David had been working for several hours straight, his eyes were bloodshot. Through the hole in the ceiling, the moonlight could be seen coming down and casting a dim glow in the furnace. The reason he was awake now was easy to determine.

 

Boom! Boom! Bang! Clang! Boom! Boom!

 

The walking corpses were smashing at the walls of the furnace he was in, and the sound was enough to drive a normal person insane. That wasn’t the only sound he was having to hear.

 

ROOOAAAARRRR!!! BOOOM! RIIIP! CRASH!

 

The Butcher Ghoul could hear all the sounds that the walking corpses were making, and it was being drawn to this section of the building. David wasn’t sure if it was ripping apart the walls or going through the collapsed passage, but he knew he needed to create something that could kill the Butcher Ghoul. Above him was the furnace unit that he had disassembled for parts. The thing he discovered that shocked him was that the natural gas was still operating.   

 

The metal plate that separated him from the parts of the furnace had been opened by filing off the heads of the bolts. He had attached this plate to the grate behind him that was being held on by a pair of screws. Duct tape and cold weld could do incredible things for bonding metal to metal. The plumber’s tape had been rolled together to form a rope, and it connected to the handle of the toolbox. The other end of this makeshift rope ran around David and to the other side of the reinforced grate. A second rope of plumber’s tape ran up to the gas line.

 

“I will let you in and burn you all alive, yep…” David muttered to himself with bloodshot eyes. “But first, the big fucker.”

 

A metal end cap had a slot filed through it, and a Butcher’s Blade had been epoxied in place using strong adhesives and pressure. He had filed several U-shaped inserts to help hold it. The bottom of the blade had been filed flat, as had the head of the baton. David was currently holding a rubber mallet, a slot had been filed into it to accept a bullet using one of the round files.

 

Pop! Pop! Pop!

 

Reaching to the back of the hammer, he saw the primer of a bullet peeking at him. Grabbing the rim of the bullet with his fingers, he extracted it from the rubber. Using the rubber mallet made it easy to knock the bullet tip out of the casing by inserting it inside and swinging it. The back of the baton had also been removed, and David pulled the bullet tip off and poured it into the handle. The original end cap had a hole drilled in it already, and David had inserted the ignitor for the furnace inside it. With a click it would ignite the gunpowder and drive the spearhead forward, to avoid breaking his arm he filed the last section of the baton flat so that it would eject from the handle. This would only be possible if he pulled a safety pin out of it that he made from his lock pick. 

 

He could extend it to act as a short spear or a bladed mace head. Or he could retract it, pull the safety pin, and fire off the weapon as a short spear with a lot of heft. He had used the gunpowder from three bullets and dumped them into the tip of the baton. He then took the igniter and a wad of paper and pushed it into the metal sleeve, deep into the gunpowder. Securing the end closed using the round metal end cap, the cable was coming out of the hole that used to be there to let the air out, and sealed with adhesive.

 

“My mechanical sense tells me that the weapon can survive a single shot, it should also be powerful enough to kill the Butcher Ghoul.” David said to himself. “I am betting it got injured when it was fighting the Esper undead, and it ate its corpse to try to recover. If it is still injured, then this is my best chance to kill it.”

 

Ghouls always become ravenously hungry when they are hurt, it is also the best time to defeat them.

 

“If I can draw it back inside the duct like before, it will be easy to kill it.” David muttered in contemplation. “I don’t want to let it have time to recover if it is hurt.”

 

The other Butcher’s blade had also been attached to a pipe, turning it into a normal knife. Now that the voices in his head had stopped, he felt much calmer. He didn’t feel as panicked or as desperate anymore. He had also thought about how he wanted to fight in the future. Magic was good, but he couldn’t afford to allow himself to be as fragile as the Machine Lord had been, David wasn’t capable of instantly regenerating. 

 

This was apparent by the angry red lines that were forming on his face from the scratches he got from the Butcher Ghoul. To clean them, he had mixed some pool chlorine in water to make a type of bleach, but it was really painful to use. The goal for killing the Butcher Ghoul was to gain access to precious antibiotics and other medicines, he also needed its magic stone for his growth. That was by using his own magic stone to absorb the mana from a more powerful one. Humans could not eat the stones directly like most monsters could, so they could only siphon mana out of the stone to increase their reserves. This was the only way to increase your mana layers quickly, without using precious herbs and resources.

 

This took the form of meditation and took a while to receive the full benefits of the absorption. They often considered the magic stones of monsters and powerful humans as treasures for those who were training. The core of both Martial Force and Magic was the magic stone a person possessed. To cast a spell, or use an ability, mana had to be molded into the correct form and then reach the correct power level to activate. The research was very dangerous, with a single mistake being capable of crippling the person who is doing it. Mana running out of control most commonly tends to explode in the worst cases or some other equally dangerous phenomena.

 

Looking at the filth covering his clothes, and the deep blisters that had formed in his hands from operating tools he wasn’t used to, he concluded that he didn’t want to do this ever again.

 

“I think I want to be a magician,” David muttered in sadness. “Is it too late for some kind of giant to appear and take me off to a magical school?”

 

David closed the reinforced chute and pressed his back to it. The hatch to get it was secured with both the toolbox and a thick rope made of duct tape. It also had some steel banding wrapped around it, keeping it closed. Even with the constant pounding around him, he was tired enough that he could ignore it all. Closing his eyes, he let himself drift off.

 

-

 

A large stone pillar stood covered in cracks within the large chamber, thousands of these same pillars all stood, supporting the large stone ceiling. The pillars appeared to be made of dense granite, the ceiling was slabs of stone being held together by pressure. These pillars held up a monument to the current royal family of the Tullens Empire. Inside each pillar was a sealed prisoner, trapped inside the stone, for thousands of years generations of Tullens Royalty had added to this extensive crypt.

 

This crypt was designed with a single thought in mind, a single failed pillar would bring down the entire structure. That was the original intention, but after hundreds of years of corruption seeping into the empire, this thought had been abandoned, and instead, it was now used as a tourist attraction, to drive fear of the Tullens into their citizens and visitors. They could store objects in stone with their ability, and imprisoning people in granite was one of their favorite methods of sealing people away. What they were doing was using mana to store the molecules inside of another structure. It was true death the moment they let the target go, all except a single victim of this grim mausoleum. 

 

This time David was a disembodied ghost, he could look around and see all of the surrounding pillars. The pillar that intrigued him the most was in ruins, pieces of it had fallen all over the floor.

 

Crack! Crack! Pop!

 

David watched as a few more fissures formed in the granite, then a large piece fell off, triggering a domino effect as all of the granite fell away. The ceiling that should have collapsed with the destruction of a pillar… did not happen. Over the years many of these pillars had broken because of faults in the granite, and never once had a prisoner come out of one of them. The panic that happened every single time a part of the monument caved in was difficult to quell, and it was costly to repair. David watched in horror as a frail man came out of the pillar, he could not see the man’s face.

 

It’s the Machine Lord!

 

“Hahahahaha!” The man laughed madly as he crawled out of the rubble.

 

His broken bones seemed to jerk into position, as if they were being violently set back into shape. His scratches and wounds were instantly spitting out any rubble stuck inside of his body and instantly sealing. The sound of constant crunching and popping as his bones rearranged themselves into their proper positions was only overshadowed by the sounds of the rocks smashing around on the ground.

 

“I’m finally out!” The Machine Lord roared into the air in a mixture of excitement and rage. “Just you wait until I get my hands on you! I will torment your entire family line! Hahahaha!”

 

The man stood on wobbly feet and began to shakily walk forward.

 

“123 years, 235 days, 16 hours, 22 minutes, 19 seconds, and the rest... doesn’t matter.” The Machine Lord muttered.

 

“HALT!” a male voice screamed in shock.

 

The Machine Lord stopped as a man ran up to him wearing enchanted armor, beside him were several golems wielding long poles with a blunt tip that was emitting sparks. 

 

“You dare stop me with my technology…. Hahahaha! How foolish!” The Machine Lord laughed as if he had seen a joke.

 

David watched in horror as the air around the man with the shadowy head seemed to vibrate. It looked like a heat mirage emanating out of the Machine Lord and spreading around him, filling up the air in a large circumference. David estimated the radius to be about 45 feet (14M) with him in the center. 

 

The man wearing heavy enchanted armor suddenly screamed in horror, this was because the hundred-pound arm armor suddenly disconnected from the shoulders, breaking both of his arms. He pitched forward as the legs stopped working, and it broke his spine in the fall. The armor made a loud clattering noise as it hit the ground, and various screws and plates detached and fell off. The golems also were stuck twitching and thrashing around when they were hit with the wave of twisting light. They suddenly locked up as they seemed to run out of energy and all of the lights in their runes turned off. Pieces of the enchanted armor and the man’s gun began to snake their way onto these golems and gave them additional parts and weapons.

 

“How utterly foolish. Do you have any idea who I am?” The Machine Lord asked the man who was staring up at the Machine Lord from the ground.

 

The man whose armor had abandoned him could only look at the Machine Lord as he faded in and out of consciousness, his bones crushed by his armor.

 

The golem’s both jerked back to life as the various parts of the armor and gun finished equipping themselves to them. Both of the golem’s suddenly performed a deep bow before they took their places at the Machine Lord’s side.

 

“Let’s go, we have an empire to rip apart.” The Machine Lord said with glee as he walked past the dying man.

 

One of the golems at the Machine Lord’s side did not miss bringing its armored foot down on the man’s head, ending his misery.

-

 

David violently jerked awake, his breathing picking up several octaves. He shakily reached into the shredded tote and grabbed his inhaler, taking a puff off of it. 

 

“I thought I was done getting those memories.” David muttered in horror. 

 

The banging was still going on all around him, but he had shut it out of his mind. Right now he was digging through the memories of the Machine Lord and he realized they were nowhere near complete. This was the first time he was trying to see the man’s full life, but he had only seen the last 30 years. He was missing the context for a lot of the information he had received, there didn’t appear to be many holes in that.

 

“I can’t think with all this banging going on.” David muttered in anger.

 

He would also never be as awesome as the Machine Lord, even if he had his entire life to practice mana control. The Machine Lord created a way to control his mana by creating a tape that was a single molecule wide. This tape had 3 states, neutral, positive, and negative. Using these, he created an entire language for magical machines through the power of Trinary. He used the properties of mana to overcome the issue that transistors had, and that was the precision of mana.

 

These cords of mana he created were also incredibly strong, and he could use them to manipulate non-organic substances, like the armor the man wore in his dream. Even with David possessing more mana, he wasn’t able to control it so finely he could adjust the polarity of each molecule and use them to control golems and drones the same way he did. 

 

“I can only try to be a mage who can somewhat fight.” David muttered as he crawled through the ducts. 

 

 It was morning, and the undead would not be as powerful as they were at night. This was his best time to deal with the Butcher Ghoul. David already knew more about monsters than anybody in the world did at this point, if he could not kill a measly Butcher Ghoul he could never survive the other horrors that mana could produce.

 

I also need to get some antibiotics.

 

His wounds were turning black, it didn’t matter how much you cleaned yourself if you lived in filth. The furnace was not a place he could survive for long. As David crawled through the duct, he could hear the ghoul continuing to make its way towards the walking corpses that were pounding on the furnace unit. Arriving where the ghoul had smashed through the wall to get him, he carefully made his way through the hole. Both of his knives were in each of his hands, with the normal knife tucked into his waistband.

 

David came out of the ducting, into the room with the safe he had opened, and noticed the ghoul had not returned here. Walking slowly towards the doorway, he peeked out into the hallway. Near the end of the hallway where the ghoul was, he could see rocks coming from around a bend and hitting the wall. Large dents were already formed and a large pile of rubble had formed, filling half the hallway.

 

It’s digging out the rubble…

 

Turning his head towards the control room at the other end of the hall, he could see a bloody sight. The skeleton of a skinny creature with a large head was present, it was the manipulator-type undead. A crown of bones was forming from the crown of its skull.

 

It must have been hiding in the cafeteria, the zombies in the yard were the pets it was raising.

 

David began to wonder if this ghoul had been eating the patients that were trapped in their rooms.

 

I need to figure out what happened here, and how much time has passed since this all started. I can only do that if I kill all of the undead. This can also be the start of my training. I will be the king of junk!

 

As he turned his sights toward the bend in the hallway that the ghoul was throwing rocks from, he suddenly applauded his choice to go into the ducts.

If I went to the end of the hallway I would have found a dead end!