Chương 13: The Toll

The park had changed. Four days. That was all it had been since the rain started falling. But the trees lining the road on either side had put out new growth that belonged to weeks of spring, branches extending at odd angles with pale green shoots. The undergrowth crept across the footpaths and into the road, grass tall enough to brush the pedals as they rode past. Sumi had her hand up, thumb and index finger in a circle, scanning.

"The vegetation is saturated. I can see mana flowing everywhere. It's almost as if the plants are pulling it in." Enzo could feel it too, even without activating Mana Sense. A subtle weight in the air that hadn't been present in the more urban parts of the city. As if the park were a basin collecting something invisible. They kept riding, the road sloping upwards, weaving around cars and trucks that had been abandoned where they broke down. And the occasional corpse, too.

"The mana is getting denser," Sumi said after a few minutes.

"It was lighter back near your house. Around the hospital, it was moderate. Here it's..." She trailed off, looking for the word.

"Heavy," Enzo finished.

"Heavy. Yes. And it's not uniform. There are pockets where it pools, almost like water gathering in low ground." Mana pooling in areas with dense vegetation. Or dense vegetation growing because of pooled mana. Cause and effect tangled together with no way to determine which came first. Through a gap in the trees, something caught his eye.

"Stop." They pulled to a halt on the road. Below them, visible through a break in the canopy, one of the park's ponds stretched across a low area. The water was crimson. Blood from the rain had drained downhill and collected here, thick enough that the surface looked almost solid, a dark red mirror reflecting the light. Above it, a crack hung in the air. Purple-black. Arm-thick. It undulated as he watched. Even from this distance, even without Mana Sense active, looking at it felt wrong.

His eyes wanted to slide off it. His brain insisted the space where it hung should be empty, and the contradiction between what he saw and what he expected created a low, persistent nausea.

"What is that?" Val asked softly. Enzo didn't answer. He couldn't. An Eater stumbled out of the treeline on the far side of the lake. It paused, head swiveling, and then locked onto the crack. The screech that followed was raw, the same frenzied sound they'd heard from every Eater that had ever sensed mana. It charged. The bloody pond slowed it. Waist-deep crimson water dragged at its legs, each step a lurching fight forward, arms clawing at the surface as if it could pull itself through faster. It didn't care.

Whatever the crack was, the Eater wanted it badly enough to wade through a lake of blood to reach it. The tear flared. Widened. Its edges peeled apart like something organic, something opening, and its insides were a dark void of nothing. It encompassed the entire pond in a single moment, a maw yawning wide, and the Eater was simply gone. No sound. No flash of light. Then the void closed, the crack thinned, flickered like a dying spark, and vanished.

The three of them sat on their bikes on the road above, staring at the space where it had been. Val gaped.

"Correction. What the fuck was that?"

"I don't know… but I want to go down there," Enzo said. Val turned to look at him.

"You want to investigate the thing that just swallowed an Eater whole and disappeared."

"I want to see where it was. Look for residual mana. Anything."

"Absolutely not." He looked to Sumi for support.

"Also no," she said.

"Very firmly no." Enzo exhaled. He wanted to argue, but two against one was two against one. And they weren't wrong. The crack had consumed something and vanished. There might be nothing left to find. Worse, he might actually find something. Screeches rang out across the park below, echoing the first. He looked at the empty air above the lake one more time. It was an easy spot to remember, at least. They pushed off and kept riding.

The park gave way to city streets, and the streets looked the same as every other stretch they'd ridden through. Abandoned cars. Bodies. The occasional cluster of people who watched them pass with guarded expressions. A barricade across a residential intersection, better built than the last one they'd seen, with actual furniture and cars stacked into a wall. The men behind it had real weapons. A machete. A hatchet. One held a length of rebar. Nobody spoke to them. Nobody tried to stop them.

The bikes moved fast enough that they were past before any interaction could develop, and Enzo suspected that was its own kind of protection. They weren't threatening because they were clearly going somewhere else. He kept practicing as they rode. Telekinesis on a piece of debris blocking a bike lane. Lock on a van's sliding door as they passed. Each cast a fraction of a second, each target a different mechanism. The notifications pulsed but he continued to ignore them. Ten minutes later they hit the Presidio.

They remained on the highway, avoiding the walkways and bike paths. The forest had always been dense here. Cypress and eucalyptus and Monterey pine planted a century ago by the military, packed tight enough to block the wind off the bay. Now it was denser. Trunks had thickened visibly, bark splitting where the wood beneath had expanded too fast. New branches reached across the road, some low enough that Enzo had to duck.

The undergrowth had consumed the shoulders entirely, ferns and ivy and things he couldn't name pressing inward until the road felt like a tunnel. The light changed. Filtered. Greenish with a red tint underlying everything. The canopy overhead had filled in until the sky was visible only in patches.

"It's stronger here," Sumi said quietly.

"A lot stronger." Enzo could feel it. The air didn't just have weight anymore. It had texture. A faint pressure against the skin, like standing too close to something that was vibrating at a frequency just beyond hearing. Murph was growing tense. She started whining, a sustained, low sound that rose and fell with each stride. Her ears were flat against her skull. A gap in the foliage opened on the right side of the road, a small clearing between the trees where the canopy thinned enough to see.

Movement, maybe fifty meters in. Birds wheeling beneath the branches, where two groups tangled together in the air. One group, the larger of the two, fought with jerky, aggressive motions. The other was faster, more fluid, and working in concert to drive the other birds downward. Beneath them, arrayed across the clearing with a spacing that looked deliberate, a mixed pack. Dogs and coyotes together, waiting.

As one of the birds tumbled low enough, a coyote lunged, snapped it from the air, and two dogs closed in to help tear it apart. The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. A massive white dog sat alone at the edge of the formation. And it wasn't watching the hunt. It was watching them. Murph lunged against the leash arm. Val's bike jerked sideways, and she swore, correcting hard.

"Damnit, Murph! Stop," she yelled.

"I'm going to crash." The border collie struggled, growling low and insistent.

"Murph. No." Enzo kept his voice low and firm.

"Keep going." Murph whined, but obeyed. Her eyes stayed locked on the big dog until the gap closed behind them and the forest swallowed the clearing from view.

"Some of those birds were Eaters, weren't they?" Sumi asked. Val nodded.

"Right? I was thinking the same thing. Animal Eaters… that's scary."

"Definitely," Enzo agreed.

"But I'm more curious about the animals working together to fight them."

"Looked like pack behavior," Val said.

"Except dogs and coyotes don't form packs. And with birds? That's even weirder." They fell silent. Enzo considered the implications. He'd assumed animals were affected from the moment he heard chittering coming from the forest behind the campus, when he went looking for Val. Murph's transformation confirmed it. Her behavior upon encountering her first Eater reminded him of his own overwhelming instinctive response. That raised a serious question. Whether animals had the genes for mana manipulation and cultivation.

Or if something else was happening. They rounded a bend and saw something he'd failed to account for. The tunnel. Four hundred meters of concrete cutting through the hill, and without power it was a black mouth in the hillside with a distant point of light at the far end. He'd driven through many times and never once thought about what it would be like without electricity. Thinking about a world without modern conveniences still didn't come naturally.

They stopped at the entrance and listened, quietly discussing their options. After what they'd seen earlier, they all agreed that a brief stretch of darkness was less worrying than dense foliage and animals that moved like Eaters. They rode in, making it about a third of the way before the light from behind dimmed enough that the risk of an accident became real. From there, they dismounted and walked, one hand on the wall, Murph's claws clicking and echoing in the darkness.

Nothing found them in the dark, while the distant pinprick of light grew to a circle, finally providing enough light for them to ride again. Moments later, they were on the other side. The road sloped downward as they emerged from both the tunnel and the Presidio forest, and the world opened up. Ahead, San Francisco Bay stretched before them, its blue shimmer somehow more vibrant than he remembered. To the left, below the overpass, a row of white houses sat nestled among the foliage.

A series of carefully formed barricades and people standing watch blocked the streets. It was yet another small community that had formed since the blood rain. They stared up at Enzo and the others with undisguised hostility as they rode by. They ignored the stares and kept riding. The road curved north and merged onto the freeway, and before long the Golden Gate Bridge came into view ahead, its orange towers rising against the clear sky.

The toll plaza stood guard at the approach, dozens of cars broken down and abandoned across the lanes. Some with doors hanging open, others still sealed shut. There was clear evidence of fighting, too. Broken windows. Bodies with wounds from blades and blunt objects. Others had been chewed on and eaten. Which meant that others had passed this way, either coming from the bridge or seeking to pass it like they were, and encountered Eaters. Or each other.

"Let's take a break," Val said. She pointed to a covered bus shelter on the left side of the road.

"There." They dismounted and wheeled the bikes under the shelter's overhang. Val unclipped Murph from the leash, and the dog immediately flopped out next to Enzo, panting and tongue lolling. He scratched behind her ears without thinking about it. Sumi passed around water bottles and protein bars. Val poured some from her bottle, which Murph lapped up eagerly. Enzo sat on the metal bench and bit into the bar without tasting it. His eyes moved across the toll plaza, cataloging.

"Give me that back," Val said. Enzo looked over. Murph had a strip of jerky in her mouth, pulled from Val's hand. She was chewing with an expression of pure innocence that fooled nobody.

"Murph." Val reached for it. Murph turned her head away, chewing faster.

"That's people food."

"She's already committed," Enzo said.

"Let her have it."

"She has two bags of premium kibble and she steals my jerky." Enzo reached over and ripped open a bag of dog food in Val's pannier.

"She must be hungry." He scooped a couple of handfuls onto the ground next to Murph, who immediately dug in. Val muttered something about favoritism and pulled out another strip for herself. Sumi laughed, and for a moment, sitting in a bus shelter surrounded by the wreckage of the apocalypse, things felt almost normal. Almost like three friends on a road trip, sharing snacks, with a dog that had no manners and no shame. Enzo pulled up his notifications.

— Eater Eliminated → Bonus Mana Capacity Provided (+10) Lock (Level 2) → Lock (Level 7) Telekinesis (Level 1) → Telekinesis (Level 6) — Status | Name: Lorenzo Locke | Class: Wizard | Mana Perception: 17 meters | Spell Range: 9 meters | Mana Capacity: 340 (180 | 160) units Skills | Mana Sense (Level 7) | Mana Control (Level 8) | Mana Absorption (Level 8) | Spell Forms (Level 4) | Attunement (Level 5) | Enchanting (Level 1) Spells | Lock (Level 7) | Shield (Level 3) | Bolt (Level 9) | Spear (Level 4) | Telekinesis (Level 6) Techniques | None Schema | Barrier — His efforts on the ride had drained most of his mana, but grinding out some levels by exploiting the abundant opportunities left on the streets had paid off.

He dismissed the notifications.

"Sumi. Did you manage to learn Telekinesis?" She shook her head.

"I've been trying, but no. Creating stable arcane structures while introducing threads that mimic instability..." She blew out a breath.

"It's hard. The whole point of the spell is controlled chaos, and arcane mana fights me on the chaos part."

"You figured out Bolster, and that's got a similar complexity."

"Life and Body mana come naturally to me. I just get them. They do what I ask. Arcane is..." She searched for the word.

"Less obedient." He nodded. He couldn't relate to that particular problem, stuck as he was with one mana type, but he understood the concept. Some materials worked with you. Others fought every step.

"Are you working on anything new?" Sumi's face lit up.

"Actually, yes. I've been thinking about Bolster. It works by boosting the effects of cultivation, right? I designed both Heal and Bolster based on the cultivator's descriptions of mana circulation. They amplify what the body already does. But I keep wondering if I could come up with an equivalent for wizards."

"What do you mean?"

"Cultivators store mana in their hearts and circulate it. That's what Bolster targets. Wizards store mana in their brains. I think the Attunement skill might be related. What if it enhances our minds in the same way cultivation enhances their physical attributes? What if I could design a spell that improves memory or thinking speed? Maybe even enhance perception. I realized how useful that might be while we were in the tunnel." Enzo looked at her.

His thinking about Attunement aligned with hers, though without the Guide providing a description, it was merely guesswork at this point.

"That would be incredible. How's it going?" She deflated slightly.

"I have ideas for the forms, but testing is slow. I can only try one configuration at a time, and most of them don't do anything."

"Keep at it. You'll figure it out." He meant it. If anyone could design a spell from pure theory, it was Sumi. Murph's head came up. Her ears rotated forward, body shifting from relaxed to rigid in a single breath. A low growl built in her chest, aimed at the toll booths.

"Guys," Val said.

"We have incoming." Enzo and Sumi looked up. Seven people, coming from the direction of the bridge, passed between the toll booths. They moved fast, bunched together, the kind of group that had been through something bad and hadn't finished processing. Ragged. Most wore leather jackets, though from the variety it looked more like they'd raided a department store than chosen a uniform. They carried knives and makeshift spears fashioned from whatever they'd found.

One man had a sledgehammer resting on his shoulder, and from the way his arm trembled under the weight, he was regretting the choice. Three of them trailed behind the rest. Two held a man between them, his arms draped over their shoulders, feet dragging across the asphalt. The one on the right had his free hand pressed against the man's neck, fingers slick and red, trying to hold back the blood that ran visibly between them even from this distance.