Today was annoying. I was tired, my head hurt, and this undead fucker was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It’s not enough that I had to go into a murder-frenzy to eradicate basement spiders, but to have a zombie mindlessly pound on my door like an obsessed drummer?
Oh hell no.
I checked all of my windows around the first level of the house to verify that this was the only zombie nearby. The desiccated bastard didn’t look like the ripped fast-running kind of scary zombie that will take over the world. This dude looked like a slightly more in shape version of Walking Dead zombies. He could probably jog, but not for long without giving out structurally. I went and found my small ax that was a gift from Elizabeth last Christmas. It was only for practice, as she had proven that she could throw an ax better than me. Man, I am never going to live that down.
With the ax in my right hand and a conjured stone gauntlet on my left, I took a few deep breaths to focus. Quickly pulling open the door, I spartan-kicked the zombie directly in his chest. The force sent the rotting body backwards flipping over the porch railing and he landed awkwardly on his face in my yard. I heard the crack of the shins as they smacked into the ridged brick edging for the garden.
I gestured up with my hand and the earth softened like quicksand, pulling at the zombie and encasing it from the neck down. Bringing my ax up, I ran around the railing and let his head have it. The brittle skull caved in with each savage blow. It did not smell good, bursting with well-aged contents. I didn’t think that it would, but I never really thought it would be this bad. My stomach also agreed with my nose by covering the split head with its mess.
I gagged, spitting over and over to get the smell out of my mouth. [Now this is just too much.] I thought, holding back the rest of my gorge. Using my magic, I sank the whole mess six feet under and then transmuted a six-inch layer of earth to stone. Earth magic is great for cleanup.
Yard cleanup aside, I was a filthy mess. Unidentifiable bits of old, rotten gore were splattered across me and I hadn’t felt this gross ever in my life. I stank with the kind of putrid cloud hanging over me that you would imagine would be saved for someone who was inside of a porta-potty that someone else tipped over, and then flipped that bitch for good measure. Standing in my tub with the shower on but no water flowing out, I found myself with a first world problem.
“I’m slowly running out of useful curse words!” I nakedly raged, glaring at my stinking pile of clothes that were most likely ruined. My own fascination with history reminded me of what I already knew. America is the historical pinnacle of wealth and convenience and I’m a spoiled brat.
Life was put in easy mode in this country starting roughly in the 1700’s when brilliant innovators solved our species’ most common issue of survival: hunger. Inventions of labor-saving machinery and unparalleled efficiency led to the advent of factory farming which by and large solved starvation and the effects of that spread out to the rest of the world. But what came after was just as important, if not more so; the blessing of widespread sanitation.
Indoor plumbing and water treatment. Those two systemic improvements served to bring humanity into the modern era just as much as fire did for bringing the separation between us and animals. Clean water doesn’t just appear out of nowhere, it is piped in house through plastic or metal pipes from gigantic treatment plants that remove all kinds of filth from us clustering together too much. The overall improvements to sanitation with access to clean water has probably been one of the largest boons my species has ever experienced.
Because of this, humanity’s equally greatest need, aside from food, being WATER, it forced my train of thought into a direction that made me sigh. I knew what I had to do for my last crystal and it kind of bummed me out.
I needed Water Sorcery.
I wanted other cooler powers, but my long-term survival did hinge on providing for my own basic needs. Besides, with my powers already being fairly druid-like in scope, adding water would bring about a complete synergistic power set. Flesh and Mana Sorceries give me a solid foundation that allows me to grow and heal, while Earth and Nature Sorceries can make me a demi-god in defensive terms with avenues towards innovation and creation. Growing my own food shouldn’t be a problem either. Water Sorcery, added to that crunchy list, rounds out the power set, and water does have its own form of offense. Rainstorms, floods, raging rivers, constant erosion, ice, hail, water is an ever present force for change, and I definitely plan on changing things for me for the better.
Finally feeling a bit more content with my thoughts after bludgeoning them into a semblance of order with symbolic logic, I stared at the last Chaos crystal twinkling in my hands. The damn thing was laughing at me as its internal sparkles mocked my new resolve. I didn’t want to be a druid (the wizardly version of a nature-loving hippie) but circumstances conspired with need to bring me to this point. Taking a second to live out a daydream of being a dangerous storm wizard who rides the wind like a surfer while tossing out bolts of fire and lightning, I chuckled at myself. Standing here naked in my tub in the middle of magic-apocalypse-Virginia and I’m complaining about which awesome magical powers I picked. What a spoiled rotten dumbass.
Sighing again, I placed the Chaos crystal in a bowl of water that was sitting on the side of the tub and watched it dissolve as I lifted the bowl towards my mouth. This crystal went down smooth compared to the others, water’s gentle nature easing its way into my flesh and entwining with my strained soul, its caress soothing aches and pains that I didn’t notice until they were made apparent. All the while I concentrated on what I knew and desired of water. Conjuring, shaping, and banishing the various forms water takes, it all flowed through my head as I thought of videos that FEMA used to put up. The power of a raging river effortlessly sweeping away highways full of cars and debris, lazy icebergs cracking open boats the way lobsters crush clams, hailstorms smashing everything in sight; I pictured it all even as I held the softer aspects of what water was to me.
Soothing hot springs for healing the body and mind, the gentle embrace of a still lake enveloping hordes of laughing children, the way that the thirst of every living being on this planet is quenched by cool water; I capped the infusion of power off with the symbolistic purity of water washing the slate clean, water’s natural relationship with the earth and healing bringing it full-circle.
Oh sweet conjured water sluiced down my body, taking with it the grime of the day. Blood, dirt, unidentifiable corpse-juice and grossness went down the drain as I flicked my will, playing with the water like a new toy. It was easy, twisting and flicking with my imagination, the water sluicing me squeaky clean.
*******
The next day came too soon. I had passed out on the couch in a clean fit of exhaustion, my weapons strewn around me just in case. Putting my hand on my woman, that egg-like feeling still resonated through my magic and gave me a bit of comfort. I didn’t sleep well but dawn was here whether I liked it or not. Coffee is my normal go to morning routine but my dumbass had no fire or electricity.
Groaning the groan of the lazy yet undefeated, I stood up and cracked my back. [Eh, I could experiment, I guess.] I thought as I took in the room. The walls of the house were covered in conjured stone from my basement enchantment. The quartz covered windows were reinforced on the sides by extra granite and even the wooden floor was covered in the stone. After getting fully dressed and checking myself over, I covered the coffee table in front of me in a layer of conjured slate and then went to the kitchen and grabbed the copper kettle.
Taking my time, I slowly rubbed my hands over the kettle, allowing my Earth Sorcery to confirm that copper did indeed fall under my scope of powers. I shaped a small rune for fire on the inside bottom of the pot in the shape of a campfire and conjured water to fill it up. If I could get this to work, then maybe I could magic up some French press coffee!
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Inserting a small bit of mana into the rune caused the water to bubble a little, and just a bit more magic made it bubble a lot. I put my hands right next to the pot without touching it. Heat, SUCCESS! Five minutes later, I had perfect French press coffee. The tricky part was using Water Sorcery to filter out the extra tiny coffee grounds when it was done, but VOILA! Sweet dark brown nectar from the gods!
And . . . since that little experiment with temperature worked, I figured I could use that to make the fridge magic-apocalypse-proof since electricity is taking a permanent rain check. Relaxing next to Elizabeth for a few minutes, I etched out a rudimentary plan on the slate covered coffee table with my magic.
“Uh huh, yeah, magic works.” I mumbled, the words shaping themselves into existence via my magic. “And I have magic. And Elizabeth is a magic tree. And I can make magic things. Joy. Gotta keep my mind busy or I’ll go insane because this shit is bananas.” My hands trembled less as I spoke aloud, the noise centering me. “Might as well do some more testing.”
Going slowly, I conjured four thin square, stone blocks and put a makeshift rune of ice onto each one. While the rune for ice was simple, a simple depiction of a snowflake, I had to concentrate on what that meant to me and how I wanted it to be implemented. Specifically, each cold rune was supposed to focus on absorbing ambient heat. In my mind, my impromptu system of runes is pretty much a cheat as they follow my intent but I can see that they’re not the most efficient in terms of power. The magic only seems to care about the intent and the fact that it has something physical to grip onto. I could be wrong, but it works for me right now.
From what I can tell, my Mana Sorcery enchantments work better the more I take general physics into account, and since I don’t have all the knowledge on how to build an arcane refrigerator, I figured I could go the cooler method route. Mom used to put ice packs in the cooler to keep Capri-Suns cold when we went to the park. Mirroring that general concept that everyone is familiar with, I put one runed ice-stone block in the fridge, and three in the freezer. If this works, I should be set for preserving food.
A wave of cold air hit me as I shut the freezer door. [Hell yes!] I celebrated internally. [It’s barely after dawn and I’ve solved my two biggest problems, coffee and food preservation!] Then I went through the fridge and took out food that had spoiled and stuck it in a paper bag.
“Odd.” I muttered, wrinkling my nose and tossing the bag into the back yard. Turns out I could bury it with Earth Sorcery even from twenty feet away. “Didn’t I buy those groceries a week ago?”
Shaking my head at the weirdness, I went back inside and plopped down on the couch. Talking to my tree lady might make me seem a little nuts, but it definitely helped to talk out my plans. I mean, she couldn’t disagree with me, right?
“Ok babe, I do have a laundry list of shit to do today.” I muttered aloud, ticking off items on my fingers. “Check on the acorn experiment, plant them if they turned out alright, and turn them into my house-protecting slaves. Find a solution to the way-too-close graveyards near me. Maybe I could probably just transmute the dirt around the coffins into stone, right? That shouldn’t be too hard, just time-consuming. Man am I glad that we went grocery shopping three days ago, so I don’t have to worry about that right now. Oh! And figure out some magic that’s effective with distance. Earth, ice and nature - that’s some close up shit. Yes, yes, I know that I have two guns, but my ammo is limited, and I honestly don’t know how effective it will be in the long run.”
Her face didn’t change at all as I finished rattling off my to-do list. Definitely not amused at my plight. I frowned at her. “It’s not my fault I didn’t learn how to make my own ammo! The ammo-press was too damn expensive! We got a nice Kitchen-Aid instead.” My mockery still went unnoticed.
Laughing to myself while shaking my head, I thought of an idea or two but they were rather iffy. I needed to see how my basement plans were coming along first. Going down into the basement, I immediately got a heady feeling. I could feel the mana just washing over me. The batteries on the left were full, and the left and middle generator were just churning out mana.
Checking on the enchantments showed my boneheaded mistake. I didn’t put a governor on them at all. There was no conditional trigger to turn them off. The good news was that the enchantments themselves didn’t degrade at all over the last 15 hours or so.
[Oh well - it’s fixing time.]
About an hour later of banging my head against a wall and wringing my Mana Sorcery for all it was worth, my problems were all taken care of. The left generator had 10 slots for the crystal batteries, and it would now turn off once they were full and not dump extra mana into the air. The middle generator would stay off but in a standby mode until something decided to drain the house's reserves of energy by attacking it, at which point it would turn itself back on until the reserves were full. The right generator had soaked my little acorns in energy and to my mana vision they were bursting with inner light. Tight.
Another hour later, I was feeling better about myself. I put on my weight vest with ten full crystal batteries slotted into the pouches, all of my weapons that I had enchanted with durability were strapped to me, my small pocket generator hanging from my neck, and some armor made of bone and stone to cover the rest of me.
So why the hell was I so damn afraid? All I had to do was walk outside and plant four acorns, link them to the preset enchantment on the last generator, and then secure two graveyards. No big deal right?
But all I could think about was how unprepared I was. Just thinking about it made me more afraid. I don’t have a freaking clue what I’m doing. For all I know, everything I make is going to blow up in my face, and that’s nothing compared to having all these powers with almost zero practice.
I have Flesh Sorcery and I haven’t enhanced my body in any way. I have Sorcery over mana itself and I have no epic magical weapon. I have Nature Sorcery and no badass creature to slay my enemies for me. Hell, with a few spiders and one zombie, this almost seems a bit gentle. A gentle apocalypse. Who would have thought? Not me, for sure. One of mine and Elizabeth’s favorite pastimes was to talk about various apocalypses while we drank and what we would do. The movie ‘2012’ and ‘SnowPiercer’ were family favorites even though they were pretty unlikely to happen. Her family has a cabin deep in the West Virginia mountains that we could live happy hippy lives at while the world burned. Now that she’s a tree and stuck in the fucking living room, that ain’t happening.
[Breathe in, breathe out]. The jitters were killing me. This is worse than public speaking. [I can do this. Someone has to.] Then it hit me. Why haven’t I checked on the neighbors? Why haven’t I thought about my family? The latter lives both an hour north and south of me but holy cow. Exasperated at myself for not at least thinking of them, I tried to tame my shaky lines of thought.
I probably should check on my neighbors while I’m outside and see if they’re still alive, or even if they know what’s going on. I live in suburbia and there should be tons of people losing their minds right about now. Part of me is still kinda freaking out. I expected much more violence from we humans. Cracking my knuckles to force myself to concentrate just a bit more, I planned my strategy out and also decided to incorporate some testing along the way.
Hollywood has done a fairly good job programming us. Their movies and ever-improving CGI portray mythical creatures with certain abilities. Dragons fly, vampires suck blood, and zombies swarm. Seeing as I’ve only seen a zombie so far, I reviewed my Hollywood knowledge and tried to plan with some basic expectations. Zombies tend to kill humans due to endless endurance more than anything, well that and the fact that they swarm like wasps. This presents a problem because I don’t have endless endurance and there’s definitely only one of me, but I might be able to mimic the former.
Concentrating on the pocket generator, I altered the enchantment to split into two flows, one to keep my personal mana well full, the other to send me energy to keep my Flesh Sorcery in a constant state of healing. Taking a lesson from my mistakes so far, I also twisted the enchantment output to have a control valve in the middle so I could regulate the flow.
My working theory is that the healing energy would help keep my stamina up. The planned sprint to the nearby graveyard would prove my theory. This derailed my thoughts down another alley of insane possibilities but I had to table it for later because my pocket generator is small. Its current setup gives me a small but constant feed of energy (and I can only handle a small flow right now) but I do need to figure out why and how to change that. I don’t seem to have a problem manipulating the already present mana in the batteries, just as long as it’s not in me.
Again, problems for another time.
It took me two minutes to quietly navigate out of my house, around the nearby street corner and down the hill to the closest graveyard. It’s very small, maybe thirty yards long and wide. I think some old money families have their dead here. I used to run past it during my cardio days and never give it a second thought. Peeking from behind a tree, I only saw one disturbed grave.
[God I hope that was the dude I buried yesterday.]
I counted twenty graves. [Easy.]
Quickly and quietly jogging up to the first one, I reached out with my Earth Sorcery and felt around. My magical senses told me that there was a coffin in the dirt and turning that dirt into stone was fairly easy. I could feel a cacophony of muffled thumps reverberating through the earth in more than one spot.
“Crap, no, no, no, no!” I muttered, scrambling for my power. Frantically, I pushed my senses further into the dirt, compacting each coffin by compressing the dirt until I could barely feel the other corpses trying to dig their way out. Luckily, I didn’t even need to dip into my batteries to seal all the graves. Using my inspiration from my ever-present paranoia, I then transmuted the closest layer of dirt over each coffin into a thick stone cap on top of each grave for extra security.
Wiping my brow, I looked around and reviewed what I’d learned. I knew now that my theory about using the mana I personally held was correct and easier to pull off than I had originally thought, it’s time for the next cemetery. As I made my way over there, I picked up the pace bit by bit. It was weird though . . . the neighborhood seemed abandoned.
Where is everyone?
The usual noise of chirping birds and whining insects was constant but the chatter and laughter of people simply wasn’t there. This is a beautiful neighborhood filled with running paths and tennis courts and playgrounds, people were usually out and about.
But no. No cars zoomed by. The hum of the powerlines was gone.
By the time I crossed two city blocks and took a left turn down the hill to get to the big historic cemetery, I had sprinted my ass off and wasn’t even winded. I could feel the healing energy removing bodily fatigue, the lactic acid. My lungs weren’t bursting at the seams and my chest wasn’t tight from exertion. My body was cycling the oxygen and carbon dioxide at a rate well above what a desk jockey should expect. This experiment right here could make an average man a marathon runner if I so chose. I was so caught up in my own thoughts and accomplishments that it took me a second to realize that I had stopped my sprint in front of a horde of zombies halfway concealed by trees and vine-covered fences.
“Fresh meat for my army I see!”