Flipping Haunted Houses For Fun And Profit! 1.11 - Keres (Patreon)

The cars on the road were already at a dead stop when Loren stepped out his building and into the cool, predawn gloom. The sky was already turning blue from the sun just over the horizon, and he could feel the sun’s energy just over the horizon as some of it began to fill the sky. He sighed as he stared at the utterly stalled vehicles. Already, the sidewalks were being filled by walking people, and the air by Thaumaturgists held aloft by glowing platforms of veneplate or venefluid or, more rarely, other Flame Mages with fire jetting out from the ends of their limbs as they flew like rockets. Every so often, the form of a Symbol would fly by, moving faster and not limited by things like ‘comfortable positioning’ since they didn’t need to be lifted up a specific points.

Loren pushed ‘buying a bike or at least a scooter’ a bit higher up his list of priorities as he started walking. The sidewalk was crowded with people doing the same, but since they most of the other pedestrians were walking in pretty much the same direction it wasn’t yet an issue.  Unfortunately, there were too many people for him to be able to break out into a run, especially since there were assholes in bikes and even motorcycles trying to get up on the sidewalk to make progress. Putting one foot in front of the other, Loren began to make his way towards where he was all but certain Harmony was.

As he walked, Loren reluctantly let his Flame spread out from him in a wide circle, causing the air within his claim to feel warm, no doubt to the mild discomfort of his fellow pedestrians. The Flame mage immediately began to feel the keres around him, the evil spirits feeling like little patches of heat that writhed hungrily, churning in place like they were water. Nearly invisible and immaterial as they fed on people, he knew the spiritual pests far better than he did ghosts and the spirits of houses. As he walked, he sent little blooms of magic—equally invisible, not quite immaterial—to burn them out of existence, leaving only a brief shimmer of heat haze.

Blind and not very smart, the little immature keres were easy to eliminate, but he knew there was always more. And even in the area around Loren that he’d claimed with his magic as he walked, he couldn’t burn away all of them. There was just so many, and some were so small it didn’t feel like an efficient use of effort. It was like trying to use a hammer to kill fleas. He could do it, but it would be tiring and inefficient unless there were several clustered together. Better to use the hammer to kill cockroaches.

As Loren walked, he felt other mages in the crowd doing the same. His claimed area brushed against the claim of another Flame mage, and the two of them briefly met gazes as they instinctively sought each other out before exchanging brief nods. The venefog of a Thaumaturgist swirl around him as he felt the manifested magic pseudo-vapor interacting with the controlled heat of his claim interacted in strange, seemingly random ways. The population density of the city meant that there was always another mage of some sort every few dozen steps away, although not all of them could really do this.

It wasn’t really anything he thought about anymore, just something he’d been doing ever since he’d learned how to use his magic. There were keres in the world, and only mages could really do something about them. Not all did—and they were assholes and keres chow for doing so—and not all could—poor Necromancers—but it was something only a mage could do that made the world better for everyone, or so he’d been taught. 

It also gave him a convenient way of keeping track of the people around him, particularly those who got close to his backpack. These were still the streets of Selurong, after all.

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Loren went on foot for over an half an hour as he got closer to where the manifested keres was, the crowd eventually thinning as people had detoured up and down a major intersection to try and find alternate roads where the traffic wasn’t deadlocked. That had finally allowed him to pick up the pace, moving into a jog as he let Flame fill his legs. There were ways to use Flamecraft to get superhuman performance from your body, but Loren didn’t know them, so he was using the far more simpler method of simply feeding Flame to his muscles to give them energy. It let him run flat out, the Flame letting him drive his body further as his magic fueled his muscles. With the magic energizing his legs directly, he didn’t need to breath as hard, letting him keep running without panting for air.

Block after block flew by as he ran, two- and three-storey buildings passing him by on either side, a mix of commercial storefronts with some sort of private residence on the floor above, or simply a very old house that had managed to hang on to their property despite the rising land prices. Loren was willing to admit that he started missing some of the keres around him in his haste. It was fine. They were small, and not even close to manifesting. Someone else would get them…

He needed to get to Harmony.

As Loren ran, he saw a brilliant green light flare ahead of him, although he couldn’t see the source. And then he did see as a glowing form rose into the air, small as a pin-prick and shining like a floodlight pointed directly in his face. And then the light had become blinding, forcing him to stop and protect his eyes as a beam of magic, green as the light through a stained glass window, blasted downward towards something on the ground. A second later, he felt a powerful tremor vibrate through the ground, and he’d instinctively tried to keep his balance. A heartbeat later, the crack of a violent explosion slammed into his ears, and he actually saw windows around him vibrate, before an unearthly scream that felt like water boiling in his ears rang through the air and cut off like a cut throat. 

For a moment, he just stood there, trying to get his brain to settle. What the fuck…?

Loren shook his head, then fell back into a run. That had either been a good thing or a bad thing, but either way, Harmony was probably closer to it than he’d been.

After about five minutes of running, he saw people ahead of him again. They filled the sidewalks and spilled out into the streets, and unlike the early morning crowd he’d encountered before all wearing office clothing or business casual, these people were wearing shorts, nightdresses, and old shirts. A few men were topless, dad-bod bellies and muscles on display. Many people milled about uncertainly, but those with children of various ages had found places to sit on doorsteps, stoops, or just the sidewalk, the little ones passed out as one or both of their parents kept watch over them. On one spot, someone had laid out a tarp of the floor, where a tangle of children were all curled up together for warmth, arms, legs and tentacles tangled together, an occasional foot or hand sticking out onto the pavement.

He slowed his pace, pulling his phone from his pocket and finally turning on the app that would let him find out where Harmony was, or at least her phone. Fortunately, the cellular network seemed to be working properly, so he was quickly able to get a ping on the app’s map. Remembering the location, he put the phone back in his pocket before someone decided to grab it out of his hand. The crowd of people—most likely those evacuated from where the keres nest was found—slowed him down, since there were too many people to run through. Weren’t they supposed to go to evacuation centers instead of just being left a couple of blocks away to obstruct traffic?

Loren found Harmony among a crowd of people being held back by a pair of police cars parked across the street to block the road, yellow police tape strung out between them and some power poles to try and make it clear that no one was supposed to enter. Some temporary tents had been set up nearby, where people in their nightclothes were being examined by doctors—or more likely, first responders, but that was probably just his cynicism speaking—

He paused, flared out his Flame around him, and found a keres latched onto his left ankle. A bit more magic than strictly necessary burst out from his leg, enough to cause a jet of hot air to ruffle his pantleg. He took a moment to check the rest of him, and blasted two more keres on his right calf and behind his right knee. Ugh, he hated those things. He knew was inclined to see the worst in the world, but he didn’t need to see the enablers of that terribleness agreeing with him.

Putting his attention back towards the circle that he had claimed around him, he started lancing more and more keres as he walked. Everyone seemed to have two or three keres attached to them, although since the watery little things were invisible, he couldn’t tell what kind. Still, from all the coughing and sniffling he heard, he could guess. This had all started because of a Plague Keres, after all. Probably Emptiness too, from the blank, ‘done with this shit’ expressions many people were sporting. At least it wasn’t Wrath, though that was probably only a matter of time. There were always assholes who wanted to pick a fight for the sake of ‘standing up for themselves’.

Harmony was easy enough to find. For one thing, she was one of the few people who wasn’t wearing sleepwear, which immediately made her stand out. Her pink backpack—that she always defended was not pink but magenta—also stood out, and she was handing out crackers to the people around her. they were the cheap, pale, tasteless kind that was probably just water and flour and maybe salt pressed together into a little sheet of cardboard, but people were literally eating it up eagerly. It took him a second to realize that these people must have been up for hours and probably haven’t had breakfast yet.

A quick glance around showed that besides Harmony, there was no one handing out anything edible. Actually, now that he looked, the first responders examining people didn’t have any food near them. There was usually at least a burger or the wrapper of one nearby, since it was easier to get fast food, but they didn’t even seem to have any bottled water to hydrate.

Loren checked around him for keres before he sighed and pessimistically wondered if there would be another local mayor or balangay captain who’d be forced to resign for incompetence. Shit like this was why he didn’t vote. All the candidates were usually bad, and at least this way he wasn’t responsible for putting anyone in power. People always told him he should vote anyway and pick ‘the lesser evil’ and such people were morons. Evil was still evil. Maybe he’d vote if they had an option like ‘none of these idiots, do over the election with a fresh batch’ but there wasn’t, so he didn’t.

…

Well, not his problem, he wasn’t registered to vote here… not that he voted anyway.

Sighing, he made his way towards Harmony, putting a hand on her shoulder to get her attention.

“Oh, there you are!” she said cheerfully as if she’d expected him to be here, even as she continued handing out crackers to people. “I’m running out of crackers. Do you have any food? Wat—nevermind. No one’s had anything to eat yet, and the vigilants are concentrating on hunting down the secondary manifestations so they don’t go to ground and come up again as full manifested in a few days, so right now the only ones here are us and the volunteers from the local convent.” She pointed and over the buildings Loren could just make out a tall steeple with the circle of the seven goddess atop it. Huh. He hadn’t realized there was a church nearby…

No, no, no getting distracted. He gave Harmony his flattest glare. “Shouldn’t you be heading to work?” he said.

“Shouldn’t you?” she said with a shit-eating grin as she gave away her last three crackers, folding the plastic packaging and putting it in her pocket.

“Yeah, well, my coworker who might have been able to help me figure out how to commute around the traffic decided to bigger off and play vigilant.”

Harmony rolled her eyes, although there was a dash of chagrin in her expression as she said, “You’re a grown-ass man, you can figure out your own com—”

And that was when the emaciated, diseased, child-like figures leapt down from the roofs of the buildings on either side of the street and started attacking people.