I pulled my laptop, and phone charger out from my inventory. This is y how power was supposed to flow. I shook my head and connected the laptop to my phone before focusing mana into the phone. Kevin must be stupid. He had gone out and found enough smartphones to take apart so that he could power his whole house. I wanted to smack Kevin. But if not for him doing this I wouldn’t of been able to stretch my mana pool like I have been.

I have been practicing making and sustaining ice bolts since I first got the power. No matter where I went there was always three icicle spears circling above my head slowly.

After we crossed to the main land people started to follow me using this as a sign of I knew what I was doing.

Packs started to disappear into people’s inventory as they learned how it worked. The first few people asked me but then they spread the info like a wild fire. Soon everyone was traveling lighter and it made the kids that were with their parents friendlier.

The kids helped me strengthen my ice spears. We found out that while they are sitting inactive they don’t put any physical strain on me. As long as the ice didn’t crack it would support the weight.

The kids had me tie rope to my ice to use as a swing. This gave them a place to rest when they were tired while the adults kept walking.

Our pace was blistering slow. I could still see the spot we made camp the night before.

My phone buzzed on my lap. The action broke my concentration on transferring my mana into power. The screen went dead but my phone lit up.

A race has broken through the rift. An elf has escaped to this world.

I looked up in the sky. The last info we had received about the rifts on the news stated they had appeared in areas with high population. The bigger the city was the larger the rift above it appeared.

I refocused the power to the laptop and checked the news. There was live coverage of the rifts all around the world to anyone that had cared to look.

I found the one I was looking for instantly. The video was on a loop playing a girl with white hair falling from the sky. The army tried to capture the girl but she evaded them. The girl was slightly taller then the average male but appeared much younger then everyone who was around her.

“Awe common can’t ya see she is just afraid!” I yelled at my computer and the screen flickered.

“Wow she is pretty.” Dee had snuck up behind me. I lost the connection to the computer again but this time my mana fluctuated and even my ice crystals shattered.

My phone buzzed again.

“I didn’t notice.” I lied, the elf was extremely attractive. “How’s training your enchantments going?”

“Still bad.” She looked like she was completely out of shape. To her enchantment was useless. She had invested all her stat points into agility thinking that Kevin had pranked her into letting me join some new online game. It wasn’t until she realized that the phone no longer worked as a phone. “Thirty minutes is still the maximum that I can enchant an object for.”

Dee was concerned that she had become a fail character. I stood up, my laptop and phone charger faded into little particles of light before hitting the ground retuning to my inventory.

I wrapped my arms around Dee while increasing the amount of ice spears to my maximum. All the spears blocked our view of the camp as I had them stab into the ground for a bit of privacy.

“Don’t worry babe, I am sure I can still find a use for you.” My forehead pressed against hers.

“What is going to happen when the seven of you get together tho.” Her tears froze on her cheek. I kissed her forehead and whipped the small ice cubes away.

“Well first we will build,” the meeting place was going to be two years down the road at the rate we moved. “Then we will start taking back our world.”

“So you would leave me to go save the world?” She buried her face into my chest. She was strong in front of everyone, but behind my wall she was fragile.

“I’d rather think of it as carving a You a home so we could grow old together. My ice started to crack. I pulled her face back and kissed her hard before wiping away her tears.

A bit of her worry was gone as the ice fell. The whole camp was looking at us. Dee’s face turned red as she walked away to go help prepare dinner.

I sat back down to recover my mana. There was three ways that we had found out how to recover mana. This first was through the chest skill that Kevin obtained. The next was meditation, this is what I was attempting. The final way was through drinking a concoction that I made and named blue potion. The problem with blue potions was that if you take more potion then your mana can hold you get really sick and it can lay you on your ass until your mana stabilizes. The second problem was that the ingredients were hard to come by.

“Hey Ty?” A voice called out disturbing my meditation. I felt the mana I was drawing in leave my body again.

“What dick!” Anyone who chose a mana skill knew how hard it was to regain your mana. Interrupting a mages meditation was the biggest reason of fights in the camp. I could see the fear in his eyes so I calmed down. “I mean, what’s up Richard?”

“I- is it tr-true?” The old man wasn’t alone, anyone and everyone who was free was there around me. The camp was silent even the people who were cooking were looking this way.

“Is what true?” I pulled out my phone. I had levelled.

“Tha-that there are six people you are going to meet with to save the wo-world” a murmur rang through the crowd. The kids all came closer.

I had obtained a skill point. I scrolled up the list of skills and found the one I wanted. Mana started flowing into me.

I took a deep breath.

“Let me tell you a story about the seven brave heroes.” The kids all came closer the two youngest sitting on my lap. “The first hero to mention is Chase the brave and solid. He is the strongest of the strong no matter how he looks. This hero is the first one our enemies see. His steps ring out on the battle field and his battle cry draws only the strongest to want to fight him. He is our protector, our guardian. Even if we fail he will be the one to be the last wall. The final protector.”

Dee handed me a sandwich and whispered in my ear. “What game is this story from?”

I just smiled.

“Now no matter how good the shield is,a shield can not win a battle alone. To go with the strongest shield comes the sword hero. She is a brutal woman who can knock any, and I mean any, man flat on his ass. There is only three people I fear. Kevin, Nessa, and well you know.” Everyone glances at Dee and chuckled.

“Nessa fights in the most brutal of ways. If Chase will endure the most, Nessa will overpower anything then humiliate them for loosing to a girl.” Everyone had either a sandwich or bowl of soup with them so I took a bite before continuing.

“The sword and shield protect the heart and our heart protects us all. Our heart is Kyle. Now Kyle wasn’t originally our heart. He was forged into becoming the heart through numerous battles, but he was guided into becoming the strongest heart possible. He proved his worth in a task that everyone around him said would be impossible. But the impossible had become the possible. Our heart is our weak point. Kevin formed a plan that guarded this weak point. Next to the heart at all times was our bow, our bow had one job, protect the heart.”

My legs were starting to fall asleep so I passed the kids off to their parents.

“Kyle only got the role of our heart from his older sister. I know no one more accurate with the bow then Abigale.”

“Sir?” The kids all looked confused. “Why didn’t Abby use a gun?”

“Well their are only three things that hurt the foes we were fighting together at the time, the first was forged iron like swords and knives. The second was magicka!” I formed an ice spear in front of the kids before shattering it into snowflakes. “And the most powerful heroes could empower their weapons magicka. Arrows can be empowered while a bullet can’t be.”

Most of the adults lost interest but I continued the story for the kids. “When we are in our battle formation we have the two strongest mages you have ever seen. Ice and lightning crash down across our foes. The two of us together were a force no enemy wanted to see against them.”

Dee gave a weak smile my way. I returned her smile with a small nod. She was the lightning mage but no longer.

“Now let me tell you about Kevin. Kevin is too smart for his own good. While I can currently power up my laptop, Kevin could power a whole house. While Abigale could track a creature on land, Kevin could track it in the air. But Kevin has two sides to him. When he is in his fight mode nothing can stop him. He is our blade that will move swiftly to cover any downfall. But he often turns his brain off making him look far more average then he is.”

The kids were starting to yawn. The glow of the rift above us was the only light in the sky.

“I first met Kevin back when he was no older then you, I was on a quest to learn about magicka and there he was. He was toying with creature alone in a cave. I sat there watching him for what must of been a day before he noticed me there. This beast of a creature couldn’t touch him as he danced around it with ease. I became an added distraction to him as he struck up a conversation with me. We talked for about an hour before a group of adventures were heard coming down into the cave. His eyes changed and an instant later his dance partner fell. He left that cave with out saying another word.”

“Abigale and Chase were a couple when I met them. The two of them were looking for more people to help in their quest. Our conversation while traveling was about other strange people we had met while questing. Abigale told an impossible story about the day a whole forest of goblins were chasing after a sole person. Goblin arrows rained down mere steps behind him. Chase told a story about a person he had seen climbing a cliff for two days just to jump off it and land in a lake. I told my story of the man dancing with a giant creature for a full day just to finally kill it when too many people arrived to see it.” Little did we know all the stories were of the same person. I continued telling stories about adventuring with Chase and Abigale until the kids looked like they were ready to fall asleep.

The next day the kids had me continue telling the stories. I got to the point where Dee would of been introduced as our lightning mage but left her name out of it. The kids never questioned her name they just believed every word I said. I told the story of our original healer and how he fit in with the party. I told the tale of how Nessa forced her way into our group.

The story went on like that for three more days.

My phone buzzed

The notification every adult had gotten.

All of them looked at me in fear.

The first human to officially die by another races hands.

That night the camp was silent, the parents guarded their children and we doubled the night watch.

The next morning a new window showed on my phone. It was a list of the races and how many of each were around.

Humans had an outstanding amount but that number was dropping slowly. There was three names in red. With humans being the only name in green.

Goblins were almost near a million strong. I tapped on the race and saw the description. A race that relied on raping females of other races to make their own race grow.

“Now you have heard stories about the other five heroes before we were known as the heroes but I have left out one.” The parents knew I was doing this to ease the tension in the camp as we walked.

“The strange Kevin?”

The kids all gathered behind me as I walked hoping to hear something unbelievable.

“Our group found Kevin alone, sitting in a tavern in the darkest corner by him self. We had just gotten back from our quest and needed to relax a little before we called it a night.” Dee shook her head. She knew the story I was going to tell. “A girl too young to be in the tavern ran in screaming and crying. Her clothing was ripped and her appearance made the whole bar go silent.” I stopped my story there and watched my phone.

The goblin race had gone up by another thousand and there was five hundred less humans. The goblin race started to flash the amount of them dropped by two.

“Before anyone could react there was a guy who had his arms wrapped around the girl letting her cry into his shoulder.”

Two more goblins dropped from the counter.

“The girl was attacked by evil adventures and lost everything.” A cold shiver went down my spine and a smile crept into my face. “The girl just wanted a hero to help avenge her, she didn’t want her stuff back she just wanted someone to show the bad guys the fear that she felt.” Dee saw that I was making the story more child friendly.

Ten goblins dropped from the list one after another.

“The whole tavern had gotten into an outrage over what had happened to the girl. When the tavern calmed down enough so that we could ask where they were the girl stood there confused and wrapped in a dark cloak.”

The humans had stopped going down in number. The amount of goblins slowly went down.

My story stopped there for a while. Something didn’t feel right. My ice spears hardened and sharpened to the point of being stronger then steel.

A small green creature ran out of the woods ahead of us looking scared.

“The shadow man is coming!” It’s voice was that of a child. It hid behind me and pointed towards the woods.

The little creature was holding a notebook that had familiar looking writing on it. The books title was the shadow man.

I knelt down to look at the green child. It’s red eyes were full of fear and it was wearing a rabbits pelt as a loin cloth. “I am a hero, who is the shadow man?”

“The shadow man hates gobs like me. He eats us and leaves not one alive behind him.” He showed me the book.

I opened it and read it. It was a tale of a goblin hunt gone wrong. The pray of the goblin horde appeared to be just a single guy but no goblin archer could hit him. The goblins angered the guy when they went and involved a young archer girl in the hunt. The young archer was going to be a new mommy for the horde but the man in black didn’t like that. The man in black got angry and attacked the horde. He saved the would be mommy and killed every gob in the forest. No goblin was safe no matter the age of it.

“Where did you get this from?” The book had blood on it. I passed the book to Dee and she flipped through the pages turning pale. We had both seen the book before.

“Mommy had it. When gobs started to die she said the shadow man was poncible” I nodded to Dee and a few of the younger adults saw we both knew who his mother was.

“Can you take me to your mommy?” My anger was rising but I tried to keep my mind calm.

“Mommy said only a hero can save us.” I nodded I was going to have to make a pit stop.

“I am a hero.” My voice was monotone. I held out my hand to the little goblin and he grabbed it pulling me gently with his clawed fingers.