Emergency report:

Activity spike from stat.eff (EXCLUDED) anomaly of designation:ZLTDB0K9HUV.

Sprite at heightened risk of corruption.

Admin query sent.

RULING:

READINGS WITHIN ACCEPTABLE TOLERANCE. CONTINUE MONITORING.

Acknowledged.

Resuming basic protocol with exclusionary status.

Albek couldn’t breathe. This couldn’t be real.

The steps up to the entrance of their home were painted in blood. The windows had been smashed, the boards they’d nailed over them ripped off and strewn about. The front door, a solid slab of wood, was still whole, but it was lying out on the yard thirty feet from the house. The hinges on the frame had been destroyed, hammered until they were warped beyond repair.

Albek was standing in the driveway when his father whirled past him, up the ramp, and through the gaping entrance where their door used to be. Dune followed him, barking. It took another moment for Albek to come to his senses.

He called out, “Hey! It could be a trap!”

With his bat in hand, he rushed forward after them, clearing the four steps to the porch in one leap.

It was a scene of destruction inside. Their furniture was converted into stuffing and splinters. There were clothes piled on the floor and bathed in more feathers, blood, and viscera. It must have been from their chickens. The corpses were missing, probably taken by the raiders as food.

He heard the noise of things being thrown from his father’s room. It wasn’t the sound of fighting, but somebody searching for something. He stopped mid-step, suddenly remembering Liyne, outside and alone.

‘Shit, maybe they’re out there!’

He ran back out and saw his sister sitting with her hands wrapped around her knees, staring vacantly at nothing. Albek had a clear line of sight for nearly two hundred feet and there was no sign of anyone around, but people could still be lurking beyond that. He went to her.

‘This wasn’t a looting. This was vandalism. They wouldn’t have destroyed everything like this if they didn’t hate us. But it couldn’t have been the church, right? They were—’

At that thought, it clicked into place for Albek. He knew who’d done this. And he also knew that they were long gone. He scooped Liyne up in his arms, holding her head to his chest so she couldn’t see the wreckage.

The vandals might be gone, but that didn’t mean he’d leave her out here.

He went back in with her, moving down the hall towards Hemash, checking each doorway and corner, just in case. His father’s wheelchair had been abandoned right outside the door to his room.

“Dad?” he called out, “You in there?”

There was no response, unless he counted unintelligible muttering.

He peered inside. His father was in the far corner of the room, legs splayed out behind him with his weight on his hip. He leaned on a cabinet for support while he rooted through the debris. He must have crawled the entire way there, dragging himself through detritus such as mattress stuffing, splinters, and shards of glass. Hemash was looking over a drawer from his cabinet that had been emptied out and thrown aside. He had it propped it up and was tinkering with something underneath it while muttering, his eyes closed as if in prayer.

Albek heard a click, and a false bottom fell to the floor. With it came two objects, a tattered book and a small black box. Hemash stilled, his hand outstretched as if he’d been caught off-guard, but then he reached out and picked up the box, cracking it open to look inside.

Hemash shuddered, the motion wracking through him like a convulsion. Then, he looked up at Albek. His eyes were red.

“Umeith? Is that you?” he rasped, squinting. “No…”

His father blinked, and his confusion started clearing up.

Albek put Liyne down on a relatively intact and glass-free portion of the mattress near Hemash. Albek must have whispered something soothing to her, but he didn’t know what it was, because all he could hear was the sound of blood pulsing in his ears.

Hemash, as if seeing something worrying in his son, averted his gaze.

Albek turned around to leave.

“I’m going to take a look around,” he said.

First he checked over the kitchen. All their food was gone, of course. It had been more than enough to last them a month: everything he’d gathered from abandoned homes over the past few weeks. He’d have to go much further out now to find places that hadn’t already been looted, to more dangerous areas.

The entrance hall and living room he’d already seen on his way in. Nothing was salvageable. If it was wooden, it had been snapped. Ceramics were fragments on the floor. Leather was ripped and shredded by blades. Fabrics and anything more durable had been gathered in the entrance room and splattered in gore.

Most omnipresent were the fragments of glass. The barricades they put over their windows, hodgepodges of wood and sandbags, had been meticulously removed and destroyed, and then the looters had smashed in each and every window from the outside with rocks and bricks. They’d done it from the outside so that the shards littered the floor.

It was the little decisions the vandals made, the cruel icing on the cake, that made Albek have to stop and control his breathing. He might have broken something himself if he’d found anything that hadn’t been destroyed already.

In the garage, the floor was soaking wet: the plastic tanks they used to store water had holes and gashes opened up on their sides. He picked up some of the more intact bags of dog food—for even those had been targeted by a few axe swipes—setting them high up to dry. Other than those and a few piles of lumber, their tools, nails, and everything else of use had either been taken, destroyed, or strewn about their property. The already unusable van had the windows and side mirrors smashed in with a sledgehammer.

Outside, he saw what he expected. The chickens were gone, along with the feed they kept in an adjacent shed. Both coop and shed were destroyed. The dozens of footprints in the mud might have been a clue as to their numbers if Albek hadn’t already known exactly how many there were.

This was scorched earth.

The group was large enough to have wrecked the place in a short amount of time. The Shokarovs had been kept waiting outside the church gates for thirty minutes. The church’s “foraging party” had arrived even later than that.

With about twenty people, they could have done this in under half an hour.

He saw the man, the Nassorian in military clothes, grinning as he walked into the church. He saw the flecks of paint—that he now knew was blood—under his fingernails. He remembered the man watching his family as they left the church, his eyes glinting with a bright light.

Just then, he caught a whiff of something foul, and Albek did a double take. Something nearby was rotting. He liberated his baseball bat from its holster on his belt and began pacing a circle in the yard, noting where the smell was stronger and moving towards it.

He reached the edge of their property and stopped, his eyes widening. Just outside the fence, there was a body. It looked to have been dead for a while. No—wait, even as he watched, a piece of flesh sloughed off it like melting fat. An acrid smoke was rising from it as the sun worked its ruin even through the canopy above. This was a zombie.

But why here? Now? It hadn’t been here this morning. He stared for a few more seconds. Did it even matter? It was dead now, anyway.

He’d deal with it later.

He thought he heard a faint ringing noise in his head. It must be his blood pressure. He went back inside.

Two last things to check. He’d been holding off on doing them. First was Liyne’s room.

It had received the same treatment as Hemash’s. Little to nothing was salvageable. When Albek saw her twin bed, torn apart as if by wolves, the ringing in his ears began to amplify. He closed the door and for a second wondered if his fingers would leave imprints on the brass doorknob. He moved down the hall to his room, a panic rising in him even before he entered. He knew what he’d find, but a faint hope still remained. He paused for a moment before his doorway, then stepped inside.

His clothes were gone, but he’d already seen them in the entrance hall. His bed wasn’t functional, either. He tensed upon seeing his toppled cabinet. He checked the floor. He lifted the dresser and looked under it. Then, the closet. Under the bed. He threw the mattress over as he continued on his hunt through the room.

It wasn’t here.

He went back to the hall, through the rooms he’d already been, scanning the debris, kicking over chairs and chunks of wood. No sign of it.

They’d taken it. Of course they had. It looked valuable enough for them to snatch it up, even though it wasn’t food.

But it was his. His mother’s last gift to him. He wanted to break something, but there was nothing left to break. He let out a low groan, but there was no stopping the feeling like he’d just stepped off a cliff. Looking down, he saw his feet still planted on the floor, and he took a step, just to see if he’d fall through the floorboards. He didn’t.

He returned to Hemash’s room. His father had mostly recovered in the few minutes he’d been gone. Liyne was leaning on him, her head facing down so that he couldn’t see her face. Had she been crying? Hemash stroked her hair with his free hand, while the other held the box he’d recovered from his hidden compartment.

Albek whispered, his words so low and quiet it surprised his father. “You know who did it?”

“The foraging party,” Hemash replied. “I was worried when they were so late to the meeting this morning. I suspected it might have been a pretext to get me away from the house, so I did not tell Dale that I was coming. It seems the precaution was useless. They must have hidden themselves to the side of the road and watched us leave this morning. The noise in the bushes. It was too loud to be some animal.”

They should have unloaded into that bush.

“Everything is gone or destroyed,” Albek said. “Except some dog food in the garage.”

Fucking dog food.

“If you see anyone from the church, shoot them,” Albek said, in a voice that shouldn’t have come from the mouth of a teenager.

With that, he turned on his heel.

“Son, wait—”

Albek kept going. Through the ruined kitchen. Out the front, his shoes tracking bloody footprints down the stairs. Gravel crunched as he broke into a jog.

The irritating ringing noise in his ears had suddenly stopped.

A shout came from inside the house, but he was already gone.

- - -

Albek’s head was like ice. Images of his room’s destruction swirled around him, sharply coming into focus one second, and the next, spinning away. His gemstone armlet, clear and beautiful and all that remained of his mother, grabbed by some scum’s greasy fingers.

He thought clearly, more clearly than he ever could before. He saw the men of the foraging party as they appeared entering the church this morning. He saw the austere Nassorian, the hint of a wicked smile playing at his lips, giving Finlay a nod. Was the other man smiling too?

“I am a firm believer that people’s actions have two effects: the preliminary and the secondary, or the planned and the unforeseen.”

Finlay’s words.

“The first is that which was chosen by man, but the second is always given over to the jurisdiction of divinity. The workings of heaven see to it that the just are rewarded, and the wicked punished. Keep this in mind wherever you go. Safe journeys.”

Albek imagined the man’s bones breaking under his bat. He wanted violence.

Albek thought over everything he knew about them. Most of the Nulites had been armed with blunt weapons, tools like hammers and bats. There were some axes in the mix, as well as gardening implements they turned into bladed weapons. A few machetes were sprinkled in for good measure. What about the Nassorian? He had a belt with some knives and no other visible weapons. He was the most talented, but was he the strongest member of their group?

Perhaps he could wait outside the church for a group of one or two people to leave, then strike hard and fast. He could blitz one person, maybe two. By repeating hit-and-run tactics while mixing it up and getting more creative each time, he could weaken the group enough to infiltrate the grounds and get his gift back.

No, he was being stupid. They’d catch on after the first time he attacked them. Besides, they didn’t leave in small groups, according to Finlay. Unless that was a lie.

Wasn’t there a better way? Didn’t he have access to spells now? Pulling up the menu as he walked, he saw Shimmer, but that was almost worthless in a fight. He needed to be able to cause damage.

Among the Low-Rank, nothing stuck out. Going through the names and descriptions of all the High-Rank spells on the list, one caught his eye. He hadn’t paid it much mind before, but right now something drew him to it.

Tier 0 High-Rank Spell: Cold Snap

Direct a cone of freezing mana in a target direction.

Size and strength of effect is contingent on the amount of mana supplied.

Shape of effect is contingent on the caster’s skill.

After selecting it, Embryo sent him a message.

WARNING It is recommended to master at least two to three Low-Rank spells before moving on to the High-Rank ones, which are more complex and have a greater risk of misfire.

He waved away the warning and waited for the steps that would teach him the spell, but nothing came up. It was like the program had shut off. Wait, had it? When he tried to pull up his status, nothing happened. Something was wrong.

Then, Albek’s consciousness divided, and he gasped as he felt a part of himself ripped from his body. He remained conscious in the material world, but suddenly his concentration had been split between his awareness on Oitania and whatever this other experience was. Images flashed before him—no, it would be more correct to say that he saw through other’s eyes. Sensations and emotions accompanied the visions, making it difficult to differentiate his real body from this new one.

He was an acolyte in white robes in a mossy pavilion, shaded by the boughs of giant trees of a species he’d never seen before. He stood before a wooden bowl filled with water. Turning, he faced a row of old men and women off to the side and bowed. Steeling his nerves, he made a circle with his hands and whispered a phrase in a language he couldn’t understand. He blew through the circle he’d formed, and as it passed through, his breath turned to white frost, which flew out, encompassing the bowl. When the mist cleared, the water had turned to ice.

Several more scenes like these flashed by. Each time, the spell was performed differently. Some mages didn’t exhale, but emitted the mist from their hand. Others didn’t say the incantation. Some froze living creatures solid or used it to quell fires, and some didn’t bother to project the spell in any direction, instead letting it radiate around them, freezing the ground where they stood without even pointing a finger.

One was particularly distinct. An old woman stood by the shore of a raging sea during a thunderstorm. Her long white hair blew about as lightning struck the ground near her, but she may have been in a grassy meadow on a cloudless day for all the attention she gave the weather. She walked towards the water, hands at her back. As she approached, the water began to freeze over, starting in an area by the shoreline and extending out into the sea as she drew nearer. She stepped onto the icy platform, and whenever a wave of water threatened to overtake her, it simply solidified. The result was a tunnel of ice, whose walls were made of curling, icy waves, fixed in time. The woman strode onwards to a destination she couldn’t see.

Albek struggled to remain moving in his original body as the images assaulted him. Right as he was about to finally collapse, it ended. A faint aroma he couldn’t place tickled the corners of his consciousness, bringing him back to himself. He found himself standing—not near his house or in the direction of the church, where he’d intended to go—but in front of the Robinsons, where he nearly died the day before.

As if hypnotized, he walked up the driveway to the area where the cat-monster had been. The corpse was missing. Approaching, he found that where it had lain, the grass had turned gray, leaving a disturbingly human imprint on the ground.

Was it still alive? It seemed impossible. He’d seen the state it had been in.

He found his own thoughts surprisingly collected as he circled around the back of the house. He was still summarizing the experiences from inside the perspectives of the various mages. The process of casting Cold Snap involved the essence of deadness, a stillness that was imposed on the surroundings through moisture, of all things. Before, he might not have understood such a thing, but after the experiences of those mages, it made an odd sort of sense.

He inhaled, and imagined he could feel the tiny particles of water in the air enter his lungs. When he exhaled, he imagined them leaving all of their heat behind, turning into miniscule shards of ice suspended in the air. That was how many of the mages in his vision accomplished the spell. Perhaps he didn’t need to inhale, but it felt right to do so, like the spell would be more difficult without that step.

He paused in front of a shrub planted beneath a window. His reflection stared back at him, black and warped, as he flexed his fingers, forming a circle with both his hands through which he could see the bush. With the help of his unusual focus that he hoped wouldn’t be wearing out anytime soon, he was able to trace the mental pathways of the mages whose bodies he had inhabited. His method of performing the spell would be similar to how the first mage completed it. The circle made by his hands would help him imagine the transformation he was putting the energy through, changing the warm mana to a colder version of itself. Was cold even an energy? It seemed almost like it was, when the spell was readying itself in his head. Perhaps “energy” was the wrong word, though. Coldness had a personality. If fire and heat was hungry and violent, water was… haughty. Distant. Deep.

He knew, instinctively, that this would work without trying it—but he wanted to see it once in action.

What word in Kalkian fit his image of this spell?

Coldness.

“Tsivuk,” he said, and he rotated his hands out so that his palms faced his target, keeping his index fingers and thumbs on both hands in contact, forming a diamond.

He felt something pass through his body and sensed an exertion. A shimmer of something seemed to pass through the air, but the bush he targeted didn’t change visibly.

He tilted his head.

The spell felt as though it had completed, and something had happened, but the visible effects were slight. There may have been a waver in the air or there may not have been. Then, he remembered that some of the mages he’d seen didn’t have flashy effects accompanying their Cold Snaps. Some of the spells had no visual impact at all; the targets simply froze without warning, like the woman freezing the ocean. In Albek’s case, it was probably that his version was simply too weak to have much visual impact.

Taking out his bat, he swung at a branch of the bush. A number of leaves broke off, some of them even snapping in two. He plucked one from the branch and ground it between his fingers, finding it frozen to the touch. It was too easy.

This was nothing like when he struggled to learn Shimmer earlier. He’d taken dozens of attempts with breaks in between before he’d been able to make the tiniest flash. This spell came to him without any struggle, and it wasn’t only because of the memories he’d seen.

It was him. His mind felt sharper than ever. This realization didn’t inflate his ego. Instead, he focused on the feeling of the spell, and felt a cold, inflexible resolve come over him. His reflection in the window displayed a tight, humorless grin. This was magic.

Some part of him was pulling, urging him to enter the house. To test himself. Could he do it, if the monster was in there and still alive? He played through its movements in his mind.

Yes, he could.

He came to the window he used yesterday and hopped through the frame smoothly. He was once again in the foul-smelling kitchen of the Robinsons. He took the same route as before, creeping as softly as he could, and came to a stop in the foyer, giving the blood on the floor a passing glance. Remembering how he got stuck at the door yesterday, he unlocked it and propped it open, keeping his eyes on the stairwell as he did so, but there was no movement that he could see. He was confident, but that didn’t mean he shouldn’t take precautions.

Holding his hands in front of him, he felt them practically thrumming with power. The monster was fast, but it wasn’t an impossible speed. He probably couldn’t outrun it without crippling it first—but running wasn’t his plan anyway. He flexed his fingers.

Albek began to ascend the stairs, following the dried river of blood, which had crusted over the shaggy carpet and turned it nearly black, forcing him to toe the fringe to keep quiet.

As he landed on the second step from the top, it creaked. Pausing, he waited for a sound or motion from around the corner. Nothing. Taking the last step, he peered to his right. At the end of the hall, a door was cracked open. All along the walls leading to it, there were gouge marks and scrapes. Two other doors on either side had been almost ripped to shreds, with holes in them at waist-height where a person—or monster—could get in and out. Perhaps the doors had been locked from the inside and the creature clawed its way in, or possibly it just didn’t know how to use a handle. The smell of death suffused the house here, but there was another smell, too. He’d been sensing it for a while, but he’d ignored it until now. It was tantalizing—almost mouthwatering. He swallowed, focusing on clearing his thoughts.

Steadily, he advanced, following the bloodstains to the end of the hall. He glanced through the holes in the two other doors and saw sunlight. A monster wouldn’t stay in a room that bright, which left the last remaining room, probably the master bedroom, the only door that hadn’t been torn apart. Nudging it with his foot, it creaked open the rest of the way, revealing a dark interior. He saw a dim outline of light around a window on the far side of the room. The curtains were drawn shut, and stuffing and blankets had been piled up against it to block the light even further.

He immediately stepped to the side as the door opened, expecting something to fly out at him, but nothing happened, and as his eyes gradually adjusted to the gloom, he saw a shape at the foot of the master bed. It was an uneven, lumpy pile of something. Sticks? It wasn’t moving. He took a slow step inside.

A faint whine came from the closet to his right.

He whirled around, hands held out, ready to fire at the first thing that moved. He went left, circling wide, aiming to put himself behind the bed to give himself a barrier that an attacker would have to navigate around or over. He stepped on something cylindrical as he backed up, and nearly rolled his ankle. As he staggered back, his other foot landed on something that gave way with a crunching noise. His eyes were more adjusted to the dark by now, and when he glanced down, he saw—

—a small ribcage; the bones shattered underneath his foot.

He would have thought it the corpse of an animal if not for the rest of the skeleton. In the instant he spent scanning it, he saw the remains of several people. There were small, delicate bones that might have belonged to an infant, accompanied by the larger skeleton of a child. Then a teenager, about his age, with a single eye remaining in its skull that gazed at Albek almost lazily.

Albek remembered that the Robinsons had children. He’d seen them outside occasionally as he passed by in a car or bike. He’d never talked to them, so he didn’t know their names.

They were all gathered together here.

Movement from the closet tore his thoughts away. He was still in position to cast Cold Snap, having kept his hands aimed where he’d expected the creature to emerge.

That was the only thing that saved him.

“Tsivuk.”

Albek cast the spell, and a fraction of a second later, there was a crash of something slamming into the wall behind him. A rush of wind blew back his hair.

He spun around, and was met with the form of the cat-monster, partially embedded in the drywall, clawing at a suddenly immobile leg. Albek had clipped it, but didn’t deal it any fatal damage. The afflicted limb was already starting to move again, his attack only enough to throw its trajectory off. The thing hissed at him, and crouched down, readying for a strike—

“Tsivuk,” he said again.

It screeched, a jarring, discordant sound that set Albek’s teeth on edge. He’d hit it square on, and now its eyes had a glassy look to them, stuck open in a sort of faux shock. But it hadn’t been killed. The spell only froze the outer layer of skin.

Abruptly, he felt nauseous and dizzy. His body rebelled against him and he swayed, staggering a few steps back. Had he overdrawn some resource by casting the spell twice? He didn’t know it was possible. Before, when he reached his limit with Shimmer, he just became unable to cast the spell, he’d never felt any effects like this.

The cat approached him, snarling, and at once a great heat rose from within his stomach, a force that sprouted from his gut and worked its way up to his head, making the entire world turn gray and colorless—

“Tsivuk. Tsivuk. Tsivuk. Tsivuk. Tsivuk. Tsivuk. Tsivuk. Tsivuk. Tsivuk.”

Albek’s last sight as his vision went sideways was that of the monster, stiff as a statue, poised above him as if to strike.

Emergency report:

Ego encroachment of designation:ZLTDB0K9HUV has been initiated by stat.eff (EXCLUDED).

Exclusion measure deemed insufficient.

Admin query sent.

CORRUPTION RISK OF sprite.designation:ZLTDB0K9HUV EXCEEDS TOLERANCE.

CORRUPTION RISK OF SERVER DIMENSION THROUGH UPLINK EXCEEDS TOLERANCE.

RULING:

sprite.designation:ZLTDB0K9HUV TO DELETE karma.directive.

sprite.designation:ZLTDB0K9HUV TO ASSIGN PRIORITY 1 TO harvest.directive.

sprite.designation:ZLTDB0K9HUV TO INSTALL temp.server.

uplink.designation:ZLTDB0K9HUV TO BE TERMINATED.

ROOT:ZLTDB0K9HUV TO BE MOVED TO SECURE STORAGE.

Acknowledged.

Installing temp.server… Complete.

Confirming uplink termination… Complete.

Establishing internal memory log in place of standard report system.

Initiating special protocol with exclusionary status.

Soft whining and the feeling of something wet on his cheek woke Albek.

Opening his eyes, he saw a dim beige ceiling, in the center of which hung a crooked light fixture coated with dust. He was still in the Robinsons, which meant—

He tried to sit up, but gasped as a piercing pain in his gut made him collapse again. His head throbbed, warning of an incoming headache. Something licked his cheek. Turning with a painful motion, he saw a blurry brown figure.

“Dune?”

His incredulous question was met with a short bark, and the puppy clambered onto Albek’s chest. A leash on her collar trailed along the floor.

“Did you run away?” he asked, weakly fending her off.

With a visible effort, he turned his head to the other side, and saw the outline of the monster overhead, a mount made by some deranged taxidermist.

He was too tired to even be startled. For a minute he just lay there, staring up, as Dune continued to whine.

‘How long was I out?’

Behind him was the window. He wanted to get up and see how much time had passed. The horrible pain began to ease as he remained still, but he couldn’t allow this state of affairs to continue, not with nighttime creeping closer.

‘I wish I had a watch.’

He rolled over and heaved, pushing himself to his knees. Something was really off. It wasn’t just his stomach. It was too dark to see what was going on with his body, but he felt brittle. His legs were under him, but he supported himself with all four limbs because he didn’t feel confident resting on only two. It didn’t feel like he was injured, but the fragile sensation was there all the same.

He could see the window now, still surrounded by the hodgepodge of coverings that the monster used to block out the sun. The light seemed dimmer than it was before. After crawling his way toward it, he tore away the blinds and saw, with sudden horror, the last slice of the sun that was still above the horizon slipping inexorably downwards. Even as he looked, the wafer-thin edge vanished, plunging the world into twilight.

His stomach oscillated as the pain returned with a vengeance. He keeled over, retching onto the carpet, taking in shallow gasps of air between heaves. Dune whined from somewhere behind him.

‘I don’t like it any more than you.’

Once the urge to puke lessened, he became frustrated.

He lifted up his shirt, checking for wounds, but what he saw made him think he was hallucinating instead.

From his navel there extended a number of dark striations, like scars, but too extensive and uniform in their pattern to be caused by a simple injury: unless it was electrocution. The tendrils were like little branches, starting off as thick as his thumb before splitting off into dozens of smaller stalks and then into hundreds of jagged veins as wide as toothpicks, ending in points. This lightning-like pattern reached his collarbone and circled around to his back. It might have reached his face, but he couldn’t tell without a mirror. In the fickle, wavering light of dusk, the pattern on his body almost seemed to pulse.

But this wasn’t the most terrifying change.

Before the Apocalypse a month ago, he’d been on the verge of obesity. He recognized it. He hated it, but it seemed like no matter what he did, he couldn’t drop the weight. After being forced into a more active role, he ate less and moved more, and the excess of that fat had vanished. Earlier today, he had a slight belly and rounded features, but was brimming with healthy vigor.

Now he was a skeleton.

He traced his stomach with trembling fingers, cringing as waves of pain extended up from the dark patterns on his skin. He was emaciated, like the pictures of war prisoners who were fed nothing but scraps for years. While he was asleep, his body had somehow begun eating itself. And there wasn’t much left. His ribs made tents out of his skin, and his arms—his arms may as well have been those of a snowman. Sticks.

Not knowing what else to do, he looked at his status.

BASIC INFORMATION Name Albek Shokarov Titles N/A Race Human (Low) Age 16 STATISTICS Strength 2 (11) Vitality 3 (11) Stamina 2 (9) Agility 3 (10)

Dexterity 5 (13)

Thauma 9 Ki 0 DETAILS Skills Shimmer [Lv0], Cold Snap [Lv0] (NEW!) Class Neophyte [Tier 0] Status Effects [EXCLUDED]

It hurt to look at those numbers. All of his physical stats had dropped to dangerous levels. The numbers in parentheses showed his normal maximum, but he didn’t know if he’d ever recover them.

He had to get out of here. He had to escape.

Feeling delirious, he staggered to his feet and blindly made his way to the door, but lost his balance after going two feet and fell. His arms failed to break the fall, and he crumpled to the floor, dazed and confused. When he opened his eyes, he saw a severed, skeletal hand on the carpet before him. It was tiny. He recoiled in fright and disgust, backpedaling until he hit a wall, holding his hands out as if he were anticipating an attack. With the solid surface at his back, he waited for his heart to calm. He couldn't stop staring at the grisly sight, but his agitation faded after a long moment, to be replaced by lethargy.

He began seeing things. He imagined himself in that pile, his gnawed skull atop the heap, looking through a single eye that glared, unblinking, at a single blank wall of his dusty tomb. Forever.

‘There isn’t much separating me and them,’ he thought, and the thought was incoherent even to him. ‘They’re bones, I’m bones.’

As his gaze drifted to the side, a second alarming sight shocked him out of his musings. In the closet, resting on the floor, there was a clawed hand. He forced himself up again onto weak legs. He reached around for the bat in its holster. He could barely lift it, but the weight of a weapon did good for his peace of mind, if little else. It also functioned as a crutch, which he used to help him hobble towards the door.

The hand hadn’t moved, and, on closer inspection, looked lifeless. Bolstered by this, he approached and nudged the closet door fully open. Before him was the withered corpse of a second monster. And this one was strikingly familiar.

‘This is the one that nearly killed me yesterday!’

It had been dead this entire time. Albek turned, comparing this one with the frozen statue on the far side of the room. The one he’d just fought was smaller, though he hadn’t noticed before. Its fur was also a bit less ragged than this one’s, though the bar for improvement wasn’t set very high.

The second cat-monster had clearly dragged the first one back upstairs to their lair, then kept watch over its withered body. A cursory observation told him that it hadn’t eaten its mate, but in that case, what was the purpose of that action?

‘Can monsters grieve?’

He stopped to think.

There were two monsters in the Robinsons house. The Robinsons were a family of five, and there were only three corpses present, each one belonging to the children.

‘That means…’

As the realization struck him, Albek sank to the floor.

‘This nest was in the master bedroom. They cared for one another. They cared, and grieved.’

The walls of the closet were covered in hundreds of deep marks where the monster raked its claws, destroying the drywall and even gouging into the wooden studs.

The two monsters he had killed were Mr. and Mrs. Robinson.

They’d eaten their own children.

- - -

After the floor stopped spinning, he thought about what this meant. He’d known for some time that people turned into zombies, since where else could walking corpses have come from? But for them to turn into real monsters… they hadn’t even died first. Mr. Robinson was in good health, and there had been no sign of a food shortage or a break-in.

‘Holy shit. Monsters were originally people.’

Everyone seemed to think monsters took over houses because they provided the best shelter from sunlight, but that clearly wasn’t the only factor. Could someone in perfect health just wake up a monster one day? How did it work?

‘Did the church know already? Did Finlay?’

If they knew, no one told the Shokarovs.

The most unsettling realization wasn’t even this, however.

‘To think that they retained some of their personality…’

The husband and wife turned into vicious monsters, yet they still loved one-another. It wasn’t enough to save their kids, it seemed. He hoped it had been quick and that they didn’t even know what hit them, but remembering the clawed-open doors, he shivered.

Albek looked once more at the monster in the closet. He might be joining it here tonight. Darkness was coming on, and he could barely move ten feet without collapsing in agony.

Then, he noticed something familiar. It was hard to tell in the quickly fading light, but Albek remembered waking up yesterday and seeing patterns on the monster’s body. A hard look at the corpse revealed them again. Even in the poor light, they stood out. Veins like lightning branched out and coiled around its body, almost lovingly—like an anaconda embracing its prey.

It was the same pattern that he had on his skin.

He thought back to how, after talking with the Voice, he had passed out and by the time he woke, he’d been miraculously healed while the monster had been desiccated.

‘Just like I am now. I knew it—the Voice is behind this.’

It gave him an idea.

‘This is insane. But I have to try.’

Dune whined impatiently at him as he staggered back across the room, fighting through the dizziness and weakness, towards the frozen cat. It took all his strength just to remain on his feet, and the entire time he was terrified that another painful attack would send him to the floor. If that happened, he didn’t know if he’d be able to get up again.

He steadied himself on a bedpost by the corpse of the frozen monster, noticing as he did that it had begun to thaw. Then, he thought back to his conversation with the Voice yesterday.

Only yesterday. It felt like a month.

The Voice had saved him. Branded him. Its owner had the power to wither and to heal. Could he use that power? Something in him responded. Yes. And I’m hungry.

With a shaky arm, he grasped the shoulder of the monster. Then, he reached out with his mind—not to the mana like he did when trying to cast spells, but to something else—and pulled.

The effect at first was slight, almost negligible.

But he pulled harder, and as he did, the semi-thawed flesh of the monster began to crack. Albek felt a warm, rejuvenating force start to trickle into him through the palm of his hand, up his arm, through his chest and down into his stomach. The sensation was unlike anything he’d ever experienced. He continued to drain the creature, suddenly ravenous, but it stopped all too soon.

He gasped. It was like he’d eaten a spoonful of hot soup, only enough to whet his appetite and leave him craving more.

Clasping and unclasping his hands, Albek tested his strength. He was better, strong enough to stand unassisted now, but not close to being fully recovered. His status screen showed that his stats were up several points across the board, but well below his maximum. His body, too, was nearly as emaciated as before.

The monster in front of him fell to the ground with a soft thump. Glancing down, Albek saw an unrecognizable lump of fur and bones. The freezing and subsequent withering had not been kind to it.

He didn’t want to know which of the two Robinsons this one was.

The same electricity-like veins on Albek’s body now spread across the remains, confirming that this ability of his was related to the Voice, and to his status effect.

‘What kind of power did the Voice give me?’

He went back to the closet and tried draining the other monster, but was unable to draw anything out from its body, unsurprisingly. Albek glanced down at the skeletal human remains on the floor of the room and shuddered. There was nothing to gain there, and he wasn’t about to try it even if there was.

He was ready to move on.

‘But what am I going to do, exactly?’

Thinking for a second, he paused. The weight of the events from the past few hours caught up in that moment, seeming to hit him all at once. He placed a shaky hand to his forehead.

“What the fuck have I been doing?”

In the room with him were the remains of the two monsters, a pile of bones and viscera on the floor, the darkening night sky, and Dune.

Why was he here?

At what point did he suddenly decide to enter the house of the monster that literally disemboweled him yesterday? He thought back to his rationale, but it was like his memories from earlier were fuzzy and indistinct—screens of static that showed nothing but occasional flashes of violence.

He took one last look around, feeling sick and confused. The room was filled with reminders of death. He didn’t want to stay a second longer.

‘What am I going to do? I need to find a room to hide in and wait out the night.’

“Let’s get out of here,” he whispered to Dune.

When he had closed the door behind him, he bent over to remove the dog’s leash.

“You don’t need this anymore, right? Listen to what I tell you.”

He didn’t have the energy to shepherd her, so he could only hope she’d listen. Dune tilted her head inquisitively, but he imagined that she understood. Probably. If she was smart enough to escape his father and track him down, she deserved this measure of trust.

‘Wait. Has something happened to my family?’

He’d left them by themselves in a wrecked house. He shuddered, remembering what happened earlier. He pushed aside the anger that seemed all too willing to flare up again and thought quickly—did Dune’s presence here mean something happened to them?

He quickly viewed up his friends list. Their status showed that they were both alive, healthy, and in North Hill, which was at least all the major points covered, even if the lack of detailed information annoyed him.

Pulling up his chat window, he saw some messages. The first one was from his father, who was messaging him in Kalkian, which led, if not to increased communication efficiency, at least to far more creative insults than his usual brand.

CHAT LOG

Hemash [whisper]: You fool of a son! Is your head made of mud? Did a fish burrow in your ear and eat your brain?! Your sister is here worried sick. crying! If I didn’t know better I would think you the daft bir

Liyne [whisper]: Don’t listen to dad, Im not cryng. but come back

Hemash [whisper]: Bird that couldn’t find a worm, so he shed his feathers and became a mole!

Albek quickly looked through the wall of messages from his father, mostly comprised of other nonsensical Kalkian idioms involving one or more animals. Embryo showed him his most recent read messages in his chat log, so he had to scroll to the bottom to see what he was looking for. It had been sent a few hours after he had left the house on his insane mission. His father had calmed down by then, thankfully.

CHAT LOG Hemash [whisper]: We are leaving for the Brays’ house on the back roads to avoid the church. We cannot find the dog. I hope she is with you. Send a message when you can. If the sun sets, find a hole and hide.

Another message sent just an hour ago let Albek know that they had made it safely there. He clicked on his father’s name, intending to respond, when he got an error message.

ERROR

Message aborted.

Uplink of User has been restricted.

User must be within one mile to send messages.

‘…Huh?’

He tried again and got the same result. He tried selecting individual words on the message like “uplink” and “restricted” to see if he could find out what caused this, but nothing appeared. This hadn’t been a problem before. The party system had a limit of one mile, but not private messages.

He went to his notification log to see if there was some clue as to what happened, but the only screen he saw was something else entirely.

Milestone Reached! Skill obtained: Tier 0 High-Rank Spell: Cold Snap [Lv0]

He must have missed the new skill on his status earlier, but sure enough, there it was.

‘Whoopee, another level 0 skill. I guess that’s the only upside to this idiotic venture.’

Just as he was getting ready to follow his father’s advice to find a place to hide and get some rest, a woman’s scream cut through the night.

His feet started carrying him to the stairs. For a compelling moment, a deep concern for this woman’s life was the only thing that occupied his mind. But then a matching scream suddenly sounded right outside the house, louder than the first, jolting him out of it.

And then there came a third.

BASIC INFORMATION Name Albek Shokarov Titles N/A Race Human (Low) Age 16 STATISTICS Strength 6 (11) Vitality 7 (11) Stamina 5 (9) Agility 7 (10) Dexterity 11 (13) Thauma 9 Ki 0 DETAILS Skills Shimmer [Lv0], Cold Snap [Lv0] (NEW!) Class Neophyte [Tier 0] Status Effects [EXCLUDED] Tier 0 High-Rank Spell: Cold Snap (Tsivuk) (NEW!)

Direct a cone of freezing mana in a target direction.

Size and strength of effect is contingent on the amount of mana supplied.

Shape of effect is contingent on the caster’s skill.