Chương 7: Welcome Home

They pushed through the swinging doors, heading back to the stairwell. Val kept a hand on Sumi's shoulder as they walked. Sumi hadn't spoken since, but she was upright and moving under her own power. She'd scrubbed her hands on her pants, the fabric dark and wet where she'd wiped. Two figures waited on the steps below the barricade, sitting against the wall. Enzo recognized the first one. Handwraps. Rick. The cultivator Val had pointed out in the waiting area, the one with the Reinforce technique.

There was a joke in there somewhere. He didn't make it. The second was a woman he hadn't seen before. Young, maybe Sumi's age, a length of sharpened rebar across her knees, meditating where she sat while the man kept watch. Val looked up.

"Rick? Jane? What are you two doing up here?" Rick's eyes moved across the three of them. Lingered on the blood. On the number. He stood.

"The head nurse sent us to help."

"Amy? What about the main entrance?"

"Couple more mages picked up their first spell in the last hour. And the Eaters coming from the building across the street have slowed down." He rolled his shoulders.

"She said clearing the quarantine ward is the priority now." He didn't ask about Kevin. He'd looked at the three of them, counted the faces, and worked it out for himself. Val glanced at Sumi, then looked at Enzo. He could see the worry on her face and the struggle that came with the decision to continue.

"We need fifteen to recover mana," he said. Rick nodded slowly and sat back down.

"I'll keep watch." Sumi headed for the stairs. Val followed her a beat later, and they both sat down. After a moment of whispered conversation, Sumi took a deep breath and began recovering mana. Val gave him a grateful look, then did the same. Enzo walked by them and took a seat on the stairs where he could stretch his leg out comfortably and started absorbing. He still had plenty of mana, but Kevin's death was a lesson that needed to be taken to heart. Not just about confirming your kills.

It was about enforcing the patience and discipline required for their new reality. Like double-checking your anchor during a climb. And that began with being prepared for anything. He pulled up his notifications when he'd finished absorbing.

— Eater Eliminated (x4) → Bonus Mana Capacity Provided (+40) Bolt (Level 6) → Bolt (Level 8) Spear (Level 1) → Spear (Level 2) Attunement (Level 3) → Attunement (Level 4) Mana Absorption (Level 4) → Mana Absorption (Level 6) Mana Sense (Level 3) → Mana Sense (Level 4) — Seeing that Spear had leveled up almost broke Enzo's concentration. Almost. Part of him had been ready for the possibility, though. He turned his attention to the Status screen.

— Status | Name: Lorenzo Locke | Class: Wizard | Mana Perception: 14 meters | Spell Range: 7 meters | Mana Capacity: 260 (160 | 100) units Skills | Mana Sense (Level 4) | Mana Control (Level 4) | Mana Absorption (Level 6) | Spell Forms (Level 2) | Attunement (Level 4) Spells | Lock (Level 2) | Shield (Level 3) | Bolt (Level 8) | Spear (Level 2) Techniques | None — Enzo dismissed the interface and glanced at the others.

Sumi sat with her back against the wall, fingers steepled against her forehead, breathing in the same measured rhythm she'd used in the waiting area. Her eyes were closed. The trembling in her hands had stopped. Val caught him looking and met his gaze. She tilted her head toward Sumi, a question in the gesture. He studied Sumi for another moment. The set of her jaw. The evenness of her breathing. Whatever she was carrying from what happened to Kevin, she'd packed it down and kept moving. He gave Val a small nod.

When the fifteen minutes were up, they reformed in the stairwell. Rick and Jane reinforced the formation, and the group carefully rechecked each room as they went. By the time they stepped around Kevin's body, the five of them moved as if they'd practiced it. Nobody said a word, though they each glanced at the dead man as they passed. The remaining rooms went fast. Val or Rick entered first. Enzo covered the door. Sumi held position in the corridor with Jane guarding the front.

Every Eater they dropped got a follow-up strike and a verbal confirmation before anyone turned away. They checked corners before committing to doorways, cleared blind spots before advancing past them. The rhythm was tighter than before, stripped of assumption. Dozens of corpses. Sixteen rooms. Seven Eaters. Two survivors, both sent down the stairs with the same instructions. Nobody said it, but Enzo knew he wasn't the only one struggling to accept how few survivors there were.

When they finally reached the last hallway, where the hospital staff had quarantined the initial patients seizing from the blood rain, they rounded the corner and stopped. The hallway beyond was a slaughterhouse. Bodies lay in pieces across the floor, partially consumed, arranged in no pattern that suggested anything other than feeding. Hospital gowns and scrubs soaked through with red and black.

The overhead lights had been smashed, leaving the corridor lit only by what bled through from behind them and faint emergency lighting that was already flickering to the beat of the dying electricity. The air was thick with a smell that hit the back of his throat and stayed there. A figure crouched over a body near the far end, hunched forward, the wet sounds of its feeding carrying down the hallway. It was bigger than anything they'd seen.

Broader across the shoulders, arms longer than they should have been, the proportions subtly wrong even from this distance. Its head twisted around to look at them. Slow and smooth, the neck turned past the point where a human spine would have locked. Almost a full one hundred and eighty degrees, chin nearly touching its own back. It wasn't the only thing that was wrong. At the temples, where the skull curved toward the ears, a second pair of eyes glowed purple.

Smaller than the primary set, recessed into the bone as if they'd grown there, angled outward to cover the periphery. Four eyes tracked the group from across the corridor. The thing released the body it had been feeding on and rose to its full height, unfolding from the crouch in a motion that was too fluid for something that size. Blood hung from its jaw in long strings. Sumi touched Rick's back.

"Bolster." Rick shook out his arms and stepped forward, planting himself between the group and the corridor ahead.

"Reinforce." Rick's heart thumped loud enough for the others to hear, and then a faint luminescence lit beneath the man's skin, before what looked like a thin layer of dry, hardened dirt grew over his flesh, cracking as it went. Sumi reached out and tapped Jane on the shoulder.

"Bolster." Val's buff followed a second later. The Eater dropped to all fours and launched itself down the hallway without so much as a screech. Enzo's hand snapped out before it had covered half the distance. Ring and middle fingers extended, aimed low at the leading arm.

"Bolt." The projectile crossed the corridor in a heartbeat. The Eater's secondary eyes tracked it before its head even turned, and the thing threw itself sideways, fingers and toes punching into the drywall with a sound like nails driven through plaster. The Bolt blew out a chunk of the floor, missing entirely. It clung there for all of a fraction of a second, halfway up the wall, limbs splayed wide.

Its claws glowed purple where they gripped the surface, mana reinforcing the points of contact, holding its weight as if gravity were optional. Then it leapt. Rick caught it. The Eater slammed into him with enough force to drive his boots backward across the tile, but his hands locked around its wrists and held. The Eater's claws scraped against Rick's forearms, and where the sharp claws scrabbled for purchase, dirt flaked away and dissipated the moment it left his body.

Even then, the creature's body kept moving, its legs whipping around in an arc that used Rick's grip as the pivot. Jane was already stepping in, rebar raised, when the kick caught her square in the chest. The impact lifted her off her feet and sent her backward into Sumi. They went down together, the rebar clattering across the floor. Val slipped in from the other side. She planted her lead foot and drove a Burst Fist into the Eater's chest.

It twisted at the last instant, reading the attack with its secondary eyes. The detonation caught it in the ribs instead of the sternum. Bone cracked and the thing screeched, a raw sound that echoed off the walls. This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work. Then it lunged forward and bit down on Rick's forearm. The screech cut off, replaced by a wet grinding sound as teeth penetrated hardened earth, finding enforced flesh and muscle beneath.

Rick's face contorted. He roared through clenched teeth, yanked the Eater off balance and pivoted, swinging its entire body into the wall. The surface of the wall cratered. Dust and plaster fragments blew outward as the wall bowed inward under the force of the impact. The Eater's jaws loosened, but Rick held on, refusing to let go. Three Eaters burst from a doorway further down the corridor, drawn by the noise. Normal ones, all sprinting toward the fight. Jane was already moving to intercept.

She scooped the rebar off the floor without breaking stride and charged to meet them.

"Val! Help her!" Val's head whipped between Rick and the corridor ahead. Her jaw clenched.

"Go!" Rick snarled, the word distorted through gritted teeth as the Eater struggled in his grip. Val swore and took off after Jane. Enzo turned back just as the evolved Eater planted both feet against the cratered wall and shoved. Rick's back slammed into the opposite wall hard enough to crack plaster, and the air left his lungs in a grunt. Enzo let the cane drop and crossed the distance in three heavy strides.

His right knee screamed on the second one and nearly slid out from under him on the third, but he kept moving. He grabbed the Eater's right side with his palm flat against the ribs, fingers digging into the fabric of its hospital gown.

"Spear." The rigid thread of mana erupted from his palm, punched through flesh and bone, and burst from the opposite side of the Eater's torso in a spray of dark fluid. The thing convulsed, but didn't stop. Before it could react, Enzo jammed his left hand against its other side, a few inches lower.

"Spear." The second thread tore through at a different angle, crossing the first somewhere inside the chest cavity. Still the Eater thrashed between him and Rick, pinned on two lines of mana like a specimen on display. Its head twisted around to face him. The rotation was jerky but fast, all four eyes locking onto him at once, and its jaw opened wide. It lunged, teeth snapping shut inches from his face. He wrenched backward, dragging the thing with him, and his leg gave out.

He hit the tile on one knee, arms shaking, both Spears still anchored through the Eater's torso. The thing strained against them, snapping and snarling, each lunge bringing its teeth closer.

"Rick! Now would be good!" Then a hand appeared beside the Eater's jaw. Small, steady, palm facing outward.

"Spear." The thread drove through one side of its jaw and out the other. The snarling intensified, but with a wet gurgle accompanying it, as Sumi gripped her wrist and held on with everything she had. Rick sucked air through his teeth, releasing the wrist trapped in his right hand. It flailed, clawing at anything it could reach, but Rick didn't waste the opening. His fist pulled back, then drove forward.

"Burst Fist!" His form was rough, and the attack was rushed. But it was enough. The strike landed dead center as the Eater bucked, trying to wrench itself free of the three Spears and Rick's left hand. The detonation caved its chest in, crushing through the ribcage. The Eater's body folded around the impact, all four eyes going dark at once as its thrashing suddenly stopped. Enzo released the spells holding it up before the dead weight could drag him down with it, and the corpse hit the floor with a heavy thud.

Warmth bloomed in his mind. Larger than any he'd felt before. Enzo looked down the corridor. Jane stood over the last of the three standard Eaters, driving her rebar through its chest with both hands. Val turned back toward him, breathing hard, blood streaking her forearms. She gave him a tired thumbs-up. He let himself exhale. His pulse hammered in his ears and his leg ached, but it was done. The corridor was quiet.

Sumi was already beside Rick, her palm pressed against his forearm where the bite had torn through his flesh.

"Heal." Green light bloomed. The wound was ugly but relatively shallow, the teeth having ground against reinforced muscle, reaching nothing vital. Rick watched the skin slowly close with an expression of relief.

"Appreciate it," he said quietly. Sumi nodded, then stood and crossed to where Enzo's cane lay on the tile. She picked it up and held it out to him. He took it with a nod.

"Thanks, Sumi."

Several hours later, Enzo climbed the stairs to the second floor of his apartment building, one hand on the railing, the other on the cane. His leg had stopped complaining halfway home and settled into a numb throb that he knew would catch up with him later. Val and Sumi followed a few steps behind, their borrowed rain jackets rustling in the quiet of the stairwell. After the evolved Eater, they'd pushed through to the fifth floor in under an hour.

The resistance thinned as they climbed, and on six they'd linked up with a group of staff who'd barricaded themselves in above and been working their way down. They'd managed even absent any mages of their own. With the hospital mostly secured, and the Eater presence in the immediate surroundings having calmed down, Val had found Amy and briefed her. Sumi and his sister had said their goodbyes while Enzo waited by the main entrance.

Even the attacks outside had mostly ended, though the people were still watchful for the occasional Eater coming from the other nearby buildings. The walk home had been quieter than his trip to campus that morning. The rain had eased to a drizzle, thin enough that the jackets kept the worst of it off. They'd moved in silence for most of it, alert out of necessity despite the exhaustion pulling at all three of them. The streets held more bodies than he remembered.

Some had been there since the rain started, half-submerged in the blood that still pooled in gutters and low points, bloated and forgotten. Others were fresher. But the thing that stuck with him was the people. There were groups roaming the streets, armed with bats, kitchen knives, wrenches, or lengths of pipe, dragging Eater corpses into piles at intersections. He'd spotted a mage among one group, recognizable by the faint purple glow of a Shield spell. The rest were mundane, and they were fighting anyway.

They were now officially over twenty-four hours, one full day, into the end of the world. Except it had continued. With surprising resilience, despite the loss of life and the steady decline in functioning technology. Nobody had spoken to them, though they exchanged a few nods across the street. Enzo reached the second-floor landing and shrugged off his jacket, hanging it over the banister. Val and Sumi did the same. Then he stopped in front of his apartment door.

Curious, he activated Mana Sense, holding his thumb and index finger together and pressing the small circle to his forehead. The world took on the now familiar purple haze, but he ignored that and focused on the lock. Sure enough, the spell's protection, cast when he left, had faded. He released Mana Sense. And froze. It wasn't the notification of a skill increase that caught his attention, but the accompanying fact. He'd just used the ability casually, exhausted, and without being in the proper meditative pose.

It had been one-handed, too. His tired mind struggled to understand the possibilities that opened. If the pose was not required, it might mean he could learn to sense mana on the move. Maybe even absorb it without being seated with his eyes closed. Val stepped up beside him and gave him a look only a little sister could.

"Did you forget how doors work or something?" He didn't bother with a response.

"Lock." The door unlocked. Enzo pulled it open, and a whirlwind of black and white slammed into him. His bad leg folded instantly. He hit the hallway floor with the cane clattering away from him for the fourth time today, and then a wet tongue was frantically dragging across his face while a tail whipped against his knees hard enough to sting.

"Murph!" Val shouted. She sounded torn between worry over him and happiness at seeing the puppy. Enzo didn't care. He was laughing, the first real laugh he could remember since the rain, while the border collie did her best to lick his face off. He grabbed her by the scruff and pulled her into a hug. She was alive. Then his arms tightened, and the laugh faded. When he'd left that morning, Murph had been a six-month-old puppy, maybe twenty-five pounds soaking wet.

The dog pinning him to the floor was easily twice that. Her frame had filled out, chest broader, legs longer, the lean build of an adult border collie where a gangly pup had been hours earlier. Val hauled Murph off him, which took visible effort. Sumi offered her hand and pulled him to his feet, then pressed the cane into his grip.

"Thanks," he said. She smiled.

"Try not to make it a habit." He looked at Murph, who had transferred her attention to Val with equal enthusiasm, dancing around her, tail going so fast her whole back end swung with it. Val was laughing and failing to hold her back, trying to block the tongue. The change was undeniable. Murph looked fully grown. Maybe even larger than that. She moved differently, too. Each motion carried a weight and control that hadn't been there yesterday, replacing the awkward puppy behavior.

It had to be something to do with the blood. The mana carried in the blood, specifically. It was lucky that he always removed her collar when she was inside. He shuddered to think what would have happened if he hadn't. Val steered Murph through the doorway.

"Welcome to our home," she said to Sumi, already moving down the hall.

"Let me show you my room. Ignore the mess. And that it's technically his room. Long story." Sumi followed.

"Thank you for having me."

"It's not a long story," Enzo said.

"So, so long," Val replied. He stood in the doorway for a moment, listening to the sound of his sister's voice fading as she crossed the living room and entered the bedroom. Then he stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

"Lock." The mechanism clicked. He looked down at his boots, caked in blood, and kicked them off into a heap by the door. He crossed to the couch and dropped onto it. The cushions took his weight the way they always had, familiar and worn in the right places. His knee settled into the absence of strain with a gratitude that bordered on religious. He was home. Val was safe. Sumi was with them.

Murph was alive and apparently going through some kind of accelerated growth that he'd think about later, when his brain had more to offer than static. For a few seconds, he just breathed. Then his hand found the remote on the coffee table, thumb pressing the power button out of pure habit. Nothing happened. He stared at the dead screen, then set the remote down. His eyes drifted to the record player in the corner and his vinyl collection.

He almost got up to put something on before remembering that wouldn't work either. No television. No music. No phone. He exhaled slowly. The apartment was quiet in a way it had never been, stripped of every background hum he'd spent years taking for granted. Then he glanced at the workshop door. Sleep wouldn't come anytime soon. His body wanted to, but his mind was still running at maximum, cycling through the day's events in a loop he couldn't shut off. He needed something for his hands to do.

Something familiar that didn't require electricity or mana or thinking about the things he'd seen at the hospital or on the streets. He grabbed the cane and pushed himself off the couch. The workshop smelled the way it always did. Metal and stone dust and the faint tang of machine oil, layered over something warmer that he'd never been able to name. It hit him the moment he opened the door, and some of the tension in his shoulders let go.

Afternoon light filtered through the privacy curtain on the far wall, casting the room in a warm, diffused glow. Enough to work with. The left wall held his stone workbench, a slab of reinforced countertop with the engraving vise bolted to one end and a half-finished marble relief pinned under a magnifying arm. The shelves above it held his stock. Blocks of marble, onyx, soapstone, and jade in various sizes, none bigger than his head, sorted by material and color.

A few rougher pieces sat in a crate beneath the bench, waiting for him to decide what they wanted to become. The right wall was for his jewelry work. His primary bench sat beneath a now-useless articulated lamp, the surface scarred with years of small acid burns and blade marks. His tool roll lay unfurled across the back of the bench, the custom leather wrap holding gravers, files, burnishers, and setting tools in a neat row, each one seated in its own stitched pocket. He'd made the roll himself, years ago.

The leather had darkened with use and oil until it matched the bench it lived on. The far wall had the heavy equipment. Soldering station, burnout kiln, the centrifugal caster, polishing motor with its dust hood. All of it connected to the ventilation panel he'd installed in the exterior wall. All of it now dead without electricity. The safe sat to his right, just inside the door. Compact, heavy, bolted to the floor. He knelt beside it, dialed the combination, and pulled the door open.

Inside, organized trays held his working inventory. Casting grain in labeled containers, gold and silver. Wire and sheet stock in various gauges. A tray of loose gemstones, rough and cut, separated by type in small compartments. Below them, a second tray held pieces in progress. A pendant awaiting its final polish. A pair of earrings with empty prong settings. A bracelet with engraving half-finished along the interior. And the latest ring. He lifted it from its slot and held it up to the light.

White gold, sized and cast weeks ago, the band already shaped and smoothed. The setting sat empty, a six-prong crown waiting for a stone he hadn't finished cutting yet. The engraving around the band was half complete, an intricate pattern of interlocking leaves that wrapped the circumference. He'd been working on it the day before the rain, refining the depth of each cut, adjusting the angles where the leaves met. Enzo carried it to the jewelry bench and sat down on the stool.

He selected a graver from the tool roll by touch, the handle worn smooth in exactly the shape of his grip, and leaned forward. His breathing slowed. The muscles in his shoulders relaxed. Then the graver slid along the pattern he'd laid out, following lines he knew by heart. The world outside the workshop disappeared. The hospital, the Eaters, Kevin's face going slack, the sound of teeth on bone, the bloated corpses, the blood rain. All of it receded as his hands found the familiar rhythm.

Short, controlled strokes, the graver's edge biting into white gold, curling a tiny ribbon of metal away from the surface. He rotated the ring a fraction in the clamp, checked the angle, and cut again. A new notification broke his concentration. He sighed and pulled it up. New Guide Entry: Magic Crafting Enzo's breath caught.