All things considered, the situation wasn't too bad.
Ed was still breathing, which was unfortunate, but everything else had fallen more or less into place. Merle had both hands intact. The group had accepted him without too much fuss. He'd even managed to cultivate a reputation as some kind of lucky charm slash child prodigy among the survivors.
Not bad for a few days' work.
But there was something bothering him. A detail that kept nagging at the back of his mind, refusing to be ignored.
The number of walkers last night.
It was wrong.
He lay on his sleeping bag, staring up at the tent's canvas ceiling, and tried to work through the problem logically.
In the original show, the version he'd watched back in his previous life, the attack on the camp had been brutal. Sudden, violent, with people dying in ways that stuck with you long after the credits rolled. But it hadn't been prolonged. Rick and the others had returned from Atlanta to find the attack already in progress, and within what felt like minutes on screen, it was over.
Television compressed time, obviously. Real fights lasted longer than their edited versions. But even accounting for that, they'd fought for hours with walkers coming in waves that seemed endless. And they'd had advantages the show's survivors hadn't: advance warning, proper weapons, and defensive positions.
Hell, they'd had him on top of the RV with magic, which should've tipped the scales heavily in their favor. Yet the battle had still dragged on until nearly dawn.
The sheer number of corpses they'd had to haul away this morning told the story. Dozens. Maybe close to a hundred, though counting body parts made exact numbers difficult.
That wasn't normal. Not for this point in the timeline.
His mind drifted back to Atlanta.
The same thing had happened there.
The streets around the building had been thick with walkers, far more than the show had ever depicted. He'd chalked it up to the noise he and Rick made while riding in on horseback. It was the butterfly effect at work. His presence changed small details, and those changes cascaded into larger consequences.
But then there were the walkers in the fire escape. The ones that shouldn't have been there at all, that had appeared out of nowhere when Glenn's group was trying to leave. And that one on the roof, the one that had forced its way through a chained door, squeezing through a gap that should've been too small.
None of that had happened in the show.
"The storm," he muttered to himself. "That wasn't supposed to happen either."
He'd been so focused on changing fates that he hadn't stopped to properly analyze the other changes happening around him. The ones he wasn't causing.
He sat up, running both hands through his hair.
The scientific part of his brain was screaming at him that this wasn't coincidence. Two major events, both involving far more walkers than expected. Both involving him directly.
The paranoid part of his brain, which had grown considerably since waking up in an apocalypse, was suggesting something worse.
What if the extra walkers weren't random at all?
What if they were attracted to him specifically?
It sounded mental. The kind of thing you'd laugh at in a film for being too convenient. Main character syndrome taken to an absurd extreme.
Except...
Except he could feel them.
Not like some kind of GPS tracker. But when walkers were nearby, there was a presence that shouldn't be there, like death given form and hunger.
He'd noticed it first in the office building with Shane, though at the time he'd assumed it was just fear. Then in Atlanta, when he'd known exactly which streets to avoid despite never having been to the city before. And last night, when he'd been able to pinpoint walkers in the darkness.
If walkers really were drawn to him more strongly than to normal people, then it raised some questions.
Like: If walkers were more attracted to him, then why hadn't they all zeroed in on his position on the RV?
Why had they spread out, attacking the whole camp instead of swarming toward him?
Maybe the attraction wasn't that specific. More like a general pull toward the area he was in rather than his exact location. Or maybe other factors like noise could override it.
He needed more data. But the thought of testing whether walkers preferred him to other people made him feel bad.
In the show, survivors had learned they could move through walker hordes by covering themselves in blood and guts. If he really did have some kind of affinity with them, would that trick work even better for him? Could he do more than just pass unnoticed? Actually influence them somehow?
The idea was tempting and terrifying.
Tempting because it would be an incredible advantage. Terrifying because it required getting close enough to walkers to test the theory, which seemed like an excellent way to get bitten.
"Priorities," he told himself firmly. "First survive. Then experiment with whether you can become the Pied Piper of zombies."
He flopped back onto the sleeping bag with a sigh.
The real problem was that he was still weak. Oh, he'd made progress, nobody could say he hadn't been working his arse off learning magic. But "progress" and "powerful enough to survive" were two very different things.
His Levitation Charm was solid. Wandless, silent, precise enough to manipulate objects with fine control. Against walkers or for utility purposes, it was brilliant.
Against armed humans? Not so much.
The first time someone pointed a gun at him and he tried to yank it away with magic, they'd have plenty of time to shoot him before the spell took effect. He needed offensive options. Stunning spells, shields, something with stopping power.
But his textbook only covered first-year material in detail. Basic charms, simple transfiguration theory, foundational stuff that was meant to be built upon with proper instruction.
He'd managed to teach himself a few things from The Practical Spell Compendium.
The Water-Making Spell, for instance. He could conjure clean drinking water, which was useful in an apocalypse. But the advanced applications remained frustratingly out of reach.
At least he had Episkey. That one had been pure luck.
The previous owner of the spell compendium had apparently been training as a Healer. The margins around Episkey were covered in notes, diagrams, observations about technique and wand movement. Combined with what he had learned shadowing Dr. Gale, he'd managed to cobble together enough understanding to make it work.
Sort of.
The problem was that Episkey was still inconsistent.
When he cast it on other people, the magical drain was enormous. And the effect was limited to speeding up natural healing and preventing infection. It was useful, but not the instant-fix miracle he'd hoped for.
When he cast it on himself, though, the spell practically cast itself. The magic flowed smoothly, barely draining his reserves at all. Cuts and scrapes healed in seconds, bruises fading before his eyes. It was fast, efficient, and almost effortless.
Which made no sense.
Lucien frowned at the tent ceiling, working through the problem.
He wasn't an expert on Harry Potter spell mechanics. He'd read the books, and watched the films, but he'd never obsessed over the technical details the way some fans did. And then there were all the fanfictions he'd consumed over the years, each with their own interpretations and invented rules that blurred together in his memory until he couldn't remember what was canon and what wasn't.
Did healing spells normally work differently on the caster versus other people? He didn't think so, but he couldn't be certain.
Maybe it was a property of this world. Magic worked differently here than it did in the Potterverse, adapted to local rules and physics. That would explain some of the inconsistencies he'd noticed.
Or maybe...
Maybe the difference wasn't the world. Maybe it was him.
What made him fundamentally different from everyone else here?
Magic, obviously. But if that were the issue, other wizards should have the same self-healing advantage, and he didn't remember that being mentioned in the books.
What else?
He had originally come from another world. He was a transmigrator, reincarnated, or whatever term one preferred. That was metaphysical strangeness, not something that should have affected spell mechanics.
Unless his soul was different in some way. Perhaps it had been marked by the crossing between worlds, altered so that magic interacted with his body differently.
That was possible. Impossible to test, but possible.
And then there was the other thing.
"Could it be the walker virus?"