The dawn shone down on a world drenched in blood. Flat plains became littered with hills of the dead Starspawn, and rivers of blood still flowed from the cities to the fields around them. The good news is that this successfully rejuvenated the ground with nutrients. Thus, the farmers could do a second harvest this year. … Assuming that the Starspawn would allow it. The butchers, meanwhile, had conscripted anyone who could be spared to harvest the materials from the Starspawn.

  Thankfully, with the dawn, the Boars and Bovines ceased to spawn altogether, though their corpses persisted, and their living members still rampaged. The sheer amount of Starspawn created and killed in the night was sufficient to collapse several buildings, or in some cases, several towns outright.

  On every survivor’s lips was an unspoken plea for help. From their neighbors, from their family, from their friends, and their pets. But above all else, from their now dead ruler.

  …Or, at least, their supposedly dead ruler.

  It is a second after Kenny has finished reminiscing over the past 24 hours.

  “What was that?” Alexandra asked as she walked out to the porch.

  Kenny flexed his right hand, and his flesh ripped as a few Threads pierced his skin before they retreated under his skin. He turned to Alexandra and smiled.

  “Our Empress is still Alive and has upgraded me into something called a Paladin as she rests in my soul,” Kenny said.

  Alexandra hummed as she watched him dissolve his hand into a torrent of threads before it resumed its standard form.

  “I see that you’ve been Sparked.” She said. “Do you have any idea what a Paladin is supposed to do?”

  Kenny turned to the horde of monsters in his fields that were sliced and diced by Alexandra’s sword, which she was absentmindedly controlling.

  “Can you hustle one of those chicken things over to me?” Kenny asked. “I can …[Consume] it with my Threads.”

  She raised her left eyebrow and sent a twitch down her Qi string, and then one of her swords smacked a Chicken over to them.

  The man vaulted over the fence and threw the sloppiest punch Alexandra had ever seen. Despite the visible inexperience, Kenny was now strong enough to explode the Chicken’s head. His arm and hand instantly dissolved into the Threads that speared the corpse of the Chicken and shredded it into pieces, though not a single drop of blood was spilled, for it was all drunk by the Threads. It only took seconds before the entire Chicken vanished from his farm.

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  His arm twitched before it reformed. This time, his index finger had grown a fingertip claw. A shiver passed through his right hand, traveling up his elbow and across his shoulder to meet his left hand. His hands dissolved and reformed, all his fingers replaced with black and red talons.

  “Say, you know our plan about making candles from their fat?” Kenny asked rhetorically. “They. They don’t have any fat.”

  Alexandra blinked before walking over to the house's side and bashed her head against it repeatedly.

  “It. Is. An. Attack. Spell.” She punctuated her words with slams against the wall. “Why would it help us defeat itself?”

  Alexandra stopped and shook her head. " Maybe it's only the chickens? Maybe the bovines or boars still have fat?”

  Kenny merely raised his left eyebrow. “Yeah, if we were that lucky, we would still have electricity.”

  Alexandra hummed as she looked at Kenny's new claws. “I think its size would have given you a sword, not a weird gauntlet thing.”

  Kenny helplessly shrugged as his claws dissolved back into his hands.

  Alexandra walked up to him and glanced down at his …well, usually, it would be called a Sea of Qi or a Dantian, but for a newly Sparked mundane, it's more of a Puddle of Qi, for it was the metaphysical equivalent of the stomach. It was adorably tiny to her Qi Sense, barely a tenth of what her Sect’s newborn infants had at their disposal. That was before their Dantians would be encouraged to grow through the use of Ginseng and other mystical materials laced in their foods once they had been weaned.

  Kenny flexed his hands, and out of crimson-flecked golden energy came a helmet with a T-shaped visor, a segmented breastplate that reached down to his hips and up to his shoulders, and a small circular shield roughly three feet in width manifested on his left arm. In his right hand grew a javelin taller than he was. On his left hip, a short sword blossomed into existence.

  The two of them blinked at Kenny’s new dazzling bronze equipment.

  “W-well, if you have actual weapons, maybe you could focus more on spells and using your new things as ranged weapons,” Alexandra said.

  He nodded as he hummed. “I guess it will be interesting to surprise anyone who thinks that I be weak in melee.”

  He turned to face the chickens being chased by Alexandra’s sword and adopted a visibly untrained stance before his limbs shuffled on their own and forced him to be decently careful about his weapon and shield.

  His javelin soared through the air and nailed his target to the ground through its left wing. The chicken howled in pain as it glared at the approaching Kenny.

  He drew his sword directly into the chicken’s mouth, and his tendrils laced down the blade's edge to make it part of himself.