The coin Izzy had chosen was a brown color with a pictogram that looked surprisingly like the “flexed arm emoticon” from a texting app; the other side had a two on it. It was the only one he could make out from those with their faces up that didn’t appear ominous. In other words, one that didn’t look like fire, a weapon, or some other image that could have meant a whole host of different things.

  As he crushed it in his hand he felt, just as much as he saw, a brown light emanating from his fist. The brown aura washed over his forearm, climbed up the length of his arm, and traveled over the rest of his body. The brown light faded and what he felt next was beyond anything he had predicted.

  “Oh my,” he said out loud, not being able to contain it.

  Izzy felt strong. Too strong. Impossibly strong.

  He flexed his muscles, but there seemed to be no difference in his appearance. He had kept himself fairly fit through college with weight lifting and cycling, but he wasn’t exactly a Ryan Reynolds. After a brief, longing look at his unchanged biceps, he reached down and ripped a cobblestone from the road. It was like plucking a gumdrop off a gingerbread house.

  He staggered backwards, he hadn’t expected the whole stone the size of his head to come out of the ground that easily. He stood staring at the rock in his hand. He started laughing again.

  “Magic,” he whispered once he could get out a word between giggles. “Fucking magic!”

  He shook his head in amazement and in a moment of recklessness, he looked for something at which he could throw the rock.

  He had intended to just find a wall of an already broken building where he could test his hypothesis a little more, when something came around a corner of one such building. The reality of what was going on around him came crashing back into his awareness, the distraction of testing the coins vanished from his mind. He gaped at the creature as it stopped and saw Izzy. Izzy realized that “seeing him” wasn’t really possible, as the creature’s entire face was a four-jawed mouth.

  “Holy shit!” He exclaimed, gripping the stone tightly and shuffling a few steps backwards.

  The creature screeched out of its entire face. It then brought up its arms which also ended in mouths making otherworldly noises, and started tearing down the street towards Izzy.

  “Oh no… no no no…” Izzy started mumbling. He was about to turn to run when he remembered the small boulder he was holding. He had forgotten it; forgotten a stone that had to weigh 20 kilograms that he was so casually holding.

  “Well,” he said, resigning himself to whatever came next, “here goes nothing.”

  He raised the stone above his head, stepped back with his right foot to steady himself, and paused. The creature hurled towards Izzy, and thinking one last “This is all still so impossible”, he heaved the stone at the creature.

  A couple things happened and, thinking about it in the moment, Izzy couldn’t really tell the sequence of events. Something exploded behind the creature, the creature’s head exploded, and Izzy’s head exploded in pain.

  Yelling at the top of his lungs, Izzy fell to his knees clutching his head. It was in that position that what was left of the creature ran right into Izzy. In a jumble of limbs, mouths, teeth, and some choice words, Izzy and the creature tumbled a meter or so away from where Izzy had been standing.

  Izzy vaguely knew that was what happened, but the pain in his head made everything else a little less real. He lay tangled up in the creature, tears flowing from his eyes as the pain in his brain slowly went away. As his vision cleared, he remembered what had been running at him and with a yelp he started throwing limbs and the thin, gray body off of him. Izzy pushed himself backwards along the ground breathing hard and, once again, was painfully reminded of his nakedness as his buttocks dragged on the ground.

  He looked down to see the giant streak of gore down his front and, thanks to the tumble, he was marked all over his body with cuts and red marks he knew would be the really nasty kind of bruise. He stood up rubbing his butt cheek, sore from when he pushed himself along the cobblestone path. He took in the remains of the creature, seeing that the head had been sheared off so neatly it could have been cut off by surgical equipment.

  “Huh,” Izzy grunted, raising his eyebrows. “I did that with a rock? Also, what the hell is this thing?”

  He looked over to where he thought he had heard an explosion and saw that at the end of the trajectory of his throw, the stone had gone off like a pack of C-4 with pieces of rock strapped to it. The corner of the building the creature had come around had a rough semicircular blown out of it and the dust was still settling.

  “That was incredible, but what’s with my head?” Izzy thought, rubbing his temples as the last of the pain eased from his brain. “Feels like somebody took my brain out, shook it in a jar of vinegar, blended it, and poured it back in my skull.”

  Checking the rest of his head, he was confident he hadn’t received any sort of head trauma to cause what had felt like the worst migraine in his life. A couple spots on his head didn’t feel great, but there were no particularly obvious injuries. Izzy tried to remember if concussive head trauma could end up without any severe external pain. He shrugged, deciding there wasn’t much he was going to be able to do about it at the moment either way.

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  With his mouth slightly ajar and taking in the carnage he had wrought with a rock, Izzy’s mind snapped back to what the werebear had said. It had been something about dropping spell coins and that he couldn’t use them when he was a bear.

  “I’m having a really hard time wrapping my head around this, and I don’t know why,” Izzy thought. “Magic is a thing. Monsters are a thing. Werebears are a thing. Okay! No big deal, it just flies in the face of everything I have ever known and thought possible. Get with the program Schiller.”

  With one last head shake, Izzy set his shoulders and started walking back to the coins on the ground.

  “Let’s go do more impossible things! And,” he said before his eyes found his exposed nether region again, “find some pants.”

  His mind made up, Izzy set about collecting the assortment of coins on the ground. His encounter with the creature and remembering the conversation with the werebear with a clear mind had given him an appreciation for the devolving situation around him. He didn’t pay much attention to the colors or emblems of the coins, Izzy just picked them up cautiously and sorted them into the different numbers. He stood up clutching his small arsenal of magical “one free spell” coupons, and looked around.

  The werebear and his companion had moved on towards some really bad sounds in the direction the man had run. Izzy looked that way for a moment and decided that wasn’t the way for him. He looked back towards the way the “mouth monster” had come. Judging by how the creature had stopped at the corner and yelled at him, he figured those things weren’t particularly bright. They probably traveled in a relatively straight line until they found something maul. That is, until they found a confused, naked treat hanging out in the middle of the street.

  Izzy decided to walk up to the corner around which the creature had come to see if he could tell where the creatures were coming from so he could confidently not go that way. Creeping up to the corner, he could see down the street a little early because of the portion of the building his rock had destroyed. As he approached he could hear the sounds of carnage, and what he saw as he looked left around the building confirmed both his prediction and his fears.

  Down a path that appeared to have been made by taking a giant bulldozer straight through town and then putting down a weird, brown asphalt, Izzy saw a small swarm of the jellyfish creatures, the mouth creatures, and a different creature that appeared to be a mix of tall frogs whose faces looked and angry version of the bottom side of a stingray. They all also clutched some sort of spear or trident and were using them to stab, smash, and generally cause serious damage to people running away from them and the people who were attempting to fight them.

  The mindless ferocity shown by these creatures reminded Izzy of just about any zombie movie. Inevitably, in every single show or movie, the wall of “the safe place” came down and looked, more or less, like this. He wanted to be anywhere other than in the path of this horde.

  Standing at the corner, Izzy made up his mind. He wasn’t going to go backwards and right, the sounds of battle seemed even louder that way despite not seeing the source. He quickly hoped that the werebear and his friend were okay, Izzy was pretty sure that was the direction they went. He also wasn’t going to go anywhere vaguely towards his left with the monster tsunami coming from that direction.

  Izzy decided to cut across the path of destruction, and then keep going that way to put as much distance between him and all the terrifying nonsense as possible. Holding the spell coins to his chest, but not so tightly to risk activating them, he started making his way across the path of destruction.

  Picking his way past some larger pieces of building, Izzy made his way across the path quickly. Darting from a half-buried balcony, to a corner of roof embedded in the ground, Izzy kept making wary glances up and down the path, and checking carefully behind each of his pieces of cover.

  “What was the phrase from The Expanse?” Izzy thought to himself as he checked around the edge of a tipped over awning. “Doors and corners. That’s where they get you, check your doors and corners.”

  Unlike in those zombie shows, there weren’t any cliché creatures lurking behind random debris and he made it to the other side of the path unscathed. He ducked in between two buildings which appeared to have been cut with a guillotine. He paused.

  “That’s odd,” Izzy said standing up straight, his back aching from trying to sneak quickly. “Ummm… how?”

  He checked out into the path again for any creatures and, confident most of the fighting was far enough away, he took a closer look at the clean cut of one of the buildings next to him.

  The face of the brick didn’t appear to have actually been cut, it was like the bricks just ended. Stopped existing. If it were cut, there would be more signs. Broken bricks, big missing chips, a crooked line, something to indicate the force necessary to remove half a building. These bricks just, terminated.

  He reached out to feel one of the bricks, finding a small film of dust along the vertical face.

  “Dust along the vertical face? What the hell?” he thought as he rubbed the dust between his fingers and then looked past his hand, recognizing the dust from the path he had just crossed.

  Izzy looked down at his feet and realized that if the destruction had been of a physical nature, his feet would have been torn to shreds by something as he made his way across. It would have been strewn with jagged and broken pieces of things. The dust, however, had made a thick, weirdly hard covering over whatever lay beneath. Not being able to help himself, he went back to the brick he had disturbed. Wiping away more of the dust, he finally met brick. It was porous as expected, but the face was otherwise unnaturally smooth.

  “Fucking hell…” He groaned, and looked back at the giant path. “Magic. Big magic. Same day, different impossible things.”

  Izzy ducked back into the alley shaking his head. Everything before him was done by magic. It made the novelty of the spell coins wear off a little bit. He looked back and forth between the coins, the brick, and the path one more time. The scale of what he didn’t understand about what was going on shook him to the core.

  “I’m going to need to figure all this out,” he said to himself.

  Izzy paused, furrowed his brows, and thought about that statement for a moment. Even though nobody else had heard it, he rephrased what he just said, not capable of leaving it alone.

  “I will figure all of this out. I will learn everything about magic.”