Chapter 13: By The Stream
-OH GODS I AM-!
His core was so close to hers. It was a feeling that made her existence cry out in ecstasy.
Her core was singing.
Not metaphorically. The mana that constituted her consciousness was oscillating at a frequency she'd never reached before, the crystalline structure at her centre vibrating with an energy that was rebuilding her from the inside out. She could feel the repair happening — not painful, nothing like pain, more like the feeling of a held note finally resolving into its chord.
The System acknowledged it with characteristic understatement.
CORE STABILITY: 28% → 38%
Ten percent.
Ten percent in — she calculated quickly — minutes. Compared to the fractional gains she'd made from ambient mana over days of careful accumulation. She turned the number over in her awareness and felt something that might have been wonder.
Oh. Goodness.
She giggled to herself as she fully understood now why her core stability had jumped at the mall. Why the numbers had moved then too, in those quiet minutes that she hadn't had the framework to fully process. The mana transfer wasn't incidental. It wasn't accidental spill over. It was — she reached for the right concept and found it waiting for her — communion. His mana and hers, the same and different, resonating against each other until something in the frequency matched and energy moved between them.
He was feeding her core.
Without knowing it.
Without knowing any of it.
She held that knowledge in the way she'd learned to hold large things — not grasping, just letting it rest in her awareness until she understood its shape.
Bright. Oh. My. Bright.
His mana core was so close. She could feel it through the short distance between them — that familiar warmth, that steady aura of love she'd known longer than she'd known anything, the love that had been the first thing she was ever aware of. His mana was slower now. Calmer. The grief and fear that had saturated it during the breakdown had not disappeared but had changed quality — moved from acute to bearable, from wound to bruise.
She'd done that. Not intentionally. Not through any ability she'd chosen to use.
Just by being here.
I'm here, she thought. The words felt different now than they had at the end of the last chapter. Less desperate. More certain. I am here and I am getting stronger and I don't know yet what I'll be able to do when I'm strong enough but I am not going to stop.
Through the mana she could hear him breathing slow. Feel the rhythm of him settling.
She reached toward the vibrations in the air, the hearing she'd discovered in the hollow tree's silence, and listened.
His heartbeat.
That was all. Just his heartbeat, and hers, and the stream, and the woodpecker, and the blue sky she couldn't see but knew was there because he was looking at it and he had told her, and she could feel where his attention went.
And this was more than enough for her.
He lay there for ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. Long enough that a crow landed in the oak above them, considered the situation, decided it was not its business, and left.
Then he sat up.
Looked at Cherry.
Smoothed her hair back from her face with the automatic tenderness of someone who has done the same thing ten thousand times and will do it ten thousand more.
"Alright. I know the timing and location isn't exactly appropriate.." he said with a bashful smirk. Not to her, exactly. To both of them. To the forest and the stream and the blue sky and the thing that came next.
Whilst getting dressed, he checked his stats.
HP: 270/270
MP: 218/220
Better. Much better. He was ready to start pacing his new sprint skill to gain some ground quicker. His Danger Sense was quiet — that low, constant hum of a passive skill doing its job, the absence of alarm being its own kind of message.
He got Cherry settled back into the pack. Carefully. Her hat. Her hair. The small adjustments that he never skipped, not even now, not even here in the middle of a forest off the M3 with the apocalypse still ongoing in all directions.
He stood up.
Adjusted the straps.
Checked the battery.
Battery: 20.54%
Time remaining: ~9.9h
The number sat in his vision and he looked at it the way he always looked at it — with the particular focused calm of someone who has decided that panic is not a tool and therefore has stopped reaching for it. Nine hours was not enough to make it far. But nine hours was also not nothing. Nine hours was a road running roughly west, parallel through the trees, and a head full of skills that hadn't existed three days ago, and somewhere ahead there there would be an energy source. A way to recharge Cherry.
Nine hours was time enough for the next thing.
He started walking.
"Yeah. We'll be alright," he said. The pack settled against his back, and in the dimensional compression within it, against his spine through all that impossible folded space, he could almost feel her holding onto him. Almost feel her there. "Onwards and then we figure out the rest."
The rhythm found him without him looking for it.
Sprint, walk, recover. Sprint, walk, recover.
He'd worked it out in the first ten minutes — let his MP bar climb up to nearly full, activate Mana Sprint, feel the world accelerate into something almost dreamlike, the trees blurring at the edges of his vision and his footfalls becoming something between running and flying. Then the mana would tick down, 5 or 10 points and then he'd drop back to a walk. Let the bar climb again while his breathing steadied and the forest moved past at a more human pace. This was to ensure that he kept the most mana points available in case something tried to eat him.
It wasn't "travelling in a military truck" speed. But it ate ground, and he was very pleased with it.
MP: 215/220
Sprint.
The trees thinned and thickened in turns, the forest breathing around him. Through gaps in the canopy the sky was still that same indifferent blue, going slightly golden now as the morning moved toward noon. He could see the motorway barrier in flashes between the trunks — white concrete, then shadow, then white again — marking his bearing like a stitched seam running through the landscape.
MP: 210/220
Walk.
"Good pace," he said quietly.
The pack shifted with his gait, that familiar settled weight. He'd stopped noticing it the way you stopped noticing your own heartbeat. It was just part of him now — the pack, and what was inside it, and the number that lived in the corner of his vision.
Battery: 19.85%
Time remaining: ~9.5h
He'd never questioned how he could see this information nor what was recording or keeping track. Instead he focused on running calculations constantly, the way he always did. Against distances, against likely power sources, against everything he knew and didn't know about what lay between here and Cornwall. Aldermaston was a solid logical next step — the AWE facility, military infrastructure, generators almost certainly, but then again the risk of being turned away if he turned up by himself was near enough guaranteed. There were plenty of residential opportunities to find power banks or somewhere where the grid hadn't failed yet, so he'd follow this route for now until he reached buildings and then he'd just look around until he found power.
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Simple.
99.99% chance of success.
"Nine hours is more than enough." He said aloud.
It had to be.
MP: 215/220
Sprint.
Skid.
"Woa!"
He almost missed the truck, or rather, the black smoke column rising up into the sky.
It was thirty metres off the road, buried nose-first in the treeline as if it had left the motorway at speed and simply run out of world. Military markings — one of the convoy's, or one like it, he couldn't tell which. The cab had burned. The metal was blackened and warped, the windscreen gone, the interior reduced to springs and charred foam. The trees around it were scorched in a radius that told him it had gone up fast and hot.
He stopped at the edge of the ditch and looked at it.
No bodies. Same as before. He was developing a theory about what that pattern meant and he didn't like where it went, so he filed it and moved on.
He was turning away when he heard it.
A single gunshot.
Flat, sharp, and close — north, through the trees. Then another. A third. Then silence.
Pistol. Not a rifle. He guessed.
He stood still and listened.
His Danger Sense pulsed faintly, once — not the full blaze of immediate threat, but a low, cautious warning. That way. Something bad was happening that way.
Sprint.
He was already moving.
The Elvetham appeared between the trees like a fever dream of the old world.
A manor house — genuinely old, three centuries of English money expressed in red brick and white stone dressing, tall mullioned windows, a gravel sweep of drive curving up to a porticoed entrance. Topiary flanked the approach, geometric. Decorative ironwork. Stone balustrades. Flower beds that were still immaculate.
It sat in its grounds with the absolute confidence of something that had outlasted everything before and fully expected to outlast this too.
Under different circumstances it would have been beautiful.
Currently there were five goblins in the car park and they were making that sound.
Bright stopped at the treeline with a clear sightline to the hotel entrance and took them in completely before he moved.
Small — knee height, perhaps slightly more, lean and wiry in the way of things that had been built for quickness rather than strength. Their skin was mottled grey-green, catching the light badly, with a texture that looked almost granular. They moved in the loose, jostling manner of a pack that was excited — shoving each other, darting forward and back, their movements punctuated by that chittering wet laughter that hit some frequency in Bright's skull that he associated purely with wrongness.
ENEMY IDENTIFIED: VILE GOBLIN
Level: 4 — 5
Threat Level: MODERATE (Pack Behaviour: Threat scales significantly with numbers)
Aggression Type: Opportunistic assault — Vile Goblins actively seek to subdue female prey for enslavement and other purposes. They are known to target isolated survivors. Extreme caution advised.
In the middle of them, on the gravel, was Sergeant Martinez.
She was down.
Her rifle was gone — nowhere in his sightline, either lost or empty and discarded. Her sidearm was in her right hand, the slide locked back, magazine spent, and she was using it as a club with a ferocity that told him she hadn't stopped fighting for a single second since she'd run out of rounds. One goblin had a broken nose that she'd put there. Another was favouring its left side.
Her left leg was wrong. He could see it from here — the angle of it when she tried to shift her weight, the way it refused to support her. She was fighting from the ground, one knee up, the other leg useless beneath her, keeping them back through sheer aggression and the fact that she hadn't given them a single moment of stillness to work with.
Her jacket was half-gone. One sleeve torn away at the shoulder. The shirt beneath it torn open. Her trousers, hanging down by her ankles in shreds. They were circling her — testing, retreating, darting in — and she was screaming at them, a continuous furious torrent that was mostly profanity and entirely meant, her free hand clawing for anything she could use as a weapon.
One of them grabbed her hair. Two others grabbed an arm each. The biggest one silenced her with a heavy punch to the gut and got on top of her.
Bright stepped out of the treeline.
MANA BLADE ACTIVATED — MP: 208/220
He pulled the mana and threw before the nearest goblin had finished registering his presence.
The first blade left his hand at the peak of his stride — a shard of compressed blue-white energy, shaped in half a second, released on pure instinct. It crossed the twenty metres of car park in a fraction of a heartbeat and punched through the grabbing goblin's chest with a sound like a nail driving into hardwood.
The creature went down without a sound.
The others look over at their fallen comrade in confusion and laughter.
MANA BLADE ACTIVATED — MP: 198/100
The second blade was already in his palm. He shaped it and threw it mid-stride, not breaking his run, the motion becoming fluid in a way it hadn't been a week ago — arm back, focus, release — and it took the nearest goblin in the throat. The creature dropped, the laughter cutting off, replaced with gargling.
Three left.
They spotted him, but they didn't run. That was the thing about goblins, he was already learning — they didn't reassess. The pack instinct just redirected. Two of them peeled off toward him while the third, the largest, turned back toward Martinez, pinned her arms.
No.
He threw a blade at it — hurried, slightly wide, it clipped the creature's shoulder and spun it sideways rather than dropping it — and then the other two were on him.
The first one he dealt with cleanly. It came in low and fast and he sidestepped, got his hand in its collar, and used its own momentum to drive it face-first into the side of a parked car with enough force that it didn't get up.
The second one was faster than he expected.
It got inside his guard while his weight was still shifted from the slam and hit him across the ribs — not with a blade, with its claws, a concentrated slicing attack that landed directly on the crash injury and sent a white spike of pain through his entire left side and he crashed onto the ground.
-40HP
HP: 230/270
He staggered.
The goblin pressed the advantage.
-5HP
-5HP
-5HP
It was on him before he'd recovered, its weight disproportionate to its size, clawing at his face, his arms, then it suddenly went into a frenzy and reached into his pack and grabbed Cherry. and Something cold and absolute dropped into Bright's chest.
No.
Get your filthy fucking hands off her.
He grabbed the creature by both wrists. It was strong — he hadn't expected that, the wiry arms driving toward him with a leverage that didn't match the body's size. It laughed. Right in his face, up close, that wet chittering sound, its eyes bright with something that had no innocence in it.
Bright headbutted it.
-5HP
HP: 210/270
The impact cracked something — in the goblin's face or his own forehead, he wasn't immediately sure which. Pain burst across his skull. The creature reeled, grip loosening, and he used the half-second to get the Santoku free from his belt.
He didn't throw it.
The fourth goblin dropped, gutted like a fish. Bright was breathing hard, blood in his left eye from a cut on his forehead.
He rushed up to the the fifth — the large one, the one he'd clipped in the shoulder — it was manically laughing and panting, trying to get back on top of Martinez. Bright rammed the knife into the base of its neck.
+500 XP
The goblin stiffened. Bright ripped the knife out and booted it square in the temple, and stabbed it again in the neck. Fuelled by a cold rage, he moved swiftly over to each one and cut their throats with zero hesitation or grimace.
+385XP
+395XP
+410XP
+410XP
The car park went still.
Bright stood in the sudden silence with blood running down his face and the Santoku in his hand and his ribs screaming at him, and for a moment neither of them moved or spoke.
"Nokks," she said. Her voice croaked.
"Martinez." He crossed to her and crouched down. Up close she was even worse than she'd looked from the treeline. The cut above her eyebrow was deep, bleeding freely down the side of her face. Her leg was — he looked at it properly this time and made himself keep looking. Bad. The break was bad.
She was grey beneath her dark complexion. Not grey from fear — grey from blood loss and shock and the sustained effort of fighting on a broken leg for however long she'd been doing it.
"Bloody hell," he said. "Sorry, I don't have any bandages or anything-"
"Crystals." She coughed, already reaching into her vest. Her hands were shaking but working, the careful movement of someone managing their own body through a significant amount of pain. She produced two crystals — small, both of them dim, nearly spent.
"Right. I've got more." He was already pulling from his own supply. He set two on the gravel beside her knee. "Sorry, I don't know how to use them-"
She pressed the first crystal against her forehead. The bleeding slowed immediately, the wound beginning to close at the edges. The second she applied to her leg, and some of the grey left her face as the break stabilized — not healed, not remotely, but locked in place, the shattered edges held while the System began its slow work.
She repeated the treatment with Bright's two.
DEBUFF: BROKEN LEG
Status: Stabilized
Healing in progress — Estimated recovery: 58 minutes
Bright registered his own damage at roughly the same time — the rib, the forehead cut, the various minor lacerations from the struggling that he hadn't noticed during. He'd heal just fine. The rib was the worst of it and it was already fading from acute to bearable.
HP: 210/270
He sat back on his heels and looked at Martinez properly.
She was looking back at him with an expression that was doing a lot of work.
"You're alive," he said.
"Observant." But it wasn't quite hostile. It was something else — the dark deflection of someone who has just been closer to an edge that they were prepared to discuss.
"You held them off alone on a broken leg with an empty weapon."
"I was aware of that, yes."
"I'm not—" He exhaled. "I'm not being condescending. I'm just saying."
She held his gaze for a moment. Then she looked down at the five dissolving goblin bodies, leaving behind a small crystal formed from the dust, and something shifted very slightly in her eyes.
"Thank you," she said. Quietly. With the particular weight of a person for whom those words truly meant something.
Bright nodded, stood up and grabbed the crystals.
ITEMS OBTAINED:
+5 Mana Crystal (Inferior)
"You're welcome," he said. "Let's get inside."
Time: 2:11 PM
Level: 8 | XP: 2945/3600
HP: 210/270 | MP: 208/220
Stats: STR 19 | AGI 21 | CON 17 | INT 22 | WIS 15 | CHA 24
Skills: Danger Sense, Combat Reflexes, Mana Infusion, Precision Strike, Combat Awareness, Mana Sprint, Mana Blade
Equipment:
Santoku Knife (8–12, Superior)
Paring Knife (5–8, Superior)
Chef's Knife (7–11, Superior)
Inventory (Dimensional Pack – 50kg effective, x10 weight reduction):
Mana Crystal (Inferior) x11
Mana Crystal (Stabilised) x2
Charger, Tools, Phone, Blanket
Nutrient bars, Electrolytes, Food supplies
Pop-up tent, Sleeping bag, Spare clothes
Cherry (stored inside pack)
Status: Dormant (Nascent)
Core Stability: 38%
Battery Remaining: 19.68% (~9.4h)
Capabilities: Awareness, Mana Sonar, Mana Shroud, Mana Hearing
