The next few hours passed in a surreal blur. The slug monster hadn’t been much of a challenge at all, but by the same token he hadn’t gained much aura from its death, even with a few quips thrown in for good measure.
In his defence, it wasn’t easy to look cool while smashing a giant gastropod with a golf club. The pitching wedge ended up so covered in slime and slug gore that he didn’t even think about keeping it, even though it was otherwise undamaged. Luckily, he had the wherewithal to avoid getting any on his new outfit. John walked away with just 400 Aura banked, which was nothing compared to what he’d gained in previous fights.
Focusing on moving steadily away from the city centre, he made sure to pick his battles carefully. Whenever a new monster came into the range of Mana Sense, he did his best to surreptitiously get an idea of how dangerous it was before coming into full sight of it. Soul Vision gave him some insight there, but it would’ve been nice if the Spell came with more of an instruction manual than simply how to use it.
There was obviously some kind of ranking system going on with the colours. With the slug monster acting as a measuring stick, he figured a blue hue marked the weakest souls. Beyond that, he didn’t have a distinct frame of reference, but the scariest-looking monster he came across—a pale humanoid figure with hundreds of black wings spouting from its back that floated almost lazily across the sky—had a soul such a dark red it was almost black, which led him to suspect that there was a spectrum between blue and red, with plenty of shades of green, yellow, and orange marking different levels of strength. His own soul was baby blue.
Combining Mana Sense and Soul Vision, he could kinda sorta maybe see the souls of monsters through walls. If he already knew exactly where it was before activating Soul Vision, he could get a vague impression of what he was dealing with even if he couldn’t see it directly. It was like looking through an unfocused telescope, and the effect only got worse the further away he was, but it was enough to know what to avoid.
Thus, things actually went fairly well for John, for a couple of hours.
After the slug, the next fight he picked was with a monster that looked like an old postbox that had gotten rabies. Standing tall and red and shiny, the cuboid-shaped monster lumbered along by rocking itself from side to side, thick foam burbling from the rectangular mouth that split its ‘face’ in half. The ridiculous creature’s soul was blue, so John felt safe to sneak up on it.
“No spam mail,” he said before bashing it atop its red head with a three wood with all his strength.
+200 Aura
It teetered to one side, but quickly rocked back up like one of those weighted bowling pin things. John had a brief fright at the sight, wondering if he’d picked the wrong fight after all. But when it started slowly shuffling itself around to get at him, he knew he wasn’t going to have any problems. All he had to do was side step into its blind spot once more and aim another swing.
“Special delivery,” John said.
No Aura popped up that time, and he hoped it was just because the golf club had snapped with the force of the blow, not because the system didn’t appreciate his joke. Knowing he wasn’t exactly the funniest guy around, he tried to go for stylish attacks instead. For example, he fetched out a new club and did a full 360 spin attack, his Agility and Mind letting him aim it accurately and Strength giving it good power despite the somewhat awkward movement.
The monster went teetering again, blubbering bubbles from its mouth slot in indignation. There was a dent in its blocky head, now.
+200 Aura
John nodded to himself, then kept going. He tried jumping attacks, one-handed swings, and even poked at it like he was wielding a rapier. Nothing else worked until a yawn forced its way up out of his chest and, growing somewhat disinterested in this increasingly ridiculous farce of a fight, he aimed a casual one-handed swing that bashed the monster over the head and, finally, something gave way. The monster shattered like a china vase, scattering red shards all over the pavement. There was no sign of any innards. Nothing biological at all. Not even a hint of where the foam it had been spewing came from.
+200 Aura
What the fuck, John thought to himself, closing his eyes to contemplate the moment. That was just weird.
He decided not to linger on it and moved on, heading towards the outskirts of the city once more.
The previous plan he’d outlined for himself came into play, then. Rather than dithering over where to spend the Aura, he stuck to what he’d already decided when he’d had the time to think long term strategy. Right now, even with the relatively tame battle he’d just concluded, the stress of being outside in this madness, avoiding deadly monsters while trying to hide how fucking terrifying this all was, was not conducive to well-considered decisions.
Thus, the Aura he’d accumulated in those two battles went straight into Shadow Stream and Mana Blade.
-1000 Aura
Much like Mana Sense and Soul Vision, the two Level 1 Spells immediately imprinted themselves into his mind, and the energy in his navel rippled twice, a pond disturbed by a pair of stones. Their method of activation came to him immediately, but he waited until he was confident there were no monsters around him before he tried one.
Shadow Stream was about what he expected. Gaseous darkness poured from his hands like he was a living smoke machine. It appeared to be heavier than the air, pooling on the ground and pooling there like a waterfall of inky clouds, but he could fire it out as if from a firefighter’s hose, creating a stream of darkness as thick as his arm. Its range seemed to be about twenty metres, and the darkness didn’t dissipate until he dismissed it or switched his mana ‘slot’ to another Spell.
Curious, he detoured into the lobby of a small block of flats and activated it in there, and sure enough it slowly flooded the space. Best of all, he could see inside the stuff. It turned the world to a pencil sketch, but he was confident that was a damn lot better than what anyone else would see.
Mana Blade was simpler in comparison. There was little need to figure anything out about it at Level 1. With a mental command, a portion of the energy in his navel detached and shot up his arm until it burst out the ends of his fingertips as motes of silvery light. They quickly built up and formed together into a translucent white blade at the end of his arm, covering his hand.
Deadly sharp, light as a feather, and glowing an otherworldly blue, it maintained a connection to the sphere of energy in his navel—at this point, he could safely say that was his mana, right?—for as long as it was active. It was sharp enough to score a line in a solid stone wall with barely any effort, yet when he ran his finger along the edge, it didn’t even scratch his skin. After some tests, he found it couldn’t hurt him at all, no matter how much pressure he put on it.
With these, the next monster he fought didn’t even know what hit it. After avoiding three monsters in a row because he didn’t like the colour of their souls, he finally found a blue lingering in the back garden of a particularly nice house, coiled around a tree. It was remarkably similar to the tar-goat monster he’d first seen when this all began, except in the shape of a worm as thick as a toilet roll tube and easily three metres long. It oozed ichor from either end.
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John blasted it with Shadow Stream then charged with his Mana Blade at the ready. It was only just reacting to the first attack when he slashed it in half with the magical sword, then didn’t give it any time to recover. He knew how it went with worms when they got split in half, and he went to work cutting it down the middle as it tried to wriggle away from him. A minute later, its two halves were going through that rapid decay process characteristic of dead monsters.
+200 Aura
Only 200 Aura for a kill was a terrible return, but he didn’t feel too bad about it. He’d confirmed that he could get things done fast if he felt like it, and that gave him a confidence boost he sorely needed. The golf clubs seemed a bit redundant after that display, but he decided to keep them just in case, for now.
Squaring his shoulders and rolling his neck, John continued his journey.
He strolled a winding route, keeping to residential neighbourhoods. He figured any busy, built-up area such as town centres and shopping streets and the like was probably way more populated with monsters, and much deadlier ones at that. The eldritch angel and the tar-goat were the scariest things he’d seen so far, and they had both been in busier districts.
It felt cowardly. He couldn’t deny that. Another person might have gone straight towards their loved ones, but John’s were on the other side of London, towards Dagenham. Getting to them would’ve meant fighting his way through the city centre itself, which seemed like suicide. His best bet was to make it to the M25 ring road and circle around the city. Even then, he was sure he’d need to gain much more strength than he currently had.
So far, he hadn’t even really been thinking about the long term. Couldn’t quite bring himself to, though he knew he should. It was tough to look to the future when making it to tomorrow seemed like it’d be one hell of an uphill battle. For now, he had to focus on gathering Aura so he could accumulate more abilities. Thinking about other people could come once he’d saved himself, callous as it sounded.
It helped that there didn’t seem to be very many people to think about. He caught only glimpses of other human beings in the distance, dashing across roads, darting into houses. There was the occasional sound of an engine, or a distant shout, but the cacophony of screams had longed died down. The rumble of gunfire and explosions still rocked the city, but it was clear the initial wave of death was long over.
Which was a horrifying and sickening realisation to have.
So he didn’t dwell on it. Couldn’t afford the distraction.
Moving west as directly as he could, John stopped only for blues he met in favourable conditions. There were plenty of other monsters around, but Mana Sense and Soul Vision let him avoid them without getting penalised, for the most part. The system actually appeared to be pretty reasonable, in that regard: as long as he didn’t flee in terror, he didn’t actually need to do anything special to avoid a fight without punishment.
He wouldn’t gain anything unless he acted cool about it, and he figured he might as well take the extra Aura where he could. He didn’t risk it with every strong monster, only the ones where he judged he could get away with it. With this method, he reached 600 Aura without having to fight, 500 of which he swiftly spent to unlock Soul Arrow, putting him back at 100.
Activated by miming drawing a bow string along his arm, a shimmering arrow would appear in an invisible bowstring and shoot out at his command, fast enough to cover dozens of metres in a blink, but slow enough he could still track it with the naked eye. He figured that was about the speed of a regular arrow.
There didn’t appear to be an upper limit to how many he could fire, and its cooldown was only restricted by how fast he could draw and loose the imaginary bow. The sensation of mana zapping out from the sphere, up his body, and along his arm tickled, but it didn’t seem to diminish the reservoir of energy.
The ranged attack was a game changer. The Soul Arrows burst into sparkles upon contact with anything solid, but when they made contact with a monster… That was another matter entirely.
His first test of the ability once again ended a battle before the blue-souled monster knew what was coming. A relatively mundane monster compared to the weirdness he’d encounter so far, the cat-sized ant was completely unaware of John’s presence until a Soul Arrow skewered it right through the chest. He’d been aiming for its head, but even hitting the target at all on his first ever attempt at archery with a living target felt like an achievement.
+200 Aura
Again, bugger all awarded for a relatively uninteresting kill, but he was fine with that in this particular case, since it was basically a test. It wouldn’t be tenable to keep up such tactics in the future. Survival depended on growth, and picking up 200 Aura per kill simply wouldn’t be fast enough in the long run. Whatever that long run ended up looking like.
On the next one, he made sure to ham it up a bit. His repertoire of spells was granting him greater trust in his own safety. With a ranged attack, a close-quarters weapon, and a battlefield control ability, he felt versatile enough to handle himself against basically any blue-souled monster at this point—he’d seen enough of them to be sure they were weak. All of them could be deadly to someone with fewer or lesser cheats up their sleeve, but they weren’t much threat to him unless he got way too cocky. Which he wouldn’t do.
A plant creature made up of thorny green branches twisted into the shape of a featureless quadruped skittered around the gravel driveway of a smaller house like a giant insect. Dried blood and flecks of gore stuck to its spikes. It seemed infected with manic energy, constantly on the move. John decided to catch its attention with an arrow, and wasn’t at all distressed when it missed.
The plant monster snapped its attention to him.
“Shouldn’t you be on the compost heap?” he asked it disdainfully, not having to fake a sneer. This pathetic thing had killed people.
+200 Aura
It charged, and John equipped his Mana Blade. What followed was a merry bout. John lured it around into a back garden for more privacy, then led it on a chase, throwing insults at it at every opportunity. The Aura system was more stingy with its rewards this time, but it did acknowledge a couple of good ones he thought up as he steadily sliced away at the monster, granting it a death by a dozen cuts.
“I wish I’d brought my garden shears,” he drawled as he pared one of its limbs.
+200 Aura
“Maybe if the system gave me a weed-killer spell, I’d have something more appropriate for you,” he bragged as he casually dodged away from one of its attacks. It was actually closer than he made it seem, since the little bugger was a swift thing, but he couldn’t let on to how much his heart was racing.
+200 Aura
In the end, he finished it with a point-blank Soul Arrow right to the monster’s face. The system gave him no reward for that, leaving him at 900 Aura in total.
After that, there were a couple more. He gained another 600 Aura fighting a smaller version of the biped rat thing he’d killed earlier on, primarily through getting flashy with his Mana Blade, since he couldn’t think of anything ‘cool’ to say that wasn’t just a repeat of what he’d done before.
400 more came from a disappointing encounter with a giant isopod where it felt like he just couldn’t gain any more Aura no matter what he said or how he fought it. Perhaps the creature was just too pathetic. Only a moment where it rolled up into a ball and he hoofed it away in frustration earned him any Aura, aside from the final blow.
Then he got 200 from a stone thing that he wouldn’t have identified as a monster without Soul Vision. It was the richest shade of blue he’d seen yet, with a swirl of white. Nothing he said to it earned any interest from the system, so in the end he had to cut it in half with his Mana Blade, feeling baffled.
Thus, he’d gathered 1900 Aura by the time he was starting to think about stopping for a longer rest. A decision faced him, then. The priority list he’d made only counted the Spells he’d unlocked, with some consideration made for the fact he’d have to get around to the rest of the Level 0 ones eventually.
Skills had been under contemplation, too, but at the time he hadn’t known what the shape of the future was going to be, and when he’d be able to fit in the next unlock. Now, with plenty of points banked, he figured now was as good a time as ever.
Using his Mana Sense, he picked his way to a house that he was sure was abandoned, then strode through the broken door and straight into the living room. After getting comfortable on a recliner sofa, he put his points into Skills.
What he saw there made his eyes go wide.
