The first thing I noticed was that I could smell something delicious.

There was clattering and voices coming from downstairs and I was impressed that everyone had managed to sneak past me without waking me up.

So I decided to quickly went to the bathroom to get a drink and wipe myself down a bit before heading down to join in whatever tasties I could scavenge.

Water supplies were an important agenda item today for the community as the water mains were completely gone now and people were going to be using up all the water left in their home systems.

Looking in the mirror I frowned.

There was a tiny pair of lipstick lips on my cheek, too small for Marri and there was clearly some blue blush, mascara and possibly some foundation added to my face as well.

Oh-hoh the nerve!! I’ll raise this disaster with management later.

They should know blue clashes with my green eyes..

Downstairs,they were making pancakes with powdered milk and pancake ready mix. They’d used the BBQ outside and I saw a scorch mark where Erza had been blasting logs with her Majik skill to make a fire.

I smiled.

It’s great to see humanity is already abusing their powers for the mundane.

Sylvie was talking about her agenda for today, which was to carry out a community meeting to come up with a strategy going forward.

She waved me over and wasted no time to start brainstorming ideas on what we should talk about.

It took less than 5 minutes to agree it was going to be: Water, Food and Protection.

After scoffing down some delicious pancakes, we went out in a group round the ~100 completed houses and invited people to come and join the discussion over the large grassy area in the middle of the development, which also held a playground.

There was a high attendance and people were standing in groups.

Steve joined our little group as Sylvie walked to the front and started the community discussion.

She first focused on water and if anyone had any ideas for long term supplies.

A woman who didn’t introduce herself, raised her hand and said there was a good chance of accessing a water well that had been dug for the old hospital in the early 1900’s.

It was only a 5 minute walk and would need exploring to confirm it could be manually accessed, but failing that as a last resort they could dig a well and boil water.

But it was unknown how far we would need to dig.

A lot of people had water butts or collectors in their gardens so there would be plenty of ways to gather water, but boiling regularly would be difficult without electricity.

It was agreed that the existing well source would be preferable, so it was added on the list.

The next topic was food, which ended up generating three possible options.

The First location was going to be the nearest grocery shops, which were about 15-20 minutes walk. The risk here was that a few people had tried this already but bailed when they saw monsters stalking along the way.

The Second was going to be going into surrounding abandoned houses or the nearest town centre. One chap in the crowd mentioned his neighbours, a young couple ‘Aly & Sen’, still hadn’t returned after they had left for town 4 days ago.

The Third Location was quite a bit more of an intense mission. There was talk of going out into the countryside and searching the farms for any chickens or cows. There was a known farm 20 miles away, but that would take 2 hours on a bicycle or 6 hours on foot for a single journey.

Everyone agreed that it would be important to start growing food but in the short term we’d need to start looting and stocking up on long lasting foods.

Several people who worked in catering raised their hands to volunteer to cook food in bulk if they were provided ingredients.

Some quick napkin maths was formed: ~100 people stretched to an average 1kg of food a day meant we would need around 100kg per day as a bare minimum.

If 5 people could grab 20kg of food each a day, then the whole community could be fed, which sounded not bad at all but in reality it was going to be rough and people will probably die.

We’d have probably another 2 weeks before people’s home stocks were eaten up completely so that gave us time to resolve.

The final topic was around protection. There were maybe a dozen construction workers that were either staying on site in temporary, now permanent, accommodation, or general builders that just lived in the estate.

This was perfect because they all agreed that Steve's idea to fortify the walls and build a gate in the entrances could be done with materials on site.

They would need to plan together on how to move the materials and put them together with limited tools, but they would gladly do it as long as there were enough people protecting them whilst they worked.

Sylvie gave everyone a chance to mention something they had on their mind or wanted to raise once everything else was covered.

One person made a very good point about long term toilets but Steve answered this, saying that as long as you fill up the cistern, you can flush otherwise it was recommended to use the garden or compost heap.

Need to figure out how to build a bidet...

When it came to my turn I did have something I wanted to say.

“Hi everyone. Uhh, my name is Goduyne, but you can call me Godu. We don’t know each other very well but I just wanted to say thank you for coming out to risk your own lives yesterday. If you hadn’t I definitely wouldn’t have survived. You’re all truly heroes…although I figure it was probably more for Tanner’s sake since he’s definitely prettier than me, but still.” Tanner let out a snort and I got a few chuckles and smiles for that.

“You have a really amazing community here and I hope you don’t mind me and my family staying with you. We’ll definitely help where we can, so urm, really thank you, again.”

Tanner echoed my thanks and gave me a thumbs up.

I felt a bit uncomfortable saying that in front of pretty much strangers, but I really wanted to say it considering those same people came out to risk their lives only the day before and it was highly likely we would be here for a while.

3 days later..

Two days ago 3 groups made up of 3 people simultaneously went out to the shop and the city centre.

Only two people made it back 30 minutes later.

They were being chased by a swarm, 10 in number, of flesh coloured spider like nightmares with white human skulls, with black fangs and eyes dotted around and overall they were the size of medium sized dogs.

I’d not been involved in the fight, as I was spending a couple of days recovering as well as helping Marri with Lone and to get some bonding time with him.

He was such a good baby, rarely making a fuss and giving plenty of clear cues for when he needed feeding, soothing or changing.

It was nice being able to help Marri and spend time with her, as even though she did a great job of hiding it, she would constantly worry when I was out.

It wasn’t our usual style of life either.

We used to do practically everything together and rarely spend time apart.

Mainly because we liked a lot of the same things, eating, sleeping, horizontal dancing, movies, more eating, reading, playing the odd game or two..

Probably the only thing we didn’t both enjoy was shopping and it was obvious which one of us enjoyed that more.

Oh how much I would give to be back in the days of when my only problem was being dragged around clothing stores...

Oh well. Times change. Shit happens.

The fight with the monsters was chaotic at first, as people frantically ran away.

But the tides quickly turned as fear turned into defiance once enough people grouped up.

The battle ended quickly when around 30 people swarmed and killed the spiders with various weapons, however three people had been heavily injured.

Fortunately those brave damn souls were healed by some of the other residents who had been granted different types of extraordinary medical abilities.

This meant they were stabilised and fully mobile in a matter of hours with just aches and pains and hunger.

There was a truly exciting development where one guy could effectively ‘bless’ water with healing properties.

If applied to a wound, it would quickly stop bleeding, seal a wound and help promote rapid tissue repair.

The repairing limits were not fully known, but so far it had dealt with some pretty deep wounds and a sprained ankle.

I had watched this blessing in person, him holding his hand over the target and dousing it with a layer of shimmer mist, or Majiks as more people had started to call it.

And although the healing limit was unknown, his blessing limits were quickly found out, when he fainted after attempting to ignore a heavy migraine by drinking a healing tonic and carrying on.

The laws of thermodynamics say no. Or should I say Majikodynamics? Ugh terrible name, although not as bad as the one I said in front of Tanner..

Alas, I regrettably had made the mistake of calling the shimmer mist “Majist” and Tanner's eyes lit up followed by a slew of dirty remarks that swiftly punished my loose tongue.

“GUNA’ SHOOT MY LOAD OF MAJIST AT ALL THE MONSTERS!”

“GLUG GLUG! YUM YUM! A NICE BOTTLE OF FRESH MAJIST!”

Yeah no.

It turned out what had attacked however, weren’t really spiders per se.

Steve, who invited me to come witness dissecting one of the spiders completely unphased as if he was doing the dishes, informed me.

It was a completely new species not of this world, or not yet seen in this world.

Forgot to ask Steve how he knows how to disect alien spiders or spiders in general..

They had new organs including organs similar to animal lungs, rather than trachea or ‘book lungs’ amongst other unknown organs.

Which took me a while to understand, but I think the key difference is that animal lungs pull in air whilst book lungs absorb oxygen passively.

But apparently more alarmingly, they also had a skeletal structure inside.

Alarmingly, because the skeleton was the reason they could be so big, but also it may give them a chance to be even bigger.

Unsurprisingly, after the sight of the giant ’arachnots’ corpses, priorities drastically changed.

It only took the past 2 days to build up and fortify a large fence around the whole estate.

It was now something like 4 metres high and there was even a small team that had started to cut down trees and add long palisade type spikes to help reinforce and to support some of the scaffolding platforms that would be going up.

We were turning the development into a well defended safe zone.

I just hope the arachnots can’t climb vertical surfaces…

We’d had to carry all the materials by hand but as expected, people noticeably felt healthier and stronger after their garden of growth allocations.

We were also very fortunate that we had good access to an array of construction tools and materials, but some people had also received special tools as rewards from the stickman fight.

For instance, a few people had received a simple drill that seemingly didn’t need power or charging, but I suspected it used Majiks since people got really tired after using it for too long.

It was dark grey and didn’t have any branding and it had all the typical features of a basic drill, however one very interesting thing about it was that it had a VERY fast and powerful setting.

The setting had a sword icon.

One particularly fitness focused woman had observed that she could now bench press a colossal ~60% more than her previous best of 50kg, which was now 80kg after she had increased her Sword value to 6.

It was interesting to note that her physique hadn’t ballooned, nor had anyone reported too much physical change.

Even more counter intuitive was that some people noticed they had lost weight, including the fitness fanatic.

Not all however, I myself had lost a lot of fat and definitely had started to gain a bit more muscle tone, but my weight had also gone up, not down.

So the circuit of the fence had been completed this morning and today was the day where the final piece, the gates, would be installed.

Two of them.

Both large, square and made out of lots of scaffolding, wood and bits of metal.

They were set up just like those mediaeval castle gates that went up and down, a portcullis I believe Steve called them.

Steve knows a very strange mix of stuff.

Steve had also devised the gate's wind up mechanism, which was a mix of pulleys and a flywheel, connected with a large makeshift crank that could be turned by multiple people very quickly.

Again, Steve explained that the trick was in the pulleys called snatch blocks, and they effectively reduced the amount of force needed to lift an object, but you needed to pull more to achieve the same distance of lift.

You could reduce the weight required to lift an object by a factor of 100 to lift it 1 metre, but you would need to pull the rope 100 times more in length to lift it 1 metre.

Not a problem if you have a flywheel!

But being able to lift what was probably just over a ton of weight with one person was so amazing to see, even if it took over 60 seconds to fully raise the gate, it only took 20 to get it high enough to crawl under.

Due to the heavy weight, it had to be constructed in stages but with most people automatically going for strength, it was just past midday when we completed the final gate installation and it was time to test it.

I had been helping the installation team with some of the heavy lifting and we all sat down watching a couple of the others checking the pulleys and ropes before attempting to do a test.

“All looks good here, Rutin!” She was the dark tanned, dark curly haired site manager called Bekki and she gave the thumbs up towards the polish sounding dude called Rutin.

The only reason I knew she was a sitemanager was because she had her high-vis jacket on that said SITE MANAGER.

“Excellent News yes. I see not a problem. Good for test Bekki.” The burly clean head shaved Rutin responded in his thick accent.

She nodded and started to slowly turn the crank as the system creaked and lifted the hefty gate up past the halfway mark.

First test was slow and solo…heh, that’s what she sai-

“GGGGRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRLLLLL”

An ear piercing, wet howling roar sounded off straight ahead, but round the corner.

In the direction of where my dead car rested.

“NOO! AAAAAH!!”

A child's scream rang out, making my blood cool down uncomfortably.

“BED IN THE SHIT!!!!!” Rutin bellowed as he pointed.

Everyone’s heads snapped to the source.

In the distance, round the corner came a sprinting young girl, maybe 9 or 10 years of age, wearing a bloodstained and dirty floral dress with a yellow kids backpack.

She was giving absolutely everything to her legs and looked completely terrified with tears streaming down her dirt and dried blood covered face.

Dear gods..what the fuck has she been through? WHO’S blood is that?!

“PLEASE! HELP!” she cried out.

People snapped out of their confusion and started to rush forward, including myself.

Behind the girl just a moment later, came round a large patchy haired, wolf or dog like creature that had 4 long insectoid legs coming out the sides of the body, lifting it off the ground and scuttling it along.

It sported a large pointed furless snout with 4 beady eyes going down the muzzle and when it opened its mouth to gargle out a salivating howl aimed towards us, I could see maybe 4 rows of molars for teeth.

Large humanlike molars.

It looked like a canine because of the snout and the 4 stubby legs with paws that were still attached to the body but were left dangling.

One of the paws had started to elongate into 4 fingers with the index finger much longer than the rest.

It was tall, about 2 metres tall because of the long legs but overall it looked like a grub had been infused with a dog.

Grubdog or Grubwoofer...jesus its fucking horrifying.

The creature let out another metallic wet howl as it skittered towards us and everyone stumbled and hesitated in shock, including myself.

It was awful and shameful.

We weren’t soldiers, nor properly trained to control our instincts even if we outnumbered our enemy and our brains could not cope with the situation.

“THE GIRL YOU SHITS! SHE'S JUST A LITTLE GIRL! FUCK IT IN THE HEAD!” Rutin roared at everyone as he carried on going full pelt past the frozen people at the front.

People seemed to snap out of it and some snarled in anger, emboldened by Rutin’s war cry cursing as they rejoined in charging forward.

I felt a surge of excitement and energy washing away the sudden wave of fear after hearing Rutin’s words which gave me a level of dutch courage only matched by a 10 pint pub crawl.

Glad to have a hero in our midst.

It was gaining ground rapidly, breathing frantically, extremely focused, legs working mechanically skittering it forward.

The girl was mere seconds from being obliterated.

It suddenly burst forward in speed, reducing the distance to the little girl to less than a metre.

But Rutin had never stopped running forward and those few precious seconds saved the girl's life.

He reached her first and threw himself into the beast's legs, tripping it up, flipping it over.

The monster recovered fast.

The legs tucked in with lightning speed and the creature rolled sideways back onto its feet, skidding round to snarl at this new aggressor.

It didn’t hesitate to charge into Rutin, making him scream out in pain as the monster gnashed into the arm he brought up to defend himself as he fell on his back.

He was pinned down as the monster chewed and an audible snap and crunch was heard.

The girl, who had stopped after we had made it past her, was in tears.

“NO! DON’T HURT HIM! LEAVE HIM ALONE!”

Bekki rushed over to her and scooped her up and started sprinting back towards the gate.

The Grubdog’s goatlike slitted pupils darted towards the group as, myself, hammers, spears, drills and a short sword wielding mob collided with it, and we pushed it off the screaming Rutin.

The girl with the sword stepped forward, swung it like a baseball bat and with a grunt, she severed one of the legs, causing foul looking blood to gush out.

This caused the abomination to squeal and it slipped in its own slimy blood as 2 others rammed their drills into the stomach, causing heavy bleeding.

Hammers and sledgehammers smashed the legs which broke them like twigs.

As it fell, the creature managed to knock down a middle aged man, it lashed out and bit down onto his neck, before wrenching and ripping out the fleshy arteries, leaving him gargling in all the blood.

There was so much blood.

It was trying to retreat, scrambling to get back, and the group were taking turns in attacking whilst also jumping back, dodging when it tried to lash out with a snapped leg.

The sword woman got clipped in the face and crashed head first into the road with a truly graphic *CRACK*. She stopped moving.

I rushed to Rutin and hauled him up. He wobbled, cradling his destroyed arm as I barked at him to move.

“GET BACK TO THE GATE AND USE A HEALING WATER! MOVE! GO! GO!”

The guy bleeding out on the floor was clutching his neck and kept spluttering up blood as he desperately tried to breath.

I pulled out my personal bottle of the healing water and rushed over to him and carefully poured the mix over the missing chunk of his neck.

It visibly reacted with his blood and I could see swirls of silver and gold forming and shifting, like paint in water which then exponentially increased in size before it shot out hundreds of lines deeper into the wound and into his body.

His eyes were rolling around and he gripped onto my arm as he started to recover.

Comon don’t give up.

I watched as the bleeding slowed down and I saw tissue rapidly repairing and growing to connect the severed areas. The silver and gold streaks wrapped around, moulding and shaping the tiny fleshy stalactites and stalagmites of healing flesh.

The man was staring at me, with wide shock filled eyes, his face was deathly pale as his eyes started to fade.

His mouth was wide open like a fish gasping for air, making no sound as he convulsed twice….and then he went still and his eyes stared into the sky, void of life.

In a blind panic I tried to pour some more water onto the wound but dropped it and it emptied onto his face, practically drowning him.

I stared at his desecrated face for a couple of seconds before looking up at the battle that was still raging on further down the road.

The creature was on its last stand, but it still had the strength to kick another person off their feet and they crashed into a bush, loudly cursing in pain.

Looking back down, the man's drenched face was completely still and pale.

Like a mannequin with eyes that looked lifeless and fake.

I didn’t know what to do and my mind started racing, thinking about if this was my fault, will his family hate me? I was the last one with him!

FUCK! FUCK! HE’S DEAD! FUCK! F-

*GASP*

The man took a huge gasp of air and jolted up before vomiting the familiar black crap.

He took a few more gulps of air before looking around in confusion and looked at me.

I jumped up as Sylvie came rushing up to him holding a medkit.

She started fussing over the guy and checking vitals.

I nodded to them both and rushed over to help with the fight, but I heard the resurrected guy choking out some words to Sylvie.

“I-I-I’m fine Syvlie don’t worry about me, Finna’s knocked out on the floor over there, check on her please!!”

As I rushed towards the fight, I felt fearless.

A mixture of sheer relief and adrenaline resulted in me blindly rushing straight past the semi circle of people and shoulder charging recklessly, aiming at the face of the creature, who was just as shocked as the others were.

My movements felt controlled just before impact as my feet felt the familiar magnetism to the floor and upon impact, my feet were firmly glued down as all the force was transferred to the target.

Even in its shock, it whipped around and snapped its maw open to try and intercept me.

But it was too little too late.

The kinetic energy impacted it directly in the face and I heard a loud wet *SMACK*.

The creature's head ricocheted back at an unhealthy speed..but the monster recovered instantly and lowered its head before snarling, its lips quivering over the rows of teeth.

Oh shit. Someone? HELP!?

I started to back up.

I heard a glasslike metallic tinkling sound from my back shields and felt the usual internal tug as they deployed by themselves.

Huh?

The creature used its final leg to make one last ditch effort to bite off my face and at the same time my insides felt like they were being tazered.

My shields made a mechanical BRRR sound, like a printer jamming as they violently whipped forward and guillotined the beast's head off.

*Shmmiishhh*

*Thud*

Its head dropped like a sack of shit and its body crumpled to the floor as I stood there in shock as my impossibly black shifting shields nonchalantly collapsed back down into their flatpack mode.

I stared wide eyed, half impressed, half in shock as rust started to form on the Grubdog.

There was absolute silence apart from heavy breathing and some slight groaning from someone in pain.

I took a few steps back away from the rusting corpse and the others shifted a few steps to keep distance from me.

Turning around I gave them all an awkward half smile and shrugged.

“Faaaaaa-kin’ hell! Remind me to neva’ piss him off!” one of the builders squeaked out.

“Remind me to never piss off the shields..” I was only half joking.

As I started to move away, I collapsed onto my hands and knees, as a terrible pain shot through my head and body.

I looked up as a line of shimmer snaked its way towards me and flew into my eyes.

Everything went black.

And I found myself in the garden of growth, looking at the maelstrom.

The MP bar was blinking a severe red.

HP [== 40/70HP ==] ++ XFR.MP(-30)!! Cause: USYR

MP [== -30/70MP ==] ++ XFR.HP(+30)!! Cause: USYR

Huh?

A new memory flashed into my mind.

Ah.

I was being scolded for my recklessness where my shields intervention had cost more Majik than I had in the bank, resulting in a sacrifice of my health. Well, my mind was scolding itself.

Point taken. Sorry..me?

Everything went white and then my vision snapped back to reality and I found myself lying on the ground but all I could think about was food.

Damn I’m really hungry.

***