Mana addiction was like alcoholism, if you only took a few sips here and there then you didn’t have too many problems. 

 

“Why are they all so much more talented than me?” David muttered as a magic stone crumbled into dust in his hand.

 

A feeling of euphoria filled his body and his heart began rapidly beating in his chest. His breathing began to pick up as he could feel the mana filling his body to the point of bursting and he had to stop himself from laughing loudly in happiness. This euphoric feeling came on stronger every time he absorbed a magic stone using his abilities. 

 

To be as safe as possible he needed to avoid any stress to his magic stone or corrupting his mana source, he needed to take things slow and not let the feelings of euphoria lead him astray. Normally he would have taken three or four days to absorb a magic stone, but he was determined to do it in half the time. That was because it was looking like Jasmin would also be joining Lena in the second tier soon and Harry had already caught up with David.

 

“We are going hunting again tomorrow, I need to make it to the second layer by then!” David muttered.

 

He would barely qualify to be a farmer with his magical talent on Edea, his arm was acting as a second magical stone to give him greater reserves, but it was better to use it for abilities. Moving mana to his magical stone from his arm to cast spells increased the cost of them, but he couldn’t project mana outside of the arm anymore since he had begun tempering it. His control of mana is below average since he didn’t possess the Machine Lord’s insane level of control.

 

“I haven’t had a thousand years to perfect it, I can only do things by brute force,” David muttered as he put his hands on his sweaty forehead and began rocking back and forth on the floor, he took deep breaths and waited to calm down. 

 

He kept himself on a strict schedule of when he would take in mana and the amount he would take in. While absorbing mana twice as fast as normal had its risks, it also had rewards if he could bear it. That was because overcoming addiction and coming out the other side had its benefits that only the best mages and enchanters pursued. 

 

Strong willpower and the ability to process mana faster was what it got you if you could endure it to the end. The danger of taking in too much foreign mana was that it could change the source of your mana and steer you away from being human. Once that happened there was no going back anymore and you had a high likelihood of becoming an aberration.

 

An aberration was a human or monster who became twisted due to the source of their mana becoming corrupted. A chimera is the most common result of mana corruption happening to a monster, but it was unpredictable. Humans could become even more terrifying since they possessed high intelligence before becoming aberrations. 

 

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, the feeling of euphoria started to fade leaving David shaking with a cold sweat. He felt sore, tired, and drained, all common symptoms of taking in too much mana and needing to process it all. His hands were shaking, but after staring at them for a minute he was able to get them under control and steady again.

 

Outside of the window, the sun was just coming up, turning around he could see Lena sleeping in bed. David should have also been asleep but to keep up with the group he needed to take in mana every thirteen hours and nineteen minutes. This was the shortest time he could spend waiting to absorb mana with only a small chance of corruption.

 

Reaching into his pocket he took out a small timer and clicked a button on the side to reset it. It was bronze and featured a small alarm that rang when the timer was up; he planned to carry it with him at all times until he reached a high layer. Putting the small watch in his pocket, he sat up and took his sweat-soaked shirt off, and tossed it in a corner where a pile of dirty clothes sat. 

 

Reaching into his closet, he pulled out a tight black shirt that was used for working out and slid it over his body. He was wearing shorts, as he made his way out of the room and towards the workshop. Every morning he was doing some training to prepare for hunting.

 

Making his way to the garage in the warm morning light, he pushed open the door to hear the sound of a little girl humming. Stepping through the boundary of the workshop, a ceiling had been installed and several pillars were added to support the weight. This ceiling was a floor that added several rooms and created an upstairs.

 

A set of treadmills that belonged to his parents were modified by David to accept magic stones. Mana would be converted into electricity through a spell and it allowed someone to work out safely within the walls. Hitting a few buttons and adjusting the settings, he maxed out the speed at a high incline, as he began running swiftly to stay on the treadmill.

 

It only took a few minutes for David’s leg’s to begin screaming at him in protest. A dartboard sat on the other side of the workshop, a distance of fifty feet(~15M) away from the treadmill. A cup was installed on the treadmill filled with darts of all shapes and sizes, many had a weight that was inconsistent with the others.

 

Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! Clatter! Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! Clatter! Thunk!

 

“Eight of the ten hits, and none of them was a bull’s eye,” David muttered to himself.

 

With one arm that was going to be much stronger than the other one, he was trying to figure out how to use it properly in a fight. Swinging, stabbing, throwing, slashing, and a few other actions would all be improved using his left arm. Now he was forcing himself to train skills that he hadn’t previously in an attempt to increase his options in a fight.

 

“Alright! This has been enough of a warm-up.” Reaching down he pressed a button on the treadmill, this caused a change in the contraption he had made.

 

The treadmill was connected to a round metal plate, and its belt was twice as wide as a normal one, making it like a large piece of moving ground. Suddenly the ground began to move around on a pivot causing the treadmill he was on to rotate as the incline changed. The front suddenly heaved forward while the back raised sharply almost causing him to fall onto his face and he had to throw his weight back.

 

Gritting his teeth and forcing himself to stumble through it, he was ejected off the back of the belt and rolled across the concrete. Rolling with the momentum of the fall, he was able to avoid taking the brunt of the damage and quickly get to his feet. Springing up from the ground, he moved his feet rapidly as he got back on the treadmill and fought to get used to its constant movement.

 

The original branding of the treadmills that David had taken apart to make these machines were removed and he had decided to start his own line of training machines. He had written ‘Training machine  #1 Balance’ on the side of it. To master this machine would take enormous grace and balance, this was something he needed to create the best platform for the skills he was working on.

 

Using a small remote that fell from the ceiling on a cord, he pressed a green button that had ‘start’ painted on the button in dark green paint. The side of this remote used to go to a small ceiling crane that had also been renamed, it was ‘Training Machine #2 Aim’. This one caused some small electric engines on a frame to start moving an arm that was connected to the target. 

 

Clatter! Clunk! Thunk! Clatter! Clatter! Clunk! Thunk! Thunk! Clunk! Clatter!

 

“Only 3/10 while working on my balance and aim, I need to get to at least 8/10 with one or two in the bull’s eye,” David muttered. 

 

“Big Brother, let me help you!” Aubrey called as she climbed down a ladder in the corner. 

 

“Hey Kiddo, good morning. Did you sleep well?” He asked as he continued to focus on the ground beneath him.

 

“Yeah! I slept great!” She called happily. 

 

The goal was to build small rooms above the workshop that the kids without parents could sleep in. Jasmin had also decided to join them up there and act as a Big Sister when she wasn’t busy doing other things like healing injuries. With several people being in their advanced years, her healing was very appreciated around the small compound.

 

Aubrey ran over in a white nightgown that was too big for her, it was clear she had just woken up. She skipped around wearing small blue slippers as she picked up all of the darts and ran them back to David. Setting them in the cup that he had thrown them out of and smiled at him before dashing off to a sink in the corner of the workshop to begin brushing her teeth and washing her face. 

 

“I will see about finding a toilet and bathtub while we are out tomorrow. My uncle has experience in installing them so we should be able to get you a proper bathroom here.” David assured her.

 

Hearing a bell ring, he looked back to the ladder and saw another young girl climbing down the ladder. She was followed by several little boys and then several more girls who also came down to brush their teeth and wash their faces. Some of them began making their way towards the house with bathing equipment like soap and towels.

 

This was the remnants of a class of students who were touring the mine when the bus they used to get there disappeared. Aubrey and Billy’s mother had been an assistant and was with the bus when this happened. At first, the other children blamed them for being stuck here but those feelings had faded over the months and now they were treated a lot better.

 

“Billy! Get down here and stop sulking!” David called upstairs.

 

It took almost a minute before a boy could be seen making his way down the ladder wearing a thick woolen cap over his head and ears. There was a look of defeat on his face and he looked like he hadn’t been sleeping very well. Bags had developed under his eyes from a lack of sleep and he was starting to become pale.

 

“Did you need something, David?” Billy asked him with some hesitation.

 

David sighed in resignation when he saw how the kid was behaving. “Billy… I forbid you from wearing head coverings around the house.”

 

“No! Don’t do this to me!” Billy yelled in fright.

 

“You are letting it affect your sleep, we are supposed to go hunting tomorrow. I can’t have you keep acting like this, what are you going to do if you grow a tail or other features?” David asked him before his face went serious. “Take it off, you need to get used to it. Jasmin can fix it once she is in the 6th layer.”

 

“You said that it could take years to get to that point, I will have to look at this every day…” Billy muttered as his hand slowly raised to his head and began to lift off the woolen cap.

 

Removing the cap revealed that his human ears were fusing back into his head from behind, they were almost gone. From the top of his head, two furry flaps had formed and been starting to stand up in a triangular form. There were two cat’s ears in the same brown color of fur as his hair.

 

“I told you that it was going to happen and that you needed to prepare yourself. The hearing you receive from those ears will also be much more sensitive than your human ears were.” David told him seriously.

 

“I am just worried about how the other kids are going to treat me,” Billy told him hesitantly.

 

“They will probably make some jokes about it, that is just a part of being different,” David told him. “If they can’t see past the superficial then they aren’t worth being friends with. It can also serve as a warning to others.”

 

“A warning?” Billy asked.

 

Thunk! Thunk! Clatter! Thunk! Clunk! Thunk! Clatter! Clatter! Thunk! Clunk!

 

“A warning about just how easy it is to lose your humanity,” David told him.

 

David’s burned arm was held out after he finished the last throw and he let the light reflect off of the exposed flesh. This caused the scar tissue to reflect the light and show the various levels of scarring that was visible, some of it even reached the muscle. He didn’t have fingernails anymore on that hand and instead, the skin hardened and blackened in their place.

 

“A lot of the survivors are frightened of this arm, that is because it looks so different now. I originally didn’t like this arm either, but it has kind of grown on me.” David said with a smile as he picked up another dart.

 

This time he threw the dart much differently and his arm moved with a flash, the sound of the air being ripped could be heard from the throw. The dart whistled through the air from the force and the stabilizing fins were almost pulled off by the time it hit the dartboard. The dart tip was an inch(~2.54CM) long with some space for your fingers on a metal grip that was attached to a plastic tail fin.

 

Crack!

 

The entire needle entered into the wood before the dartboard cracked from the thicker grip forcing its way into the dartboard. The dart finally stopped as the grip made its way through the wood and the plastic tail was the only thing visible. A smile made its way across David’s face as he saw he had hit the dartboard and not thrown the dart through the wall.

 

“Those ears are going to be better than anything a normal human could ever hope to have, you will be able to hear much better. Instead of only looking at the negatives try looking at the positives. Besides, you might be able to use those ears one day to do something that only you can do.” David told him seriously. “Then no one will laugh at those ears.”

 

David watched the boy put his head down in contemplation and turned his attention back to the dartboard. 

 

***

A few hours later…

 

David had taken a shower after his workout, this was a much lighter one than he normally did since he didn’t want to be sore or stiff while he was hunting. Sitting at a workbench at the side, he was busily working away with an angle grinder cutting at a sheet of metal. Sparks flew across the workshop as he followed the lines he had marked out.

 

Across the room on a flat-folding cot, Jasmin was using her magic to heal an older woman with a deep cut on her hand that was being held closed with a bloody rag. The woman had made a mistake while cutting up meat to can for the winter and almost lost a finger. Jasmin had sweat at her brow as she focused her attention on supplying mana for the spell and invoking Rollo.

 

Harry was in the kitchen leading some groups of women to use salt to can monster meat in mason jars they had collected while raiding. The meat they collected would last for a few weeks, it was enough to give them a bit of breathing room. There were also plans to make traps to catch some of the fish that hadn’t become monsters.

 

Lena was busy doing some programming changes on the aiming machine to allow it to move smoother and make it more challenging for him to hit. She had also done the programming for the balance machine as well as for a general treadmill that didn’t spin on a turntable. It was used by Lena, Jasmin, Billy, and Aubrey, even the other kids were starting to use it and treated it as a game.

 

A clear plastic wall made from shower curtains divided the workshop into two sections since it had to be used for so many different purposes. Duct tape was used to merge these shower curtains along the seams and join them together. For the last few days, the team had been busy processing everything that they had acquired from going hunting and scavenging.

 

“David, can we get some more folding chairs?” Jasmin asked.

 

“Yeah, what did you need them for?” He asked.

 

“Some of the people who I have healed were religious previously,” Jasmin told him. “They need something to believe in now that everything has ended and they are latching onto Rollo.”

 

David sighed when he heard this news but it was something he expected to happen. Invokers were often confused with priests serving some god, even the astrals used this to their advantage when they were making followers. The thing he was most worried about was people claiming the invoked beings were gods and using them to their own ends, but she had already seen this coming from him.

 

“It is just meant to be a support group for people to come together who have lost their purpose,” Jasmin explained. “I come from a very religious family, I know all about how exclusive religions can be. You don’t need to worry that I would allow something to form here that harms people for their beliefs or how they were born.”

 

“Alright, I won’t say anything about it again,” David said with a nod. 

 

At this point Lena stood up and left the room with her laptop in her arms, it looked like she was going to the house to get something. David took no notice of this as he went back to using the grinder to cut out metal blanks to make throwing knives. He planned to carve runes into them that would give them different effects and treat them as single-use weapons.

 

“Hey, David?” Jasmin called to him.

 

“Yeah, what is it?” He asked.

 

“You need to be careful with Lena,” Jasmin told him.

 

“I know, she has been through a lot.” He began but Jasmin stopped him.

 

“No, the way that she thinks and sees the world is different from us. I don’t know how to explain it, but you need to be careful.” She urged him. “I don’t have a good read on it but I get a strange feeling from her sometimes.”

 

David could tell that Jasmin was being serious, but he wasn’t too sure what she meant. Lena had always been quiet but she was generally helpful and supported him in everything that he did. He suddenly found himself having problems seeing the blonde woman as anything but pitiful.

 

“I will,” David told her.

 

While he didn’t know what to be careful of, he decided that Jasmin wouldn’t give him a warning like this for no reason. So far asides from her refusal to talk about her past, she had been very supportive of him up to this point. His experience with dating was shallow, so he didn’t have much experience that he could use to help him. 

 

He tried to carefully think about her actions up to now, but aside from how she handled his cousin, everything seemed fine. It seemed to him like she was trying to warn Sarah that her father had those tendencies more than anything else. That was an assumption he was making since he realized he never asked her why she did it.

 

Since his cousin had gone missing, part of the reason he went hunting was in hopes of finding her again. The one thing he was sincerely hoping for was that she didn’t go to Denver and run into the vampire Marco. Vampires worked on a hierarchy and the closer you were to the source of the vampires, the more control you had over the spawn.

 

“Thank you for letting me know, I am counting on all of you to bring things to my attention that I might not notice.” He said calmly. 

 

David decided to put his tools away, he felt that his mana was full and he was ready to move to the next layer. It was a process that was strenuous and took time to ensure that the person didn’t fail. For David, failure wasn’t an option if he wanted to be able to survive in this world that was becoming more dangerous by the day.

 

“I am going to sit in the van for a few minutes, don’t let anyone interrupt me.” He told Jasmin as he stood up and walked over to the van that was parked outside of the bay doors and climbed into the back of it. 

 

“Alright!” She called back to him.

 

He got comfortable by leaning against the wall and prepared himself to begin the process. What it took was using the mana in the magical stone and compressing it to build a wall in the center that would be the basis for the layer. This would provide strength to the stone and allow it to take on even greater pressures, it was the basis for advancement. 

 

It took a few moments for him to feel his mana coalesce and he began to walk through the process of compressing it. It took several moments for him to build enough pressure inside his magical stone that he could feel the layer start to form, but he was having a problem. He wasn’t sure if his control was too weak, or if he was too hasty and he needed more time to stabilize the mana in his magical stone, but he could feel it slipping out of his control.

 

Are you kidding me?! He screamed in his mind.

 

The Machine Lord had never even officially entered the first layer, he was considered to be as weak as a baby. A sad smile crossed his face as he realized that the repercussions of a failure would be too severe for him to be able to recover from promptly. At best he would be weakened for several months and need to start over again and at worst his magical stone could shatter from being under too much internal pressure.

 

Just as he felt the mana that he had put under extreme pressure to create the layer beginning to slip, he felt an ice-cold feeling run up and down his spine several times. It felt like fingers made of cold air seemed to reach inside of him and dig into his body causing an oppressive chill to spread from his chest to his whole body. Suddenly he felt the mana in his body beginning to compress further as the layer started forming from the pressure.

 

He didn’t know how long he was sitting against the wall of the van, but he realized he was shivering and he had goosebumps all over his body. His hair was standing on end and when he exhaled he could see his breath. This caused him some shock for a brief moment before a feeling of exhaustion set into his body that was bone-deep.

 

“Damnit, I used all my mana to form the layer!” David had forgotten about this part of the process when he saw how carefree Lena had been after she had advanced. “Why is everything so unfair! I almost failed?!”

 

He was shocked almost stupid now that the calamity was over and he could finally breathe again. Thinking it over carefully he realized that he had been taking in too much foreign mana and not giving it enough time to digest. He would need to come up with a different way to overcome the difference in potential if he wanted to keep up with the people around him.

 

I need to create potions… that are going to create even more health problems for me down the road… 

 

Mana addiction was mostly a psychological battle where someone constantly wanted to take in more and more mana. With this near failure, he realized that he needed even more support. He wouldn’t be able to find any magical plants to make potions from, he would have to grow them himself if he wanted them. There was no such thing as an easy ride and potions had plenty of risks as well.

 

Too much of a good thing could be a bad thing, and potions were something that fell solidly in this category. They all had toxicity to them that was impossible to remove without taking the beneficial effects with them. Most people who used potions regularly developed one of many different conditions with some causing things like dementia, tremors, emotional instability, insomnia, and many more delightful things.

 

David was interrupted when he heard the door open on the van and saw Lena standing in front of him with a blank face and the creepy doll in her hands. The doll's veiled face looked cold as usual, and the dark eyes seemed as muddy as usual.  The mourning-style dress looked solemn and covered the entire body of the doll from the neck down.

 

Lena was wearing loose-fitting sweat pants and had on a white tank top with her blonde hair tied in a bun. Normally she didn't show much expression but after a moment her slight smile appeared on her face.

 

“Did you finish masturbating?” She asked him.

 

His mind went completely blank, and he found his jaw opening in shock.

 

“Your mom told me that your Dad would sneak off to masturbate when they first got into a relationship. He was too afraid to ask her for sex, but you don’t newed to worry.” She told him this with a perfectly straight expression, causing horror to spread over his face. “You just need to ask and we ca-”

 

“Lena! What the fuck has my mother been telling you!?!” He yelled, interrupting her.