2025-11-14 18:28:32Even if he has no great ability, William was still a veteran of thousand spats, and the worst ones at that.
Unfortunately for the eagle, he was quite well prepared.
The moment William saw the eagle, he brought the gun out.
It had no silencer. It won’t need any, for the world would dissolve into mayhem very soon.
He shot straight into the eagle’s head at point blank.
Yet, the bullets only caused minor dents on the eagles’ skin. At best, they cut off it’s feathers.
Meanwhile, the eagle was not a soft target.
It lunged at William, biting off his gun mid shot.
The gun got crushed, like it’s made of rubber.
However, William gathered all his power, and punched into the eagle’s head.
It is a do or die method. It’s another skill he picked up as it was floating near him.
[ Kong punch ]
[ punch out with all your attack value, using mana. Limited by the lower, attack value (or) mana. Caution: Use only as last resort, for host will have neither mana, nor vitality after the move. ]
No matter what, as long as this eagle has a single ounce of strength, he has no choice but to die. Thus, it’s better to go all out when his opponent is still underestimating him.
The punch landed right on the eagle’s open eye.
Williams fist went straight through the eagle's eye. Blood and brain matter dripped down his hand. The next moment, the torch lit up with the brilliance of a thousand suns.
William extended his hand to touch the card.
Even if he was going to faint dead, he was going to do so in the direction of the infinite mana card.
Fortunately, that is exactly what happened.
His extended pinky finger touched the bottom left corner of the card.
The next moment, William fainted dead in the torch of the Statue of liberty.
In a few minutes, the entire city of New York was in uproar.
The red and blue lights lit up all over the city, surrounding New Jersey, all the way till the foothills of Appalachian, for the police everywhere came out to control the crowd.
Thus, unless a skill card fell right in your backyard, the people to get the skills were the cops.
Fortunately, among all this commotion, there wasn’t enough time to check what’s happening with the torch of the Statue of liberty.
The skill cards could be held by not just men, but also animals.
When the animals die by the hand of a human who has initiated a skill set, the skills are automatically acquired by the killer.
The animal which has accepted a skill would not have a corpse.
Instead, all usable parts on the animal would become material cards.
These material cards could then be accepted into host space directly, where they would stay forever without losing their efficacy.
If the host does ot have an item box type skill, then, he could collect and carry these cards physically. However, they stand the chance of being lost and stolen, just like physical cards.
Fortunately for William, this process takes some time.
Even more fortunate were the skills he received from the eagle.
Both of them are passive skills, yet, their simplicity and power hungry nature was the best kind for the possessor of infinite mana cards.
[ Iron skin (passive ) ]
[ Automatically activates with the mana possessed by the host in case of danger. Could take an attack up to the value of mana provided. Host could not deactivate or remove this skill. Applies only to outer skin or equivalent. Eyes, ass hole, mouth, nostrils etc, are exempt from this defense effect. ]
On another kind of person, this is ten times a debuff, and occasional life saver.
However, on William, who possessed infinite mana now, this is the perfect sort of skill he needed.
[ Auto heal ( passive ) ]
[ Automatically activates when host’s mana / life values fall below fifty percent. Doubles the healing rate by consuming mana/power, whichever is in excess. The healing could be actively increased, applying exponential mana. Fourtimes mana means thrice the healing speed, eight times mana means four times healing speed, so on and so forth.]
And there is the crown jewel of his current cards.
[ infinite mana ]
[ what it says. ]
That’s all there is to it. No restrictions. Simple, and absolute.
No matter the commotion, the Statue of liberty is a well guarded place. Thus, the moment the torch lit up, there was an army and police dispatch both of whom were ordered to check up on what’s happening.
However, half way through the flight, the entire city is lighting up with various lights all over the place.
In some places, the lights are extinguished.
In others, the skills got attached to people driving through the cars, and accidentally touched them in their faces only to die next.
There was more than one accident in the city all of a sudden.
These skill holders, who died accidentally, all turned into a bunch of cards and items, including their cars. Only the human remained, becoming an unidentifiable creature, black from head to toe, wicked sharp nails on both hands and feet. The cards all were absorbed into this zombie, while the zombie set off to attack the nearest living human.
The people who died without touching a single card collapsed in a pile of blood and bones. Their faces were forever frozen in terror at the hellish creatures that are slaughtering them.
In the red states, the mayhem spilled over as almost every cowboy wanna be armed themselves with rifles and patrolled the roads.
Fortunately for William, he was in Newyork city, where the concentration of skill cards is highest in the country.
In light of the events that spawned the length and breadth of the county, neither the army helicopter, nor the police helicopter investigated the torch thoroughly.
Thus, they missed William, who was lying unconscious in a corner.
He woke up at one in the night.
The first thing he did was to check his status.
William smiled from ear to ear as he saw the skill cards.
Finally !
He has the strength.
He did not have great ambitions like other overlords.
He wanted his daily life back in some manner.
The most important step of the plan to achieve that is to grab resources.
The food that vanished from the entire world is not lost forever.
It’s just got sealed in cards just like every other resource in the world.
He had no idea how and where this mana apocalypse had come from, but it had a way of learning about what’s useful to humans very fast.
At this stage, the industrial chains, the weapon making industries, trains, cars, gas were all not sealed into cards.
However, it will not remain the same in future.
Mana is like a sentient being which wants everything and everyone in the world to depend on itself.
The worst part of the apocalypse was loss of knowledge and history.
Once a generation passes, computers, internet, even bicycles could very well become part of long lost history.
The stone age could well and truly return to the earth once more, as it becomes reshaped in a copy of a game world.
Yet, there are ways to avoid this.
William had it figured out.
No matter books, machines, or houses … the apocalypse would not or could not seal them as long as they belong to a single person. At least, not on the first day of the mana awakening. The owner has to die, along with all the successors. When the ownership returns to an organization, that is when they get sealed.
It’s as if the game respects privacy above all.
It’s like an iron clad rule of the apocalypse that all things belonging to a single individual would not be touched, or at least, they will belong to the owner until he dies.
In the coming days, the food resources will sharply decrease while the price of all other commodities will fall beyond comparison.
All Wlliam had to do was grab the food resources.
Best thing is, he had a great plan to achieve that. Or a very simple plan. For this is a brute force work best kind of situation.
The beings of night, i.e. the dead people who got turned into Venom style symbiote wannabe would gather in groups of ten where food cards will materialize.
These spots would happen randomly all over the country.
However, given the way things are, the concentration of such occurrences in the city is highest compared to suburbs.
Most of the time, these groups occur in or nearby where food has vanished from.
Fortunately for William, he works in one such market, albeit an asian one.
The Mitsuha supermarket thankfully exists in one of the commercial parks, which contain gigantic groceries of almost all ethnicities. There’s a ninety nine on one side, Costco on otherside, and a Wegmans and stop and shop in opposite corners.
William is absolutely sure these events will start happening from almost twelve o’clock.
Police’s first priority is to save citizens.
Thus, if there is a random vigilante killing the symbiotes, he is sure they would not pay that much attention.
Even if they pay attention, he could always get lost in crowds of monsters.
After all, he got iron skin, cops are fighting in bare clothes.
As long as people are not involved, William was sure they would not pay as much attention to him.
For now though, he needs to start climbing down.
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28 - meat grinder
The journey north from the Chesapeake Bay was a lesson in geographical decay. William had piloted the Luxury Yacht (B) as far as the Delaware River delta, but the waterways had become choked with Colossal Algae Mats—thick, fibrous webs of green sludge that fouled the intake of even a warp-capable engine.Reluctantly, he had stored the yacht in the Million Tote—a feat that required draining 30% of his mana pool to encompass the vessel's mass—and switched to overland travel.He was heading for New England. His map, updated by the Voice of the Continent interface he had briefly studied, indicated that the Northeast was a patchwork of dense forests and high-mana zones. It was the perfect place to establish his Sanctuary, hidden away from the factional wars of New York.But to get there, he had to cross the Suburban Sprawl.The vast, continuous stretch of suburbs between Philadelphia and New York—once the hallmark of the American Dream—had become a nightmare of vinyl siding and tall grass.
27 - Sleeping Sovereign
The orange glow of the Scorch-Scale Sovereign descended from the zenith of the sky, casting long, twisting shadows across the drowned ruins of Washington D.C. William, crouched behind the shattered limestone railing of the Arlington Memorial Bridge, gripped the handle of his Gauss Cannon tight, his knuckles white inside the Aegis-Vanguard gauntlets.He expected a siege. The Spydar in his accessory slot was screaming predictive warnings about thermal spikes and mana pressure. In his experience, a Boss Monster returning to its lair after a patrol was hyper-vigilant—a predator checking its territory for intruders before settling down.Wil
26 - Ghost's wrath
The Scorch-Scale Sovereign was a distant, orbiting star in the blackened sky, its thermal pressure turning the D.C. basin into a stifling oven. But the heat radiating from William was entirely internal.He stood in the shadows of the Arlington Memorial Bridge, the golden Diplomatic Link cards heavy in his inventory—a physical weight of failure. He had been played. Cecelia Wu, the "mid-grade warrior," had checkmated him in a game of 4D chess while he was busy congratulating himself on finding a radar."Stupid," William hissed, his voice cracking with frustration. "Arrogant."He slammed his fist against the concrete piling. The impact cracked the stone.The anger wasn't just about the deception; it was about the vulnerability. He had allowed himself to become predictable. He had prioritized hoarding over partnership, and in doing so, he had handed the leverage to someone else.He looked at the countdown on his Spydar. Sector 1 (Sky): Sovereign Patrol Cycle. Remaining Time: 9 Hours.Nine
25 - Diplomat's trap
William had just cleared the Pentagon’s watergate, the Spydar humming invisibly in his accessory slot, when the world turned orange.It wasn't the soft hue of a sunset. It was the violent, shimmering orange of a kiln being opened.The predictive algorithm of the Spydar screamed a warning in his retinal display—Thermal Spike Detected. Sector 1 (Capitol) Initiating Launch.—but William didn't need the A-Grade accessory to tell him the sky was burning.From the drowned center of the National Mall, three miles away, the Scorch-Scale Sovereign took flight.It was a terrifying majesty. The A-Grade Boss didn't flap wings; it didn't have any. It simply uncoiled from the shattered rotunda of the Capitol Building, rising on a column of superheated air that instantly flash-boiled the surrounding swamp water. A massive plume of steam, white and dense, erupted upwards, only to be blown apart by the creature’s sheer thermal pressure.The dragon ascended, its long, serpentine body undulating through
24 - Pentagon's eye
William retreated from the petrified white forest of the National Mall, slipping back into the murky safety of the swollen Potomac. He didn't stop until he was aboard his yacht, anchored behind the crumbling concrete shield of the Arlington Memorial Bridge. The heat radiating from the Scorch-Scale Sovereign was still palpable, a ghostly warmth clinging to his armor even in the cool, filtered air of the ship’s cabin.He sat at the console, the holographic display casting a blue glow over his face. He uploaded the encrypted packet to Cecelia: a high-resolution snapshot of the petrified forest, the A-Grade Sovereign, and the swirling, storm-touched Orb floating in the Capitol’s shattered rotunda.He waited. The response time would indicate her level of interest.It took eleven seconds.Incoming Message: Cecelia Wu “Do not engage. I repeat: Do not engage. The Sovereign is a localized disaster event waiting to happen. If you wake it up, you won’t just die; you’ll wipe the entire eastern se
23 - pulse of the swamp
The Luxury Yacht (B) cut through the swollen, silty waters of the Ohio River, its warp-capable engines humming at a low, sub-audible frequency designed to evade aquatic sonar.William stood on the bridge, watching the shoreline of what was once Kentucky slide past. It was no longer a state; it was a wall of impenetrable green. The Thousand Mile Barrier—the atmospheric and systemic wall that prevented high-speed aerial or warp travel—forced him to navigate the old waterways. But for a man with a B-Grade vessel and a silenced engine, the rivers were the veins of the continent, and he was the only blood cell moving freely.He was returning from the Harvest. The Million Tote (L) was heavy with the weight of the Midwest: grain silos, heirloom seed vaults, and enough agricultural machinery to jumpstart a civilization. He had secured the future. Now, he had to survive the present.William turned his attention to the holographic interface floating above the yacht’s console. Specifically, the
