It has only been a day, several more attacks on the town occurs. Titus rounds up a group of ex soldiers, cops, and hunters to monitor the boarders. I do my best to get into that group, hunting monsters sounds awesome. We hunt a large spider, some lizard bird things, and a werewolf with antlers. One of the hunters was bragging about how this was the first twenty pointer he had gotten.

  On a less positive note. All electronics that use wireless signals don’t work. Many people lost their money when the banks were forcibly closed for an undetermined time. I don’t know how this is going to affect the bigger cities, but I hope everyone will be OK.

  Day 2, Owen Landers

  Silas had thought through what kind of monsters he would be skilled at facing. If he had his gun, anything less than human sized would be fine. Contrary to what most people assumed military grade weapons were mass produced, not powerful. The average farmer in the Midwest had a more powerful gun than Silas was issued. His would be easier to fix, but that was only because they were mass produced.

  With his newfound endurance, Silas assumed that his range of opponents had stayed roughly the same. A similar sized monster would be more likely to injure him without a gun, but with a meat cleaver, he should be well matched against anything lacking a carapace.

  This is the mindset that caused him to choose narrow ravines whenever possible. The tentacle monster might be able to squeeze in, like octopuses and their ability to squirm through pipes. Silas had always found that a bit creepy. Squishing a brain into a different shape was called a concussion when people did it, but to an octopus it was normal.

  He was in a crevice that was large enough for the werewolves to barely fit when he came across his first monster outside of the first ravine. A couple of vermin crawled across the rocks at about head height. Silas was used to squirrels and rabbits, and as fist sized critters weren’t what he was looking for, it came as a shock when they jumped on his head.

  Tiny claws sank into his scalp and something pulled at his hair. Silas yelled in surprise and reached up with both hands to grab both creatures. His left hand closed around one, his right was still holding the cleaver, which he smacked himself with the flat of. Thankfully he didn’t cut himself, but he still felt a bit stupid.

  Dropping the knife, Silas grabbed for the second creature. It leapt off him landing on the wall beside him. They were fast but small. Before the critter’s claws touched the stone, Silas was already moving. He body slammed the wall, using his greater mass to crush the creature.

  There was a small popping as several delicate bones broke and a wine of pain. Silas stepped back, letting the crippled animal fall down to the ravine floor. A new red stain covered his left shoulder and the rock where the small monster landed.

  He quickly stomped on the injured beast to put it out of its misery.

  Notice: you have made contact with spirit manifestation Scalis Premitto. Would you like to purify the taint of Disgeneree?

  The notice startled him. Silas had started associating them with large creatures that could pull him apart like a child with string cheese. These were, quite pathetic. Silas had a second thought, maybe he would get an equally pathetic sigil from them.

  Before he gave the message his assent, he inspected the writhing creature in his hand. It was similar to a squirrel, but instead of fur, it had bone like scales covering its body. When Silas peeled a scale off he found that it was adhered to the skin, not grown from the body.

  A monster whose power resided in consuming meat to maintain itself gave Silas a sigil that granted endurance. He paused at that and opened up his interface. No, flesh lord let him do exactly what the monster he got it from did.

  Flesh Lord (1) Your flesh is subject to you. Operate at peak efficiency, resist poisons, and recover in conjunction with the appropriate diet.

  Food was something he would need to find. If his suspicions were true then appropriate meant meat, he couldn’t see the tentacle monster being a herbivore. These small easy to kill creatures would serve as a good place to harvest food.

  Looking at the bone squirrels Silas was pretty sure he didn’t want whatever sigil they offered. Best case scenario, he got bone armor or could stick to walls. Worst case, he would get buck teeth that would never stop growing. He did need more power to survive, but taking it from the bottom of the food chain sounded foolish. If he couldn’t find anything else he would do it, but there was a literal world of options before him.

  He picked up the cleaver and chopped through the rodent’s neck before affirming both purification messages and stepping forward. The black smoke turned purple after Silas stepped past, he glanced back to see two sigils floating above the bodies. A part of him wanted to run back and take the glowing symbols.

  He only had a maximum of three sigils, at least for now, and needed to use them carefully. However, he did need food, and for that, he would need fire. Wood was not necessarily needed, many cultures used cow dung for their fires. Silas grimaced at the idea, he had no desire to follow some monster around to harvest its poop.

  A roar interrupted his musings. Rocks vibrated and a few of the spires shed some of their stone. Silas crouched, not sure where to go. Hiding by the rock formations was all well and good until a rock fell on his head. He was in a narrow ravine, and whatever made that roar felt bigger than anything he had ever heard. It reminded him of the sound effect most shows used on the T-Rex or monstrous equivalent.

  The sound came from above, and when Tristan looked up, he saw dozens of small white shapes scurrying to hide. A few even fell when the roar came again, shaking the surroundings. Then it passed overhead.

  Silas couldn’t see it clearly, but what he did catch was horrifying. A set of claws with three knuckles each wrapped around the edge, crunching into stone. Then a blur passed overhead. It was a bit like watching a bullet train rush past. There were impressions, but few details. A head filled with needle teeth, a black body as long as a football field, and a bushy tail rushed past. It may have been large, but lumbering would not be a word he used to describe it.

  The part of his brain trying to keep him from panicking as he asked how something so large handled the square curbed law. Every other part of his brain was screaming ‘Don’t dare move. It will eat you!’ He decided to follow the first part to avoid giving himself a stress induced heart attack.

  Big animals existed on Earth, some as big as whatever that creature was. However, these weren’t just animals, they were tagged as spirit manifestations. How many of the laws of physics were they bound to? Did he even have a grasp of those laws? Science was the method of removing variables and options until a working theory was reached. What if there was a variable that couldn’t be measured? That would make everything wrong! Did anything he know even matter?

  Silas slapped himself. He was alive, physics wasn’t going to eat him and neither was that monster. He started chanting his mantra again.

  “Survive, get home, find Abby. Survive, get home, find Abby. Survive, I can do that, “ Silas calmed down. His hands still shook and he was crying, but no one was around to see his embarrassing state, though he would have welcomed it simply to not be alone.

  Looking up at the sky he muttered, “God if you can hear me, give me a way home.”

  Nothing changed in the small amount of purple sky he could see. His mother had once said, don’t ask for what you can do for yourself. Silas didn’t know if he could do it by himself, but he would try with or without help. He simply could not afford the alternative, leaving Abby defenseless and hurt in a world overrun by resurrecting monsters.

  Silas turned on his heel and marched right back to the bone squirrels. His goal was to survive not kill a beast like that. It wasn’t something he could even imagine accomplishing with his little knife. Stealth would be his greatest ally and if there was one thing rodents were good at, it was stealth.

  He wanted to wait for the flashy powers that his imagination conjured up, but survival mattered more. The sigils were still there, which was a good thing. They seemed to be made of the same energy as the portals and those only lasted a few minutes.

  Notice: You have claimed the purified sigil of the Scalis Premitto x 2 you will receive a greater variant of this sigil.

  Silas raised an eyebrow at that message. That was convenient, he was in a ravine full of bone squirrels. Could he commit a squirrel genocide and get an ultimate sigil? That sounded ridiculous, but then again so did planets without a sun, purple sky, and football field sized monsters.

  Portals too, though he had heard that some physicists were working on a prototype somewhere. He pulled up the interface to see what kind of stealth skill he had acquired. His goal was some variant of wall walking, it would let him stay away from most monsters that were big enough to eat him.

  Silas couldn’t help but feel disappointed. He wanted stealth, he got bone shaping. His disappointment started moving towards anger. What was he supposed to do with bones? They were brittle, couldn’t hold an edge, and most importantly were inside creatures who wanted to eat his face off.

  A small voice in the back of his head told him that there was a field of bodies surroundings the portal area. Monsters killed each other all the time, material would be plentiful. The idea of digging around in a corpse unsettled him, but he pushed it away with relative ease. Focusing on his primary goal. He would dress himself in gore if it meant getting home.

  There were several other changes that did not seem to change much. A few more titles and a point of focus - neither of which helped him in his current situation. Silas needed water, the tentacle monster’s victims could wait.

  He marched on, with the intent of reaching the open area he noticed before nightfall. Silas glanced at the sunless sky, this place might not have a night. That was going to mess with his circadian rhythm. His attention was on his destination, but he did not miss the bone squirrels poking their heads out of the cracks and crevices that they were hiding in.

  Silas expected them to use their numbers to swarm him, however they seemed to be more individualistic than he had originally assumed. Whenever he noticed one, it skittered away, hiding from his sight. It was a puzzle that he didn’t care to solve. He lacked the time to chase them down and was not confident of catching them even if he decided to.

  The ground shook again as a sound similar to a bomb going off echoed through the maze like landscape. Time seemed to freeze within moments as a roar that translated rage more clearly than any words could. Silas froze, his fear trying to bubble past the restraints he had placed on it. That sound had come from the direction he was going. He remembered the blood bath that occurred just outside the portal he had gone through.

  Hope mixed with fear as Silas realized that there was a good chance that there was one ahead. There was also a monster that could kill him by accidentally twitching the wrong way. Still, there was little on earth that could stop a beast like that from entering, Silas could always go through after it had gotten through. He would walk into a bloody war zone, but that was still preferable to being trapped here.

  Silas took a steadying breath before speeding up. With the roars of the monster as his guide, Silas staggered between the rock formations. Once he started taking the most direct routes as opposed to the narrowest, he saw other beasts making their way in the same direction. Insect monsters as large as minivans moved like cockroaches along walls. Small reptiles the size of german shepherds flew through the air on feathery wings. Several of the werewolves loped along in packs, Silas saw a tentacle monster, and many other creatures he didn’t see clearly.

  Even the bone squirrels skittered along. Silas was forced to slow down, to avoid their attention. He knew they would focus in on anyone with a sigil, and he had three. Slinking along the shadows, trying to keep a boulder between him and any creatures behind him slowed him down. There were even a few times that he was spotted.

  The first was by a feathered lizard. It nearly landed on Silas, missing only because it screeched during the dive bomb. Fortunately, it fell into the smaller than a human category. It hissed and snapped at Silas, who kicked it in the face. His steel toe boot snapped its razor teeth down on its tongue, startling it.

  It froze, wings extended to either side to make itself look bigger and standing on its rear legs. That put its head at the perfect height to let Silas chop at its neck with his cleaver. The sequence of events was so fast and easy that Silas barely believed it. He reached out to touch the corpse, but paused.

  Resurrection was an issue, but so was filling the surroundings with purple smoke that glowed. If it did come back, Silas would already be through the portal, they only lasted a handful of minutes. If he didn’t, one more monster in the swarm wouldn’t make a difference. Stepping over the temporarily deceased monster, Silas continued his careful dash to the portal.

  The second and third times were similar. A monster would spot Silas, change directions to intercept him only to cross paths with some other deadly creature and get eaten. He watched as a bug monster got torn apart by a humanoid creature with fangs and spiky bone plate covering its body. Silas made a note to stay away from that monster, it was intelligent enough to use primitive tools, judging by the femur it used to smash the insect.

  This only happened twice, that Silas noticed, but he could have been saved many other times. All of them staggered as the ground shook hard enough to make smaller pebbles dance. A second, more nasally roar blasted out. It was clearly from a second monster, but was likely the same size as the first.

  The only thing that kept Silas going was the fact that neither creature cared about him. He was not even sure that they would taste him if they ate him. He found the emotional energy to smile, he would be getting home today. Well, not home, if portals opened based on population density, the Midwest was unlikely to be the destination. Somewhere in North and South America was possible, New York, Mexico City, Dallas, and several other cities came to mind.

  Silas was torn between wanting to be close to home and see Denver through the portal and not wanting these creatures within a state of Abby. His attention was split between his imagination and hiding that he nearly missed the ground bound creatures losing their balance. Silas barely had time to stop before he crashed into the back of the flailing mass of limbs and teeth. The flying monsters and ones who leapt from formation to formation were unhindered.

  Quickly, Silas ducked behind a boulder. He would have tried to squeeze into the crevasse beneath it if the intermittent shaking wasn’t threatening to drop it on his head. A few monsters that had started behind him rushed past, trying to scramble over the pile of creatures. They were pulled into the melee as the ones below latched on to them.

  The question of what the hell was going on was answered by the sound of splashing. Something wet pooled around Silas’s boot. A pink liquid saturated the soil with enough volume to create a flood that slowly spread out. Silas took a few moments to identify the liquid as blood diluted by water. He had seen water move like this before, but only after a washing machine broke, it was unnatural.

  He needed to get past the thrashing pile of creatures. There was absolutely no way he would be able to fight his way through that mess. A quick count found ten werewolves, a tentacle monster, and dozens of insect monsters. Silas backtracked to go around the rock formation, he sacrificed safety for speed only to find that the monsters were arriving from all directions. He considered moving until he found a gap, but it was likely that it was a large circle.

  All the beasts still frantically scrambled toward the center, but they were clearly not used to running through mud. They wouldn’t get there before the portal closed. Looking around, Silas finally looked up. The top of the formation next to him was close to another, he could make that jump.

  A mental clock had started, five minutes before the portal closed. Silas was not sure if that was an accurate time frame, but it wasn’t far off. He started climbing with the frantic energy that only desperation could provide. Just because he was motivated, didn’t make Silas climb the formation at a superhuman speed. Four minutes in, he reached the top and didn’t hesitate before running at the narrow gap he needed to leap.

  The ground shook as his feet left the stone. Silas’s stomach lurched as he failed to push off with as much force as he had anticipated. The ground was a good seventy feet below, there would be no surviving if he fell. He hit the opposite side awkwardly, the stone ledge jabbing into his gut. For a moment, he balanced, teetering on his center of mass. Frantically he threw his arms forward and scrabbled at the rock, finding purchase and pulling himself forward.

  Aside from fighting monsters that was perhaps the most terrifying thing he had ever done. Silas decided that, no, he would rather fight monsters than jump between cliff ledges. He took a moment to catch his breath, lying on the stone platform with an army of monsters tearing at each other below. His mental clock hit thirty seconds, jolting him into motion.

  Silas carefully rolled to his hands and knees. The surface of this formation was not as flat as many of the others though it was larger. Careful not to slide to his death, Silas peered over the opposite side. There was a portal and what he could only describe as kaiju down below. He pushed back to hide better, not that it would matter. Silas started hyperventilating again, if he had to get past creatures like this, home was little more than a pipe dream.

  The large black creature turned out to be a massive black fox, at least when it came to body shape. It had horns flowing from the back of its skull, it had hands with human like posable thumbs, and three tails that had mace like bone nobs at the end. As bad as this creature was, it was the one who lost.

  With its back to the submissive kaiju fox a dragon pried open the portal. Dragon adjacent would be the better term, the wings were feathery, and the body was furred in the same grey as a wolf. The long neck, thick tail, and forward curving horns on its squarish head were all draconic. It was half again larger than the fox, and would have been able to look Silas in the eye from where it stood on the ground.

  Smaller beasts swarmed around the two giant’s feet. They were constantly pushed back by the water gushing through the portal. Silas was relieved, the Midwest had no population centers on large bodies of water. This was opening up on a coastal city or somewhere with a river. Then he felt guilty for the relief, these people were about to get swarmed by an army of monsters.

  Conventional weaponry would be useless and more powerful weaponry would likely put the killer more than ten minutes from the kaiju. Whatever city these things were released on would be wiped out. The portal snapped open showing off the exit site. Another wave of guilty relief washed through Silas. It had opened a fifth of the way submerged in a river allowing Silas to see buildings with Chinese characters written on them.

  Silas wasn’t familiar enough with Asian cities to recognize them from random half submerged angles. It made sense, portals opened to population centers and no one could boast of a higher population than China. He just hoped that the people there would be able to survive as a dragon pushed through to earth. The fox followed through afterwords, but the smaller monsters struggled with the fifteen foot tall wall of water pouring in.

  Some still made it. Hundreds of flying creatures swarmed through. A few tentacle monsters were able to grab onto the portal’s edge and drag themselves through. Other portals were snapping open in the distance, atop buildings and on the streets. Silas closed his eyes, he would rather be a bit ignorant than have to watch people get ripped apart.

  He just laid there for the five to ten minutes the portal was open, imagining that he could hear the dying screams of millions of people. It was purely in his head, the screeches of the lesser beasts and roaring of the water pouring in drowned out any noise from the city. Would he have to fight a giant monster with a butchers knife to get home? Did it matter?

  Silas was a bit startled at the divergent thought. Maybe he was in shock, but instead of panic he had gone towards determination instead. Did it matter if he had to kill a kaiju to get home? No. He would survive and stabbing something was not the only way for it to die. Poison, traps, suffocation, and starvation were all possibilities. Silas would use them all if he had to.

  The portal abruptly snapped closed stranding Silas once again. He didn’t feel so bad this time, he had powers, water, and most importantly a visible goal. Opening his eyes he looked down to find that the monsters had turned on each other as soon as the portal closed. The muddy ground and deep water made it difficult for them to fight effectively.

  A humanoid monster that Silas had previously seen slowly gained an upper hand. They were the only species that coordinated effectively, and one of a few that did not attack each other. Silas watched them use their bone carapace to deflect claws, stab with the spike on their reptilian tails, and bludgeon enemies with the femurs of their prey.

  Silas was instantly wary of them. Any creature that could override their instincts was deadly in the extreme. The tentacle monster had shown something approaching intelligence when it grabbed Silas and threw him through the portal. Though it had shown little else making Silas chalk that reaction up to instinct. Like an animal knowing the danger of fire, it had ignored him after he no longer posed a threat.

  These human like creatures were more than that. The guttural barks they belted out were not random. Sometimes they repeated, giving Silas the feeling that they were talking to each other. On a cursory inspection, Silas would put their intelligence somewhere between humans and monkeys. If they built homes into the stone, it was likely they were more similar to cave men.

  That led to a disturbing question. Could they learn? If they got through the portal and learned engineering, long distance communication, and modern warfare the results would be devastating. He watched one of the creatures punch the lights out of a werewolf before stabbing it with its own antler. Silas imagined it in a body suit of bullet resistant armor, carrying an automatic firearm, and with a ten minute respawn timer. They would be more dangerous than the kaiju if they were given time to breed.

  Silas made a mental note. Kill them at every possible opportunity. The less that enter Earth the better, if he was trapped here, the time might as well be used productively. He would need something other than humanoid monsters to call them. It didn’t take him long to come up with a name. They had horns, red scaly skin, a tail, and carapace, the nerd in him instantly pegged them as Dragonkin. The decision to call them that was solidified when one of them breathed fire on a centipede like creature with a mouth running along its entire underbelly.

  There were few air born creatures, a fact that Silas was grateful for. The beasts that were moving out of the water were not climbing the rock faces, instead choosing to spread out through the ravines on the ground. None of them seemed to care about the water, leaving it without a second thought. They dragged the majority of the corpses with them to eat later.

  Was water a resource foreign to this purple world? If so, then this oasis might be the only place water existed. Water pouring through portals could be the only source. It seemed ridiculous, water equaled life, but that really only applied to Earth biology. He glanced back at the bone crafter sigil, he might have dodged a metaphorical bullet. Stealth wouldn’t help without water, but with bone crafter he could make water storage. Many large cities sat on rivers and oceans, meaning this would not be the last time water poured in.

  Several hours later, Silas was able to climb down. Most of the corpses had been dragged off. Only some of the smaller ones floated in the lake. Silas had expected a good portion of the water to flow away, but the two kaiju had done a good job of digging a large bowl with their conflict. The bedrock was also only a foot or two below the surface, it was not a very porous substance either. Without plants to break up the stone and no erosion in the form of water, it should not have come as a surprise to find such a dense material.

  He started dragging the bodies out of the water. None of them resurrected, he had waited long enough that it would have happened if it was going to. The water was already contaminated, he did not want to add rotting corpses to it.

  On the side of the temporary lake, Silas used his butchers cleaver to start pulling the bodies apart. He pushed off his hunger and thirst as far as he could, but even the extra endurance he had could only take him so far. Eventually his thirst won out over his better judgement and he took a drink.

  Notice: Flesh Lord has resisted several toxic materials and bacteria.

  Silas paused at the notification, two thoughts running through his mind. At least I don’t have to purify the water. That was followed quickly by, this river water is really polluted. He glanced at the pile of fresh corpses. Normally an animal became inedible when the guts were punctured. It would go septic and become toxic for human consumption. That wouldn’t be an issue for him, raw meat wouldn’t be an issue.

  For religious reasons he wouldn’t eat any blood, but even that would not be toxic. He had a set of tools that would help him survive. Was it luck or providence that he randomly received two powers like this? Silas wasn’t sure there was a difference, but it made him feel better to think there was someone out there looking out for him.