“Fuck. This... Shit.”

Those three words were flippantly released after having been imbued with all the weight in the world. Under their weight the very heavens were bowed. At their utterance the stars of the clear black night were made to fall.

I didn’t stop having to watch my words once my [Honeyed Tongue] and [Vox Empyrean] type abilities went away. Rather, I had to watch them more, whatever it was the “Mandates” did to me or had given to me, I now even had to watch my thoughts.

A thing that I was actually quite adept at after decades of state mandated therapy and expensive counseling sessions. Not to mention the subjective eons of what basically amounted torture from my future-self and his grey fleshed friends.

Still, even with all that, I could still have off days. Bad days.

Today was one such day. I’d teleported to some ruin in the more empty parts of the continent to do some leveling. It was undead city, inhabited by wraiths and other ghostly undead.

For whatever reason things just weren’t coming together. Perhaps they were just slightly too outside my level. Or perhaps there were just too many of them...Or perhaps I’d just gotten into this far too half-cocked and instead of taking a step back like a smart person I’d done the dumb thing and instead chosen to try seeing if slamming my head against the problem in sheer stubbornness would resolve the issue.

(It didn’t…)

In either case, things just didn’t go right that day. I was nearly overwhelmed three times for every thirty-minute time span. Every time I tried to get a grip on things, the wraiths that inhabited the city would just “poof” and ghost away. Disappearing before I could even think of what tract I should be thinking.

I experienced the kind of aggravation one received when one was forced to play a broken game. Even though this was real life and not an actual game, this undead city was suckware.

Unbalanced enemies. Unfair spawn rates. Random bits of environmental fuckery because the whole city was falling apart and the magic in the area was pretty corrupt. Meaning that if the buildings weren’t falling apart, then they were coming to life and trying to eat me.

If there was anyway you could imagine a game being broken, just short of it literally just refusing to work at all, that was how bad this particular hunting trip was going.

Finally I lost my temper and teleported above the city, standing on the empty air as if it were solid ground.

Some minor bit of human decency made me ping the area with the archive to make sure there weren’t any non-combatants hidden within the city. And only once I knew that there weren’t, did I allow myself to lose my temper.

“Fuck. This. Shit.”

All my frustration and irritation at this day and all the others I’d experienced in the passing days oozed out of me. Materializing as a sea of twinkling black that fast-forwarded the evening into darkest night.

Stars fell like arrows, a glittering barrage of astral energy that pounded into the city rocking the world and drowning everything beneath me in bright red and white fire.

I listened to the roaring and screams that were released as the whole city died. The Genius Loci whatever greater spirit that had been control the city and the other spirits that dwelled within the city, howling as its existence was extinguished by the flames.

I could feel it as my core magic levels surged from absorbing all that magical essence. My level went up by more than thirty levels right there and then. More than five years gain made in a single instant.

I should have been ecstatic, I should have felt on top of the world. Satisfied and vindicated by the release that came with all that destruction and the gains I’d made from that release.

Instead I felt kind of terrible. It was like there was pit in my stomach that had been opened up and everything that had been inside had fallen through it.

For the first time in ever, for the first time in both my lifetimes I’d used my powers without restraint or any attempt of control and there was no pleasure in it at all.

It was like the period after one moves out of one’s parents house and into their own place.

There was that moment where after one was living one’s own for the first time and for the first time one decides to smoke, drink, masturbate in the open, whatever bit of mundane naughtiness that one would normally have to hide from roommates, siblings and parents.

You did it and you expected to feel great but instead you just sort of felt empty instead because all it reminded you of was that you were on your own now and were supposed to a full grown adult.

This was like expecting to cum and ending up crying instead.

I felt childish and kind of ashamed and beyond that there was this bit of existential dread over what I’d done.

This jarring realization that I’d just destroyed an entire city on a whim, in a fit of ill temper, and it wasn’t really all that amazing because I was probably one of thousands, probably tens of thousands who could do so. And there were definitely hundreds of other beings on this planet who could do worse.

It was all the awesomeness and anxiety of being a proud new gun owner and blowing your load for the first time.

I was standing there, floating there, whatever, looking at the whole in the world that I’d made. This huge crater that would eventually either became a canyon or lake.

Rather than feeling proud exactly, in my head there was a litany of safety issues and thoughts of making sure that I didn’t end up doing something similar by accident.

As well as an awareness that there was a whole horde of other maniacs who were less trustworthy and sane than I was, with the same destructive capability.

In other words I won the fight, but it ended up feeling like a loss. Like a burden. Like suddenly being gifted a big bowl of stress and anxiety from nowhere.

It was like winning a yacht and realizing that you neither know how to drive the boat or know what to do with thing.

Eventually ending up being forced to search up the details of how to sell the boat because otherwise you were probably going to have pay taxes on the thing.

“Tch….Fuck….”