Twenty people died today. I have seen the dead before, open casket funerals and a car wreck once. I have never seen a man get his head bitten off. This all felt so magical up until that point. I can make simple tools out of light, who wouldn’t get lost in the excitement. Like a TV show or anime, sure I wasn’t the main character, but it was enough to be a side kick.

  Titus decided that reinforcing the local grocery store was necessary. Most of the men in town pitched in and a few small construction companies donated the use of their back hoes. It was fast, the store was reinforced with a pile of dirt in less than a day. Plans are being made to turn the hardware store, and elementary schools into similar structures. It’s only now that I am starting to realize that this is the end of the world as I know it.

  Day 3, Owen Landers

  Notice: Flesh Lord has resisted several parasites and diseases from Esurientem Aranea.

  Eating a spider might not have seemed palatable, but Silas knew a bit about an insect’s circulatory system. Well, he knew about a lobster’s circulatory system from when he had dissected one. He had never thought that a stupid science lesson in school would have real life impact, no one needed to know how a lobster's heart worked unless they worked in marine biology. Or they got trapped in an alternate monster dimension, but who expected that to come up?

  The closed circulatory system pumped oxygenated blood up to the top of the body and let gravity pull it back down to the belly where it would get pumped to the top once again. That was about all Silas remembered, he didn’t join the army because he got high scores in school. He wasn’t stupid, simply not motivated to remember irrelevant facts. He was kicking himself over that now.

  The other reason he chose the spider was the legs. They were like crab legs and tasted quite similar, his meat cleaver had no issue cracking open the fuzzy legs that were as thick as his wrist. Eating a solid tube of meat was easy, so long as he closed his eyes and tried to forget where he got it from.

  Notice: Flesh Lord has resisted several parasites and diseases from Esurientem Aranea.

  He mentally went through the next few things that he needed to accomplish. First, he needed to figure out how to use bone crafter, it would let him make the tools he needed. There were several things he needed to know, did it consider an exoskeleton to be bone, what about horns and teeth? A shark had a cartilage skeleton so could he manipulate that? Could he use it to instantly heal broken bones?

  Silas wasn’t even sure how to use it, but he did have a lot of material to work with. He hefted his cleaver and extracted the shin bone of a large reptilian chicken monster. Cockatrice? Many of these creatures seemed to be slightly off brand monsters from mythology. The nerd in him was excited about that, monsters didn’t come without heroes after all. His better trained half recognized the danger in their existence.

  He had seen werewolves, a beholder, a three tailed fox, and a dragon. There had even been a handful of dinosaur looking creatures. Silas shook his head, this was ridiculous. He was dissecting a Central American myth because he wanted to experiment with the powers that he got from a squirrel. An evil squirrel, but still. Oh, and most of the local monsters were wary of the new body of water. That added credence to the idea that it was not a native resource.

  The bone came free with a sucking noise, covered in tendrils of stringy muscle. Silas spent a few moments attempting to remove the ligaments and blood. Then he looked down at himself. He was filthy, working with messy materials wouldn’t make it any worse. Silas repressed a shudder when he realized that he might be stuck like this for a few months or years. He only briefly considered using the water to clean up, he needed to secure drinking water first.

  “How to go about molding bone,” Silas muttered.

  He read the sigil’s description. It did say mold specifically. He wondered how well that would pair with his supposed talent. Sculpting wasn’t something that he had tried before so he couldn’t say whether or not he had real talent. So he tried to crumple up the bone like a ball of clay. His eyes widened when it smashed flat as if it were made of play dough.

  Silas looked at the relatively flat bone. Experimentally, he flicked it. Still hard as bone. Then he poked it with the intent to put his finger through, the bone gave way. Silas marveled at what he was doing, to the rest of the world bone was a solid, but it was simply clay to him. His brain started to come up with ways to abuse this ability.

  On Earth, things like drones and anything more than ten minutes from the kill sight were about to become obsolete. That meant things were about to get much more up close and personal. A punch that could deform bones would be devastating. Silas could literally tie his opponents in knots like a cartoon character.

  Experimentally, Silas drove a punch into the cockatrice’s side. The rib cage held with no issue. Silas was a bit surprised at the amount of disappointment that he felt over the lack of damage. No running around one-shotting dragons with a single stomp to the spine. There were more things he needed to discover.

  Silas spent the next day in relative peace pulling apart and creating things with the monster’s bones. The first thing he found out was that talent did not mean that he was an instant expert. Something that was obvious in hindsight - there was a reason that the saying, “work trumps talent when talent won’t work”, was so popular.

  If he understood it, the talent simply showed which skill set would give him the best progress for each hour he invested into learning it. He wished he had taken art class in high school, but his father had always mocked the ‘Artsy Fartsy Hippies.’ Silas wondered how his old man would react to his son being gifted artsy fartsy talents.

  He was wary of attacks, but the other monsters stayed clear of the water. It gave him time to work his way through different ideas. He could mold bone like play dough, and what did every child do with the colorful material? Mix it into one rainbow brown mess.

  Silas piled a few bones, a few pieces of vertebrae, and the upper arm bone, on a rock. He started to knead the pile like he was getting ready to bake some pizza dough. The thought made him hungry, he glanced at the savaged bodies that were his food supply. That killed any appetite he was building.

  The bone squished between his fingers. He rotated his hands and watched in shock as the bones twisted together. Rolling it out into a long snake of bone he felt a bit giddy at what he had made. It was a bit lumpy and ugly, but he was looking at a short spear. Bone wasn’t the best weapon, so he tried to alter the rigidity of the shaft, but nothing happened.

  It was still wet enough that a little flex was a given. Still, he had no idea how to apply the greater part of bone sculptor. There didn’t seem to be much point in making bone spaghetti, however string braided into a rope would be useful. Maybe he needed to speak a command.

  Glancing around as if someone would be watching, Silas whispered, “Greater Bone Crafting.”

  The bone was either normal bone or clay like.

  “Uh, Go Flexi-Bone,”

  Nothing.

  “Bendy Bone,”

  No flex beyond what fresh bones naturally possessed.

  “Dammit, just work!” That one came out a bit louder than he had intended.

  Silas froze, looking around for monsters that his shout might have disturbed. Nothing moved, nothing changed. Death by exasperated yell was not a way that he intended to go.

  “Focus, Silas,” He muttered to himself, “You need to build some tools with the materials you have.”

  After water came shelter, at least if he remembered the survival priorities correctly. He did have something that would make reasonable building material. Looking at the large insects Silas pried at the plates covering them. They gave, though less freely than the other creature’s endoskeleton had. A large beetle creature was Silas’s first target.

  He had to saw through several tendons to get at the piece covering the wings. When he attempted to roll it out, it was difficult, more like bending aluminum than clay. He could do it, but it was exhausting. Eventually, Silas resorted to jumping on the concave shell to flatten it out. The result was not pretty, there was excess material in the center, resulting in one of the edges tearing.

  Silas decided that a hammer was something that he needed in short order. He started reshaping his spear into a hammer when he realized that he couldn’t reshape bones at a distance. That didn’t make sense, every tradesman that he was aware of used tools to enhance their work. Picking up a rock he dropped it on the bone.

  It didn’t pass through like he had wanted it to, but it did dent the spear. He dropped the stone again, this time the stone bounced off the bone like it was supposed to. Smiling, Silas wrapped the bone around a fist sized rock to create a primitive hammer. He couldn’t be sure how the ability worked, it was a question for a time when he wasn’t so exposed and alone.

  Alone in a world of monsters who wanted to eat him.

  “Survive, get home, find Abby.” He whispered to himself.

  Silas couldn’t be sure, but he felt that he was handling the panic better than he had even a few hours ago. Maybe it had something to do with his new capabilities. Having a method for survival took a huge weight off his shoulders. Also, he might be going crazy, he was already talking to himself.

  With a half smile, Silas muttered, “Heave ho,” Before humming the tune of the song John Henry. He proceeded to hammer the plate of carapace into a flat shape. It was hard work, and even with his increased ability to work at full strength it still took a long time. He used the flattened plates of carapace as a kind of wall for a rickety structure.

  It needed to be done before night, Silas had enough issues while it was light outside he didn’t want to confront anything nocturnal. It took hours to make a small four sided building abutting one of the rock formations. Bones were scavenged to keep the carapace walls together. Hip bones, femurs, and shins were repurposed into a rudimentary mortar.

  Once the walls and roof were complete, Silas started piling rocks against the sides. They would add strength to the overall construction while also disguising it. He didn’t trust the roof enough to pile stone on it, but he did place a thin layer of dust and gravel atop it. The entrance was hidden behind a boulder, larger creatures would need to move the rock to get to him. Anything his size would get stabbed in the face by his spear as soon as it poked its nose inside.

  Silas sighed, rubbing the tiredness from his eyes. It was still midday, but it had been a long day so far, he could excuse his exhaustion. His stomach grumbled, which caused him to look back at the spider. Was he really going to eat more of the creepy crawly? He could go a bit longer without food.

  More weapons, yes, that’s what he needed. Silas started harvesting the bones from the few remaining monsters. Spears were his best bet right now, they could be mass produced with little effort and planted into the ground as traps. He imagined a pike line of spears protecting his watering hole, keeping away anything that would see him as a snack.

  Unfortunately, he would need far more bone to create those kinds of defenses. As it was, he could only make ten spears with extra thick shafts. Looking at the sad bone points, Silas put a finger on it. Bone was not made to stab things. Sure, it was sharp enough to poke holes in Silas, but the insects would be almost immune, and many creatures had thick hides.

  Silas was stumped. He might be able to break down his meat cleaver to use as a point. That idea was abandoned as soon as he gave it more than a moment’s thought. He yawned. Silas shook his head to clear out his drowsiness.

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  “You got this, what did people make pointy things out of in history?” Silas muttered. His brain went straight to bone, as that was what he had been working on for the last few hours. Or had it been days? It certainly felt like more than a few hours.

  The idea was obvious when he came to it. It even fell within his supposed talent. Before the Bronze Age was the Stone Age. Silas actually knew how to make arrowheads too. One of his friends in Cub Scouts had been fascinated by American history and that had translated into historical American weapons.

  Silas was sure that every boy went through a phase like that. His had been more modern, with big explosions and hunting rifles. He wondered what his children would get fixated on. The thought of getting back to Abby was a pleasant one. Silas blinked, what had he been doing? Arrowheads, yes. Cheap, easily produceable stone heads.

  He wasn’t sure what kind of stone was best. Something that would break cleanly along a plane. Obsidian would be nice, but while volcanoes seemed to fit the theme of this world, none of the black stone was visible. Grabbing a fist sized rock he smashed it against a boulder with everything he had.

  The stone broke into three pieces and a few dozen smaller chips. He inspected the stone for a few moments, before sighing. He had no idea what he was looking for. His friend had always found the appropriate rocks for him. Silas knew how to chip small parts off, but not what kind of stone worked.

  Staring at the rock wouldn’t make it work any better, so he started chipping off pieces of stone to make the triangular heads, It was a simple and genius process that would allow a person to sluff off planes of material with the size dependent on the angle and force used. A few hours of trial and error later, Silas was left with a serrated point made of hard stone.

  A light poke was enough to draw blood. Silas was no geologist, but whatever this substance was, it was very hard and fairly brittle. He wasn’t sure if he was lucky for having useable rocks or unlucky to be stuck without a gun. Glancing at the sky, he frowned, nothing had changed in however long he had been here.

  He went to work on making more spearheads. They needed to be good at stabbing, as he couldn’t be sure that he would be able to cut his opponent. Most things resistant to stabs were very resistant to slashes. Spearhead three was nearly finished when a notice popped up in front of him. Silas flinched, missing the in progress spearhead and skinning his knuckles.

  “A little warning next time would be nice,” He muttered.

  Notice: You have exceeded the ability of Flesh Lord to keep you alert by staying awake for ninety-six hours.

  Ninety-six what? Silas had trouble believing that. He looked up at the sky, the sunless sky. Why would a sky without a sun have a day/night cycle? Grimacing at the new information, Silas did a quick mental calculation. Had he really been working for four days? No, but he had been awake for an entire day on earth waiting for Abby’s call, then he spent quite some time moving towards the portal, and finally he had built a home out of carapace and stone.

  The wave of exhaustion that hit him was intense. Silas slumped, nearly tripping over his own feet. His already foggy brain started moving like molasses. He was glad that he had worked on the shelter before the weapons. He gathered up the stone tipped spears and staggered to his shelter.

  Silas had put the entrance to it between a boulder and a rock formation. It made him feel like he had made a human sized rabbit hole, but they lived in holes for a reason. The interior was small, a bit over ten feet long and three feet tall, he could sleep in it and do little else. Fortunately, that was exactly what he needed, He pushed some irritating stones out of the way and fell asleep on the soil.

  He opened his eyes and saw his home. It was a small affair, a mobile home in a trailer park. The neighbors were kind, and it was a great place to get life started. Silas had joined the army and used the money he saved for college to purchase it. Abby would have a place to call her own while he was gone.

  The pickup held together by duct tape and bailing twine sat beside a midlife crisis. His dad had bought the Corvette when he retired from working as a police chief, something Abby’s father always teased him about. Silas smiled at that, he was lucky, his in-laws got along with his parents.

  Stepping up to the door he knocked. Jay, his father-in-law, opened it with a smile. He gestured for Silas to enter, patted him on the shoulder, and chirped at him. Silas frowned at Jay, his face was smiling, but his eyes were off. He opened his mouth and another chirp came out.

  “Are you doing alright?” Silas asked.

  Jay nodded and then made a chirping noise. This time he could almost hear words in the chirps. It was in the same way a crow would start talking. They were comprehendible, but clearly not human.

  “Sorry, I good,” Jay said, the smile he had made Silas shudder.

  Walking further into his home, Silas found his father, polishing a bone spear with a dishrag, Looking at his father was like looking at himself in twenty years. His blond hair was greying and his face had a few more wrinkles, but his blue eyes and their well built frames were nearly identical.

  His father smiled, setting the spear on the kitchen counter, “Go out, go hunt?”

  Silas glanced back at Jay. Both had used the exact same voice. Then the crushing weight of reality fell on Silas’s shoulders. This was a dream, he wasn’t home, and this wasn’t his family. He heard light footsteps coming down the hallway, Silas closed his eyes, not wanting to see what was coming.

  A soft body hugged him from behind. He recognized the shape, but not the voice, “It Ok, we go now?”

  He knew that if he turned around, he would see Abby. A head shorter with her hair cut at shoulder length, looking up at him with her big blue eyes. Silas refused to look, he wasn’t sure he could bear it. He broke contact and moved to the counter.

  Most of the time when he realized that he was in a dream, Silas woke up, or at the very least he knew that he could awaken at any time. When willing himself awake didn’t work, he slapped himself. Staying awake for four days had done quite a number on his body, he was not sure he could wake up, even if he wanted to.

  “What's wrong,” the dream Abby chirped.

  Silas ignored her. She was just a figment of his imagination. That meant anything he did would also be fictional. Grabbing the spear, Silas sliced his palm open. Awareness came back, but so did a feeling of exhaustion. He was both in the dream and out of it. The feeling of his bare feet on the carpet and the gravel he was sleeping on both seemed real.

  He sighed, did he actually want to wake up? Sleep was necessary, but he wanted it to be dreamless, to close his eyes, then open them well rested.

  “It's Ok, need rest” came a chirp.

  Silas froze. His father-in-law’s mouth had moved, but the noise had come from outside. He snapped awake as panic filled him with energy. Sitting up, Silas bashed his head on the roof of his sleeping burrow. Thankfully, it was sturdy, not even budging at his forehead’s impact.

  He looked around, another chirp drawing his attention to the gap between the boulder and rock formation. Silas blinked in surprise, there was a human face looking in at him. The face had the tanned skin common in the Middle East, he had a square cut beard and curly hair that reminded Silas of some Babylonian art.

  Before Silas could start relaxing, small inconsistencies started showing themselves. The eyes were those of a cat’s, slitted pupils looked down at Silas hungrily. The black bear melded into a large black body behind the head. Silas had to squint through his tiredness to see it, but it looked like a giant cat’s torso and legs. Feathered wings were folded against its spine and when the creature smiled, a forked tongue flicked out from between sharpened teeth.

  It chirped, “Good eat?”

  “Aww hell no,” Silas growled, “Did you make me have that dream?”

  “Sleep good,” the Babylonian sphinx chirped, cocking its head to the side.

  Despite having a human face, the creature didn’t appear to be sapient. At least not any more than crows were. Silas did the only sensible thing, he poked the lion sized creature in the eye with his spear. There was a brief moment of shock on the sphinx’s face, before it yowled, scrambling back to get the pointy piece of stone out of its face.

  He grabbed his two other completed spears and squeezed out of his shelter. It was not defensible, if the monster tried to dig through the wall, he was dead. The carapace couldn’t stop Silas, let alone a sphinx. A notification popped up, but Silas mentally shoved it aside. Now was not the time to be reminded of his poor sleeping habits.

  The sphinx had managed to break the stone tip off in its eye socket. It pawed at its face, trying to get the sharp stone out. Before it realized that Silas had left his shelter, he stabbed it again in the closest part of the body. The blade punched through the fur and skin to get lodged in the organs below, That was a kill shot, no animal would survive punctured intestines, especially if the sharpened head remained in the viscera.

  Guaranteed death did not mean that it would be a quick one. Silas went to stab the sphinx with his third and final spear when the wings snapped open. U.S. soldiers were not trained to fight winged talking lions with Stone Age weaponry, but still, he should have seen a move like that coming.

  It knocked the wind out of him and he felt his ribs flex in a way they weren’t supposed to. Nothing broke, but he was still sent stumbling backward. Thankfully the boulder that his shelter was set against stopped him from falling. He had no confidence in grappling the sphinx.

  A screeching caw made Silas flinch, it penetrated his ears and told him to sleep. Maybe that worked on monsters, but it certainly was not designed to work on humans. His fight reflex had well and truly kicked in.

  The sphinx was hampered by its vision, but it had stopped focusing on the sharpened rock in its eye socket. Silas was a much more certain danger. It pounced, lunging forward far faster than any creature its size should have been able to.

  Silas tried to dodge, and he mostly succeeded. Four razor sharp lines of pain cut across his side. The sphinx smashed into the boulder, at least Newton’s Laws seemed to affect this creature correctly. A yowl and a crunch confirmed that it had broken its very human nose on the rock.

  He felt the claw marks, barely ignoring the pain. No organs were trying to squeeze their way out, but he couldn’t be sure if that was due to flesh lord or simple shallow cuts. They didn’t hurt like shallow cuts.

  “Don’t get my hopes up like that,” Silas hissed, half in anger, half in pain. Then he drove the final spear into the sphinx’s neck.

  He expected it to be over at that point. Neck shots from serrated rocks were lethal, right? Evidently, there were a few arteries and the spine, aside from those, a neck stabbing wasn’t instantly lethal. He twisted the shaft, intending to tear it out, but the brittle stone shattered as he put pressure on the head. The pained chirping let Silas know that damage had been done, but not enough.

  Before the sphinx could recover, Silas scuttled around the boulder. He had foolishly left his tools outside. The meat cleaver was lying beside several destroyed corpses. Silas would have liked to blame the sphinx, but he was not the best at extracting bones, they didn’t come out cleanly like in a cartoon. He went to scoop the cleaver up when he spotted a much better weapon.

  The sphinx limped around the corner, trying not to put any weight on its back right leg. Some of the muscles that moved the appendage must have been damaged. It most likely expected Silas to flee after being injured. What it received was a Stone Age hammer to the noggin. Silas imagined what a hammer to the head would do to an animal. The result wasn’t favorable, most creatures had far sturdier skulls than humans did,

  Their brains weren’t any better, so he clubbed it again. He needed to give it a concussion. If it was too dizzy to walk and fly, he could get away. Something tore in the sphinx’s throat as its head was jerked to the side. However, if Silas was being honest with himself, he was angry, he was angry at God for putting him here, angry that a communication company of all things had started the apocalypse, angry that Abby had to deal with this alone, and angry at this creature for pointing out what he lacked with its stupid psionic abilities.

  It took him a few moments and some heavy blows to realize that the creature had stopped moving. Blood trickled from the all too human face where it had been smashed. The skull had held, but the brain had not. More importantly, his spear tip had torn enough stuff up in its throat. Silas took a few more moments to examine the creature before placing his hand on it.

  “This will do for a third ability,” Silas knew for a fact that psionic abilities were overpowered.

  Notice: you have made contact with spirit manifestation Homo Panthera. Would you like to purify the taint of Nimrod?

  “Yes,” Silas affirmed. He couldn’t be sure, but he believed that Nimrod was an Assyrian or Babylonian god of hunting. He thought back to the names he had seen, Fenrir was a Norse monster. He didn’t recognize the other two names but if he looked through history he would bet on finding a Demiurge and Disgeneree.

  The sigil that coalesced from the purple smoke was mundane compared to the eldritch eye. It was a silhouette of a winged cat with a human’s head. Almost an exact replica of some of the photos he had seen of Babylonian ruins. That proved it, these monsters had visited Earth before sometime in the distant past and he was about to get the power of a creature that nations built monuments of. Dragons had less impressive sculptures than sphinxs.

  He grabbed the sigil.

  Notice: you already posses two sigils, grow your capacity to ten or greater to form a third.

  Silas blinked at the message. He couldn’t claim a third. Had he wasted his second one on some stupid squirrels? Was this a joke? Silas almost screamed in frustration before reminding himself where he was. A hell filled with dream invading monsters.

  The sigil sat in his palm, inert. He hadn’t realized that it was a tangible object, but it was made of a glass like material that felt similar to cheap porcelain that could be found in any antique store. He had no idea what he could do with it, if anything. He nearly threw it at a wall in anger, but that wouldn’t get him anything.

  There had to be an upside to this. His father believed that every bad situation hid an opportunity. So he had hit the current limit for sigils, what about Abby or her parents? They might need some. His father was the kind of man who would wipe out these creatures or die trying. He was already powered up or dead. He would save it, he would rather have Abby fight with her brain than her fists anyway.

  That was fine, how could he turn this situation around for himself? He felt his side, armor was desperately needed. It didn’t need to be invulnerable, just strong enough to survive one fight. Silas had just received a large delivery of food and bone. He could probably make some knives with those unnaturally sharp claws as well. The fur would make a decent bed for his shelter as well. As far as survival gear went, this creature was a Godsend.

  His deep thought reminded him. There had been a notification right before he stabbed the sphinx in the eye. He had assumed it was because he was tired, but he felt fine. The adrenaline rush was wearing off and he couldn’t feel the exhausted crash. Flesh Lord was most certainly functioning the way it was supposed to.

  Moving to his interface, he tried to find the junk file that old notices were sent to. That attempt brought up his military addendum on his interface. He hadn’t even considered what had happened to it. While he was tempted to explore its functionality, he wanted to have his weapons repaired and be within the relative safety of his shelter first.

  The tab that listed his past actions and assignments had been supplanted by a log of notices. He quickly found the one he was looking for and stared at it for a few moments.

  Notice: You have pushed Flesh Lord to its limits by working to exhaustion. Flesh Lord has advanced to the new baseline you have demonstrated. Your vitality has increased to reflect this.