Daily Life

It was a typical morning. Wes woke up, laced up his worn-down sneakers, and went for a run. He was ten and a half now—two years since the world had collapsed into chaos.

His father had moved them to a more secluded section of the base, under the pretense of needing more space for his medical work. In reality, it was a quiet place to train, plan, and prepare.

Simon had changed.

He still worked as a doctor, but now he hunted, trained, and prepared constantly. He had apprentices under him, so he didn't need to be around all the time, freeing him up to strengthen himself in ways he never had before.

As Wes jogged past the main road leading into the settlement, he spotted a horse-drawn cart rumbling forward, sheets covering what lay beneath. Another delivery.

He already knew.

Adjusting his pace, he stepped alongside the cart as Chester, the man driving it, met his gaze.

"Morning, Wes."

Wes barely glanced at the shapes beneath the tarp. "More dead?"

"Yeah." Chester exhaled. "Goblins are using some nasty poison. Doc needs to take a look, see if there's anything to counter it."

Wes tilted his head. "Poison killed them?"

Chester snorted. "Nah. Just slowed 'em down. The three arrows to the chest did the rest."

Wes nodded. That made sense. Poison wasn't the killer—it just made sure you couldn't fight back.

Chester didn't look sad. He didn't look angry, either. He just looked tired.

Death wasn't shocking anymore. It didn't send people into hysterics, and no one dropped everything to mourn. But that didn't mean it didn't matter. The weight of it still lingered, just quieter. People buried their dead, said their goodbyes, and moved on. Because they had to.

Without another word, Chester flicked the reins, and the cart continued toward the clinic.

Wes resumed his run.

His routine was brutal—every day, he pushed himself to his absolute limit. Today was sprinting, so he wrapped some discarded resistance bands around his legs, adding weight to each step. The goal was simple: be faster, stronger, better.

Mana was everything now. But there was a problem.

You couldn't accumulate mana until you turned twelve.

That was something Chad and their father constantly nerded out over. Some kind of biological threshold, a process nobody fully understood yet. Wes didn't care about the why—just the fact that it meant he had to rely on pure effort for now.

Chad, on the other hand, thrived in this world.

Wes was pretty sure his half-brother was secretly thrilled that civilization had crumbled. The kid had once joked about "rediscovering the lightbulb."

And honestly? He kind of did.

His biggest success? Morse code and a crude mana battery.

When mana rewrote the laws of the world, some materials stopped working altogether. Others, like Mana Ore, became essential for anything energy-based.

But figuring that out wasn't easy.

At first, Chad had tried to power things the old way. He found an old battery, stripped wires, and hooked them up to a hand-crank generator. Nothing. He tried salvaging parts from whatever tech was left in the base—radios, flashlights, even an old truck battery. Still nothing.

It wasn't until Simon, who was constantly experimenting with new materials, traded with a group of miners that things changed.

They had brought him something strange—chunks of blackened metal pulled from deep underground. It wasn't brittle, despite its scorched appearance, and it had a faint shimmer that almost made it look like it was absorbing light. Simon, fascinated, had taken a few pieces in exchange for medical treatment.

Chad had seen the ore sitting in his father's workshop and decided to test it.

But by then, he had already failed hundreds of times.

For months, he had tried anything and everything. Old-world metals, salvaged circuits, even bits of stone or crystal that looked interesting. He melted things down, reshaped them, mixed and matched materials. Nothing worked. It was starting to feel like nothing ever would.

That's when Wes found him sitting next to a pile of failed prototypes, frustration written all over his face. He was staring at the latest set of wires he'd stripped apart, flexing his fingers like he was debating throwing the whole thing across the room.

Wes, half-joking, asked if he was finally going to give up.

Chad just grinned, rolling the strange blackened ore between his fingers before slotting it into his next test.

"I have not failed," he said, adjusting the wiring. "I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

Wes smirked. He knew the quote.

That time, when Chad flipped the switch, the wires connected. The circuit closed. And for the first time since the collapse, something carried power.

It was weak, barely a flicker of energy, but it worked. That alone was a breakthrough.

Chad didn't stop there. He experimented, melting bits of the ore, testing its conductivity, and comparing it to old-world materials. His conclusion? This was something entirely new.

Mana Ore.

It wasn't just metal—it was a conductor for mana itself. The reason old wires and circuits failed was because mana had saturated everything, overriding the old rules of energy transfer. But Mana Ore adapted to those rules. It absorbed mana, let it flow, carried it like copper once carried electricity.

With this discovery, Chad created a crude mana-powered battery—the first working energy source in the settlement since the collapse. It was unstable, inefficient, and barely held a charge, but it was proof that mana could be harnessed.

And with the battery working, Chad revived long-distance communication, adapting Morse code with mana pulses. It wasn't perfect, but it was a game-changer.

"Communication over long distances is paramount," he had declared, slamming a fist onto his workbench dramatically. "This is only the beginning."

Their parents, however, kept his discoveries hidden.

A wise decision.

If the settlement found out that Chad had cracked even a small part of mana's influence on technology, it wouldn't be long before someone tried to take him for themselves.

After his workout, Wes did his chores. Most days, that meant cleaning his father's shop, but he was far more interested in helping the hunters. He'd slip away whenever he could, eager to learn something more useful than scrubbing bloodstains off wooden floors.

After that came school—not the kind with math tests and history lessons, but something his father had put together to keep kids from growing up ignorant in a world where ignorance got you killed. Reading, writing, and basic arithmetic were still taught, but survival was the real curriculum. Fighting, hunting, first aid—skills passed down by veterans of old wars and those who had been maimed by the new world. Some of the teachers were missing limbs, lost to wildlife, goblins, or other humans. They were proof that survival wasn't guaranteed, even for the strong.

Then it was back to helping his father. His mother handled the business side of things—trade, barter, securing supplies—but Simon had turned his work into something more. His clinic wasn't just a place to stitch wounds. It was an essential part of the settlement's foundation, a place that ensured people didn't just fight, but actually lived.

All was good, or at least as good as things could be in a world like this. The settlement was growing. The goblin threat was manageable. His parents had secured a foothold.

Wes tried to think back. His parents had been close to something. Something big.

Wes remembered how King had come in that day, unreasonable as ever, throwing his weight around and expecting things to go his way. But his father wasn't having any of it.

That was the first time Wes noticed others standing with his father. It wasn't just him and his mother anymore—there were others, people who had started to gather around them, who weren't just following King's rule blindly.

There had been tension. No weapons were drawn, but the way both sides stood, ready, watching—it was clear.

King had laughed it off in the end, acting like it was nothing, but Wes remembered. It hadn't been nothing.

They were planning something.

And then—everything changed.

The man with void black eyes showed up.