Jace had been having a good day.

He grabbed breakfast at the old-timey diner two blocks down the road. Waffles and bacon never started a day off wrong. It was a warm morning, and sunny as well. Really just a beautiful day in general. He had gotten a good amount of sleep, there were no big plans at work today, and he was feeling good.

Jace worked as a supervisor in a small home goods store. There were nowhere near enough employees to have someone dedicated to the position, but the company insisted that it showed a good look for someone to be making sure even the managers did their jobs. Usually, that would be the owner, but he rarely showed up at all, let alone did work. So, Jace spent his days telling his coworkers to at least goof off away from the cameras and making sure that everything ran smoothly.

Not much business had happened on the day the world ended. Like he said, it was beautiful. Everyone not working was probably out in the parks or hanging around just letting the day pass by. The few customers they did have knew what they wanted and didn't cause any fuss, so there wasn't much to supervise. The cashier had been watching one of those overenthusiastic baking shows on her phone, and half the other employees were huddled around her joining in. All the others were half-heartedly but quickly getting their jobs done in the hopes of being sent home early.

They got their wish in the late afternoon. They closed in half an hour and no customers had shown up in forty-five minutes, so Jace sent the rest of his coworkers home and closed up early. He did some final touch-ups on re-stocking the shelves, made sure the security system was on, and checked to make sure the registers were locked and all the revenue was accounted for. He left an hour after he had sent everyone home and began to walk back to his apartment, which was at the edge of the commercial district.

As he walked, he passed the blacksmith shop that was a few doors down from his own job. Apparently, some kind of famous guy ran it, and the stuff on display sure seemed nice. But Jace looked right past them at the woman closing up the shop. Her name was Mary, and he had been working up the courage to introduce himself to her for three weeks now. They had said a few pleasantries in the past if they finished closing up at the same time, but never really got to know each other. But she was shockingly beautiful, seemed kind, and if the rumors from his own customers were to be believed, a terror at the negotiation table. He wanted to get to know her. Maybe even more.

But not today. He would ask to hang out tomorrow. Or the day after. There was no rush. He had time.

Twenty minutes later, right as he entered the residential district, something fell out of the sky and shook the earth. A shockwave lifted Jace into the air, and he stayed conscious just long enough to see the commercial and residential districts peel apart from each other and shoot miles away. When he woke up, he was in a forest that looked like it had been around for centuries, and no civilization was in sight.

He heard howls and frantically claimed the closest tree. Just in time as well. A monstrosity of a wolf clambered through the woods. It took almost a minute for it to notice Jace, which had let him climb almost thirty feet up the tree. He wasn't out of the woods yet though. It could almost certainly still reach him.

The wolf was the size of a bus. It had perfectly groomed luxurious fur, a pristine white that repelled the dirt and debris of the forest. Its fangs and claws were made of some jagged black crystal, which looked sharp enough to cut through a car. It had a crown of the same black crystal growing out of its head, crimson light dancing between the arches crackling like lightning. Its eyes glowed the same color, although the energy contained within those orbs looked far, far stronger.

Then its backup arrived. A pack of mutant-zombie-super wolves that was at least sixty wolves strong darted between the legs of the larger beast, howling and roaring with bloodlust and hunger. Not a single one saw him, forty feet high as he now was, but the alpha kept its gaze locked on his. And then, it smiled. It was a guttural expression not meant for something with the face of a wolf, but that only made it all the more intimidating.

He could feel judgment in that gaze. He was weak right now. Too weak to even be prey. It would not hunt him itself. It was too important to sully its fangs on a weakling.

So the massive wolf left, along with its pack. Jace found a hollow in the tree large enough to be a closet, and hyperventilate while leaning against the wall for twenty minutes. He had just looked something that could kill him in seconds in the eye, and it smiled.

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Jace was no longer having a good day.

Once he calmed down enough to breathe again, he inspected the glowing blue tattoo on his wrist.

[Name: Jace Blevard]

[Class: Overseer(may be upgraded or changed)]

[Rank: Mortal-1]

[Sponsor: None]

[Affinity: Spatial]

[Signiture Ability: Overbearing Gaze]

The words made some sense, but not much. He had played some video games in his life, and this looked like some kind of status screen, but just what the hell had happened? Jace closed his eyes, hugged his knees to his chest, and began to cry. He had no idea where he was, how that monstrous wolf existed, or why he was still alive instead of torn to shred by its jaws. Everything had been turned on its head in the space of half of an hour. His thoughts of asking Mary out now seemed like a distant memory.

But through his closed and tear-filled eyes, he could still see. Like a heads-up display on the inside of his eyelids, he could perceive out of an entirely separate point of view directly in front of his eyes. Until his breakdown, they had been showing the exact same image, so he hadn't noticed the difference. Once he recovered from the bone-shaking fear yet again, he began mentally prodding at the floating viewpoint.

He could feel instinctually that this was Overbearing Gaze. It seemed to be a drone-like point-of-veiw that he could move around at will. His mental prodding was clumsy, and the further he got from himself the grainier the footage was, but he could look around without opening his eyes or moving his body at all. The viewpoint jerked around sporadically if he tried to control it too finely, so it was definitely something he would need practice with.

With the Overbearing Gaze, Jace tried to figure out just where he was. The viewpoint flew clumsily around the forest, often running into trees or falling into bushes if he lost concentration. Only wolves, some mundane birds, and one bear the size of an eighteen-wheeler prowled through the woods. The bear was the bus-sized wolf's polar opposite. Its fur was a dusty and matted brown, and green energy flowed like water across claws of solid stone. Its eyes were normal, but its teeth were death, so compacted that he had seen it bite through a smaller wolf without the slightest bit of resistance.

After a few skirmishes between the small wolves and the bear, the two massive beasts appeared to come to some territorial agreement. They stayed away from each other's hunting ground and the bear only killed smaller wolves if they were dumb enough to attack it first. That wasn't to say that disputes didn't happen after the first few hours. The wolf and bear both sported a few scars from their initial fight.

The trees stretched up into the sky seemingly forever, but the viewpoint eventually managed to break through the canopy. Forest was spread around for miles and miles, only seeing to stop in two places. One was off in the distance, the very beginning of some grassy plains. Jace tried to get a closer look, but that kind of distance made his Overbearing Gaze blind entirely, not just grainy. The other was a break in the trees about halfway between the viewpoint and the horizon, closer to the plains but not out of the forest entirely.

He could see buildings if he sent the gaze as high as he could while still getting detail, but at the distance he was he couldn't tell what kind they were. It might be a small town, it might be some sort of facility or plant, or it might even be part of Jace's city. He had been turned around by the forest and knocked out even before that, so he had no idea in what direction the fragments of the city were shot off in.

He slept in the tree that night. It was racked with nightmares and he woke up having to hold himself back from screaming twice. But at least nothing found him in the tree, and with his viewpoint patrolling he didn't see anything stalking through the night too close to him. The morning couldn't come fast enough.

When the sun finally rose, so too did Jace's hunger. He had been knocked out at sunset, woke up in the early morning, spent an entire day in a tree, and spent the night fearing for his life, all without eating. His Overbearing Gaze looked through the forest for any food that was close enough to safely collect, but there was nothing suitable close enough to the tree. In the distance, there was a lake surrounded by berry bushes, but it would take at least two minutes to sprint there and he didn't like his chances with the wolves drinking from the lake.

He sat staring at those berries for half an hour with his viewpoint, hungrier than he had ever been. They didn't look poisonous, and he had seen some birds eat a few, so he thought they were safe to consume. The bushes were sagging under the weight of all the food, each bush carrying dozens of them at least. He wanted so badly to just reach out and grab one, but his real body was far, far away.

Until a rush of mana went through his body, half condensing above his hand and half flowing out into his connection with Overbearing Gaze. The magic looked like a purple mist, swirling in on itself until it made an entirely opaque plane that looked like stained glass. An exact copy appeared in front of his viewpoint, and both began to spin. They churned faster and faster before collapsing in on themselves. A pair of portals took their place, only a few inches in diameter.

Jace's hand shot through and grabbed a berry, frantically pulling it back a moment before the portal closed. He had just enough time to place the berry in his mouth and savor its taste before mana exhaustion whisked his consciousness away. Leaning back against the tree hollow, for the first time in the post-mana world, Jace smiled.