From the moonlight that was entering the room through a window, A statue of a woman on a pedestal made of black marble. The statue itself Was pretty simple. It was wearing a robe and some armour underneath. The statue itself was of only one colour—pure crimson. And as for the material used, at first, it looked like gold, but it seemed more metallic at a closer look. There was also a crown on the statue’s head. And engraved on the crown, were what looked to be eyes.

“Oh, Great Calamity. Please guide your followers. Allow us to aid in the descent of the great and almighty you.” Prayed a man wearing a crimson robe. The man and the statue were In a dark room. Barely anything could be seen inside the room but there was one thing in particular that stood out because of the moonlight. Paintings on the wall.

One of them depicted a woman with dark skin and white hair in a crimson robe. The women in particular were depicted as some sort of deity. She had a crimson moon right behind her head and her eyes were closed.

One depicted a completely different scene. A scene of several people in chains begging for food to what looked like soldiers.

And another depicted a scene of some strange creatures. There were about ten of them in total. One was a gigantic wolf with two heads and each head containing about three eyes. One of them was a giant floating castle with tentacles below it and eyes looking out of the tentacles. The castle itself was shrouded by a mysterious fog. There were also some more paintings, but they weren’t visible.

The hooded man walked by to the pedestal with a knife in his hand. He stabbed his own chest and dropped dead in front of the statue. Suddenly a bright crimson light shone from the statue which slowly engulfed the man. Soon, there was none left of him. Other than his heart. After that, things were quiet for a while and a few more people entered the room. The people slowly walked to the statue and bowed down and slammed their heads on the ground. “All hail the great calamity!”

They spoke. The people prayed for a while before backing away. One of them came forward again and bowed to the statue twice before picking up the heart. And, after that… He began chewing on the heart.

***

Abraham woke up from his sleep and got out of his bed. He quickly washed his face from the water in the wooden bucket nearby and tidied his hair. He got dressed in some casual clothing and went outside with his bag. ‘All right. I have quite a bit to do today but let me start by praying to god first.’

He began walking to the direction of the church before stopping midway on the muddy pathway. ‘Praying to god huh… is this something I would usually do?’

He thought for a while before changing his destination to vincent’s place. Which was only a few houses away from where Abraham’s residence was allocated.

“Good morning Vincent.” Abraham spoke in a gentle voice as he began making himself comfortable. He sat on a wooden chair nearby.

“Good morning Abraham. How’s your day?” Vincent spoke as he sat on the chair just across from the one Abraham was sitting on. “I’m fine I suppose. How about you?”

Abraham’s reply made Vincent give off a big grin. He began searching through his bag and took out a glass bottle. “I’m good. Anyways, Look what I found!”

Although Vincent had said that, One look at his face showed that he had not slept in quite a while.

He spoke as he handed the bottle to Abraham. Abraham looked at it closely and was astonished by the bottle’s quality. ‘This doesn't look like it was made in this era Especially in a place such as this. I guess magic sure does wonders huh.’

He opened the cap of the bottle and was astonished by the smell that invaded his nose. “I knew they were lying when they said they don't have any liquor around here. Where did you get this from, Vincent?”

Abraham asked vincent. Who was currently giving off an All-knowing smile. Vincent took the bottle from Abraham and poured some of it in two glasses. Both of them then picked up each glass and chugged the liquor slowly. “It’s not the best.”

Vincent replied looking somewhat disappointed. “Well, at least it’s better than nothing. Anyways, you can get it from Old Holger. You know who he is.”

“Right.” Abraham chatted with Vincent for a while longer before walking away. ‘Hmm, perhaps I should visit Old Holger again. Oh well I’m in no hurry just for some liquor. But this begs me to think, what else are they hiding for us? And why liquor?’

Abraham walked through a stone street filled with not that many people. The houses gradually changed from being well-made to being sloppily made. He walked towards what looked like a town centre which was filled with quite a bit of people. “ Oh hello there Abraham! Are you here for some vegetables today?”

Spoke a woman who was selling some vegetables on a small show nearby. Abraham shook his head and politely spoke “No thank you, I’m fine for today.”

The town itself was quite lively. There were people walking around and doing their jobs, Kids playing on the streets. Farmers sell their crops to others. And beggars asking for some money on the side. ‘So calm and peaceful. It’s like heaven compared to my previous world.’

He continued walking down the alleyway towards a dense group of trees. It was the beginning of the dense forest outside the town. He went through the forest and soon reached a place that looked similar to a library. He went inside and found an array of bookshelves with various books in them. He ignored all of it though and went to a particular door near the end. He gently pushed the door open revealing a staircase leading down. He began walking down the steps, but… His moment was blocked by a giant blade. ‘I’m still not allowed in. But this answers my question. I’m being monitored all the time.’

Abraham picked up a couple of books related to magic ‘I can’t understand any of these even though I know how to spread them. Oh well. I'll just try.’

He left the library and began rushing back to his home.

He walked through the muddy path and eventually reached a fairly quiet part of the town. ‘Barely any houses that are inhabited. And even the ones that look like people live there, look fairly uncared for. This part has always looked neglected to me.’

However, today… To him this place felt eerier than usual. ‘I have a bad feeling about this place’

He thought while walking down the empty muddy street. “Glory to the calamity!”

‘...What the fuck.’

Abraham suddenly froze in place. He had already been feeling weird but now what he had just heard made him feel there was something terrible going on. ‘Glory to the calamity… Is it a cult? But… why would anyone want to worship something called ‘Calamity’?’

He had several thoughts that he was too drowned in. This made him subconsciously head towards the source of the sound. When he reached the location of the sound, he found something extremely peculiar.

It was a boy with a hole in his stomach laying on the thighs of a person in a crimson robe.

***

The boy had his stomach sliced open. The man, whose thighs the boy was on, Rummaged his hands inside the boy's stomach and carefully took out his heart. “That'll do.”

Spoke a woman who stood beside the man.

The man got up and his hands began shining with a blinding crimson light. The woman handed the man a bag and the man began drawing some strange runes on the floor. The rune consisted of three circles. And the interior of each circle was filled with other smaller runes. And each circle had one smaller circle on their outside. ‘A ritual…’

Abraham knew exactly what was happening. Thus he decided to observe for a while longer.

The man took out three eyeballs from the bag and placed them on the smaller circles. He then took out a bottle of liquid that looked like blood and sprayed it all over the rune. He began chanting some things in a language Abraham couldn’t understand. The man took out a knife from the bag and cut out a chunk of flesh from his own hands and placed it right in the middle of the rune.

He took the boy's body and dragged it to the middle of the rune and ate his heart. He then stabbed himself on the chest just enough to not kill him and fell down.The woman walked over to the middle and placed her hand on the boy's chest and began muttering something in an unknown language.

She then suddenly fainted on the spot and a blinding crimson light covered that area. Abraham felt a chill down his spine. ‘Could it be…’

‘Are they trying to summon an evil god?’ Abraham barely knew anything about the gods from the little information he had, but he was told about the evil gods by the village people. And he knew enough about them to know what kind of disaster would occur if one was summoned at this place. ‘That disgusting monster I saw back then was Called catastrophe… A minion of an evil god… But I haven’t been told the evil god’s name.’

‘Catastrophe… calamity… what could it be?’ Abraham felt a sense of urgency as he began hurriedly walking away from the spot. He was terrified. His legs were shaking so hard that he felt that he would fall anytime. ‘Catastrophe… the messenger of death… the appearance of Catastrophe is a sign that ‘she’ will emerge. And put an end to this world. Is the ‘she’ that the village folk were referring to, Calamity? It has a similar name to Catastrophe.. My god is a world-ending scenario about to take place?’

Abraham felt like he could die at any moment. Several dark thoughts clouded his mind. That was, until he heard a female voice say…“Finally. It’s done.”

He looked back in horror, expecting an evil god to be standing behind him. But, what he saw was, ‘Wait isn’t that… The dead boy? And… the woman.’

Abraham couldn’t believe what he was seeing. But, he was greatly relieved of one thing. There was no evil god being summoned here. ‘Where the hell is the person monitoring me? Damnit, they should've stepped in… am I truly even being monitored?’

Abraham hurried away from that place so as to not get caught. ‘Should I tell this to Alfred? Just in case I’m not being monitored.’

His movement suddenly came to a halt ‘Wait… Why should I tell this to Alfred? No… What the hell is happening to me? I wouldn't have thought of this before… Shit, something is seriously wrong with me!’

Abraham inwardly cursed his fate and began walking towards Vincent's place.

***

Inside a room filled with clutters of papers, metal scraps, Wooden waste, and kinds of other waste materials, Vincent stood in front of what looked to be a target made for practice. With some sort of pistol In his hands. The target itself was made of Iron. It had a red dot in the middle and was covered with runes everywhere else. It was kept on the table ten feet away from Vincent. “Here it goes.”

He wiped off the sweat from his face and pulled the trigger with great anticipation. The gun let out a loud Bang As it was fired. The bullet flew at great speed and hit the red spot of the target with great force. Unfortunately, the bullet fell down on the ground without doing any damage to the target. ‘What a failure.’

Vincent’s face showed disappointment. He let out a sig and dropped on his bed while throwing away the pistol to a corner in the room. ‘Even if this pistol wasn’t particularly that advanced… It should have left at least some mark on fucking wood. Just as I thought. Our tech can’t win against magic.’

Vincent closed his eyelids which had become dark due to all the all-nighters he had pulled. ‘What a waste of time. After finally managing to collect all the materials to build this thing It did absolutely nothing. I wonder… Does it even fucking matter if I do anything? Even If I managed to combine Magic to the gun, would it truly be effective against ‘That thing’ Described by Abraham? Let’s see… Body bigger than anything else I've created. Covered with eyes and tentacles. Floating hands… That sure sounds terrifying. Guns or anything we make for that matter probably won’t do anything against ‘That thing’.’

Vincent had begun losing hope. He felt worthless and just wished to leave it all away and take a long nap. ‘Fucking hell I need to stop being so negative.. We haven’t even tried combining it yet. I will succeed. But before that… I think I should sacrifice some time on the research of runes.’

Vincent got up from his bed and took out a pen and paper. ‘I’m still quite curious how these types of pens already exist in this world.’

The pen was sort of modern. ‘It’s quite dogshit when compared to pens in even the early modern periods of 2030-40. But at least it’s better than a fucking quill… Anyways. I need to first do more research on runes and master them before attempting to combine two different kinds of tech. Hmmm… If I remember correctly, runes use quite a bit of systematic processes. Only then can one produce excellent spells. So… If two people of the same strength fight, the victor will be decided by those who have better runes.’

Vincent began noting down a lot of his ideas on a small sheet of paper. ‘Alright. I will first begin with the simplest spell. The spell which allows the user to cast light from their hands… Even I can do that.’

Vincent put his hands forward and began trying to remember the feeling of manipulating mana. He pushed some mana to form some patterns on his hands. The patterns themselves weren't as complex as some of the other ones used by Alfred or perhaps the ritual earlier. After all, it only consisted of pretty basic runes. Vincent opened his eyes and was satisfied by the result. ‘Alfred was right That drug sure does make sleep no longer be a necessity.’

He quickly tested the runes and as he had expected, they succeeded in casting the light spell. After being satisfied by the result, he began drawing the runes on the sheet of paper. The runes consisted of a circle, And inside the circle were symmetrical line like patterns in the shape of a star. Each line had small circles attached to them With symbols of a language that looked to be elvish. Vincent was able to understand this language. As he had studied it alread. The words in this circle were “Fire” “Air” “Mana” “Atmosphere” “Heat” and “Contain”

‘This is so fucking vague…’ Vincent wrote down the words on a separate sheet of paper and began hypothesising what they could mean and how they worked. ‘Im guessing the circles with the word fire in it are a smaller and simpler version of the runes required to produce fire. After all they have the same flame-like patterns I had seen on the fire runes. So it’s quite obvious those ones produce a flame.’

‘The air one looks to be a rune that produces gust… I had seen it before in the demonstration of wind spells.’

‘Mana is… Well I guess it’s a rune that manipulates the mana. Now in which way… I need to test that.’

‘Heat is quite obviously a rune from the fire producing spell tree. And what it does is pretty self-explanatory as well.”

‘As for Atmosphere… Well I need to test it.’

“Alright. Now then, let me begin with the heat rune.”

Vincent began once again concentrating at the feeling of mana rushing to his hands. He manipulated its pathway to draw the heat rune on his hands. He opened his eyes and attempted to use it… But. “It doesn't work huh…”

The rune seemed to be doing absolutely nothing. This disappointed vincent but then he remembered something important he had learnt from Alfred. ‘Every person is born with an element and they can’t use the spells of other elements… In that case why the hell could I produce the light?’

Vincent went into deep thought and had several hypotheses on why this could be possible. But at the end he came to one conclusion. ‘I remember seeing this mana rune on almost every spell… This is probably it.’

He picked up a pen and began drawing a spell on an empty sheet of paper. He first drew a circle and then wrote the words “mana”: in elvish inside the circle. He wrote them just on the borders and made an entire circle of the word “mana” Inside. He then closed it off with another circle. Then, inside the second circle, he drew a star. The star had 4 points and inside each point was a circle. And inside each circle, he wrote the heat rune. Then, in the middle of the star, he drew another circle and filled it with the combination of the heat rune and the mana rune. “It’s made sloppily but Alfred said almost every rune can work as long as it matches with the laws of this world. Now then, time to test this.”

Vincent went into concentration and began drawing the rune on his hands. This time the task was much more difficult than before, but after a while he eventually succeeded. He then nervously attempted to use the rune, and…

“I’ve succeeded!!!” The room began becoming warmer. Vincent of course was very escatic. But, that didn’t last long. “Shit!”

The room’s temperature continued to rise without any signs of stopping. Vincent began feeling nauseous and he hurriedly began dispelling the spell.

Which he succeeded in. But he began realizing what kind of reckless act he had done. He was quite like Abraham. ‘Fucking hell’

He also remembered certain words that Alfred had told him.

And that was to never, ever, Use spells made up of unverified rune patterns.

***

Can Penis Drawings Become A Rune? -St. Ein