Arcane Apocalypse

21 – Back to back

Mia heard the knock and turned her bleary gaze away from her reflection in the mirror. She looked terrible. Well, compared to how she usually looked these days she did at least. The deepening dark circles under her eyes and the lethargic look in the eyes themselves entirely didn’t fit the barbie-like look the rest of her face had going for it.

Not that the rest of her face made her all that happy now that she was looking at it. She pinched her cheeks, pulling at them this way and that. They were irritatingly smooth. She couldn’t even see the pores of her skin. It looked fake as hell, like she had more makeup on than the walls had plaster.

Well, maybe she shouldn’t have stayed up late. Maybe she should have stopped after the first rune settled down in her runic-model, or the second, or the third. Mia calculated the number of hours she would get to sleep and reasoned four hours would be enough for her just this once, but damn, did she not account for someone starting a shootout with some monsters in the next city block at the ass crack of dawn.

You’d think moving away from the US would have made firearms rarer, but Austrians were damned wild. Thirty out of a hundred people owned a gun. Well, Mia hoped the goblins liked the taste of lead as much as they liked her Arcane Blasts.

Mia wet her hands in the lukewarm water and slapped her cheeks. It stung, but at least the pain woke her up a bit. Oh, how she missed coffee. She felt like a corpse for the first third of the day without her morning cup.

Another knock reached her ears, and Mia let out a sigh, tearing her gaze away from her reflection. Her hair was a tangled mess she pulled into a loose ponytail and she didn’t bother to put on any makeup. She looked like death warmed over, and a little makeup wouldn’t hide that enough to be worth the effort.

“I’m coming,” she said as she reached for the door, paused and stood on her tiptoes to glance through the peephole. The knocks didn’t sound like Jeff’s. The man always beat on the wood like it owed him money, as did most of the men Mia knew. These knocks sounded gentle, almost feminine. Sure enough, she saw her blonde bird-murdering partner from the day before standing on the other side.

“Hi there,” Mia said, trying not to sound like she was about to fall asleep. “Come in? I’m going to get dressed then we can go.”

“Ah, sure. Good morning?” Lina said, stepping in and looking around the room awkwardly. Her gaze stopped on the many signs of the bird’s rampage, though it lingered on the abomination of duct tape and wood that was their table after Mark ‘fixed it up’.

“It’s neither morning, nor is it good,” Mia mumbled under her breath as she nevertheless gave a lazy nod of acknowledgement at Lina’s words. The sun was barely above the horizon, only psychos woke up this early, especially in the summer. “Get comfortable, I’ll be back in a minute.”

For the third day of the apocalypse, just to change things up a bit, Mia decided to wear jeans shorts. Though she was already regretting foregoing the comfy cotton shorts by the time she got back to the living room.

“Let’s go?” She said, startling Lina, who was peeking out through a tiny gap left in the barricade covering the windows.

“Oh, right!” the girl spun around and nodded, quickly striding up to Mia. “Sooo, goblin hunting, right? You said you’d show me today?”

I don’t think I explicitly promised anything. Mia mused, then shrugged. “Sure.”

“So,” Lina spoke up once they were outside the flat. “Ehm. How are you? You look pretty … tired.”

“I feel worse than I look,” Mia grumbled, throwing a weak glare at the blonde. “How could you sleep with that?”

She could still hear it. Distant cracks of air, the thundering echoes of gunshots and not the cute low calibre ones either, but the sort that goes through concrete. Someone pulled out some heavy-duty stuff from God knows where and was probably going wild on the monsters.

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“With what?” Lina sounded confused.

“The gunshots?” Mia frowned, looking up at Lina to check whether she was messing with her. She seemed genuinely befuddled. “You don’t hear it?”

“No?” Lina blinked, then squinted as she tilted her head this way and that, prying her ears. “No. I don’t hear anything.”

Mia groaned. Stupid pointy ears were making her life harder again, it seemed. “Well. Damn.”

“What?” Lina asked. “What’s up?”

“These ears,” Mia said, barely stopping herself from flicking the triangular organs in irritation. It was one thing to embarrass herself before Mark and another entirely to do so before someone who was practically a stranger. And cute. “Aren’t just for show I suppose. I thought I could sort of turn down the volume, but it seems I was only partially right.”

“How so?” Lina asked. “What’s it like? All I got from that awakening were these freaky eyes. Honestly, I’m pretty jealous.”

“Don’t be,” Mia said, still feeling grouchy without her morning coffee. “I got off lightly with these silly things. I could have ended up with bark for skin or whatnot.”

“Hmmm, I suppose you’re right.” Lina shrugged, then squinted at Mia. “What changed for you though? The ears are one, I am guessing and the hair? I don’t suppose you had pink hair before? I’d assume I’d have remembered someone with a hair colour like that living in the same building as me.”

“Yeah,” Mia said, shrugging. “That’s about it. I had black hair before.”

“Really?” Lina asked. “Like, full raven black?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s so weird.” Lina mused. “I can’t imagine you with black hair. It’d ruin the entire vibe you got going on.”

“I don’t have a vibe going on.”

“But you do,” Lina insisted. “You look like a faerie out of some steamy romantasy book. The sort that has werewolves and vampires tearing each other’s throats out to ‘have’.”

“Urgh,” Mia scowled at the thought. If that was right, she’d have to be careful. She just managed to shake that annoying stalking leech off of her not so long ago. She most certainly didn’t want to attract any new psychos. Fuck you Arnold. I hope the goblins ate your guts. “Just what I need atop of monsters trying to eat my guts.”

“At least you got super hearing.”

“I suppose,” Mia shrugged. “And magic. That’s a pretty nice extra.”

“For sure,” Lina grinned, and Mia’s eyes were once again drawn to the girl’s chest.

Okay. I should stop following this stupid Spirit Sense urge to stare at every clump of moving mana I feel around me. Mia mused as her gaze followed the mana as it rushed through the blonde’s energy channels down to her fingertips. Since all of those things were invisible to the naked eye, Mia probably just looked like she was ogling Lina like some pervert.

Well, she’ll have you know. She had more self-control than to allow herself to do that … most of the time.

The whitish mist came streaming out of the girl’s fingers a moment later, twisting around themselves and curling into a thick braid. Then Lina let it go and the braid of white mana floated off, slowly starting to dissipate and fade from Mia’s sight.

“Wait a second,” Lina said and Mia glanced at her, finding the blonde staring at her with wide eyes. “You saw that? The thing I made?”

“Yeah?” Mia asked, frowning. “Why wouldn’t I? It looked like a tiny braid made out of clouds.”

“Huh,” Lina blinked, then thinned her lips. “I didn’t see anything. You have some magic super sight too or something?”

“How did you do that if you didn’t see any of it?” Mia asked.

“I mean, I just felt, sort of, where my mana was?” Lina shrugged. “It’s like an extra limb you can’t see and can only half feel. Weird. But it works.”

“Cool,” Mia said, scratching her cheeks as she thought it over.

“Soooo, how did a girl from all the way over from America end up here?” Lina said, enunciating the last word like it was supposed to be a curse.

“My grandmother was born here,” Mia said, slowly getting used to the whiplash of getting the topic switched every half a minute without any warning. “Went out to the USA in the fifties, but moved back here a few years before she died and left an old house to my mom. Which we moved into when … my parents got divorced.”

Mia grimaced. Divorced was far too light of a word for that man going out for a pack of cigarettes and never coming back. Her mom thought he died, she even reported him as missing and waited for him for almost a year.

But she was a teacher, a part-time one at that with three kids. Mortgage caught up with her and before Mia or her siblings knew it, they were on a plane heading to Austria to move into a crumbling old house.

“Sorry,” Lina said, looking awkward all of a sudden. Mia almost snorted. The girl was far too blunt and willing to dissect her personal life to never have walked into social landmines like these before. She should have learned how to handle them long ago, and she apparently did, as she gave a quick side hug to Mia while saying another whispered apology.

“It’s fine.” Mia lied. She spent nights staying up with her little brother when they were little, listening to their mother cry locked in the bathroom. She’d never be ‘fine’ with having lived through that. Still, that was hardly something she wanted to talk about with a girl she barely knew. “As for why Graz? The house was here and I decided to move back here after uni to stay close to mom.”

“Must have been so different,” Lina mused. “You moved half the world away from one day to the next.”

“It was not,” Mia snorted. “Small towns, rolling hills and the forests look just the same over here as they do over there. Honestly, if you dropped me down on a hiking trail in either place, I wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference.”

“Hmmm,” Lina nodded slowly. “I guess … You like hiking?”

“Yeah,” Mia said with a shrug. “It’s nice and calming. And I love forests and hiking up to the top of hills.”

“Think we could still go?” Lina asked. “Hiking I mean? With all these monsters in the city … and who knows what else out in the woods. I don’t know whether we’ll ever again be safe hiking like we would have been before.”

“You just have to be more dangerous than a monster,” Mia said, a smile tugging at her lips. ‘You just have to be more dangerous than a bear.’ Gabe used to tell her that when she worried about getting mauled or eaten by one, the idiot. “With magic, we don’t even need guns to be dangerous. Lead bullets have nothing on the sort of stuff we can now throw around.”

*****

Lina watched what used to be a goblin. It took some effort, especially because of the considerable distance between herself and the monster, but she’d managed and the results spoke for themselves. It was very, very dead and spread out over the pavement.

Maybe I shouldn’t have pushed myself so much. She thought, grimacing at the gory sight. Her magic literally ripped the thing to shreds.

“See?” Mia asked next to her, glancing at her with a half-smirk that disappeared like a mirage a moment later. “Your magic works perfectly. The birds were just a bad matchup.”

Lina grinned. The little elfin girl was adorably awkward, especially when she tried to be consoling. She was like the little sister Lina never got to have.

“Seems so,” she said, then glanced to the side where the pink-haired girl effortlessly butchered a group of twelve goblins. Someone is going to be very damned sorry when they try to mess with this girl. “How long do we have here?”

“A few hours,” Mia said, shrugging as she pushed her face up to the bars to look for more prey. “Not sure. Jeff just dumped me in that room with you yesterday. I’m not even sure if they are going to ask us for anything today.”

Lina grimaced at that. If only she didn’t pass out after only two damned birds. What if someone died because she took an impromptu nap? Worse yet, what if they never let her fight again afterwards?

Lina knew how this worked. Laws only worked when there was someone to enforce them and she sure as hell didn’t see any policemen around. It’d take one lucky bastard who got too powerful with his magical bullshit and they’d all be helpless.

Power made people show their true selves, and Lina knew from experience that usually wasn’t pretty. How much worse it’d be when that power was permanent and supernatural, she could only guess, but it’d be only a matter of time before everyone learned the lesson that’d been beaten into her.

‘The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.’

Lina bit her lips. People were already ahead of her in the power-curve in this new magical reality. Not only was she lagging behind, but all she had was this flimsy air magic that she thought was barely able to do more than slow a powerful enemy down.

Was she jealous? Of course. Every time she saw one of those ‘hunters’ the landlord had basically on retainer, she burned with envy. They tore out rocks from the dirt, healed from grievous wounds, and conjured up infernos while she was a human-shaped fan. Everyone would have been jealous in her position.

If she was being honest, she almost felt the same way about the petite elf girl next to her at the start. Elves were super magical and whatnot in pop-culture, right? So the girl could probably run circles around her in the magic department, even with Lina’s supposedly ‘noble’ and awesome Bloodline.

That’s what she thought, at least and Mia’s abrasive way of, well, existing, didn’t help Lina’s opinion of her. But then she stayed behind while Lina slept like a log, invited her into her home and attempted to console her.

She’s even more lost than me. The blonde thought, watching as the elven girl perked up.

“We have a new group coming in,” Mia said, giving a quick glance over her shoulder to Lina. “Want to try taking the whole group down? I’m sure you could use some levels and practice.”

Lina took a quick breath, gulped, then stepped up to the window. If she didn’t want to be a victim ever again, she had to grab this opportunity by the balls. Magic and levels were a type of power no one would be able to take away from her.