An hour before the strike in Shelton.Aron walked through the hatch into the underground facility constructed by Jason and Catherine. He looked around in approval, thinking, ‘This is a good aesthetic, but it needs a little something... extra.’He gestured for his escort to halt, then bent down and, perhaps in a fit of chuunibyo, clapped his hands and placed them on the ground. Unseen by his unblessed escort, a runic circle spread out from his hands and the floor, walls, and ceiling began changing. Line after line dug itself through the imperial steel alloy structure, leaving behind a mystifying, maze-like pattern. The lines etched themselves throughout the entire base for an entire five minutes before the etching process was completed. Once they stopped, the runic circle under Aron’s hands began pulsing like a heartbeat, each pulse coming faster and faster as the process continued. Finally, the pulse was so fast it appeared that it was a solid light, then rune after rune flew out of

Aron’s eyes flashed gold as he looked at the unconscious cultists in the crater. He noticed a purple worm wriggling its way out of the eye of one of the awakeners and attempting to flee. But since his shield blocked all mana from passing through in both directions, the purple worm could only bang against it like a fly on a windowpane.He stepped off the rim of the crater and slid down the steep side. “Why did everything disintegrate when I absorbed all of the mana?” he asked Nova.{Have you heard of the saying that all matter is mostly emptiness, sir?} she replied.“Refresh my memory.”{Atoms are over 99.9% empty space. If they were blown up to the size of a football stadium, the nucleus would be the size of a marble in the center, and the electrons would be microscopic specks of dust orbiting around the outside of the stadium in the parking lot. {So when mana is injected into matter, it fills that empty space up, like turning the entire stadium into a huge swimming pool, or perhaps

Amarillo, Texas.In the Oakdale neighborhood of Amarillo was a shabby, dilapidated one-bedroom house. Its windows were boarded up and the outside was covered in graffiti, and the front lawn had overgrown with weeds until it spilled out over the curb and onto the street. Inside, a young man was sleeping on a pile of old U-Haul moving blankets.He opened his eyes, a purple glint flashing through them, and sat up. He pulled an old flip phone out of his pocket and called the imperial police agency’s non-emergency number, then reported that a homeless person was squatting in the house he was in, then sat back to wait for the police to arrive.A few minutes later, there was a knock on the door. The young man opened the door and, as he had expected, two men in neat imperial police uniforms were standing on the porch.The taller of the two officers gave a friendly smile and said, “Hello, sir. I’m Officer St. Pierre, and this is my partner, Officer Mendoza. We received a report that someone he

“What’s the problem, Nova?” Aron asked.{Our Henry’s Eye sensors detected a very large surge of mana headed west from your location. It stopped in a local store a few miles away,} she replied.“Possibility of a false positive?”{Low, sir.}“I’ll check it out,” Aron said, then rose into the air and rocketed away in the direction of the mana surge.......Outskirts of Amarillo, Texas.Greg Bauer hummed as he paced up and down the aisles in the Tractor Supply Co. in Amarillo. He was a farmer, but today, he was buying things that no farmer needed. Or rather, things that no farmer needed in the amount he was buying them in.Every now and then as he came across something, his eyes would flash purple and, without thinking, he would dump it in his cart. He had already filled three carts and parked them at the front of the store for later checkout. It was to the point now that the employees had started giving him weird looks when they passed him while doing their routine tasks.Suddenly, he gr

Aron turned and looked around the parking lot. He had thought they were alone, but now he realized that, other than him and the pile of dust that used to be a cult leader, there were others who had witnessed the events.A short distance away, people who had been loading supplies in their cars and trucks were pointing at him. Thankfully, things had happened so fast that none of them had had time to pull out their phones and start recording before everything was over. And people further away had been too absorbed in their own errands to pay attention to a distant argument.Only a very small portion of the population was awakened and could actually see anything happening. To everyone else, it just sounded like a normal argument, if they could even hear it at all. And not everyone—especially not the kind of people (read: farmers) that shop at Tractor Supply Co.—were constantly recording everything in hopes of catching a major event that would give them a boost in visibility on the interne