Johnny was angry. He was always angry. Now that there was magic in the world; his anger was manifest to the world. A sickly green aura surrounding him at all times. Anyone who stood too close to him felt nausea within minutes. No one tested it but was assumed if you stayed too long in the aura you would die. It certainly helped him survive in this new world. Monsters tried to avoid him. Fighting him in the aura was beyond dangerous.

The aura did more than that though. Johnny was a necromancer. He could command the dead. He preferred to raise skeletons. He got a dark joy from watching his creations move under his command.

He walked holding a bone staff. The bottom of the staff was a human foot. Growing up from that was a twisted spiral of bone. There were three spirals of bones that traveled the length of the staff. Topping the staff was a grinning skull. Flames dance in it’s eyes and jaw. As Johnny walked, the skull sometimes seemed to be talking and looking around. Everywhere once in a while the skull lazily turned its head from side to side.

Skeletons followed along in his wake. They shuffled and clattered as they walked along. There were three human skeletons and three four legged animals. The animals on all fours were grotesque monstrosities. None of the four creatures looked alike. Fire glittered in their eyes. Their claws glittered with an unknown material.

Johnny ignored all this. He was their master. He could feel each skeleton in the back of his mind. Each one screamed with the broken screams of the damned. The souls of the previous owners of the skeleton echoed in his head. The skeletons brokenly remembered their prior lives. Johnny had the power to control the dead. He could prevent the soul from dissipating into the ether. The souls knew their torment would never end, but they were powerless to end their misery.

Johnny was lost in thought as he trudged along. His mind went back several days. He was controlling a small rat skeleton. It was freshly killed and still looked mostly normal. The longer he held onto a body. The worse it would look. Already a small blue flame kindled inside the eyes of the rat.

Johnny was currently spying on people. He was always a bit of a creep and a pervert. It wasn’t his fault people didn’t understand him. If they wouldn’t talk to him normally, he would just find out what he wanted as he usually did. He was spying on a military encampment he had stumbled across. At least he assumed it was a military encampment. The surrounding environment had changed drastically. Anything man made had disappeared into the mana wasting that seemed to affect everything.

It was hard to tell where the old cities had been. Some of them were easier to find. Rivers hadn’t changed much. Places that had been next to rivers were sometimes easier to find. Not that there were very many people inhabiting the towns anymore. Johnny had barely escaped Seattle when the mana system descended on the planet. His hatred of the world is what propelled him on. The green aura descended upon him then. Now he had found who he was searching for. Tracy.

He had listened to the conversation between that strange soldier and that even stranger ant. They were being interrogated. And as they described everything they had seen Johnny realized they were describing Tracy and her friends. She belonged to him. He was on his way to get her back. If he could only find that Tree.