When the apocalypse began, John had just finished an exchange with a cute fast food worker like this:

  “Enjoy your meal,” she said, handing him his XL cheeseburger and fries combo with a smile that made his insides wriggle, even though he knew she was just being polite, as her position demanded.

  “You too,” he replied. His voice cracked on the second word.

  Their eyes met. The cashier gave an awkward chuckle, and he just knew she was internally rolling her eyes at his stupidity. His heart tripped over a beat and went tumbling. He didn’t dare look around, already knowing everyone in the restaurant was laughing at him. If a giant asteroid came plunging from the heavens and wiped out humanity, he would be fine with it. Anything to ensure everyone in earshot forgot what had just happened.

  A demon crashing through the wall wasn’t what he’d had in mind, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  It was like a puddle of tar had been brought to life by an eldritch god that didn’t know what a goat was supposed to look like. Standing on two skeletal legs, its form was covered with gaping maws, each of which drooled an endless stream of oozing black ichor that sizzled like cold water on a hot pan as it hit the ground. Grasping tendrils sprouted from its back and shoulders and wriggled like manic worms. The area where its head was surely supposed to be was covered in eyes that swivelled as if they didn’t know where to look.

  The restaurant descended into chaos. People screamed, scrambling away from the monster. John wasn’t ashamed to say he was among them. His meal—which had cost him an outrageous twelve quid, but that wasn’t important right now—went flying out of his hands as he turned away with every intention of sprinting towards the back of the restaurant, wailing in terror.

  Before he’d taken a step, a nugget of information simultaneously zapped itself into his brain and appeared before his eyes.

  -100 Aura

  The very next blink, the text faded away, but the knowledge remained. He’d lost a hundred aura. He didn’t know what the fuck that meant, and right now he didn’t care. There was no room in his mind for anything else but escape. He ran for the back door of the restaurant as fast as his legs could carry him. A spilled drink from one of the other fleeing patrons sent his leg skidding out from under him, and another bit of text appeared with a ping that sounded almost disappointed.

  -100 Aura

  Again, it barely registered. Nothing could contest the vice grip that sheer terror had on his mind. People screamed behind him. The monster screeched like a pack of twenty billy goats that had been smoking a pack a day for the last century, and he felt the sound in his bones. It rummaged his stomach up until he was sure he was going to vomit.

  Lurching back to his feet, John saw there was a crush building as people desperately sought to escape through the back door. Immediately seeing the futility of going that way, he instead pivoted and threw himself over the restaurant’s counter.

  +100 Aura

  Landing on his shoulder and rolling with the momentum by sheer luck, he sprung up and into a dead sprint, not daring to look back. Madness erupted behind him, a cacophony of shouts and screams and otherworldly, hellish mayhem.

  The kitchens were empty by this point. Any staff that had been on duty had rightfully got the hell out of dodge already, leaving food and oil and equipment scattered all over the place. The fire escape at the back of the room was already hanging open. Safety’s sweet promise drew him forward like gravity had reasserted itself in the wrong direction, and he moved faster than he ever had before. Bursting out into the back alley behind the restaurant, John didn’t get more than two paces before coming to a halt and gaping up at the impossibility above him.

  The sky was on fire. There was no other way to put it. Minutes ago, it had been a clear, sunny day in London, which was remarkable in its own right. That was the whole reason he’d bothered to go out to buy lunch rather than ordering it in. It wasn’t often one saw a cloudless sky and the sun shining down in the first week of March, and even someone such as he wanted to take advantage of that.

  Now, the world was bathed in the angry glow of an inferno that stretched from horizon to horizon. Countless screams surrounded him. Sirens wailed. Car horns blared. Deep booms reverberated through the trembling ground. It was as hot as a summer heat wave. The air was thick with the smell of sulphur and blood.

  All that paled before the sheer impossibility of looking up and seeing this shade of red.

  “The world is really ending,” he muttered to himself. A chuckle bubbled up from his belly, and he decided to indulge it. Because why not? No one was around to see him act like a lunatic, and even if they were, they’d probably commiserate. “Well, at least I won’t have to go to work on Monday.”

  +100 Aura

  John’s eye twitched. He looked around, but saw nothing unusual aside from the apocalypse. “Okay, seriously, what is this Aura shit?”

  The restaurant shook behind him. Bricks dislodged from the wall and crashed to the ground. Voices rose from within, screams of terror and pain mingling. The eldritch wail of the monster followed them, warbling like an air raid siren. The sound made his bones shudder. Fear reared its ugly head once more, reasserting its dominance after his brief moment of sheer bafflement at the state of the sky, and John’s unconscious mind had already made the idiotic reflex decision to look back before sense could reassert itself.

  His heart dropped through the floor so fast it probably tunnelled through the Earth and came out in Australia. Most of the restaurant was hidden to him by kitchen equipment, but he could just about see through to the register area, where elongated humanoid figures made of tar-like ooze were clambering over the counter. They moved jerkily, stop-start, their faceless heads snapping from one direction to the other at every little sound.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  John managed not to scream out loud as he fucking ran for it, but only because he was keeping his mouth closed with one hand, physically holding the sound in. Tears gathered in his eyes

  -100 Aura

  Instinct pushed him to keep away from the main road, judging by the sirens, screams, and general pandemonium he could hear that way. Deeper into the alley he ran, his long, gangly legs eating up the distance and carrying him away from danger. He circled behind the restaurant and plunged straight into the housing estate that neighboured it.

  The world blurred. Time lost all meaning, and his surroundings turned to impressionist watercolour. Sounds faded to distant mumbles as all cranial activity began to shut down so he could focus on running. He turned corners. Sprinted down streets. Left, right, right, left, straight, and then he wasn’t keeping track any more.

  John’s saving grace had always been that he wasn’t overweight. Whatever else had gone wrong in his life, whatever else one could say about his health or lack thereof, at least he could truthfully boast that he wasn’t obese. That didn’t mean he was in shape, however.

  Before long, his lungs were burning. His heart was trying to bash its way out of his chest. He felt like he had more lactic acid in him than blood. Cramp was threatening to twist his calves into knots.

  But he kept going. There was nothing else he could do.

  He barely registered more monsters, refusing to catalogue them to his memory. Acknowledging them would only slow him down. That didn’t stop him screaming every time he saw a new one.

  -100 Aura

  -100 Aura

  -100 Aura

  But they were everywhere. There was no escape. No salvation. Running evidently wasn’t working, so his mind cast around for plan B. He found it in the form of a household recycling bin propped up against a wall in a back alley behind a set of terraced houses. Sprinting for it, he threw open the lid and dived in head first. It was empty, but at this point, he wouldn’t have cared if it wasn’t. The lid fell shut, and he was in darkness.

  -1000 Aura

  Reality started to creep back in. The bin might have cut off his view of the world’s end, but the sounds of it still reached him. Sirens, rumbles, explosions, screams, bestial roars, inhuman laughter, the angry growl of fire, rolling thunder, the agonised groan of cracking stone. It all mixed together into a horrifying amalgamation of noise. And the heat. The smell. All of it. It was too much. He didn’t want to acknowledge any of it.

  Searching for any kind of distraction to drag his mind away from Armageddon, John finally turned his attention to the nonsensical notifications that had been shoving themselves intermittently into his vision since this madness began. As if it had been waiting for his notice, it immediately beamed more info into his mind.

  Increase Vitality (Level 0 -> Level 1): 100 Aura

  Increase Strength (Level 0 -> Level 1): 100 Aura

  Increase Agility (Level 0 -> Level 1): 100 Aura

  Increase Mind (Level 0 -> Level 1): 100 Aura

  Increase Arcane (Level 0 -> Level 1): 100 Aura

  Increase Talent (Level 0 -> Level 1): 100 Aura

  Unlock Spells: 1000 Aura

  Unlock Skills: 1000 Aura

  Unlock Inventory: 10000 Aura

  Current Aura: -1400

  Wedged upside down in a wheelie bin, John could only blink in utter bewilderment as he read through the text three times over. Was blood flooding his brain, or was he really seeing what his mind was telling him he was seeing? Spells? Skills? If whatever Gods out there were watching this shitshow had decided to give him a way to fight through the pandemonium that had befallen the world, they’d chosen a really fucking weird way to go about it.

  Because that was the only sense he could make of it. Whatever this Aura stuff was, wherever it came from, the implication of this new menu was obvious: he’d be able to use it to buy special abilities of some kind.

  Eventually. He was heavily in the negatives right now. He was going to have to figure out how to get more Aura, then see what happened once he spent it. If it worked how reason dictated it should, then he’d get stronger or more talented or more… vital. And so on. Given the murderous demons running about, the stuff on that list sounded mightily useful.

  The possibility that he’d gone insane and a bunch of people were standing around his bin with their phones out did occur to him, as did the likelihood that the police might already be on their way in such a case. That kind of humiliation seemed right up his alley. Certainly moreso than superpowers granted by some unknown higher power to help him survive the apocalypse.

  But he’d once read about how the difference between living in a simulation and the real world was immaterial to your behaviour, and felt the same logic could be applied to his current circumstances. The consequences of assuming he’d lost his mind and ignoring the very-fucking-real-looking end of the world out there were far more severe than getting carted off to the loony bin screaming about his aura or whatever.

  The next issue on the agenda was what to actually do next. Unfortunately, he didn’t get the time to ponder this problem anywhere near as much as it warranted. The nature of Aura and the exact mechanics of gaining and losing it would have to wait for another time, because one of the screams he’d been blocking out was coming closer. Close enough he could make out it wasn’t just an unending cry of terror, but was actually composed of shrill words like “help” and “please” and “somebody, anybody!” in the voice of a teen or young woman. Worst, it was painfully familiar.

  Coincidences like this were never good things, in his experience, but he found himself wriggling around in his bin anyway, trying to contort himself upright. It took far too long to get his feet under himself and surge upwards, slamming the bin lid open like the hatch on a submarine.

  As he’d thought, the voice was one he recognised: it matched with the blonde hair, the blue eyes, the black-and-yellow uniform and hat, all of which he’d last seen ten minutes and a different life ago. The cashier he’d wished a good meal to gaped at him as she crawled down the alley, but he only had eyes for the monster bearing down on her, facing away from him.

  Eight hairy arachnid legs crowded their way out of a black spherical torso that was way too small to fit them all, waving around in the air like more rigid whacky inflatable tube men. The actual legs it stood on were horrifically humanoid, but red as the worst kind of sun burn. It had no mouth, but somehow made a wheezing groan sound, like the petulant little shit was awfully put out to have to hunt down and murder every living being it encountered. Blood slicked its spidery legs, drip drip dripping to the ground.

  John stared at it. “Oi, you ugly son of a bitch,” he said. It turned. Its spherical body, it turned out, contained a bloodshot eyeball. “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?!”

  +500 Aura

  That was when his bin toppled over, sending him tumbling to the muddy pavement.

  -500 Aura