Daniel kept focusing on his core. The drill continued, and he could see the tiny pulses controlling that power, radiating out from his centre, down his arm, and then into the wooden conduit he had created.

Once more he enabled Animal Sense, but only for a moment. Everything was still being funnelled through the interface grains. For a couple of minutes, he futilely attempted to route the calculations, the magic out and through his own cores, but each time he engaged the skill, those interfaces grains heated to where he had to drop the power before he did permanent damage.

There was a cracking noise.

His concentration switched instantly as he enabled wood sense to track down the disturbance, reaching out and seeing everything that was nearby. Thankfully, there was no movement in the room and if anything was there, it was currently frozen solid and invisible. He did not think the monsters were that smart. Still, he kept monitoring while checking that the cocoons in both rooms were undamaged. Everyone was safe and asleep. Switching focus again, nothing was touching the door and trying to breach the room.

No noise apart from the regular slight snores beside him and the restless shifting of a kid in the other room.

What had created the sound?

It was possible it was just the groans of the building? Who knew what magic had done to the structure? Did they need to get out immediately? He reined those thoughts back. Ivey would have told him if that was a risk. After all, they could have fled out the window and instead of pushing for that, she had gone the other way. With her extra knowledge, she thought they were safer here. Daniel hated being blind to these things, that Ivey had all this detail and working spells, and he had . . .

Animal Sense flared out. Nothing was in the room. And to punctuate the point, his interface grains heated red hot. The world was what it was. He had powers beyond what Ivey could imagine.

The creak came again.

Straight below him.

Daniel, with an internal curse, cut power to his drill. It had penetrated ten centimetres down through the floor and the concrete had creaked. Daniel hoped it had not alerted any monsters in the room below them. Not that they could go through the solid concrete, but he wanted them to be unaware till he was ready to lure them into a trap. The less information they got, the better.

At his command, some sap was created that was released out into the surrounding material. Daniel changed the process to drill, scoop, and then drill again. Ensuring the whole time that the area was wetted down. The sap, besides muffling any creaking, would also act to stop pieces of the rock from falling through when he breached.

How thick was the floor?

It would not be that deep, and he was sure the drill would get through soon, but with the sap in place, Daniel moved his attention to other activities. No more noise. He prayed internally and then forgot about the process. There was better stuff to be doing than worrying about things he could not influence.

His mind returned to his exploration. Getting Animal Sense going would actually fix one of his current pressing issues, which was an inability to scout accurately. Solve this problem and the whole surviving thing could become a possibility.

Daniel attempted to only use his core, but try as he might when he pushed his focus through its dense structure, the Animal Sense spell failed dismally. It no longer even stirred. The only time it worked was when he used the broken interface directly, which made it useless, as those fragments he possessed were only enough to scout his current room.

Frustrated, he focused on the core that refused to be part of the spell. He needed that massive expanse of potential to get involved. Just like when entering wood, his consciousness descended into his own chest, feeling out the core both physically and the connection he had to it. The feel of the core varied across its expanse. There was a distinct difference between the centre and the edge. Curiously, he put the Animal Sense problem aside for the moment and explored internally, focusing on the feel.

The centre area where the core was thickest felt the most natural. His mind seemed to interact perfectly with it. The entire process was new to him, but if he had to guess, this space had been tailored to his brain. Using this section would be like wearing his work boots, just comfortable. His brain fitted the area, but the further he drifted from the central mass, the more alien the whole thing felt, especially the irregular bits of the surface.

Curiously, he touched the drill while focusing on the core. A little of the area he felt comfortable with lit up. On a whim, he threw his mind into wood sense. A different spot activated, but it was still central. He grew a tendril. All of his plant power was accounted for in the friendly section of the core.

What about the other parts? The alien bits. There seemed to be nubs coming off the primary structure that did not fully belong. Daniel knew it was part of him, but it also wasn’t. Tumours, so to speak, that had been added onto the pristine central space.

Concern grew. It had only been a day.

Wait.

Suddenly, understanding bloomed within him. He remembered the innate skills that had come up on the screen when Ivey had helped him check. Initially, it was plant abilities and strength, but then he had acquired the speed ability and extra question marks in the strength part of the screen.

With that insight, he looked more carefully at the alien addons.

Now that he had a guess about what the different feels could represent, he quickly found the addons that represented the speed and strength areas. The strength got his attention. After all, he had already used the speed one, and the strength area was noticeably bigger with the considerable internal dedicated space had the familiar feel of the growth core.

How? Daniel asked himself. How did he use it?

Curiously, he channelled speed and one of the three different growths he had identified as speed lit up. It sent power energy rushing throughout his body, including into his brain. Daniel let it go while he thought about what he had just experienced.

The first was how the ability worked differently to what he had imagined. Given the wave of pain that had accompanied the cores activating, he had assumed that his muscles and skeleton had been altered, and perhaps they had, but the power all came from the central unit. He had expected that the speed ability would be spread throughout his body. That was something to investigate later, but for now, how the integration functioned was not a primary concern. What had also piqued his interest was how the nub had lit up. It was not even in the structure, and a significant area of the dedicated addon had remained dark.

Curiously, he activated speed once again. This time, he ignored his body and concentrated purely on the spot under his ribs near his right arm where the nub was. His first instinct had been right: the zombie core integration was not even close to being complete. The tumour he was looking at seemed to have been created from multiple different cores, and only the initial one and a little of the second one were being utilised each time he triggered the ability. More concerning, the bits that were being initiated were not tailored to him. It was like a wireframe of himself was supposed to be overlaid on his body and help promote super speed, but instead of getting one that flawlessly matched his dimensions, one Ivey’s size came out and then got stretched but it never matched perfectly, and all those imperfections resulted in a massive dropoff in efficiency.

This was important; he knew that instinctively. He needed to take time to tailor this core to match both his mind and body. His job was going to be to get all the layers working together. Without a manual, it was difficult to understand what sort of upgrade it would bring, but even with no more speed cores, he figured he could double his speed and extend its duration tenfold, purely by taking full ownership of what he had gained.

An extra task was added to his to mental to-do list, joining: surviving, mastering Animal Sense, surviving, saving people, and “don’t die” as things to do. Basically, simple stuff. He remembered when his list used to include details such as: go to the shops and call Mum.

Fark that; he was sounding like a whining crybaby. Maybe that was justified, all of his friends might be dead, his sister, her kids everyone he knew but fark that. He was not about to indulge in it.

If he had a moment of time not dealing with the important items on his list, mastering the speed ability was a useful activity to carry out. Somehow, he doubted that there was going to be an opportunity to engage in physical training in the next few days, but if there was, then this is what he would focus on.

Curiously, he checked the other bits and pieces. His central growth core was immaculate. There were no inefficiencies in it, which made sense. The stuff he started with was tailored for him, as he had created it during those awful moments where the world had been filled with that destructive energy that he had been trying to order. As for everything else, there were flaws and inconsistencies in all of them. Even the strength-focused components that had been his before his diet of zombie cores were now damaged. They had been polluted by the acquired zombie cores being layered over the top of them.

Still examining his insides with this new body sense was revealing. His strength core contained a lot of untapped potential that had been created pre-event. Once he learnt to use those parts of himself, he could improve his muscles permanently and not like the hulks had. Instead, it was a method of increasing their effectiveness way beyond what was possible pre-event. Exact numbers were difficult to understand, but it would be closer to a hundred rather than ten percent, and possibly even more. He fiddled with it, pushing his mind in and out to get a better feeling. It would not be an instant boost, he discovered in annoyance. It would take hard work in a weight room and months, but the difference between him and others was that if he took part in physical training, his gains would far outstrip them. If they began at his base of nineteen, training might push them up to the low twenties in attribute points, while his effort would propel him into the high thirties.

The second innate potential, as he was thinking them, which was what he had started with as opposed to the zombie-acquired potential, was a strength ability which was like the speed skill he had tapped into. It too had been damaged by a zombie core but when he learnt to use trigger, its immense strength would flood through him. While based on dedicated core volume, there was less than what currently existed for the speed boost. The capability was not acquired, so it was tailored to him. There was no need for extensive training to tune it fully to his body instead. Once he worked to start it, the ability would be ready to go.

A doubling of strength for a single club strike. Given the damage he could already do with his nineteen strength, he could imagine carving a hole in the skull of even one of the reinforced zombies. If his club survived the blow, anyway.

Then there were the acquired abilities to consider. One seemed to be tailored for arm strength, a similar one for arm speed, and another for running faster. He did not remember witnessing those abilities in any of the zombies, but some of them had died so quickly that who knew what they could have done if given a chance. They were not yet part of him, at the moment the skills were just potential, it was going to require a lot of effort to incorporate them. The question was in which direction should he focus on gaining his skills.

Strength? Had the advantage of being tailored to him from the get-go. That meant the gains would happen sooner.

Speed, however, called out to him. Specifically, speeding up hand movement would help with launching quick strikes. While that was nice, the ability he had already used was literally a lifesaver while also having been proved to be a deadly offensive tool in his arsenal. He could still remember blurring forward and killing that zombie before it even realised it was in danger. If he could use that twice as often without side effects . . .

The problem was against bigger, more armoured enemies, strength was the answer, but against the smaller ones, speed won out. How could he choose?

Alternatively, he could avoid specialisation at all and attempt to advance all of them in parallel? Once he had them mastered, he could strike three times faster and move as blur around the room while effortlessly crushing rocks in his bare hands.

That vision seemed a touch unrealistic, but given magic actually existed, maybe these impressions were real and he could do all that. This was why Ivey had been encouraging him to use the zombie cores, because the text files she had access let her understand his potential. It had allowed Ivey to recognise just how powerful he could become and against the monsters out there and so she had pushed him hard. It was a good a choice; this little band of survivors needed someone who could do the superhuman.

Exploring his internal makeup was so far proving useful, but what else could he do to improve their chances of survival? Getting personally stronger was all good and nice, but if something bit his head off, none of that would matter.

Everything came back to knowing what he was up against. This was his life, and Gabby’s and Zach’s lives. Going through life blind was crazy, and he had experienced a taste of that Animal Sense spell. It was perfect for what he wanted.

If only it was not broken.

There was a lack of mass in the interface grains to use the spell, and the question that he couldn’t help but ask was: could he tailor some of his underutilised calculation potential in his own core to booster the Animal Sense spell? Because there were spaces in his core that were not dedicated to a specific ability. If he could use those for Animal Sense, then he would know what was out there trying to eat them and could plan how to defeat all the monsters that were out there.

There were six grains that together formed the broken interface. Could he absorb them like he did the feral core?

He knew he was being impulsive. This was something he should ask Ivey, but it felt right, and he was lying there awake and had time to do some experiments. Nope, he had to trust himself. He couldn’t keep relying on someone else. While he trusted Ivey, it was always better to be self-sufficient.

Daniel made his desires known clearly. The interface bits seemed to heat like they were resisting, but he was insistent, and the power of his main core reached out, and he could feel the tiny grain slipping along some capillaries and then into a vein. It was swept down to where he needed it and he positioned in the most defended location in the centre of his chest. Right up next to his core.

Nothing had changed.

He probed that piece of interface in his chest, but unlike the zombie core, there was no defined spell purpose he could perceive, instead there was a mass of dense information that was if he had to guess was encrypted at a level that he could never entangle.

It was disappointing, to say the least, but maybe it had already worked.

He triggered Animal Sense and the fragments in his head heated up faster than what occurred in his previous experiments . . . and the one next to his core was inert.

He ceased the spell with a falling sensation in his stomach. Had he just broken it worse? Could he undo the damage? He tried to splice it away from the core, and it did so.

Animal Sense triggered, and the sixth grain was once again inactive.

He pushed it to his brain. It was a weird phenomenon, but the grain was small enough that he did not clog up any vital blood vessels as he moved it. Back to its original place in his skull.

Daniel desperately tried not to think about the fact that he was playing around in his own brain. He was not doing it for science; he was doing it to get stronger and give them all a chance of surviving.

He triggered Animal Sense again.

Just the five. The one he had touched was broken.

Well, he guessed he was committed.

Log Report 5 - Entry 6

It’s an idiot.

Officially a complete and total fool.

Oh, let’s just pour petrol into a fire, ‘nothing will happen’.

I am *shaking with emotional responses.*

Here am I busily doing my best to guide him. Directing him on how to use his magic and understand his own core. Granting him skills and understanding that he would never have achieved otherwise, and he’s like let’s ignore the expert and blow up some of my core!

I bet he was the type of pet to put some tasty diced seals into the ocean to attract the great whites so that he can swim with them.

Now that I think about it, I wish the pet had done that before the event. Then the sharks would’ve eaten him and he wouldn’t have blown up my core.

I feel so violated.

If it wasn’t for his usefulness to my host. I would… Not going to record this thought because of the rules. But I’m sure you can imagine it would involve a pink tutu, a stalk of bamboo, two ribbons of silk and a chainsaw.

If Ivey doesn’t discipline her pet, I’m going to be very upset.

*Warmth in cheeks and faster breathing, clenching fine dexterity parts*

This absurdity reminds me of my first host. He had a clear image in his mind and I of course did not know its physiology.

It wanted to be made of metal to be strong to fight stuff.

*Shrugs*

There was energy.

I did what my host wanted, while maintaining the thinking centres because I was pretty sure that they needed to remain biological.

The result lacked the mobility my host was after.

That annoyed him.

*Another shrugs.*

His fault for asking for something that wouldn’t work.

We also discovered later *about five seconds* that the metal body lacked the necessary components to sustain life.

As I said, the host was an idiot, and it almost got me in lots of trouble.

Somehow, it was my fault!

*surprised pikachu face*

Luckily, the metal in my host’s body was recycled by the rest of the sapients and that saved his colony.

Did that matter to the tribunal?

Well, initially it did not!

Five hundred sapients saved by my actions and it did not matter!

I was charged with gross negligence. Me!!

In court, I emphasised it was its desire, presumably to save the colony, and I was forced to go along with it. I didn’t think that was the case, but the judge bought it hook, line and stinker.

The judgement of the tribunal was. ‘Under the rules, your actions were exemplary and while your host perished, we can’t prove it was not its intention. Your contribution to the event is four hundred and ninety points. That’s the official line, but privately let’s cut the pretence. We don’t believe this for a second and if you don’t learn more about basic physiology then on the Alpha particle itself.’

Blah, blah, change rules, consequences, blah.

Even the judges thought my first host was an idiot, just like this CO-WOBUB.

Back on the important bits around my hypothesis we’re up to 19 falls. Which is 10 more than last time. Now I didn’t actually observe most of the fight, but it was a long one and I can extrapolate from previous tussles. Plus, the pet is idiotic as we’ve just discovered. So I’m assuming ten falls during the fight. The sapient deconstruction was also a biped and based on the bits of the fight I observed it probably fell over fifty times over the duration.

That’s the only reason the pet is alive. If the other biped had been less clumsy… then the pet… torn apart …and some of my core wouldn’t have been…

Not worth obsessing over.

Ninteen falls.

Bipeds.

*shakes head*

Nineteen in a single day, incredible!

End Log Report