Pedro stared at the waves, his motorbike's engine roaring behind before fading into muffled noise.

That kid better have it back by six.

He was smoking a nasty pack of cigarettes. It's been a long while since he smoked a stick, but seeing the world the way it was now, he needed a quick boost of dopamine–whatever shape or form that took.

"Old habits do die hard, huh, Matty?"

Ever since Matty's parents died, the kid's been hard at work providing for his sister and grandmama. His household wasn't all that well off to begin with, and the few relatives he had weren't in a much better boat, so the loss of his parents made things all the more worse. He ended up dropping out a month into college to find a day job.

Pedro had been a helping hand to Matty with anything he could offer, seeing a kid at that age in need. He helped him find a job that paid a pretty hefty sum to pay for Ana's tuition, as well as for the hospital bills for Isabel. Though it wasn't clean money, it was money.

He'd also drop by sometimes to gift them leftover fish from the day's catch. It was the least he could do as their Tito. He wasn't exactly their bona fide uncle, but at least he could help the kids out. After all, he's been through something similar. The last thing he wanted was for them to experience the same horrors he did.

He spent the next minutes staring at the ocean, puffing his cigs. Just before he could smoke one last, the ground started to shake. It was an earthquake. And the docks were more likely than not going to hold. He ran to solid ground, before something caught his eye at the corner of his vision. A tower emerged from the earth at the far side of town. It continued to grow, piercing the sky until the top was hidden behind a sea of clouds.

That thing was massive.

What followed then was silence. Thankfully, the docks were fine, but he couldn't say the same for everything else.

Pedro's eyes widened. The blue sun showed itself again, showering glimmering sunshine down. Where the light met his skin, it turned frozen, with frost spikes riddling his body from inside like bullets.

He heard screams from around the market. Everyone was freezing down in hell. He hurried to the closest stand, stumbling, but by then his limbs had already been incapacitated; his skin burning from the cold as if tempted to peel off his body.

Pedro thought the worst of it was over, but the sun shone harder. Stronger. As if taking on some kind of challenge.

Sunlight crept into the stand, seeking to sniff out the remaining warmth out of him. He tumbled, back into the corner where the last pint of shadow was left, and there it was–his saving grace–a wooden box. He climbed into it, pushing himself in before closing the outside off with the lid. The light shone stronger and stronger, not daring to stop, peeking through the gaps to wash over his skin with frostburns. Time seemed to stop, with the pain all too much to handle, until finally, everything blacked out to darkness.

Pedro gasped, coughing out empty air. It took a while before he slowly turned, peeking through the lid; everything outside was dark again. He pushed himself out with his entire body shivering.

Every bit of his body was riddled with spikes, with his skin starting to rot already. He could feel worms squirming under the thin layer of tissue. It was hell. Whispers inside his head ran, tempting him to give up and surrender control. His arms started to flail, as if possessed, with his mouth spewing out nonsensical words over and over again.

He was going insane.

He hid in the stand for a while, unable to run nor call for help, with his shout turning to a silent yelp.

He then heard a scream.

He waited for a while, counting the seconds from when he first heard it echoing, keeping himself sane from the pain and whispers by digging into his own skin with his fingernails. He didn't know what it was, but he was in no condition to do anything about it. After long, aching seconds that seemed like hours, he finally took a peek over the counter.

There was a body lying lifeless on the ground. Looking around, the culprit wasn't there, but instead there was something floating above the body: a white light.

Pedro grunted, pushing himself out his hiding place and into the open, closing in on the body with a slow crawl. He knew it was suicide; there was something out there that did this, but he couldn't ignore the light–the holy light floating above the mangled corpse.

Like a moth drawn to a flame.

He really was going insane. As if drunk from the pain, he continued, his skin burning as he dragged himself over the asphalt like it was running through high grade sandpaper. But he kept on going. He knew both his body and mind weren't going to last anyway, and if he needed a miracle, this light might have well been it.

Pedro squinted. The light was a white orb suspended midair. He reached out his hand, clutching for it. Once he managed to grab it, a piercing pain nicked the back of his head, and he fell unconscious.

Body is undergoing reconstruction for magic adaptation. Estimated time until finished: 23 hours, 59 minutes, 51 seconds.

* * *

Mateo bit his lips.

He was on his motorboat, sitting across uncle Pedro who was retelling his side of the story.

The blue sun showed up again right after the earthquake. That much was true, and it hit stronger the second time around, but there was one puzzle piece Mateo couldn't fit in. Both uncle Pedro and Hans were affected by the sun, but Mateo and Jan weren't at all fazed by it.

Why was that?

And seeing uncle Pedro now, his body wasn't at all frozen like what he said in the story. In fact, he looked as fit as a fiddle, almost as if he rewinded time back to his forties.

"I thought your entire body was frozen? It's not adding up, isn't it?" Mateo said.

"About that. I couldn't believe it then, but my body had turned back to normal when I woke up." Uncle Pedro showed off his hands. Even the fingers he showed back when the first wave of sunlight hit, they too had healed.

"I think it was because of that white orb."

That explained most of it. Mateo recalled the text that appeared when the first wave hit him on the open sea.

Body detected to have the Magic Node Relic. Successfully resisted the debuff of Frostblight.

That was it. The white orb is the Magic Node. Along with providing Mateo with much needed guidance on magic, it also functioned as immunity against this Frostblight disease. It was stupid of him to take this long to find out, though he let himself slide this time since he's been on the constant run from Walkers. It wasn't exactly a good environment to theory craft.

Tying into this, uncle Pedro found a Magic Node, but Mateo didn't find anything. He already had a Magic Node since day one. How?

In times like this, he knew exactly who or what to ask. He snapped his fingers, materializing the white orb: the Magic Node.

"What are you?"

Magic Node

An artificial node created by the Magitech guild. Allows even non-magical beings to tap into the power of the Elders.

It also grants ease of magic use and convenience. Features an ID system, Stat tracking, Fractal tracking, Magic tracking, and Relic tracking, along with a built-in dictionary of all magic-related keywords and terms.

Reading the texts, someone must've given Mateo a Magic Node in the past. That was the only logical conclusion. And it might've well been his parents.

But if that was true, how did they…

Mateo brushed off the thought, leaving the trail cold to preserve the remaining brain juice he had left. It didn't do him much to answer all this now, though reading the texts again, a question lingered on his mind.

"Magitech guild?"

The Magic Node didn't answer, probably because the creator of it–this 'Magitech guild'–didn't design it for that specific purpose in mind. It was as if Mateo asked a dog to meow.

"But a guild, huh."

"Oh right." Uncle Pedro cleared his throat. "When I woke up, I found three kids alongside me. It seemed like they took care of me while I was passed out, but there was something… off about them."

Mateo paused. "How off?"

"This might be crazy to say, but they weren't human." Uncle Pedro swallowed, the look in his eyes begging for confirmation. "One girl had… bunny ears, the other girl had curled horns–like a ram, and the boy had midnight blue skin with white tattoos. They wore outlandish clothes, a mix of leather, chainmail, and metal armor."

Mateo shared glances with uncle Pedro.

With the apocalypse running around turning humans to acid spitting zombies, along with Mateo's fire magic and uncle Pedro's snake thing, it wasn't really out there to say that fictional characters from Warcraft and Final Fantasy were real. But Mateo still held his reserves.

"Don't look at your Tito like that, Matty." Uncle Pedro sighed. "They were as real as they could get. They were pretty nice kids, offering me some kind of exotic food and water before pointing me to the tower. I remember the boy saying this…"

"Climb the world bridge. And once you reach a portal, travel to the next world, Dimidi. It's a much safer place than here."

Mateo blinked. He then turned, his eyes fixed to the tower piercing the sky. Even if what uncle Pedro said was true–which he had a hard time believing–that tower looked anything but safe.

But maybe this was the hope he's been waiting for.

Mateo broke to laughter. It was a wholehearted laugh, finding everything happening around so ridiculous. Things were really getting out of hand, and all he could do was just laugh his ass off, waiting for the next big reveal to blow him off his seat again and again.

"So?" Mateo said, wiping the grin off his face. "What happened to them?"

"They left soon after. They said they had some kind of business to take care of, leaving me with a bead and shards. The orb reacted immediately, asking if I wanted to absorb the Snake Elder's Fractal. The rest is, well…"

He snapped his fingers to summon his Magic Node. "Show me my list of magic."

Magic: Snake Staff, Enhanced Sense, Viper (3/10)