A few hours of what could only marginally be called sleep did manage to restore some semblance of vigor to the young man. Such is the gift of being an eighteen year old. Alexander kept himself quiet and made plans while he awaited the dawn. Sparse clouds painted in reds and orange gave him the green light to leave his shelter to start enacting the plan he’d come to last night. In short, he was going to blitz the dungeon core. That black crystal seemed to be the heart of the problem, and, if he could get to it fast, he might be able to seal the source of these undead, just like he’d sealed the source of the goblins.
It was a reasonable tactic, and it even had a high chance for success. Especially when compared to the alternative of trying to conduct a battle of attrition with close to a thousand zombies. Yesterday’s scouting run had yielded several critical pieces of data.
First, his gifts were perfectly suited to destroying the undead in small numbers. Second, small numbers wasn’t what he was going to get unless he stayed moving, because the entire necropolis would feel him coming as soon as he crossed into the “contested zone”. Therefore, a rapid advance into the territory was most practical.
Once he’d dealt with the crystal, even if the animated corpses didn’t fall, absent their source of magical energy, the problem wouldn’t grow worse. Probably. He was operating off incomplete information, but that was the norm. The third fact that had been demonstrated amply to him was that this problem wasn’t going to go away, which made it a threat that had to be dealt with as swiftly as he was able. Call it a hunch, but the last Gerifalte had an intuition that the next time the undead paid a visit to his hometown it would be in far, far greater volume than the last.
In the spirit of his strategy, Alexander left the heavy rifle behind in the nice old ranch house. If it wasn’t effective at destroying the zombies, it was dead weight. Today was going to be all about keeping lean and clean. He’d only engage with an enemy if he risked becoming stalled by not doing so.
With a deep inhalation of the cool clean air on the porch of the borrowed house, Alexander stepped off to take initiative against the mad world that conspired to create fresh insanities with which to assail him.
Retraced steps carried him cautiously back to the threshold of that creepy remnant of what had been an American city. A small one, but a city, nevertheless. Now a tomb, occupied and invaded by some other reality, whatever Tech Duinn was. Milling constructs aimlessly patrolled where he’d escaped the evening before. That either suggested a form of memory or that the necrotic guards had simply lost “sight” of him and paused where contact was last made.
Alexander skirted the avenue he’d first used to enter the field dungeon, as good a way to describe it as anything else he could come up with. Calling it a spatial anomaly seemed too…clinical for his tastes. There was nothing clean about the roiling crypt energy that put the shiver down his spine when it enveloped him. This side street would take him not quite in the direction he wanted but he was going to cut through yards and empty houses anyway, so it didn’t much matter.
At a three-quarters pace the young man pressed forward deeper into the dungeon. He wasn’t concerned about stealth as he had been the day before, it was a moot point. The zombies would be closing in on him already, probably forming a huge circle to net him. If whatever will that guided these things had intellect, then it would almost certainly seek to tighten the noose faster than the day before but from closer in, so that the density of zombies would be harder to push through.
Familiar landmarks from the shopping trips of a life long since ended crawled by as he ran. A store where he’d shopped for clothes for school. A hobby shop where his father had combed for niche tools or parts for his projects. Most poignant was a novelty shop where he and his parents had gotten matching Halloween costumes for the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future.
They’d jangled chains playfully at their neighbors while collecting candy and donations for the animal shelter. Not because Alexander was incredibly interested in such things, but his mother was a crusader for taking care of strays, getting them somewhere clean and dry and where they could be fed until someone could give them a home. It was a worthy cause, even if it wasn’t his schtick.
Memories propelled him on, reminding him that destroying the madness encroaching on the world was only one part of his goals. Finding a cure to the affliction of his parents, and maybe even the world, was the major objective. Failing that, vengeance was the only thing he’d have left. Living like that, for the sake of punishing the sick reality that had taken all that from him would make for a long, miserable life.
“On task, Little Falcon.” He chided himself.
The scuffing, shuffling feet of necromantic puppets was regular, and the sight of small groups of a dozen or so frequently had him moving to cut through an oddly disquieting empty shop, or around a cluster of houses, or some such obstacle to make the zombies cover more ground to close on him.
Winding though his path was, Alexander was holding a constant approach toward the floating black crystal, whose slow, stately spin would have been dignified, if it weren’t the nexus of the grotesque.
His efforts at avoiding a fight ended abruptly when he came around the corner of an aisle of a trendy whole foods shopping center and came almost within arm’s reach of a squad of undead. Faster moving, more robust than the monsters he’d encountered yesterday, these showed almost no sign of rot, skin pallid but unblemished. Clawing hands reached for him and he had to swipe Winter’s Breath across in a choked-up slash to take the grasping appendages off at the wrist. A quick stab into the face, and a burst of chaos mana put an end to that first zombie. The others had gone around their foe to encircle him, and Alexander tried not to panic, instead concentrating on working the haft of the spear to hack hands from arms and to bury the frozen blade into chests.
Six creatures down gave him a window through which to escape. His flight was dogged though, the power-walking zombies wouldn’t be left behind so easily. Alexander snatched a push broom, abandoned next to a statue of the janitor who had been pushing it, and used it to secure the inward opening doors of the whole foods joint. He took off, satisfied that he’d slowed the pursuit, until a few seconds later he heard the crack of wood and glanced over his shoulder to see that the zombies had simply pushed through the sturdy hardwood handle with supernatural strength.
Fuck.
Where the young man went around a wood fence, the constructs walked through it. Where he climbed into a window, needing painful seconds to open it, the zombies clawed through broken glass uncaring for the laceration of their cold flesh.
Occasionally he would be forced to pause to cut his way past a wandering corpse directly in his path. Sometimes it would be a solid four or seven. Then a dozen, as he tried to beeline through a church parking lot that had, apparently, been meeting when the Pulse hit, for all the parked cars and fancily dressed statues scattered thereabout. Inside windows sat a congregation mostly intact while they had listened to the gospel of their shepherd, a macabre audience for the drama unfolding outside.
Hacking down the latest of his obstacles, Alexander realized that the problem was growing worse, faster than he had anticipated.
Crisis arrived, presently. In the muted, weak sunlight of the dungeon space out into which Alexander had just burst, having just cut through yet another townhouse, a hundred zombies closed in from the surrounding streets and alleys.
The smoky black crystal loomed large in the distance. A half mile away and no more. But the large contingent of undead lay directly between him and it. The chasing monsters would be coming from behind within a minute or so, and his options were swiftly down to one.
“Alright you poor dead sonsofbitches, I’m going to put you down!” He shouted at the unhearing crowd.
Not that he was yelling for their benefit. More for his own. He really wasn’t looking forward to this part.
Ruthless
The sudden lightness in his body, like he was removed from the situation washed through him, and the Entropic venator made ready his weapons, mundane and not so much. Suddenly he didn't mind so much giving the marauding undead a taste of the ol' ultra-violence.
A shell of chaotic energy washed out away from the youth, his gifts unfurling. The flicker of entropic energy along his enchanted spear, now doubly potent, gave him distant comfort in this desperate moment.
Alexander threw himself into the fray, lashing out with spear blade with enthusiasm, if without grace. So close to the beacon of undeath powering the creatures, his aura only briefly stunned the zombies, bought him only a second or two of stillness before the necrotic energies reasserted their dominance of the former occupants of the city. Those seconds were dear to him, and he made all he could of them, slashing, stabbing, unmaking the monstrous townsfolk as rapidly as his arms could work.
The line of undead bulged, like a vesicle forming around him as the horde, driven by unearthly will, tried to complete the surround. Alexander fought through it, piercing the press of bodies, his breaths coming in labored gasps at the continual effort. He spun, crouching low, raking the sword blade of his naginata through knees and shins, the blossoming frost rendering legs worthless as it passed. Corpses suddenly with only a single supporting limb fell over and Alexander used the slight delay of stepping over their brethren as his gap to sprint free.
Entropic aura faded and the imbuement with it, Alexander striving to save what strength he could. Ten minutes of hard running, interspersed with fighting, was draining his stamina. If he attempted to hole up somewhere he’d be trapped. Unacceptable. All the young man could do was stick to the plan. Ignoring the growing stitch in his side, he forced himself to jog toward the source of the dungeon’s strength.
Having escaped again the attempts to cordon him, a few minutes blessed relief from skirting undead allowed him free passage to the regional hospital building. Twelve stories high, the looming prism of modern architecture buried him in its shadow. Behind him, none too distant, would be the endless mass of animated bodies.
“Final push.” He sighed and entered the interior of the hospital.
Navigating the once pristinely clean, clinical environment, with its staff and patrons alike frozen in a single moment of time, was one of the most disconcerting experiences of Alexander’s life. Empty hospital beds in the hall, awaiting forever the orderly who was to move them to their needed location. Equipment of all kinds, once a pinnacle of achievement, a testament to man’s mastery of medicine, now as still and dead as the people who had used them. Except for the unlucky ones that had survived the Pulse that is.
Those were following behind him, a grizzly caricature of life. It suddenly struck the young man, as he thundered through a door labeled “stairs”, what a deeply ironic, almost insulting thing it was for the dungeon core for a land of undeath to have claimed a hospital for its throne upon Gaia’s surface. Expunging that wrongness would be satisfying for more than his survivals’ sake.
Muscles burning from fatigue, labored breaths that threatened to fog his Plexiglas visor, none of it stopped him, not with the horde undoubtedly in tow. Twelve stories of hospital. Twelve sets of stairs. The brutal climb ended after what seemed an eternity and Alexander Gerifalte exited the stairwell into the half light of day inside the dungeon on rubbery legs.
Standing tall, seven feet, at least, was a black robed skeleton, cloaked as if to travel in heavy weather, its eye sockets burning cold pinpricks of necrotic energy within its hood. It held a large scythe, like what an old timey farmer might have used to harvest wheat in its bony hands. The smooth ivory handle of the scythe threw light from its polish. The stillness of the skeleton was utterly inhuman, unnatural. When it moved, it did so in a jerky, abrupt fashion that was, somehow, even more unsettling than its motionlessness.
Tech Duinn Reaper
Status:
Menacing
Soak: 95%
LifeForce/Armor
Head
Mana: 100%
Might
23
Height
7’1”
LifeForce/Armor
Left Arm
-30/0%
LifeForce/Armor
Right Arm
Grace
25
Weight
179lbs
-25/5%
Mantle of the Reaper
-25/5% bonus to fire resistance
Impetus
16
Age
∞
Mourning vestment
LifeForce/Armor
Chest
Mourning vestment
Cogitation
17
Core
Black spinel, ball
Fiend ivory spirit scythe
-35/5%
Fiend ivory spirit scythe
Wisdom
18
Origin
Gaia
LifeForce/Armor
Left Leg
Mourning vestment
LifeForce/Armor
Right Leg
Ingenuity
4
Monster Race:
Undead-3rd Tier (Reaper)
-25/5%
LifeForce/Armor
Abdomen
-25/5%
Durability
19
Mourning vestment
-10/5%
Mourning vestment
Valor
∞
Mourning vestment
Traits
Spirit sight, Immortal, Poison immunity, Disease immunity, Weakness to fire, Weakness to Holy
Skills
Life harvest, Reap, Call of the void
Arcana
Reaper’s aura, Negative ward, Death knell
Lungs worked hard to bring air into him as he stared at this final hurdle. He should have known it wouldn’t be so easy as to just fight through a mass of the undead. Nothing was easy, these days. Most things worth doing weren’t, in any case, so Alexander gritted his teeth and hefted the golem steel naginata, making ready to purge the guardian of the dungeon.
“Long has it been since one challenged a Reaper of Tech Duinn in single combat.” Whispered the skeleton, like dry leather sliding over stone.
Those small breaks in speech, necessary because lungs needed air to create the sounds were absent in this entity’s voice, and shivers crawled across Alexander’s spine, from his unconscious awareness of the lack. Everything about the monster radiated menace toward the living, and hunger to bring those alive under its necrotic umbrella.
Its head shifted, canted sideways at an unnaturally wide angle, polished teeth sharp as it spoke without lips, tongue, or fleshy aid, is hissing voice eerily precise.
“Does the mortal fear? Do not. Life is the fleeting dream, a scant iota of time separating the void from the grave.”
The scythe blade raised, hefted without apparent effort by the robed form, its figure threatening in spite of the almost comforting declaration of life’s ephemerality.
A building pressure, crawling along his perceptions, weighing down on him, was met by the litany of battles fought against fiends, beasts, and monsters since he’d ridden his plane to the earth those long months back and rolled off his shoulders. Ruthless buffered the assault on his senses, and he realized that this was part of the Reaper’s tool kit, probably meant to suppress the will and focus of its mortal foes.
As if Alexander needed reminding of the brevity of his mortal coil, or the suddenness with which it could be slipped. Fear was a part of his life, a companion held most dear. But not fear of death. He knew, unlike most young people, that his time was coming, and soon. No, he lived under the shadow of failure. If he fell, none would remain to lift the curse. If he perished, the injustice of his world ending, his parents’ death, the grisly murder of the townsfolk who’d survived, their last days being slaughtered and eaten by goblins, all of it would go unpunished. The scales unbalanced that was what kept him awake nights.
“Thanks, Chief, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.” Alexander quoted to the foul dead thing, his voice sounding oddly resonant from within the helmet.
He raised a hand, not toward the skeleton, but toward the real threat and loosed a Chaos strike directly at the black crystal heart of this defiled space.
Sizzling grey and black, the concentrated entropy hurtled to the dungeon core, intercepted at the last possible moment by the dark grey metal of the scythe blade. Cracks, pitted voids, and a maroon discoloration spread along half the length of the harvest tool.
Another curious tilt of the head, pinprick lights radiating surprise at the change enacted on its implement, was all that separated Alexander’s deflected attack from the Reaper’s own.
Fast as an adder striking, the skeletal monster lunged, sweeping the blade down to part Alexander’s chest from his waist. The last Gerifalte stepped forward, driven against common instincts by the merry whisper of his mother before he went to school to deal with a bully and anger management issues.
“The scary ones never think you’ll come to them,” said the laughing woman who’d reared him with such love and ferocity, “Step up and swing, Alexander my joy.”
Ruthless damping the ache of muscles strained and fatigued, Alexander stepped up and swung, bringing himself within the arc of the curved blade, and out of danger from it, while driving Winter’s Breath into the eternal smile of the undead monster. They came together in a crash of armored human against undead monster.
Baleful Smite
Rippling black and grey flame danced off the hooded skull, its skull pierced completely by the blow, amplified and empowered as it had been by his full weight, magical and otherwise. The creature spasmed wildly and Alexander was knocked flat by the flailing haft of the scythe as the abominable thing shrieked.
“Uggh!” He grunted, rolling and flopping, naginata left embedded in the monstrous visage, his grip broken by the inhuman power of the thing’s errant blow. The hit was hard, but muted, his own minimal Soak bleeding some small fraction of the energy from the hit and his impact with the ground. Through all the armor, and helmet, he wasn’t even bruised. His diaphragm had gotten drilled square though, and he sucked wind breathlessly, glad for the protection of the golem metal plates.
A roll brought him to his feet, barely, kneeling hunched over his side, unable to breathe from the impact of the hit. Gasps brought a dry lungful of air, sterile and cool as a crypt.
The enemy was distracted by the spear in its face, so he reached deep into the last of his reserves of magic and loosed a trio of chaotic energy bullets toward the Reaper, each ripping into its cloaked form, each biting huge chunks from its chest and torso. The rapid, sequential flashes of entropy magic unwound the Reaper, tearing at the unlife that sustained it.
Polished bone clattered loudly to the rooftop concrete, the scythe forgotten, and the monster clawed at its chaos and frost ruined face, bone grinding bone. Blue, white energy pulsed, cold will animating the creature failing, and the black crystal behind it stopped spinning in a single instant.
Bones fell apart and the creature was suddenly inert, suddenly returned to the void of which it spoke so longingly. Unceremonious was the death of the dungeon’s guardian monster, and, as for all beings, whatever menacing dignity it had was gone upon the very moment of its end.
No chances would Alexander take, he kicked the scythe away from the tangled bundle of cloth and bone and, still sucking wind, grabbed for his spear.
One wide glittering arc of golem steel jacketed by silver later and Alexander Gerifalte drove his weapon into the hovering crystal core of Tech Duinn. Or, at least, this little pocket of it.
The crystal rang like an iron gong, pealing uproarious across the city. Vaguely humanoid forms that had been almost upon him from the shadow of the stairwell froze at the purity of that knell, and the animating force left the long dead humans in a breath. Corpses suddenly returned to inanimate states, and they fell down the stairs audibly.
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Alexander could spare them no attention; he was enmeshed completely by the sound, and the pull on his consciousness was irresistible.
Black smoke surrounded him blocking his sight, closed in on him, cloaking him in the cold dry cloying scent of the beyond, wiping away sound in its roaring silence.
A voice came from the darkness, the same as the last time.
WORTHY! WORTHY! THOU HAST RETURNED IN VICTORY!
The same all-encompassing voice shouting in his mind. He was transported back to the first experience with this entity, the cryptic words it had uttered burned into his mind.
WORTHY! WHAT IS THY DESIRE?
Surrounded by the feel and aura of undeath, his strength failing rapidly with the fading of the Ruthless state hiding his fatigue, only one thing came to mind, only one desire dominated his thoughts.
“You said I could bring them back! I want to undo the affliction on my parents, I want them back!” He shouted into the darkness around him.
YOU WALK THE PATH ALREADY! SIP THE DRAGON PULSE! TRANSFORM!
BECOME!
Beckoning in the giant voice, yearning, washed through him, hammering against his mind.
He walked the path? Sip the dragon pulse? What in the ever-loving fuck was he hearing? None of that was giving him what he wanted godsdamnit!Only a moment had he to contemplate before his thoughts were scattered by a flood of energy that surged against him, unbidden.
Heat again ignited inside his form, radiant in veins of fire spreading from his heart. Or, perhaps more specifically, from the gem that sat behind it.
The gloom of the necromantic crystal faded, along with its powers, and Alexander was left standing on the roof top alone, the skeletal remains blowing away like ashes on the wind, leaving behind only the vestige it had been wearing and the cruelly sharp ivory handled scythe. Suddenly claustrophobic within his reinforced biker helmet, the young man pulled it from his head, exultant at the cool spring air that brushed his face.
Sunlight poured down unhindered upon Gaia’s surface once more, the contested zone contested no longer.
“Two and zero bitches!” Alexander Gerifalte rejoiced from atop the hospital, shouting into the wide blue skies.
Arms raised, he allowed himself a moment of joy, enjoyed greatly before he sagged down to lay on the concrete, completely spent. Muscles screamed their discontent at his abuse of them and a deep tiredness born of utilizing the greater part of his somewhat limited magical ability landed with both feet on flimsy consciousness. Lightheaded vertigo would have toppled him, and he rode it out for a few difficult seconds. Once it passed, he had enough of his shit together to start assessing.
Victory was not cheap.
Staring down at the pitted blade of his wonderful spear, the effects of using chaos magic alongside the frozen enchantment, Alexander knew he’d broken his greatest invention. No more mist poured from the head of the naginata, the polar mana had escaped the confinement of the materials used to restrain it, leaks eaten through by chaos mana.
Damn. Alexander hadn’t even gotten to use it all that much.
“Don’t double dip, Little Falcon.” The youth summarized, staring regretfully at the once pristine metal.
It was a costly error, born of necessity maybe, since the alternative was being eaten by the minions of the undead crystal, or failing to launch his one and only first strike and being struck down by the guardian skeleton monster. The loss of precious materials and time did not sting any less for that.
“Ahh, well,” Alexander ruminated aloud, long since used to talking to himself, “Nothing for it. I didn’t get killed to death and that’s the important part. Now, what changed from killing the dungeon?”
He desperately needed an upside to balance the massive loss of his magical spear.
Concentrating on himself, Alexander summoned the great blue scroll of magical fuckery that described him.
Alexander Gerifalte
Class:
Entropic Venator
Status:
exhausted
Soak: 5%
LifeForce/Armor
Head
Mana: 5%
Might
13(+5)
Height
6’3”
LifeForce/Armor
Left Arm
15/25 slash/impact resistance
LifeForce/Armor
Right Arm
Grace
12(+5)
Weight
165lbs
11/15 fire resistance
Highsteel combat helmet
11/15 fire resistance
Impetus
15(+5)
Age
18
Highsteel combat jacket
LifeForce/Armor
Chest
Highsteel combat jacket
Cogitation
16(+5)
Core
Black Fire Opal, brilliant
Winter’s Breath (broken)
17/24 fire resistance
Winter’s Breath (broken)
Wisdom
13
Origin
Gaia
LifeForce/Armor
Left Leg
Highsteel combat jacket
LifeForce/Armor
Right Leg
Ingenuity
16(+5)
Sapient Race:
Human-2rd Tier (Shaggoth)
13/15
LifeForce/Armor
Abdomen
13/15
Durability
13(+5)
Highsteel combat leathers
13/24 bonus to fire resistance
Highsteel combat leathers
Valor
27(+15)
Highsteel combat jacket
Traits
Raptor gaze, Fantasia, Spatial adept, Back from the brink, Gaia’s child, Lethal, Warforger, Scholarship, Singular prominence
Skills
Baleful smite, Ruthless, Greater focus, Greater analyze, Stalk
Arcana
Entropic aura, Chaos strike
He’d gained an inch. It was one of those details that was of supreme inanity that nevertheless stood out to him. Since the early spring Alexander had grown an inch in height and he noticed this immediately within the scroll-work of the arcane. A giggle of sheer incredulity sounded out of place given the situation, but he couldn’t hold one back. Soon enough he was lost in a fit of rollicking belly laughter.
When it subsided, leaving the young man even more tired than before, a mark of how incredibly drained he was by the conquest of the field dungeon he turned his attention to the radical increase in his stats, now all bearing a modifier of plus five. That was a thirty percent increase around the board, and when he wasn’t more worn out than a logging mule, he’d be able to appreciate it. Unthinking, he concentrated on the new trait and its details unfurled before his vision.
Singular prominence: by your own power you have assaulted and vanquished multiple incursions of the hundred and eight worlds, claiming their hearts. Excess mana has refined your form, bolstering it substantially.
+5 to all attributes;
Huh. Well, that was certainly something.
Laying there in a semi-boneless pool of weariness, he mulled over the events of the last twenty-four hours. It occurred to the youth then that he’d soloed two dungeons, wiping out their champions and destroying their cores. Like an absolute savage. Pride swelled in his breast. He knew he’d done right by his folks. That all permeating voice was the key to getting them back, he knew it now. Twice now the voice had asked for his desire. Twice it had given him something that he hadn’t asked for in as many words, but which led surely to his stated ends.
First, he had wanted to know the rules and the ability to break them. That had translated to being able to pull up these weird pages of information and, he was certain, his entropic mana powers. Alexander’s magic seemed best at unraveling the nonsense of this dreamland, pulling apart its magical shielding Soak, tearing apart the animating necromancy keeping the zombies going, and generally fucking with anything magical, as he’d found with his spear. But only when he’d aggressively channeled his powers into it, so there were tolerances.
Second, he’d directly asked to undo the affliction, the petrification of his parents. The gift this time was a direct amplification of his abilities, all of them. That boon made it more likely for him to be able to overcome the next obstacle that placed itself in his way, implying that he would find what he wanted by continuing to do what he’d been doing. All he had to do was find these so-called conflict zones and conquer them, claiming the power inside them.
A languorous chuckle escaped him. Sure thing. No problem. Easy as falling off a log.
There, fatigue caught up with him and he could resist it no longer. The youth fell soundly asleep and did not rise until sunset’s final golden rays beamed down on him. When he stirred slowly awake, he spent a few dazzled moments trying to piece together where he was before memory slammed in, bearing the weight of his circumstances back on young shoulders.
Alexander claimed his prizes from the Reaper, its thick mantle and its scythe, the polished ivory incredibly smooth under his fingers. The vestments it had worn had turned to ash along with the rest of it, according to rules Alexander would probably never completely understand. Whatever, he had the fucker’s cowl and weapon, that was trophy enough.
He used the mantle as a sash, tying the scythe to his back and hefted his ruined naginata before retracing the desperate steps of his running fight through the city. The stairwell gave evidence that he hadn’t dreamt the entire thing, a pile of now rotting corpses scattered along the bottom of the top flight of stairs. The stench of rot poured off them now that the necromantic energy holding them in a kind of stasis had left them.
Dry heaves kept Alexander occupied while he walked down the next three flights, and he was never so glad for experience gutting animals and tanning his hides as then. Without exposure to those similarly profound funks he’d have vomited profusely for the next half hour. Before he left the hospital, Alexander filled a duffle-bag from one of the floors of the regional hospital with medical supplies. More exotic antibiotics, analgesics, general painkillers, epi pens, and adrenaline were high on his priority list, as were I. V. bags, needles, surgical implements, all the things to handle capital “B” bad situations.
Every third sunrise Alexander was healed of anything that might ail him, but he had come closer to dying than he was comfortable with more times than he was comfortable with to not try to hedge his bets. It was a shame the diagnostic equipment was all trashed. Even the magnets inside the MRI machines were cooked. The Pulse had been as thorough here as back at home.
Pervasive was the stench of death and purification throughout the city. The dungeon had reanimated and preserved the corpses of the raised and they had all simultaneously lost the protection of that magic when he’d struck down the core. All across the city, the dead were moving rapidly through the stages of decay and Alexander fled as rapidly as he could manage. Sickness was nearly guaranteed with so many rotting corpses about. Even so, it was well past dark by the time Alexander managed to find his flagged mailbox to shack up within his hideaway.
That night’s sleep came easily and he slept without dreams or nightmares, blessedly unburdened for a time. Birdsong, loud, exuberant, and full of the passion of tiny creatures telling their competitors to fuck off or potential mates to fuck on filled the morning air. The last Gerifalte breakfasted heartily on the canned goods, enjoying a big can of tuna alongside another pot of vegetable stew. He ate twice in three hours to really pack on the free calories and took a lovely mid morning stroll back down the road to his home.
The empty highway had lost the majority of its menace, now that the threat of the undead was gone. Alexander kept a hawkish gaze on his surroundings, keenly aware that wolves, elk, panthers, and who knew what else might be about, especially if they’d been avoiding the area claimed by the dungeon. His boon proved a godsend, the extra strength especially, as he barely even noticed the extra weight of the medical supplies and food scavenged back from this venture, to say nothing of the Reaper’s mantle and scythe. Boots clopped cheerfully all the long way home and the sight of his ruined town was bittersweet, as always when he viewed it from a vantage. Unlike many times before, there was a tinge of hope in the sight now. Alexander had reason to believe that there might be a way to revert the petrification, to undo the lethal aspect of the Pulse.
Straight away, Alexander offloaded his supplies, stashed the trophies in his study for examination, and did a patrol around town to make sure there weren’t any surprises waiting for him. While he was at it, he checked the status of the tanning pits. The foul things were going according to plan and he would be moving some of the pelts along to the dry working step tomorrow. A short stop by the smithy was in order as well, the young man had a date with the forge and had to check his inventory of Golem ingots to begin the process of crafting a new weapon, most likely another naginata, the sword bladed spear had served him faithfully and well. Best not to fix what wasn’t broken.
Late afternoon rolled around while he wasn’t looking and the growls of his belly reminded him that it had taken most of the day to walk between the distant city and home, to say nothing of the chores that followed. The refinement of his body was incredible, he barely felt tired even after all that going!
A few tomatoes, ripe already, their growth clearly drastically altered by the Entling enhanced soil he was testing, added fresh produce to his supper, a welcome change indeed from preserved food.
That night, laying again in the familiar comfort of his own bed, it occurred to the young man that he needed to find some cows to relocate. He was finding himself in dire need of dairy products, what with the majority of pre-Pulse cheeses, creams, milk, and butter having gone rancid by this point. There were probably some ultra-pasteurized milks that were still good out there somewhere but he hadn’t found any in his examination of the markets in his home and he couldn’t haul that kind of weight from the city. It would require conveyance of some kind to attempt that kind of transportation of goods, a steam engine powered buggy or something.
That little idea went onto the pile of projects for a much distant future. Alexander had bigger fish to fry currently, starting with jump starting his food stocks by planting rows of wheat, corn, barley and oats, along with a fruit orchard using beds of the, now precious, Entling soil. The rate of growth from that stuff was flatly impossible according to the old rules and Alexander would take advantage of every cheat, reality hack, and flagrant piece of mystical nonsense he could get away with. He parted from the waking world gently and dreamed of giant orchards and caramel apples.
Dawn broke over the last week of April and Alexander greeted it from the Creek-side, bathing himself in cold, fresh waters. Naked, he reflected that, more and more, he found himself dispensing with unnecessary fires, not wanting to spend the time maintaining them or the effort to procure fuel that would be better spent in the winter season. Life post Pulse was hardening the youth, scrubbing the softness of the old world from him a day at a time. A draft of warm spring air brought a prickling of skin and he dipped back indoors to make an assessment about his spoils from the Reaper.
It no longer struck him as odd to cut a piece of the thick, almost velvety fabric to eat it for better understanding of its properties. The sharply sour taste, like vinegar dialed to twelve, assaulted his nasal passages before rapidly fading.
Crypt velveteen: acquired from the fibers of a Sepulcher Lily, an unmistakable flower grown only where necrotic mana ambiance is pervasive and concentrated, native to Tech Duinn. The dense, yet supple cloth made from processed plant fibers radiates death magic, though less potent than the leaves of the flower freshly harvested. The glistening, unrelieved black of the material makes nearby mortal creatures uneasy, imparts sight unimpeded by darkness, and hides the wearer from scrying.
Insufficient skill to resolve further property, proceed with caution.
Fascinating. Death magic? Was that why he was vaguely nervous around it? Alexander had himself a feeling like something might be crawling around behind him, an unease. Spooky. Proceed with caution, it had said. A new one. Definitely needed more study.
Alexander put the loose bundle of fabric over his head and pulled the cowl up. Immediately, his vision transformed, becoming a vibrant grey scale that took on crisp, hard edges. Woah! Trippy. He lowered the hood and the stark, too sharp picture of the world faded back to its normal, soft, warmth. That fabric was worrisome, for sure. But he would find a way to make it work for him, sooner or later.
The scythe was a trickier proposition. Alexander wasn’t certain how to go about testing the materials, so he grabbed a fine, high grit sandpaper and rubbed the polished ivory down low, near the end of the handle. A taste of that, acrid and bitter, was all he wanted.
Fiend ivory: made from the horns of a high tier demon, aged for eons to become the finest of ivories. This vanishingly rare material is prized by sorcerers, seers, and practitioners of arts pertaining to crossings of the veil between worlds. Resistant to nearly any form of magical or chemical change and conductive of neither heat nor electricity, the ivory is nearly impervious to transmutation.
Alexander had to admit, that was a pretty metal description. It also peeled back a layer on the insanity onion that his life had become, mentioning several things that should have been straight out of occultism. Demons, seers, and all that. Looking at the long length of pearlescent white mineral, all of a single piece, the last Gerifalte couldn’t help but try to imagine what a demon bearing horns of such length might look like. He rapidly abandoned that notion, not needing to buy any more reasons to worry.
Some flakes from the back of the scythe blade were similarly disturbing. For one thing, the tiny particles of metal, barely a few flecks large enough to even see, tasted like a mouthful of blood.
Umberite: raw wolfram ore suffused by dark energies, hidden from sunlight for thousands of years is woven with the dark and resists flame, rendering it surpassingly difficult to forge. Requires the strength of a giant or colossus to shape, despite the impurities laced in its substrate. Rumored to have been once used in the making of Acherontic Bronze, an abyssal alloy of myth.
That took the youth aback. The polished scythe blade was ore? Not even metal? That didn’t make sense at all, ores were too brittle to be sharpened like this, too inconsistent to polish without voids or pitting. The blade, to his hand, was absolutely smooth and visibly free of defect. What the hell?
Suddenly, cleaning up that underworld dungeon seemed like a far, far better thing than he’d first assumed. Everything about it seemed to invoke places of darkness, death, and the bowels of Hades. If it grew, expanded, entrenched itself on Gaia’s plane, who knows what might have managed to crawl out of it? Tech Duinn, whatever else it was, was definitely bad news.
The blue scroll-work describing the scythe as a whole was far less interesting than its parts, oddly enough. It was described merely as an instrument of harvest, meticulously crafted of exquisitely rare materials found only in the shadowed realms. Apparently, from his examination of the not-metal of the blade, it wasn’t even truly smithed, the scythe was ore, unrefined, unfinished. That irked the craftsman in him to no end. Stupid grim reaper wannabe, at least finish your damned weapon.
He didn’t have long to dwell though, time was pressing, he had shit to accomplish. Turning aside his study of the realms of death, Alexander put his mind and hands to work on those projects most polar opposite: the growing and sustaining of life. Spring wouldn’t last forever, he had to get his vegetable gardens and fruit trees planted.
To that end, for the rest of the morning, before a noon time stop for work on the tannery, and an afternoon spent in the smithy, the young man hauled wheelbarrows of enriched dirt and prepared gardens. For the orchard, he planted apple cuttings from several of the neighbor’s old trees. He buried several sets of whole green apples, rotted though they were, to see if they would sprout. Between the cuttings of the red apples and the tart greens he figured he could make do with apple preserves, ciders, and the like.
Speaking of cider, booze was another little item on the agenda, as beer and spirits was a way to hedge his bets on having potable water available year round, as well as a way to increase the calorie density of his diet. Getting a beer belly wasn’t a problem for the foreseeable future. The materials for a still and brewery were, thankfully, easily obtainable and Papa Gerifalte’s treasured library housed several different tomes on the ancient art of the brew-master. The first successful IPA he drafted would be called the Etri Imperial, in honor of his father. The first potato spirits that he managed to successfully raise to above one hundred eighty proof would be called the Minerva crystal vodka. That thought cheered him until he remembered that there was no one around to raise a toast with. Damn it, sad again. And lonely.
Alexander kept himself too busy to brood the rest of the day, forging golem steel ingots.
Nothing impinged on Alexander’s peace for the remainder of that week. Every day fell into a rhythm of work. Grape arbors were run along the hill behind his house, since the south facing slope would absorb more sunlight, the better for Maine’s already too cool and short growing season to be optimal for grapes. He was trusting the Entling’s bounty to assist with that shortcoming. The last of the fertile stuff went into the vegetable gardens and, by week’s end, shoots were rising that promised he would not go hungry this next winter.
As for the orchards, both experiments proved successful, thanks to the sheer fecundity of the green-blood juiced soil. The cuttings rooted and threw shoots before the week was out, while up from the black soil fresh young apple trees rose. Alexander had to divide and re-pot them, there were so many!
His tanneries were now in the long-haul stage of preservation, sitting in the tanning solution, full strength, and would be ready not for another month or two. The youth wouldn’t lack for projects to fill his hands in the meantime.
Reforging his spear turned out to be less the challenge than he’d initially thought. The haft of the weapon was unaffected by his abusive use of Baneful smite and Entropic imbuement, two things he now knew should not be done simultaneously if one wanted to continue using the item. The sword blade was, of course, a total loss and had to be redone from scratch.
Fortunately, he was able to recover most of the material from the blade through a complete meltdown of it. The high-steel and golem silver itself was, once it had been reheated and forged out, purified of the contaminating effects of his chaos magic to the effect of having lost fifteen percent of its mass due to the disordering influence of his mana. He was out of polar cores, unless he wanted to sacrifice his refrigerators, which he didn’t, so he resigned himself to being unable to perform the magical enhancements until he’d had the fortune of hunting a new bear possessed of one.
All the while he hammered and heated, the specter of that Umberite ore lived in his thoughts. It wouldn’t react to heat, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a way to coax the ore apart from the aberrant metals it imprisoned. Alexander wondered what the yield from such a small batch of ore as was represented by the scythe blade would even be useful for. The average take from a good tungsten ore smelt was only about one percent, according to the mining and metallurgy literature he had available. He found nothing about how to smelt without fire or heat and, so, defeated by ignorance, the scythe hung on his study wall, a trophy for courage against the vision of death.
The mantle Alexander kept tied as a sash around his chest, ready to be untied and donned should he ever need to go lurking about in the dark of night. A few jaunts to test it proved thrilling, who knew how many critters were out and about in the witching hours?
Almost a week after his return from claiming the undead dungeon’s heart, Alexander Gerifalte was on a hunt on the mountain side. He was deep into the forests, on high alert, because he’d crossed panther paw prints that were larger than his frying pan, and deep enough that the animal creating those impressions must have massed better than six hundred pounds. That was a lot of fucking panther, even with his armor, magic, and spear.
One side benefit of the Reaper’s Mantle was that it worked to keep predators leery of approaching him, which had, more than once already, given him the chance to study a great brown bear, or dire wolf pack from afar, unmolested. They felt the emanations of the Tech Duinn guardian monster and avoided it. Alexander wasn’t banking on that protection keeping a super tiger or something from coming after him though so he was keeping his head on a swivel.
Afternoon light dappled the ground through the leaves of the birch and maple and a big pine grove lent the air that distinct twangy note of turpentine. So it was that when a marvelously rich, sweet aroma drifted into his nostrils he froze. There was no doubt, the grinning young man fist pumped, he was smelling honey.
One of the startling changes that had occurred when the flowers blossomed this spring was that many of the flowers, following the pattern of their animal counterparts, had become monsterized. They bloomed, waxy, vibrant, succulent, and fucking huge. Star-flower bigger than a dinner plate, where they were normally only a half inch across. Lily of the valley that stood half Alexander’s height, with intensely lavender blooms hanging bowed from their stems. Bluets stood like small palm fronds and the four leafed blue flowers, their yellow centers so distinct made him think of colorful ceiling fans. Those flowers had to mean wonders for the pollinators.
Those ranks had to include bees. The smell in his nostrils said that the buzzing little honey factories were eating well from the pollen of giant magical flowers.
Not that he necessarily needed honey, the stuff was one of the few nonperishable sources of food in the stores, it would sit in its jars, edible as the day it was sat there on the shelf for years. He was mostly interested because he had a couple of brewing kits assembled and honey wine, or mead, sounded like a damned good time, if only he could find a renewable source for the honey. Lo’ and behold! Nature provided.
Turning aside from the game trail he was paralleling, the once pilot aspirant followed the potent aroma, pushing farther down into the valley that dropped behind the ridge line abutting his home town. This area was slightly wilder than his usual trekking, rock outcrops and bluffs prominent, and a fast running creek along the cleft of the narrow valley inspired big hemlock’s to grow tall along that hillside. The old timer who’d owned the place had inherited it from his grandfather, who told the logging company’s that wanted to come in and “selectively” log it to fuck off, which meant it was one of the few areas that was relatively untouched, except for the trees taken for the homestead’s use back in the day. It showed, this section of forest was tall, tall, dark and deep.
Golden temptation led Alexander astray.
A disturbance in the background of the forest that grew louder, so imperceptibly slowly that he hadn’t even noticed until it was a thrumming hum, suddenly became obvious. The source of the sound grew at once clear and also alarming, because a formidable looking bee the size of a basketball meandered into his view. The stinger pulsed on its abdomen, a hand long and wickedly barbed, while it droned along its merry way.
“Holy shit balls!” commented the last Gerifalte.
Frozen in place, he watched and waited, as time and experience had taught him to do. Dozens of bees came and went, all headed to or from a central location just ahead. A few ambled in from behind him, coming to within a few dozen feet or so, but showing no obvious interest in the young man. Alexander took this opportunity to pause and rethink his course. Bees were one thing, he wasn’t allergic and didn’t mind a few stings to secure a big score, especially since he had bee boxes back in the town just sitting around unused, their wrappings untouched where they’d been stored at the big agriculture store.
Alexander had had thoughts toward maybe bringing the queen to roost in a nice convenient new home, which he’d seen some of the good old boys do, just grab her up in their hand and pack her to the new box, the swarm surprisingly docile about the whole thing.
That was that, and this was this.
Not knowing, Alexander would bet these bees were at least as toxic as their regular sized cousins. Projecting along the trend of obviously magical creatures being more potent than their workaday variants, there was sufficient reason to believe that the buzzing monsterized bees drifting around were orders of magnitude more lethal. What they, by all observance, also appeared to be was just as calm. For once, no mindless aggression, no oddly specific hate boner just for him. He was watching big ol’ bees doing bee things.
Or, that was his position until he spied a horned rabbit scrunching its cute, deceitfully vicious face before it hopped through a regular old patch of herbaceous foliage, beneath a patch of the mutant bluets. The flowers were being serviced by three of the massive bees. The horned rabbit, about as large as a German shepherd itself, with a solid foot long spiral of sharp bone to give it its name, mistakenly bent down a bluet that held a bee. The bee, disturbed, its food taken away, dove stinger first, drilling the rabbit in the back of the neck and the other two comrades of black and yellow joined it, aggressive humming from wings accelerating them into knifing their stingers into the horned rabbit’s already spasming back.
A loud rabbit squeal cut off under a buzzing rendition of the end of Julius Ceasar, barbed stingers ripping away before driving home repeatedly, even though the mauled rabbit was long dead.
Ah. Well. Not so harmless, then.
Once the rabbit was dispatched, with great prejudice, the bees resumed their ambling collection of pollen.
Nothing else, the squirrels, birds, or even a white tail that wandered through the valley was bothered by the flying super hive monsters. A few more horned rabbits showed themselves, sniffed around their downed relative but made no move toward the occupied flowers. So. It would appear to Alexander’s reckoning that the bees were only hostile on the defensive. As long as nothing interfered with their gathering of food, they were content to be peaceful gleaners of pollen. However. Woe to the creature that garnered their ire.
Alexander retreated back the way he’d come, seeing no reason to tempt fate. The rich odor of monster honey called a siren song to him, but he hardened his will and made careful way back to the familiar side of the mountain. He would be back, but not until he had a plan. It was a caution born of hard earned, and painful, experience. The unknown was always dangerous.