Rejoice.

Gor Mar’s words reverberated through his mind. Anger accompanied them, drowning out the last of the calm provided by The Lone Wanderer.

“How dare you say that to me,” Zane raised the neon spear.

Zane stepped forward but Gor Mar. The Kapdel scout looked confused by his anger. Despite its horrifying words, he had the impression that it hadn’t intended to insult or torture him. The creature spoke English, but that didn’t mean that it was human. It’s thoughts and intentions were as alien to him as he was to it.

“This is an opportunity that many across the cosmos would kill for,” Gor Mar clicked its mandibles.

“How many died for it?” Zane asked. “How many humans survived?”

Zane didn’t want to hear the answer, but he had to know.

“You lived, but though there may be others in these ruins, I cannot guarantee it,” Gor Mar said. “This is the heart of the wave, where its effects are the strongest. It is a lucrative place. And a dangerous one. This landmass was greatly affected. The others around it are less so. Perhaps in those it will not be rare to find more of your kind.”

It’s words didn’t bring him the relief he was expecting.

“You’re not sure?” Zane asked.

Gor Mar sounded hesitant. The Kapdel shifted as he focused on it, its claws twitching uncomfortably.

“Invasion, when the toll is paid,” it said. “Chaos restrains the strong. Makes them vulnerable. When they arrive, they will settle in the inhabitable regents of the chaos world, where it is safe. Any who stand in their way will be removed.”

The meaning of its words was clear. Others were coming to Earth to claim the rewards the apocalypse had brought. And they wouldn’t tolerate competition.

If humanity wasn’t dead now, they would be soon.

“Bargain, the sublime settlement toppled,” Gor Mar said. “May we meet again, soulsmith, and trade in your wares.”

Before Zane could stop it, Gor Mar raised its claws and sunk them into Tobie’s body. With strength that defied its stature the scout dragged the gigantic corpse away from the convenience store. Zane watched it go with wary eyes. If they had fought Gor Mar would have torn his body in half with ease.

Soon, the scout disappeared into the distant streets, and silence took its place.

He was alone again.

Panic threatened to overwhelm him, and he staggered to the back of the convenience store and focused on his breathing. The Calm Wanderer had eased Zane’s mind enough for him to keep his thoughts coherent, but he knew that he needed more. Zane forced himself to sit down and wait patiently for the ability to come off cooldown.

Two hours passed, and he activated The Calm Wanderer four times.

The half-an-hour cooldown started when the ability was first used. Which meant that it was more of a fifteen minute cooldown when combined with the fifteen minutes of calm the ability brought. The difference the ability made to his mental state was immeasurable. He felt like he could take a thousand calls from angry customers and still have patience to spare.

Zane quickly sobered up when he remembered that there would be no more calls. Not today, and maybe never again.

Humanity had entered into a new era, and they hadn’t been ready for it.

Zane gripped his spear tight. The deaths of others didn’t mean that he couldn’t survive. Tobie had always gone on about what was important during the apocalypse. In fact, it was one of the only things he wouldn’t shut up about.

Food and water, shelter, mobility, and power. Those were the five keys to success in the apocalypse.

I have plenty of food. And enough water to last a long time.

The convenience store was filled with food of questionable nutrition, and more importantly, more bottles of water than he could carry. He took out a can of soup and stabbed the neon spear’s tip into it, forcing its lid open. The inside were cold, and chunky, but they smelled like heaven to him.

As he ate, he took stock of the world around him. Shelter was easy to find, the buildings of his city abandoned and decrepit. He wasn’t sure if cars would work, especially since the street was blocked on all sides by wrecked cars caught up in the wave. As for power, well, that was a different story.

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Tobie had bought a gun. Five of them, actually.

Zane didn’t have any. Even if he did, he wasn’t sure how effective they would be. Gor Mar had called this area dangerous, and guns were loud enough to give his position away to everything that was in the city.

That was okay. He had a different means of survival.

Zane closed his eyes and he tried to find the two cards that rested within his body. Focusing on their existence caused them to appear in front of him, each one emanating a different colored glow.

Vendor of Souls.

The Calm Wanderer.

So far Tobie’s card had brought Zane the most tangible benefits, but it was clear to him that Vendor of Souls was the reason he could take the card in the first place. According to Vendor of Souls, it wasn’t really a card, it was Tobie’s soul in the shape of a card. Through his own card Zane had gained access to a substance that humanity wasn’t even sure existed.

Despite the fact that the card was the entirety of another being’s existence, Zane only felt a slight pressure from taking it in. He didn’t feel like he had reached the limits of how many souls he could carry. He wasn’t even close.

Which meant that he could grow stronger. And improve his chances of survival.

Zane was willing to bet that there were more souls out there. Gor Mar suggested that he was the only survivor, but millions had lived in the city. Most of them seemed to be lost, or displaced, but if he could find a survivor then his chances of survival would increase. If he found a corpse, then he’d see if it glowed like Tobie’s had.

Gripping the neon spear in his hand he walked out of the convenience store, prepared for the worst. The moment he stepped out of the entryway, he froze. Despite the fact that he had activated The Calm Wanderer his legs felt like they were made of jelly, and a sense of trepidation crossed over him.

Calmness wasn’t courage.

The card could help him, but it couldn’t overcome his humanity.

Tobie would be laughing at you right now. Zane told himself. I bet his soul is looking at me and wondering why I bothered to pick it up.

The thoughts eased Zane’s worries, and he made his way outside.

It was wider than he expected.

Before, the city had been filled with skyscrapers and tall buildings that blocked the sky. Now, there was nothing higher than the crumbling apartment buildings a few blocks over.

He didn’t know what had happened to the people in the skyscrapers, but if it was anything like what had happened to his building then he hoped that everyone inside had died quickly. To the east was a massive black mountain that he had never seen before. The material it was made out of was opaque, and he could see multiple things crawling over its surface. From here they looked like ants, but he knew that if he went up close each would be the size of a small truck.

To the west was a continuous stream of ash that billowed into the sky. It wasn’t large enough to contaminate the atmosphere and block out the sun, but a soft orange glow splashed around the buildings in the area, and he could see some were beginning to melt. Ahead of Zane to the north was a forest with trees that were bigger than the buildings around him. It was draped in darkness, with the exception of a single lake that ran through the middle.

Finally, there was a building in the sky. White marble walls reflected the sun’s light onto the city below, and two massive towers pierced the heavens above it. Looking at it sent a shiver down his spine.

It was the source of the cold that had enveloped the city.

What the hell is in there and how do they stay afloat?

Everything around Zane had changed more than he had expected, so he decided to walk through the street that passed beside his old work building. The streets had seen better days, to say the least. Parts of them were crumbling as though they had been in use for thousands of years. Others had entire sections ripped out. Most of the street he was walking through had collapsed where Tobie had stomped over it.

Once familiar buildings were now as alien as Gor Mar, most twisted in ways that defied his limited knowledge of architecture. Most had imploded, their innards gutted and spread out across the streets like trash. A lot had collapsed upon themselves, their foundations stripped away or replaced by foreign materials.

Out of everything, the cars had been hit the worst.

Most looked like they had exploded from the inside out, their frames twisting into a cacophony of disorder that stabbed into the ground and melded with it. A few had strange growths on their surfaces that looked like flesh, but purple and spongy. He couldn’t see any sort of glow coming from them, and he avoided them just in case.

Zane found his first intact car five blocks away from the convenience store. It was a black sedan with tinted windows that had both been smashed, and a woman lay face-down on the dashboard.

The side of her head was caked in blood. She was dead.

Zane’s lips pursed into a tight line. Her skin was glowing with a soft light the color of iron, with a red tinge marking its edges. She had a soul ready for the taking. Relief swept through Zane, but then he shook it off. This was the first human he had seen since the end, and he intended to be as respectful as possible.

I wonder who she was before all this went down.

Zane stepped forward, about to touch the soul, when he paused. Sunlight had reflected off of his neon spear, revealing something underneath the sedan. It writhed and squirmed as he spotted it, and a single bright orb appeared in the darkness. Then another. And another.

Two. Four. Eight. Twelve.

Half a dozen pairs of glowing eyes watched Zane from the shadows, each one blinking in unison.

A purple tentacle shot through the air in front of him, lashing out with the force of a whip. Zane dodged it with a hurried movement and the tentacle hit an object that was a warped amalgamation of a lamppost, a car, and a bin. The monster shrieked in pain as its flesh smacked against the metal.

Zane stabbed the outstretched limb with the neon spear, the strike powered by sheer desperation and panic.

Opal blood oozed from the wound as the spear tip sliced through flesh with ease. The monster withdrew its tentacle with a snap and the sedan screeched and toppled over, the creature rising to its full height. The being was covered in fur and had a bulbous head pregnant with thick masses that resembled tumors. The monster had no mouth, though he could hear it screaming, and thick veins carried opal blood through its limbs as seven tentacles held firmly onto the ground, an eighth lying damaged at its side.

A dozen eyes stared at Zane, a universal emotion running through them.

It was angry.