Chương 6: Our New Reality

The mana refused to change. This time he held the concept of air in his mind. Felt the ambient mana move. Its gentle touch against his forehead. The mana entered his reserves warm and familiar and completely, stubbornly arcane. He released the visualization and opened his eyes, exhaling through his nose. That was five types now. Life, Body, Fire, Water, and Air.

He'd been at it for almost two hours, working through each one methodically, giving every attempt at least fifteen minutes of focused concentration before accepting the result and moving on. Life had been first, since Sumi's immediate affinity for it suggested it might be common or easy. Then Body, for the same reason. Fire because Val and others had managed it. Water because it had also been confirmed. Then Air because if Fire and Water were types, Air almost certainly was too. None of them produced anything.

The mana flowed in, settled into his reserves, and sat there unchanged. No resistance, no partial conversion, no hint that the energy cared about what he wanted. It was like trying to change the color of water by thinking at it really hard. Across the room, a mage suddenly straightened on his blanket, eyes flying open. The man stared at his hands, turning them over, and a grin split his face.

"I got it," he said to the woman beside him.

"Holy shit, I actually got it." She leaned in, asking him something Enzo couldn't hear. The man cupped his palms together and a faint reddish glow pulsed between his fingers. Fire. The woman gasped and immediately closed her eyes, resuming her own meditation with renewed intensity. The process worked. People were figuring it out all around him, at different speeds and with different types, but they were figuring it out. He'd already tried everything. And not once had there been even a hint of success.

He took a breath and let it go. Whatever was preventing conversion, brute-force repetition wasn't going to solve it. He needed to understand the problem before he could fix it, and right now he didn't even know what the problem was. Val sat on the bench beside him in the cultivation pose, hands interlocked over her heart. She must have returned from rotation while he was deep in concentration. Her breathing was measured and slow, the steady rhythm of active absorption. He waited.

She finished ten minutes later, opening her eyes and taking him in. She read his expression quickly.

"Nothing?"

"Nothing." Her brow furrowed, clearly expecting a different answer.

"None of them worked?"

"I tried everything. Absorption works fine except it won't convert." Val studied him for a long moment. He could see her trying to come up with something that might help, but eventually she just shook her head.

"That's weird. Everyone else picks it up pretty quickly." She frowned.

"Even though some types don't work, everyone finds something eventually."

"I know." Val opened her mouth, then closed it. Whatever she'd been about to say, she thought better of it.

"We'll figure it out later," she said.

"Right now we have a floor to clear."

Val led him to the cafeteria where a man was finishing a protein bar and talking with two other cultivators. He stood when he saw them coming. Tall, about Enzo's height, with cropped hair and tattoos running down both forearms where he'd rolled his sleeves up. His shirt was stiff with dried blood, the same as everyone else. He stepped forward and offered his hand.

"Hey, pleasure to meet you. I'm Kevin. Val tells me you're our gunner." His grip was firm and his eye contact was steady. Enzo liked him immediately.

"I guess I am. Thanks for joining us." Kevin shrugged.

"Beats standing at the rear barricade waiting for the odd straggler." Val laid out the plan after Sumi joined them a few minutes later. The earlier stairwell breach had been Eaters pushing down from above. While they'd cleared and secured the third floor, the real problem started on four. Where the quarantine ward had been set up when the blood rain started. Patients brought in were isolated from the rest of the hospital, and when they started turning, the floor was sealed.

They estimated there were fifteen to twenty Eaters along with an unknown number of staff and patients trapped with them. They had little information about what was happening above level four. They knew staff had secured some of the upper floors, but they didn't know how far up the Eater problem extended. Which gave them a simple goal. Clear the fourth floor, then push upward until they reach other survivors.

"Any suggestions?" Val asked.

"Formation," Enzo said.

"Val and Kevin are at the front. Sumi in the middle. I'll take the rear." Val raised an eyebrow.

"You two are close-range fighters. Sumi needs to be close enough to maintain Bolster but protected from direct engagement. I cover the rear against anything coming from behind, and I can react to any threats. I've got range, along with Shield and Spear for any surprises."

"I'll need to touch you to refresh the spell," Sumi added. Kevin nodded.

"Makes sense." Val agreed. They spent the next fifteen minutes assembling what passed for gear. Magazines duct-taped around forearms and shins for bite resistance, the same protection Val was already wearing. Sumi grabbed a light metal rod from a pile of improvised weapons near the cafeteria entrance, more baton than club.

"Everyone ready?" Val asked. Kevin cracked his knuckles.

"Let's go get those people out." The ground floor corridors felt the same as the waiting area. Organized chaos. Staff moved between rooms, volunteers hauled supplies, and the distant rhythm of the barricade defense carried through the walls. On the second-floor landing, a handwritten sign with big letters had been taped to the wall. SILENCE FROM THIS POINT. A woman sat beside it. She pointed at the sign as they approached the landing, then waved them on. They climbed without speaking.

Enzo kept his free hand on the railing, letting it take weight off the knee on each step. The stairwell was standard hospital construction: two parallel flights separated by a concrete dividing wall, connected by flat half-landings where the stairs reversed direction. Each floor sat a full flight above the last, with a half-landing in between. Between the second and third floors, blood smeared the walls and stairs in long, dried streaks. Evidence of the earlier breach.

Eaters that had pushed down this far before being stopped. The third-floor landing opened onto a wide corridor where body bags lined one wall. Zipped closed, a dozen or more, arranged with care despite the circumstances. Two guards sat nearby, facing up the stairs, backs to the third-floor hallway. They watched the barricade above them. The barricade filled the width of the landing from the outer wall to the dividing wall. Two hospital bed frames stood on their ends, metal headrests wedged against the concrete.

A pair of vending machines had been shoved tight against them, their weight pinning the frames in place. Opaque plastic sheeting hung from ceiling to floor, taped at the edges, hiding the gaps. Towels plugged the holes along the bottom.

"Anything new?" Val whispered when she got close. The mage leaned in.

"Scratching earlier. Went quiet about twenty minutes ago."

"We're heading up to clear it. We'll send any survivors back down with instructions to knock three times and identify themselves."

"Got it." Val turned to the group.

"Ready?" Sumi placed a hand on Val's back.

"Bolster," she breathed. Green light pulsed briefly. She moved to Kevin and repeated it. He rolled his shoulders as the magic settled over him. Enzo really wanted to be able to create spells like that. Soon, hopefully. They climbed to the barricade. A dolly sat against the dividing wall, left from when the vending machines had been positioned. Kevin and Enzo squeezed past the bed frames on one side and used the dolly to ease a vending machine back far enough to create a gap.

Val peered through the opening into the stairwell above. Held still for several seconds. She looked back and gave a clear signal. They slipped through one at a time. Behind them, the guards were already working the vending machine back into place. The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement. They crept up in single file, finding the fourth-floor landing empty. The corridor extended left and right from the stairwell opening, dim under emergency lighting. No movement.

No sound. Kevin eased past the group and checked the stairs going up to five. He climbed half a flight, stopped, listened, then came back down and shook his head. Clear above, at least for now. Val pointed left. They advanced in formation. The corridor was short before it hit a set of swinging double doors, the type used as fire-breaks between wards, with small rectangular windows at eye height. They were closed. Beyond them would be the quarantine section where the seizing patients had been held.

Val approached the left door. Kevin took the right. She rose on her toes and peered through the small window, scanning the corridor beyond. Held for several seconds. Kevin did the same. Neither of them reported an issue. Then Val pushed the door, easing it open an inch at a time. A blast tore through the gap before the door was even half open. Raw mana, aimed upward at his sister, directed by an Eater only just now visible, crouched below the windows.

Hidden below their sightline, and angled to strike, to ambush, the moment someone came through. Val snapped her head to the side, bending at the waist, again moving faster than humanly possible, and the attack shot past her face and punched into the ceiling, raining plaster dust on the group. Kevin moved. He drove his boot into the right-side door, kicking it open. The edge caught the crouching Eater in the shoulder and knocked it sideways. It stumbled across the corridor, using all fours to maintain some balance.

Enzo's hand came up. Ring and middle fingers extended. Aimed between Val and Kevin. Between the two swinging doors. Filtered out everything but the Eater, reeling, eyes squeezed shut, the instinctive response almost humanlike.

"Bolt." The spell took it in the face. The glow behind its eyes died before it hit the floor. Everything else returned as his focus relaxed. He'd aimed for the head on instinct, something he'd been careful about since the first Eater inhaled his magic. But it felt right, because this one's eyes had been closed. And the success proved that their method of absorbing magic, the 'eating', wasn't automatic.

The Eater closing its eyes after being hit in the face by the door also proved that some autonomic behavior remained, even in death. That was useful to know. The doors swung shut, swaying gently behind them. The corridor beyond stretched ahead before hitting a T-intersection, where it continued forward and branched right. Emergency lighting cast the same flat, shadowless wash as the landing. Blood on the floor, the walls. Doors on both sides, some open, some closed.

Just past the fire doors on the left, a patient room with curtains drawn across the interior window. Dark inside. Then, from around the corner of the T-intersection, screeching erupted, overlapped, raw and hungry, the sound bouncing off the walls and making it impossible to tell how many were coming. They appeared a moment later. Five Eaters rounding the corner, pouring into the corridor in a staggered rush. Four of them began sprinting with a frenzied gait, two of them pulling ahead of the pack.

"Incoming!" Val called. The fifth hung back at the intersection, head twitching, the shimmer of building energy visible around its head. Enzo recognized the threat.

"Bolt." The first projectile crossed the corridor in a blink, slipping through the middle of the charging pack. The manipulation-type's mouth opened, and it threw its head back, inhaling the spell. Identical to the first Eater he fought. Eyes closed, almost savoring it. Useful.

"Bolt." The second projectile struck it right between its eyes, still closed from inhaling the first. The back of its skull blew apart, and the shimmer around its temples died. Val and Kevin stepped forward to meet the charge, shoulder to shoulder but with enough space between them to swing. Kevin intercepted the first with a kick to the knee that buckled the joint sideways, then grabbed the stumbling Eater by the collar of its hospital gown and drove a Burst Fist into its chest.

Ribs cracked, and the thing went limp. Val met the second with a combination that would have looked at home in a competition ring. Her lead foot snapped out in a teep kick that halted its momentum, buying the half-second she needed to step in and hammer her own Burst Fist directly over the heart. The precision was clinical, but then, she'd been obsessed with martial arts long before she began studying the biomechanics of how bodies moved. The magic might be new, but she'd earned her technique the old fashioned way.

A side room door swung open to Val's left.

"Left!" Kevin shouted. A sixth Eater lunged through the gap, hitting her flank while she was engaged with one of the other two remaining threats. Val pivoted on her rear foot and drove a heel kick into its stomach.

"Burst Step." The detonation launched the Eater backward through the doorway it had come from. She was already turning back to the corridor before it finished flying. Enzo tracked the kicked Eater through the open doorway. It hit the far wall, crumpled, and started pulling itself upright. It's head was angled down. He lined up the shot and fired. Bolt punched into the top of the skull, and the Eater went down. Sumi stepped forward, reaching out to tap Val on the small of the back.

"Bolster." The green pulse was brief, the buff enhancing Val's movement immediately. She moved to Kevin next. Her palm touched between his shoulder blades and he flinched hard, half-turning before he caught himself.

"Sorry," Sumi said quickly.

"Just refreshing."

"Warn me next time," Kevin said, throwing the next Eater against the wall, followed by a Burst Fist to the sternum, caving its chest in. Val stepped inside the last one's reach, hip-checked it, and threw it over her shoulder before slamming a boot down on its neck. She braced.

"Burst Step." The explosion sent the head spinning down the hallway. Everyone watched it roll, the only thing still moving down the now quiet corridor. Six bodies lay scattered around them. Val and Kevin breathed steadily. Sumi remained where she'd been, a few feet ahead of Enzo, her hands trembling slightly from the adrenaline.

"Everyone okay?" Val asked. They nodded.

"Let's keep moving then." The first room they opened had a feeding Eater. The window in the door had been smashed inward, glass scattered across the floor inside. The Eater crouched in the far corner over a body in scrubs, hunched forward, the wet sounds of its feeding audible before they opened the door. It had swollen in size visibly. Distended stomach pressing against the fabric of its hospital gown, limbs bloated and sluggish. Val moved fast.

It barely reacted, too gorged to move quickly, before a Burst Fist to the back of the head ended it. When she stepped back into the corridor, she leaned against the wall. Her face pale. Kevin looked through the doorway, then looked away. His jaw worked a few times, but he said nothing. Enzo glanced in long enough to note the details without lingering. The Eater had gone for the skull first, then the ribs. Brain and heart. Potential mana centers consumed before anything else.

The feeding behavior tracked with what the Guide had described. Perpetual hunger driven by mana bleed in dead tissue. They moved on. More rooms. Some empty, some not. The sickness on their faces didn't fade, but they didn't slow down as the room-by-room clearing developed into a rhythm. Val or Kevin entered first, Enzo covered the hallway in both directions, and Sumi kept near the doorway to reapply Bolster as needed. One door opened onto ambiguity. A figure hunched in the corner, back to them, motionless.

The room was dim, the overhead light shattered. Val held out a hand, making the group pause. She and Kevin exchanged a glance. Enzo lined up a shot from the doorway. The figure shifted. Turned slowly. Human eyes, bloodshot and swollen from crying, found them in the dim light.

"Please," the woman whispered.

"Is it over?" Val lowered her hand.

"Not yet. But we're getting you out." They sent her to the stairs with the instructions they'd given the guards, then continued clearing. They were three-quarters through the floor when Kevin entered a room alone, with a single Eater inside, visible through the cracked door window. It charged the moment the door opened, aggressive, closing fast. Kevin met it. Boot to the thigh to kill its momentum. Grabbed its shoulder, jerked it upward, straightening the creature's posture.

Then a Burst Fist drove hard into the center of its chest, shattering ribs and destroying the heart. The Eater dropped. Kevin turned toward the door. Behind him, the Eater moved. Purple light built behind its eyes as it raised a hand toward the back of Kevin's head. Enzo saw it first. His mouth opened to warn Kevin. Too late. Kevin had already heard it. Or seen the alarm on Enzo's face. He started to turn. His head was halfway around when the blast took him in the side of the face at close range.

The sound was wrong. Thudding. Wet. Kevin's head snapped sideways, and he stumbled through the doorway into the corridor. Enzo saw his face as he passed. The left side of his jaw was flayed open, muscle and bone visible beneath the torn skin. His eyes were glassy. An uncomprehending look of confusion, like his brain hadn't yet caught up to how bad it was. The Eater launched through the doorway behind him. It hit Kevin in the back and they both went down. Teeth found his throat.

Kevin screamed, a sound that turned into a gurgle as the Eater bit down and ripped. He thrashed, fists hammering at the thing's head, but his Burst Fist misfired, the detonation going off against the floor instead of the Eater's skull. The mana blast cracked the tile and Kevin's hand with it. Enzo had an angle. But the Eater was on Kevin's back, head buried in his neck. A Bolt through the Eater's skull at this range might punch straight through and into Kevin beneath it.

"Get it off him!" Val burst from the room across the hall. She grabbed the Eater by the back of its gown and wrenched it sideways. Kevin shoved upward with his good hand. The Eater tore free of his throat, taking chunks of flesh with it. Enzo fired the instant they separated. The spell struck it in the head, and the Eater went down. Kevin collapsed back onto the tile. Blood pulsed from his throat rhythmically, pooling fast. Too fast. Sumi was already there.

She dropped to her knees beside him, both hands pressing against the wound.

"Heal." Green light bloomed. The skin at the edges tried to close, the smallest superficial tears knitting together. But the deeper damage was catastrophic. Severed vessels, torn muscle, the trachea visible through the gap.

"Heal." The light was weaker. The arterial gushing hadn't slowed.

"Heal." Her voice cracked. The green glow flickered against damage so far beyond what the spell could manage that it was like trying to fill a bathtub with an eyedropper. Kevin's eyes were open. He was looking at Sumi. His lips moved, but only blood came out. His eyes glazed over. The fight left his body. Blood kept pulsing for a few seconds after, then slowed to a steady seeping bleed. Sumi's hands were still glowing when he stopped breathing. Silence filled the corridor. Val moved first.

She crossed to Sumi and knelt beside her, one hand gently covering Sumi's where they still pressed against Kevin's chest. She spoke quietly, close to Sumi's ear. Enzo couldn't hear the words. It wouldn't have mattered. He wasn't listening. Instead, he stared at Kevin's face. Already aware of what had to happen. What the Guide had said. That a mage's body would reanimate, though presumably only if their mana center remained intact. Kevin's heart was. Val helped Sumi to her feet.

Sumi's hands left Kevin's chest, leaving red prints on the fabric. Val kept an arm around her and guided her back down the corridor. As they passed him, Val's eyes found his. She'd realized the problem, too. Enzo knelt beside Kevin, knee protesting. He closed his eyes. Placed his palm flat over the man's heart. Warmth still radiated from the body.

"I'm sorry," he whispered.

"Spear." He held the spell for a moment. Tried not to hear the wet squish. Tried not to feel the impact. Then released it. A notification tugged at his awareness. He ignored it. He opened his eyes and pulled his hand away. Then stood and followed the others. It hadn't even been twenty-four hours since the world as he knew it ended. And he was almost ashamed to admit that there were moments when he caught himself enjoying it. Magic being real. Spell creation. Finding his sister alive and thriving.

Learning about the different spells and mana types. Like Sumi's life magic. Kevin shaking his hand and not once glancing at the cane and wondering if he'd be a burden when they all set out. Perhaps pushing aside all the horrible things he'd seen since feeling the first drop of blood on the back of his neck was normal. Natural. But having to defile the body of a man he'd just met and fought alongside made that so much harder.