Arcane Apocalypse

After stuffing her face with some food, Mia headed down to meet up with Jeff before she could talk herself out of going.

From there, she was quickly directed up to a first-floor window facing out onto the street-front.

“You were quick,” the man who guided her there said conversationally. “It’s gonna be another few hours before we are anywhere close to turning the garden into a crop field. Until then, you might as well get a few levels.”

“I suppose,” Mia said as she slid up next to the window and took a quick peek out. It might have been barred up, but the birds could throw their knife-like feathers and she didn’t want to be turned into a pincushion. “Won’t it be a problem if I run out of mana?”

“Eh,” the man shrugged. “Keep enough back to down one or two birds. You won’t be the only one on anti-air duty and even if you were, there aren't that many of the damned things.”

“Really?” Mia asked incredulously. But he must have been right since as her eyes roamed the streets below, she found them much more empty than the last time. There was no horde, though she could spot several groups of the little green monsters and some of the birds soaring through the air.

“Yeah,” the man said. “The fuckers kill each other just as happily as they do us, if not more so. The only reason the streets aren’t chuck full with corpses is that the goblins eat every single one down to the bone.”

“Goblins?” Mia frowned. “Guess it fits.”

“That it does,” a clear tinge of disgust entered his tone. “Those little shits are much worse than how they are depicted in any anime I've seen.”

“I suppose I’ll get to it then,” Mia said, rolling her shoulders and psyching herself up. “Will you keep looming over me?”

“Ah, sorry, sorry,” the man said sheepishly. “I was supposed to stay here and help if anything gets close … if you want. I doubt I can put up much more resistance than those bars.”

Mia doubted the man dressed in ragged clothes and wielding a crowbar of all things would be much help against something that blasted through a set of bars as thick as her wrist.

“I’ll be fine,” Mia shrugged. “I’m sure you have something better to do.”

“Well, I do have a bed with my name on it so if you don’t mind, I’ll be on my way?”

Mia gave him a lazy wave and watched him shuffle out of the room, letting out a sigh of relief once she was finally alone. Having one of Jeff’s goons breathing down her neck for hours would have been torture on her poor nerves.

As a warmup, Mia ran a bit of mana down to the tip of her fingers, worked it through every energy channel in her right arm, then pulled it back into her core and repeated the exercise for her left arm.

The energy channels running from her core towards the tips of her fingers felt just a touch more alive from the exercise. Mia wasn’t sure whether that was just her imagination, but it couldn’t hurt.

She took another peek out the window and searched for a target. Arcane Blast had maximum range she would have to feel out, since the spell’s explosive charge would blow either when it struck an object or when the part of the spell responsible for its containment ran out of mana.

I think that should be at around a hundred metres … maybe a bit less. Most of the street should be in range.

The street itself was a mess, reminding Mia of videos she’d seen of war torn cities. The buildings stood, but everything else was wrecked.

The asphalt was cracked, parked cars bent and their windows smashed. Every door or window down the street met the same fate.

On this landscape, small groups of goblins moved about, poking their ugly heads into cars and fiddling with stuff clearly taken from one house or another.

Mia readied her runic model, summoned up her mana and selected her target: one particularly nasty green monster busily nibbling on an ivory piece of something.

Her index finger just barely poked out between the bars when the pink circle blinked. With a sharp whistle like a flying arrow her bolt dashed off.

Mia was focused on the goblin the entire time, watching as it swung its tiny legs about as it sat atop a ruined SUV. As such, when the pink point slammed into its shoulder and tore into its body, she saw everything in elaborate detail.

Still, not even her quickly running consciousness, enhanced by her Cognity stat could see anything that happened between the goblin’s shoulder getting crushed and its gory remains splattering against anything within a few metres of its previous perch.

Mia regretted eating anything before, as that small meal was doing its best to reintroduce itself to the world. While not thinking herself too squeamish — hell, she even took part in one or two of the traditional pig slaughters her grandparents held — but seeing that goblin fucking explode was a bit much.

By some miracle, she managed to swallow the vomit. It was disgusting, but food was now scarce. That’s what she told herself.

She took a deep breath, then let it out in a huff and took a peek at her workmanship once more. Looking at the three other mates of the little fucker she killed look around in what she assumed was fright filled her with a sick satisfaction.

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Yesterday, the monsters hunted her. Today it would be the other way. It was right for them to be afraid like she was, to tremble in fear.

Another Blast shot off, this one catching a goblin in the head and leaving behind a stump from the waist down. That was when the other two realised they should be panicking. They looked around frantically as they clutched ivory spears and shoddy bows.

Mia didn’t wait this time. One Blast shot off, and the second followed after as she practically tore the mana from her pool and rushed it to her hand to charge the second spell.

Her aim was not perfect, she hit shoulders when she aimed for the head and blasted off legs when she aimed for the torso, but her spells were strong enough to compensate for her mistakes.

It helped that goblins were … squishy. Even when she only hit the one in the knee, it lost everything up to its ribcage. Which was still more than lethal.

[Level Up!]

[Level: 2 -> 3]

[Free Attribute Points: 2 -> 5]

Mia slid down, slumping against the wall under the window sill. Her heart raced madly, scorching blood surging through her veins.

A part of her insisted what she was doing was wrong, the goblins were clearly intelligent, and she’d just blasted four of them to kingdom come. That was murder in every conceivable way to the Mia of two days ago.

I should be feeling awful about this. She leaned her head back, knocking her skull against the cold wall. There was not a flick of regret in her, if anything, she felt awesome. The only reason she even had to contend with her stomach was for the gruesome way she killed the goblins.

That last one screamed quite loudly before it died. Mia remembered, feeling no pity for the malicious creature. They were wrong, she wasn’t sure how or why, but every monster was deeply wrong in a way that only killing them could fix. They are worse than animals. Those goblins and even the bird were smart, intelligent, and they still chose to be cruel. A tiger kills to eat, but these things, they enjoy it.

Mia could see it in their eyes. She remembered how the bird acted, how it played with them like a cat with its food.

Chitters, barks and shuffling caught her ears and Mia took in a calming breath as she ran a gentle stream of mana through her strained energy channel.

A grimace flickered across her face at how tender it felt. I suppose I’ll have to use my left hand for now. It was stupid to force the second spell to cast that quickly. I almost missed it too.

Another group of five goblins greeted her when she took a glimpse, having wandered over from where she saw them before at the edge of the next block over to the gory scene she’d made.

Did they survey their surroundings? Search for whoever killed their brethren? Did they mourn, even?

Fuck no, they were chomping down on the remains of the slightly exploded goblins like it was an open buffet.

They are either blind, much dumber than I thought, or just don’t give a shit. Mia was somewhat fascinated. Did they have no survival instincts? Well, it suited her just fine.

With a curious hmm, she revolved her runic model into another shape. The resulting circle was half the size of the previous one and used only a third of the runes.

There were some similarities, she noticed, her imprinted runic theory knowledge just about enough to understand the simple design. A blob of arcane mana manifested to have physical weight and form and then given momentum on a simple forward vector.

Arcane Bolt wasn’t a masterful spell circle, far from it, a child could have copied it perfectly and redrawn it a dozen times, but it didn’t need to be.

If the simple solution does the job, there is no need to overcomplicate things. That was mostly Mia’s job. Find overcomplicated bits of code, idiotic design choices and fix them up. Or tell one of the junior devs under her to do so.

Mia aimed and focused, her will crashing into a little blob of mana as she commanded it to-

The pink Bolt whizzed off with a quick spark of pink around her fingers and smashed into a goblin’s head like a brick a moment later, braining the green creature.

That spell activated much easier than any of the others. Mia moved her fingers, still feeling a slight buzz in them. The damage was also beyond what she expected.

At most she hoped for it to be as strong as a punch a trained boxer could throw, but if goblin skulls weren’t just unnaturally soft, the Bolt did much more than that. And for a fifth of the price too, the explosive parts of the Blast spell must be the energy-intensive ones.

Mia glanced at the fallen goblin, just catching sight of it before the other goblins descended on it like a group of ravenous hyenas.

The thing looked like someone smacked it in the face with a brick. Not enough to shine some light into the eternal darkness that must be the inside of a goblin skull, but more than enough to kill.

With none of the greenskin being all that bothered about one of them dying, Mia shrugged and took aim again. Her next bolt smashed into the centre of another goblin’s back.

The thing collapsed with a shriek that set Mia’s teeth on edge. It wasn’t dead, but it would be soon. If not from the bits of spine poking out from the wound she made, then from its bloodthirsty brethren.

These are dumb as bricks. Mia frowned. The previous group was a bit smarter, and that one goblin she made eye contact with the night before was downright terrifying. There must be different sorts. Maybe they evolve like in games?

Mia almost facepalmed when another possibility came to her. Stats. The Mind stat in particular. It probably made the dumb as rock goblins just a bit smarter with every point, at least up to a basic human level of intelligence.

That means any one of them could be cunning enough to be dangerous. I need to be careful. She eyed the bits of the sky and rooftops she could see through the bars, looking for any birds readying to rush her, but found none.

With a mental shrug, she sent off another Bolt, then another and then the third. Mia made sure to be gentle with her unabused energy channels, she let her mana take its time in travelling to its destination before she activated the spell in a casual sequence.

Aiming was strange, an exercise that was about one part mental and two parts spiritual. Her mind was the eye with which she aimed and her spirit was the hand that guided the attack itself.

The first goblin got caught in the neck, the bolt almost separating the head from the body, but not quite managing to snap the spine. The final two, though, hit perfectly at the back of each goblin’s skull.

[Level Up!]

[Level: 3 -> 4]

[Free Attribute Points: 5 -> 8]

[Manifestation: 3 -> 4]

Mia couldn’t help but grin. The numbers going up rubbed her silly monkey brain all the right ways. It also helped that she’d just removed eight monsters from the world, making sure they couldn’t hurt anyone ever again.

The part of her that felt their wrongness most deeply now felt a hint of satisfaction bordering on relief. It was the feeling you get when you finally manage to swat that one fly that had been haunting you the whole night with its incessant buzzing.

Unfortunately, there were many more mosquitos still buzzing in the distance, just waiting to make a nuisance of themselves. That was why the relief was nothing more than a temporary reprieve.

Mia took a moment to close her eyes and prod her mana pool. It was hard to feel how much mana she really had left even when she focused, but if she had to guess, she still had at least fifty Bolts in her.

That would leave me with enough mana to cast about a dozen Blasts before I got mana deprivation. Mia was earmarking the stuff hard, but she hoped she hadn’t miscalculated too much.

Mana deprivation crept up on you only when you were a spell away from entering it, and even then it was all too easy to miss the mental nudge when one didn’t have the experience of half an hour of agonised writhing on the floor to tie to that faint sensation.

Mia shuddered at the memory. At least it helped me get a more intimate feel of my mana and energy channels.

With a shrug, Mia went back to looking for monsters to kill. That last group even gave her a Manifestation stat-up. Or maybe casting the spells tipped over some mystical scale. Who knew?

The blood was a wonderful lure, it only took a few minutes before another group of four goblins warily walked out of a nearby alley. Their long noses sniffed the air and they carefully stalked through the street, making their way over to the goblin corpses.

They tried to move unnoticed, but Mia’s ears combined with her top-down view of the street made that a challenge. A challenge the green monsters utterly failed.

Mia waited until she had a clear line of sight on one of them, then sent a Bolt flying. Unfortunately, even the Bolt took quite some time to close the distance of around 150 metres and was coming at the goblin from the front.

The green monster managed to dodge, dropping onto the asphalt as the Bolt streaked past just above its head. The arcane projectile smacked into the pavement a few metres away with a loud crack, but left no visible damage on the asphalt.

Mia cursed, pulling on her mana again and readying for the next shot. She got too excited, hasty. Shooting from that far and in a way that the monster could easily see the glowing Bolt coming was idiotic.

This group was the most cautious she’d seen so far and she’d just spooked them. If they ran off to find an easier meal, depriving her of target dummies, Mia would only have herself to blame.

Thankfully, that didn’t happen. The goblins sat around for a good five minutes, their ugly mugs poking out from behind wrecked cars and that one upturned hot-dog stand that had to shut down a week back when the damned looters kept stealing whatever the old man operating it made that day.

Mia hoped he was alright. She was sure the old man gave her a discount back when she was living off of her college scholarship and the pittance they paid her as a part-time intern.

Slowly and cautiously, the goblins started moving again. The one she almost brained looked especially jumpy.

Mia snorted as the stupid thing jumped half its height into the air with a shriek when a rabbit, of all things, hopped out from under a car.

The rest of the goblins turned to look at once, readying ivory spears and hatchets. Mia’s amusement gave way to confusion as all the goblins tensed up like a punch of tightly coiled springs.

Then one of them was sent flying and splattered against a wall like a water balloon.

Mia stared, mouth hanging open as her gaze frantically searched for some hidden monster, a strong human maybe that could have attacked from stealth or anything really.

Then her eyes once again landed on the rabbit. Its brown fur was drenched in fresh blood as it stood where the dead goblin once stood, thumping its legs on the pavement.

Mia realised the animal felt just as much, if not more wrong as the goblins.

The goblins threw themselves at it all at once, reacting to some signal. Mia stared, gobsmacked as one after the other mangled corpses of goblins flew through the air.

She caught it moving, the little rabbit darting around almost half as fast as Mia’s Bolts as it ran circles around the clumsy goblins and their primitive weaponry.

Once Mia even caught the moment it struck. It started with the rabbit launching itself at a nearby wall, then kicking off like a rocket and flipping around to slam feet first into a goblin.

Somehow, when the rabbit that wasn’t even tall enough to reach Mia’s knees crashed into the goblin that must have weighed at least ten times as much, it was the goblin that went flying. Very dead.

Metal birds, goblins and now murder bunnies. Fuck my life. With every new thing like this, Mia felt more and more certain that magic really was the bare minimum to be had if she was forced to live in this new world. The list of Cons for the System were rapidly growing while the Pros seemed smaller by comparison with each new Con added.

She thought back fondly to the time when she thought the worst thing about the coming of the system was her pink hair. Yesterday feels like ages ago and the day before that another world entirely.

Meanwhile, the little monster that ruined bunnies for Mia forever was done, thumping its leg happily on the pavement in the middle of a circle of mangled corpses.

The question of ‘do I try to shoot that thing?’ almost asked itself. Did she want to try? Did she have any hope of hitting that little ball of fluffy death, moving faster than Mia could comfortably track?

Mia took a step back for a moment and squinted at the metal bars on the window, then at the distant rabbit. She compared the approximate sizes of the gap between the bars and the rabbit.

It was hard to tell from afar, but the rabbit was tiny. Mia didn’t want to tempt fate, so she came to the decision to not commit suicide by rabbit.

A smart choice on her part really was in order already in Mia’s opinion. Just to shake things up for a change before she eventually went back to making stupid decisions like agreeing to act like an anti-air turret for Jeff.

While busy patting herself on the back, Mia didn’t pay too much attention to the rabbit.

By the time she took a peek out, the monster was gone, only leaving behind the gory reminder of its rampage and a chill that ran down Mia’s spine.

I’ll have to make sure Jeff knows about this. That rabbit could slip through the building’s defences effortlessly.

With that ominous thought, Mia sat back to wait for another target to show up. She occasionally surveyed the street for any sign of the rabbit, but there was none.

Nor did any new monster wander within range of her hideout for the next two hours, which was when Jeff finally came to find her.