Deepika entered their apartment and rolled out the piece of leather she had gotten from Carter. She sighed as she pulled the Tome of Spatial Enchanting from a shelf and opened it where she had been stuck last night.

  The book was relatively thick and quite dense. And it assumed a level of knowledge on enchanting basics that she just didn’t have. However, she hadn’t been a professor of physics for nothing—digging into an abstract topic until she unlocked its secrets was not just something she enjoyed, but also something she excelled at.

  From what she had gathered so far, enchanting in principle was about imbuing non-living things to leverage Energy to have magical effects. The very basic self-repairing features of some of the system-provided armor were a good example.

  Apparently, there were two classes of enchantments: those that were powered by ambient Energy, and therefore were mobile, and those that were powered by condensed Energy. From what she could tell, that basically meant monster cores. These kinds of enchantments were typically large and immobile.

  Spatial enchantments were grouped into three different applications: teleportation, barriers, and compression and expansion. Only the last one seemed even remotely accessible to her right now.

  With enough cores it was supposedly possible to make the interior of a shed as large as a warehouse.

  Applications based on ambient Energy were a bit simpler, but very useful. When she had told Sarah about the possibility to eventually have pocket dimensions linked to objects, such as rings, she had gotten extremely excited and quoted some books she had read in the past. That was not quite in Deepika’s wheelhouse right now, however, she felt like it should be possible to leverage her bare-bones understanding of enchanting, her [Displace] perk, the rare leather she had gotten from Carter, and extensive trial and error to create a small bag of holding.

  She would always be willing to help defend the Protectorate and her family, but if she could figure this out, she felt that she would have found a path that suited her better than being a Protector, and at the same time would help those around her as well.

  She was looking forward to her experiments.

  ***

  He didn’t really fit in. He never had. Not with his family of hard-working, smart businessmen and women, nor with the Warriors. He wasn’t really bulky and strong enough for the semi-legal part of the business, nor ruthless enough, if he was honest with himself, for the hard-core organized crime part.

  Antonio—never again Little Tony, he thought forcefully—understood that he didn’t fit in, but he had made his bed; now he had to sleep in it.

  Unfortunately, that currently meant that he had to hike through a forsaken forest as if he was some sort of outdoor nut. Whether this was yet another loyalty test or whether his team lead was just trying to get rid of him he didn’t know. It didn’t matter, really. The Warriors were his only path to safety in this crazy world, and he would not fail. For once he wouldn’t fail.

  He stopped in the middle of a step. A notification with a helpful map directing him to the so-called Protectorate of the Blue Mountain Forest—what a joke of a name. Only a lumberjack meathead could come up with something that pretentious.

  Anyway, nice of the system to show him the way. Every minute he would save was one that he could be back in the city sooner.

  He slowed down as he saw the trees giving way to a large clearing. What he saw didn’t make sense. In the past he had consumed some of the stuff that the Warriors sold in the clubs of the city, but that had been a while ago, and he hadn’t experienced hallucinations since.

  He had expected a couple of wood cabins, maybe a fence, a bunch of half-starved nut jobs.

  What he saw was a gleaming white village made of stone, with golden features, such as the pyramid on top of the large pillar in the town center. And all of that protected by a wooden wall that was patrolled by people wearing the same kind of costumes that the idiots who had attacked one of their teams at the hospital supposedly had.

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  He froze. Is that… cousin Lui over there on the wall?

  Could it be that his grandmother, the only person he had really respected out of his whole weak-ass family, had led them here? He had wondered where they all had gone to. Not that he had wanted to go with them. Not at all. But that his whole family, his own mother, had left him without a hint as to where they had gone was just typical. And it showed that he had made the right choice in helping the Warriors grab their inventory before it could have come to that.

  He spent a few minutes counting the people he could see, then turned around, walking back to the city.

  If he survived the trip, he would have a great story to tell. Maybe his ticket to take the next step in the hierarchy.

  ***

  Doctor Tauber was restless. He walked the corridors of the hospital that was largely empty. They had run out of medicine a while ago, not that they needed it with their skills. If he was honest with himself, if it hadn’t been for the Warriors outside who had tried to milk their patients for what they were worth, they might have realized earlier that such a huge facility, geared toward housing patients indefinitely so the insurance money would keep rolling in, had been pretty much obsolete within days of Arrival Day.

  Combined with the overall horrible food supply situation across the whole city, to just keep doing what he had always done did not seem particularly smart or even helpful to his fellow humans.

  He wasn’t sure whether questioning his way forward was another symptom of his midlife crisis or a sign of rationality in the face of a changing world. He had resisted the temptation to buy himself a motorbike in the past—after having seen too many patients suffering from their accidents—but maybe now was the chance to try something new.

  Maybe he should try to get a job as a farmhand. They were sitting at the source for food. Which farmer wouldn’t like to have a farmhand who could heal them? Maybe he could extend his healing perks to animals as well?

  But then again, farmhands probably should have a Body attribute higher than 9… It seems that I have gone bonkers walking through this empty hospital, he chuckled.

  He also should think of his brother’s family. If he left, they would be stuck without medical support—unless they could trade for it somehow. But his sister-in-law had worked at the local radio station and his brother had been a cop—not so obvious what they would have to trade.

  Deep down, the doctor knew the answer. It was exciting, tantalizing. But also repulsive. He had not forgotten about the three men who had taken out the Warriors in seconds. Such violence. A far cry from the path he had chosen for himself. But, in fairness, he was the one who had asked for it. He knew he could be a hypocrite.

  He had talked with the nurses he had delivered letters to and they had told him about this so-called Protectorate. A place supposedly safe? With food? It felt like a fairy tale. But so did a lot of what was happening in the world right now. And they had helped him without hesitation.

  Maybe that was his adventure… he would talk with his brother about it.

  ***

  Prime Minister Clotilde Mercier sat in her office and looked out of the window. Former Prime Minister, really… Or maybe Prime Minister on hiatus, she chuckled.

  On hiatus until the country she had served emerged again.

  Unlikely. She had to admit.

  They had been doing ok so far. By centralizing and distributing food they had prevented looting and so far supplies were still ok. Dwindling, but ok.

  The farmers in the surrounding areas, who all got protection from the military, had reported that vegetables and livestock grew a bit faster than in the past. Whether that was a permanent effect of the Energy that surrounded them, she didn’t know, but she would take it for now.

  It still wasn’t enough. The military hunted—with bow and arrow, crazy world!—some of the Energy-born creatures in the countryside, but that was a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of food they needed.

  They were still discussing options. One idea was to essentially give up on cities and distribute people into smaller self-sufficient villages and towns. She hated the idea for what it would mean for the weaker parts of the population and that it would admit that their civilization would not survive.

  But maybe it was already dead and she just didn’t want to admit it.

  The alternative was to go all in on some of the more esoteric perks that researchers had gotten. They promised to radically improve the yield of their fields with modified plants. It looked good in what now went for a lab, but the decision to give up on their tried-and-true approach to farming in the middle of a crisis was a tough one. At least for her so-called council. She believed that it was their only chance to keep a resemblance of their former life—but she expected to have to go through many hours of meetings until the decision could be taken.

  She shrugged. If she couldn’t convince them by the end of next week, she would send some of her people out to test the waters with farmers directly. In the old world that would have probably been a scandal, if not illegal, but she could live with it if it meant saving the remnants of her country.