Mysterious. Unpredictable. Boundless. It was a fusion of that which was undoubtedly impossible to fuse, two untamed and opposing energies that defied the pre-established laws of reality, yet simultaneously kept those very same laws perfectly in check. They couldn’t understand it then, and even a dozen millennia later, they still can’t. Forever shall the Origin remain an enigma.

The Ancient History of Energy, Page 4672.

**

A faint mechanical whir resounded, and a dark figure rose up out of the shadows. Darkness sloughed off from their form and they tapped the side of their mask lightly, the tri-optics twisting and zooming in on the rapidly receding sight of the manned jeep as it drove off into the bounds of what was fittingly deemed the ‘mainland’.

They zoomed in even further, and a click rang out once, twice, three times. It was only when the vehicle finally crested the range of their ocular enhanced sight that they slunk back into the shadows, sparing a glance for the pitiful men and women of the town as they awaited their eventual demise. It was only a matter of time until the infestation of Skin Walkers returned here, and the individual knew there was nothing to be done about it.

Genesis neither had the time, resources, or interest to waste here and now on ‘insignificant’ people. It was part of the reason that the individual despised the organisation.

They tapped the carbon fibre mask one last time, and a triad of photos flickered into existence in their vision, an action facilitated by hidden technology, and in silence, they regarded the individuals depicted. A man, no older than twenty-five: a boy in his late teens: and a woman not much younger than the first. On the outside, they appeared simple, but they were anything but.

Oddly enough, the oldest – and perhaps most powerful – person present bore a significant resemblance to someone that had already been placed on the organisation’s watchlist. It was someone the figure knew quite well in fact. Without waiting much longer, they began to meld into the shadows as their comms crackled to life.

“Mission report…”

**

Contrary to what one would expect, road trips in a post-apocalyptic world dominated by horrifying monsters and a fallen society were no more interesting than the ones that occurred before that all came to be. In fact, the simple truth that they were now capable of so much more only made the trip even more boring.

Even Fon, who had originally come off as somewhat quiet and reserved had voiced her complaints.

Grumbling to himself, Brock kept his hands on the wheel and just drove, the aged countryside and dilapidated remains of towns passing them by at speeds that would have surely been illegal to drive before the System. Mostly, the man tried to keep to the ruined continues of the roads, but every now and then some off-roading was required. The abundant bumpiness made those parts less than fun.

A day had already fled by them, and Fon had slowly begun to fit in the dynamic that Brock and Harry had built with each other. It was slight, but the elder man knew that with enough time she’d fit right in. For now, though, it was enough that she’d indulge in some banter now and then. Her sarcasm also seemed to have a penchant for amusing Brock.

Briefly, when Harry had needed to use the shitter, she had demonstrated her usefulness during the downtime by assisting Brock in understanding the way many of his abilities worked and the energy processes they went through to achieve their effects. Of course, she wasn’t an expert and had little experience in the field of the ethereal, so her insights were limited, but it was very interesting, nonetheless.

In fact, it somewhat reminded Brock of chemistry in high school.

Though it wasn’t all boring times and friendship. Travelling through the lands and visiting the various dregs that were once meant to be centres of civilisation had made the threat of Skin Walkers all the more apparent to Brock and his companions. Before that, it had seemed to be something of such a small scope. A local issue, perhaps.

But as they regarded dead, silent, and deserted towns filled with rotting corpses and the hungry beasts that were feeding upon their remains, the true weight of the situation began to dawn on them. There was no doubt people had lived there since the ending of the Tutorial. Now, not a single soul was left in sight. The problem wasn’t just something that threatened people, it was one that threatened humanity.

Like a plague, Brock wondered if the monsters were yet to infest the continent in its entirety.

Unfortunately, the same dilemma he had come to realise back in the town applied to him right now; he had no idea where to even begin to solve the problem. Sure, he could manage to find who was and who wasn’t one of the beasts, but there was no way to oust every Skin Walker in the country, let alone the whole affected portion of the world, assuming it was considerable.

Even if he could, they would probably just come right back soon after he left, and they’d once more face the same issue as before. Fon had previously insisted in her confidence that they were not true monsters, instead speculating that they were either summons or artificial life, like homunculus or some such. As his ‘False Life’ Title had mentioned, Brock knew it was the latter. Definitely, someone was making these things.

“Hey Brock, I need to go to the toilet,” Harry spoke through the silence that had befallen the group.

Brock sighed loudly, “Why do you always need to shit?”

Harry went silent at the hostility in his tone and a quiet once more washed over the group. Brock felt bad, knowing that the monotony of the trip was getting to him, and he apologised, parking near a bundle of shrubbery and letting the kid do what he needed. Fon looked away for privacy’s sake, and Brock snorted.

Few beasts got in their way as they returned to the road, most just skittering out the way and avoiding them like the plague. Other, more stubborn ones required a burst of Harry’s domineering level 45 aura to scare them off. Brock didn’t know much about the durability of roadkill, but he doubted crashing into a mutant, two-headed deer at 255kmph would be anything but a messy affair.

He liked tomato sauce, but not when it was on both him and his car.

For the most part, he didn’t manage to spot any monsters peaking above the fifties, though creatures sitting at that level and ones a bit under it were quite common, a far contrast to the monstrous residents of the outback. It made the place look like a kindergarten compared to the ready danger they saw in every which direction here.

Hours later, Brock swapped with Fon at the wheel and lounged in the back, lamenting on the fact he had neglected to bring a card game with them to pass the time. In the end, he settled for a conversation with Harry on politics. He regretted it as soon as the conversation started. It was like speaking to a brick wall that never passed brick primary school. Needless to say, the office worker did not enjoy the experience.

“Yeah, but then why does New York have their own style of pizza?” Harry rebutted with distaste.

Brock placed his head in both his hands and screamed, “What the fuck does pizza have to do with health care fund-?!”

He froze abruptly as a shiver went down his spine, and his head whipped around, panning his gaze across the landscape behind them and scrutinising every single nook and cranny of the place. A shadow over to his far-left appeared to shift around slightly, but he discarded it as anything of importance. He had sworn he felt that someone had been spying on them.

One didn’t fight beasts often without developing some sense of natural instinct.

The jeep swerved slightly as Brock’s fully recovered aura billowed out in full and scrubbed over the area, Fon becoming startled by its sudden appearance. Aside from creatures burrowed under the earth and monsters swooping high in the sky, he found nothing apart from the strange urge that he was able to do something more with his powers. He wasn’t quite sure where that impression came from, but he had felt it faintly ever since he’d had that fated final meeting with Fon’s scammer friend.

“What was that for?!” The woman in question cried out, glancing panickily in the rear-view mirror and meeting Brock’s apologetic eyes.

He scratched the back of his head awkwardly, “I… it was nothing. Just thought I saw a magpie.”

Harry snorted and kicked his feet up on the glass studded dashboard, taking a swing from a bottle of coke that Brock had been drinking from earlier, “And you call me a cockhead.”

The eldest person present scoffed at the boy and gave him the finger before snatching his sugary drink back.

He spared one more look over to the landscape, but all was still and nothing was out of the ordinary, as far as the new ordinary went. Sparse trees studded the terrain – a simple plains of verdant grass and the occasional boulders – and monsters of various types went about their lives, as though they were animals and not the mindless beasts Brock thought them to be.

They seemed to have their very own ecosystems, and he thought it was a bit of a call back to the first time he had observed a Lesser Treant naturally. It was a pity he had been yet to see one since. He’d love to fight one, if only for the nostalgia and clear comparison of growth he had undergone.

Just like this, another day passed by. Brock had to admit, by now, he was enjoying sleeping under the stars in the chill of night. The weather didn’t bother him as much as it used to, whether due to his growing Stats or hardened mindset, and it was a freeing experience every time.

Then, as morning came the day after, they were back on the road, him at the wheel.

It was about midday when they noticed a thick wall of fog looming in the distance. It blotted out both the ground and sky alike, and it was straining to see, but the barest tip of a gargantuan spire was visible, spreading out with a wide base and ending in a fine point piercing up into the obscured heavens.

Fon gasped as she laid her eyes on it, and from her voice, Brock could tell she held no small amount of excitement, “That’s… the Eiffel Tower! That’s… Paris?”

While he could see that she was beaming in the rear-view mirror, he could hear the hesitance in her voice as she looked to the barrier of fog. It was quite the menacing sight, and Brock didn’t really know if he wanted to risk entering it and driving to the town beyond, even considering the dwindling supplies they held.

Idly, he wondered how far the town they had come from had been from Paris if they could have reached it in only two days of full-speed driving, but the presence of dozens upon dozens of individual auras drew his attention away from the thought and to the ivory obscuring the city. Or more accurately, the people approaching from within.

Their auras were slightly muffled by the presence of the fog, but he could tell that each person was sitting above level 40, something that was respectable in its own right considering the sheer number of individuals present. Sure, it wasn’t the highest he’d seen, but it was still pretty high up there.

There was a bit over thirty people if he counted correctly and like from what he had sensed in both Ari’s aura and that of some of the thugs that had ambushed him, many possessed the feeble trace of an Augment within.

Absentmindedly, the office worker wondered if he could overcome them all if things came to a fight. In terms of raw Stats alone, he was sitting at a considerable 1,737.9 points, pinning him at a physical prowess above that of even a level 50 legendary Shard of Awakening user. If he calculated correctly, then theirs would only be around 1,350 stats, the effects of Titles discounted.

More so than stats, however, Augments mattered. He had no doubt that even if he had a significantly higher Stat count than someone, he would lose massively if they had an Augment or two of a level similar to his own. Obviously, he was the clear winner here in every single category of power, yet numbers were an advantage that should never be looked down upon, not even by him.

Afraid he’d make some snarky remark that he’d think would be amusing but would actually be super rude, Brock clapped Fon on her shoulder and gestured to the fog, “Thirty people above level 40 are coming our way. You got this champ.”

He smiled and gave her a consoling thumb up.

The nostalgic smile at seeing her hometown sloughed off her face instantaneously. Next, her head seemed to try and hide within itself as she recoiled and frantically looked to the fog, even going so far as to use her aura senses to track them. She stiffened as the troop came into her range only a few seconds later.

An armoured black limo burst out of the fog first, followed by several men and women riding motorbikes and military jeeps, all rather similar to Brock’s own. He could sense two auras within the limo driving at the head of the parade - that of the driver and someone else within. The latter seemed to possess the most powerful aura present, sitting at around level 44 by Brock’s estimates.

Brock eased up on the pedal and they began to slow. Despite that, they were still going at a considerable speed, and even without his foot on the gas, they crossed several meters each second. Eventually, as the distance between them rapidly decreased, Brock saw fit to physically ‘oppress’ the vehicle’s momentum using his second Technique.

The opposing vehicles too slowed to a stop and the roof of the armoured limo slid open a moment later.

Brock’s eyes narrowed curiously as the figure of a man rose up from the sunroof, sporting slicked-back hair that gleamed in the sunlight and a sleek three-piece suit, from what Brock could tell. He idly wondered if the man washed his hair with hair gel instead of shampoo, but otherwise struggled to discern any more features at this distance. His Dexterity was lacking, it seemed.

Fortunately - or perhaps unfortunately for the individual who appeared - an androgynous figure rose up from the shadow cast by the vehicle, a phone held in hand. They were forced to frantically dodge to the side as Brock swung out at the person’s head with his arm blade instinctively. Luckily, however, they managed to calm him down before it escalated further.

“Our boss wishes to speak with you. Consider the phone complementary.” A mechanically distorted voice resounded from behind the midnight mask they wore, a somewhat bulky armoured combat suit hiding any features that gave away any modicum of indication of the messenger’s gender.

Brock carefully reached out and plucked the phone from their outstretched hand, noticing it was already on call. Almost as an afterthought, he spotted a series of solar panels built into the back, and he had to applaud this mysterious ‘boss’ for his ingenuity in working around the tough times.

“Hello?”

Instantly, a baritone voice replied, and Brock looked up to see the man in the limousine holding a phone to his ear, “Brock Carter, I assume?”

“Yeah, lemme just get him for ya.” The man in question snorted and handed the phone off to Fon, taking a swig from the half-empty bottle of coke right after. That shit hits different during the apocalypse.

Fon glared daggers at him as she held the phone up to her ear, clearly disapproving of him. He could also see that she didn’t really want to speak to someone so high profile, but if she had nothing to do, that tended to make people feel unwanted in his experience. Best to make her feel useful, he felt.

Fon clicked her tongue quietly, “Hello. Sorry, this is Fon Tanya, an acquaintance of Brock. You wish to speak with him?”

“Adam Seezy. A pleasure to meet you, Miss Tanya. And more so acquaint ourselves with him than to simply speak.”

Fon glanced at the man sitting in the driver’s seat beside her, and he shook his head imperceptibly. An evil grin broke across her face, and she held the phone up to her mouth as Brock reached for it, “He would love to meet with you. May we come in?”

A series of indeterminate call-outs occurred from the other side of the line, and Brock sorrowfully glanced at the messenger as they were consumed by shadow and disappeared. Soon, the gathered armada of vehicles began to retreat back into the fog, and Adam spoke once more, his voice soothing in its depth.

“Genesis welcomes you to New Paris. I hope the ensuing drive is pleasant.”

Fon hung up the phone afterwards and passed it to Brock, who was frowning at her in an exaggerated manner. Giving him an eyebrow raise in response, she flinched as he stepped on the pedal, and the jeep lurched forward toward ‘New’ Paris. Today looked like it was going to be interesting.