Every nerve and neuron in my central nervous system and brain was a live wire. Every inch of my skin was on fire.

I’d never been in so much pain before.(Nah, I totally have, there’s a reason why I call the bad place, the ‘bad’ place, but this is still pretty terrible.)

*****

There were three types of casters in Novem. The first were the witches and the warlocks, the innate casters. Men and women who were born with powers and just naturally were able to use magic.

Then there were the non-innate casters, the magicians, and wizards and alchemists, who had to work at using magic, using theorems and formulas and materials to make magical things happen.

Finally there were augmented, those who gained power through use of the creations of the non-innate. Using serums and parasitic weapons to gain magical powers.

The augmented were the ones who got sent into the wastes and onto the battlefields because their powers were generally made for combat and quick practical use.

The non-innates worked in background inventing magical technologies, creating monsters and super weapons and more or simultaneously destroying and saving civilization at the same time.

Finally there were innate who more or less operated like the non-innate and augment, depending on the strength and nature of their inborn powers.

As for why I’m telling you all this...It’s because I just became an augmented. (Or at least that was the plan.)

*****

I think I might have already mentioned that monsters prefered to gain their powers from ‘mundane’ means.

While being a monster, a real monster, generally means that one could very well doing anything, that’s just generally too expensive to be worth doing. I for instance, can move fairly quickly when I want to.

And eroding my humanity a little allows me leeway when it comes dealing with the laws of force, momentum and space-time. But that’s just from exaggerating the natural capabilities of a human-revenant.

If I wanted more powers, and I didn’t want to burn myself out I had to find some in-universe means of getting them.

******

My willpower broke around hour nineteen, granted I’d already more or less passed out by then.

“Arghahahaha…..Gah...Argh….Aghahahaha…”

I realized it was easier to just scream. It was fine, I was out in the waste where none but the beasties could hear me.

So I screamed. I screamed and screamed, till my throat was raw and blood joined with the bile that was filling my throat and pouring out of my mouth.

My bellows echoing out in the wastes, ghastly growling, snarling, cries that carried across the Novem wastes.

******

So….amongst the many things I found in the mansion of the one eyed boss of the Diamond Wolf Cartel, was a refrigerated case.

A case full of syringes. They were drugs, but not the fun kind that the hedonistic former owner of my body had liked imbibing in.

These were serums. Awakening Serums.

It was the equivalent of finding a cache of surface to air rockets in the back of someone’s  closet. Or like finding a working tank in someone’s barn. Equivalent, because that was pretty much what it was.

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Awakening Serums were sorcerous concoctions that could grant an individual powers. They were essentially full scale military weapons, that were not meant to get into the hands of civilian buyers.

As such, they were all ‘hot’ as hell, and trying to sell them would have likely gotten through into some dungeon somewhere.

After all even if I wasn’t the idiot who stole highly sensitive military tech, I’d have been the idiot trying to sell it.

Considering my total lack of underworld connections I would have been caught and once I was caught there would have been no way explaining my way out of it.

Thus I had a choice. I either could let them burn up with the house, because it ‘was’ on fire at the time. (Through no fault of my own…)

Or I could take those syringes and maybe see if I could find some use for them. I held back on using them myself at first.

Because ‘duh’...This was a case full syringes that were each full of scary substances that were meant to warp and contort the very nature of an individual’s being till something ‘else’ came out.

Turning soldiers into weapons. Hypothetically creating persons of Mass Destruction if I had happened to have stumbled onto a batch of the high ranking serums.

Who knew what they would do to ‘me’? Someone who wasn’t even fully human.

Then later on my resolution started to waver. Maybe it was the fight with the ghoul mother, or maybe it was the fact that let’s face it, superpowers are part of a man’s romance.

How many girls and boys grow up wishing at least once, that they had some kind of power?

So this time when I was heading into the wastes I started thinking, maybe I should use them after all.

******

I kept screaming till I could no longer scream. I realized that I was now bleeding out of every hole and pore on my body.

My nails were torn and my skin was shredded. Through teary, blood fogged eyes I could see my veins glowing. Growing incandescent.

The color of the light that issued out from under my skin shifting till suddenly all those blood vessels beneath my skin, burst.

I went blind for a second and then in the next second I could see everything.

Absolutely everything, I could see ‘too’ much. The world was horrifying its clarity.  My whole world was nausea, fear and existential despair. It was all a tad like the moment when I’d first stopped being a man and finally gave into being a monster.

The sensation was almost nostalgic. I found some calm as all the pain and ill-feeling finally stopped.

“Whew...is it finally ove-....?”

My words were cut off by the sounds of terrific explosion. I went off like a bomb. Bursting. Wiping everything around me, for miles and miles.

My only thought during before I presumed to be my death, was,

‘Huh...maybe I “shouldn't” taken them all at once.’