1 Prologue
Chaos.
No better word to decribe the current situation, with the nearby buildings all being in ruins, flames and chunks of ice falling from the sky.
And yes you've read it well, just flames. Not meteorites(even though that's probably not impossible right now, even more than it was before) or pieces of wood(or any other material) on fire.
Supposedly this is only the beginning as well, we should be able to manipulate chunks of earth with melting hot temperature in the near future, freeze entire buildings or cities with a single touch, control lightning.
All the forces we've seen in nature that were supposed to be out of our reach, are now at the tip of our fingers, thanks to a new type of 'energy', for a lack of better word to express what it is. Simply called 'Mana' by scientists, before the gravity fields got f'd up and chaos ensued.
Well, to continue from earlier, I'm currently located inside what can only be called a battlefield, with all that fire n ice attacking not only foes, but also allies, and what's left of the nearby structures.
Currently, our 'foes' are the creatures of imagination, called 'mana beasts', simply to stick with the term mana which they came from, and them being what they are - beasts.
'Inspect'
---------------------------------------------
Name: Cerberus, Race:Demon
Age:3m Rank:***
Patk:200 Pdef:200
Matk:20 Mdef: 40
Hp: 420/2220 Stam:120/400
MP: 170/500 Level:21
Attr**************************************
Agi:30 Str: 40 Vit:40
Mag:30 Wis: 10 Dex:15
Title: **Devourer**
Skills************************************
Chomp: (1-3 heads)
Bonus damage if using multiple heads. Heals some HP.
Sonic blast: (1-3 heads)
Deafens the targets within 20-40-60m(cone shaped blast).
Fire ball:
Depending on mp used, create a ball of fire and release it in a targeted direction.
Fire storm: (domain-type)
Create multiple fire-balls, which float around the user while having a synergistic effect of increasing nearby temperature and flammability.
---------------------------------------------
That's the mama beast around here. The big boss or whatnot. One of the first beasts spawned since the start of all this crap.
Mana works in mysterious ways. In large concentrations it sometimes 'spawns' creatures like this one. Before 'Mana shift' happened, and yes - that's the official name for the start of the apocalypse, mana appeared on Earth for some time. To be precise, it should have appeared 1 month before the shift.
It was May 1st, and the weather suddenly changed from being relatively cold to excruciatingly hot.
There was nothing wrong with that by itself, the weather got really wacky in the past few years, and everyone was screaming the term 'global warming' left and right. The starter of almost every small-talk on the streets, and with these sudden shifts this change was nothing truly unusual.
What was unusual though, was the first weather report on TV after that. A weather reporter called Mary Pollins was giving the weather report for the following week, and because of the sudden shift, which somehow wasn't seen by all the people and programs monitoring the weather (again nothing unusual .-.), she wore a thick jacket and a pair of pants to work. While giving the report live on TV, sweat was pouring like a waterfall down her face, caused by the hot temperature and her clothes.
Then all of a sudden, a ball of water started floating above her.
She probably never would have noticed, if not for the camera-man and a few members of the staff gawking at her. Above her to be precise. Only then did she look up, saw the water 'balloon', and at that moment it suddenly released a *pop* sound and it splashed all over her, while she fell unconscious pretty much at the same moment.
Camera recorded for a few more seconds, most likely because everyone was still surprised, after which the transmission stopped.
Some panic ensued after that. Most people only saw a recording of that moment, and they thought it's fake. Even most of those who saw it live on TV still didn't believe it.
And I was watching it live on TV in my living room while eating lunch. Though I pretty much never watch the TV, a friend of mine was getting married in a couple of days, and because he moved away to a different city(work reasons) I planned to rent a room in a hotel in the same city for a few days before&after the wedding, to relax a bit while there.
So as luck would have it, I had a chance to see that bubble popping, and it got me thinking. I didn't want to believe it, but something crazy did happen to me that morning.
When I was taking a shower, after waking up, I remembered that I didn't bring a towel with me while entering the tub. When I was internally cursing myself for my own stupidity, and thinking how I'll need to wipe the whole floor later, and hope that the parquet won't swell up from all the water(I know, parquet in a toilet? Just horrible. An advantage of renting an apartment -.-), wishing I didn't forget the darn towel, I suddenly found myself staring at one on the floor.
And mind you, I don't keep my towels on the floor usually, my mama taught me better. But while unlikely, I thought that maybe I took the towel absentmindedly and forgot all about that event, as it can happen sometimes.
Watching the news reporter on TV got me thinking though. I'm an avid reader of novels/light novels/fan-fics, so I didn't exclude the possibility, even as unlikely as it was. Meditation isn't a strange term for me. I tried it a few times, even if i never had any real success. So I put the obvious(for me at least, at that moment) one plus one together, and tried to do just that.
Therefore I concentrated deeply, wishing of course the cold beer from the fridge was in front of me, as having a nice cold beer on a day like this would be heavenly. So I thought really hard about it, until suddenly I felt a bit lighter in my head. I looked around and found nothing out of the ordinary, and then, the world turned black.
