Two weeks of November passed after the conquering of the first dungeon, which was how he had begun to think of it upon stumbling across a trove of fantasy role playing books held in one of the abandoned homes of his territory. Besides the occasional pack of wolves, panthers, and, once, a huge goddamned bear, nothing had broken the silence of Alexander’s solitude. The role-playing books had provided a crucial route to relaxation from his intensive study or practice of means to attempt the revival of civilization. They had also proven slightly prophetic in some regards. Alexander was slowly coming to terms with the existence of magic in his paradigm.
He didn’t like many of the conclusions to which that, admittedly dubious, guidance led him.
Impossible animals, more cunning and lethal than natural counterparts. Even more impossible monsters, of varieties and characteristics beyond his imagining. Alexander’s encounter with goblins was, in the terms of the notes and books and research materials he read, “rookie shit”. The same humanoid creatures that had taxed his skills to improvise traps and dispatch from range with guns were considered almost pests. Weak, slow, stupid, without truly hazardous abilities or skills. If all of that were true in comparison to whatever else lay in wait for him, then he was officially in deep shit.
Alexander was no longer facing these nightmares unbaptized in their metaphysical advantages, however. He had his own abilities, his own advantages. Contact with that huge crystal had altered him, somehow. The odd voice, a combination of alien vastness and almost motherly beneficence, had empowered him with a measure of strength.
On a notepad he had scrawled notes, penciled chaos incarnate. Arrows led from definitions and snippets copied from the scrolls of information seen only by his eyes to hypothesis, scratched out when evidence contradicted his suppositions. Atop his desk, the disorderly mass of papers clipped together with their wild stream of consciousness annotations combined with methodical experimentation, contained all he had come to know.
Firstly, the parameters of his body were discrete, measured. He had come to determine that might could be quantified as approximately the poundage he could dead lift divided by forty. The number was higher than anything he’d managed in a gym prior to the Pulse, but he’d verified it in the now deserted high school gym’s weight room. Other exercises hadn’t produced as exact a ratio, so he failed to see any clear delineations between that stat and what he could do. All he knew was he was slightly behind the jocks of the football team in most lifts, but ahead of most others in his age group.
Other categories played out similarly, grace significantly above average, he noticed his ability to do things like walk on his hands, toe a narrow line, do footwork drills, throw darts, anything that required a deft touch was improved. Impetus held a measure of speed. Alexander clocked himself at almost exactly twenty-six miles per hour in a dead run. A speed twice his impetus. A speed that was right up there with world class sprinters. He’d never been that fast, not even close. Too lean, not enough power in his muscles, and, yet, the hourglass’s falling sands did not lie. Other things he was less able to directly observe.
Cogitation, Ingenuity, Wisdom, he had no real way to apply a direct calculation. He did notice that he seemed to be much faster at reading, memorizing, and generally processing his father’s hoard of technical documents. He was a little more emotionally stable too, less up and down. That could just be human adaptability to stress though, Homo Sapiens was a robust critter in the face of adversity.
About the weirder things he actually had a better idea. Firstly, magic and cores. He had one, apparently, inside him. Kindled by his touch of the dungeon core, it was labeled as black fire opal, a precious gem notable for its flares of reds, greens, blues, and yellows, as well as a heavy black component. He was no geologist though, and nothing in the library revealed any more information, other than a footnote on opals being considered bad luck.
Normally Alexander would have put such a statement right up there with astrology in his horseshit people believe rankings. However, his fortunes did seem to run towards glass half broken and scattered across the floor these days.
Mana was another thing that was actually sort of cut and dry. Alexander had magic. Two different supernatural manifestations that he had practiced since discovering the dungeon granted powers and ability to see scrolls of information about the world.
The first, Entropic aura, was something like a field of interference that eroded mana. By keeping it active around one of the goblin cores, he recorded a progressive decay of the crystalline facets and a diminishing luster of the glowing force that had to be magic inside it. After about five minutes, which also cost him his entire pool of mana, the little grape sized core shattered and turned to glittering dust, which Alexander scraped into a bottle and kept because he squirreled everything away that might be useful. So far as he could tell, the aura functioned as a kind of anti-magic zone, which could be exceedingly useful if more things that liked to throw fireballs at him showed up.
The second bit of arcana was called Chaos bolt. It was an offensive magic, consisting of a fist sized ball of black and grey light that whirled with eye hurting twists of almost negative light. All at once glowing and drinking in light, he didn’t like to look at the thing when he made it. He was certain the magic was a kind of weapon though, when it hit things, it did more damage than a rifle bullet and had kind of material weakening effect. The steel plate he used as a practice target became brittle as glass, shattering on the third hit, which also was how many of the little arrow fast bolts of magic he could use in a short span. Wooden targets took on a definitely aged look around the impact of the spell and concrete looked like it was separating into sand and gravel, like the mortar holding the aggregate material had come apart.
The effects on living things were quite destructive, as he learned when he turned aside an ambush from another panther.
Two strikes of the bolts left great bleeding wounds that looked like they caused the tissue nearby to become withered, as if the wounds had spread, tried to heal badly, and scarred around the impact. The panther barely managed to lift its head to growl at him when he finished it with an axe blow to the skull, so badly devastated was it from the magical strikes.
Rising from where he had been adding to the anarchy of his investigations, Alexander drank cool creek water from a pitcher, and went into the living room to add wood to the big iron stove, stirring the coals first to make space and get the wood burning hot. If he let it burn without the stoking it made more smoke. More smoke would make his hidey-hole visible from farther away and Alexander didn’t want anyone or anything to know where he was. Just because the goblins had been too stupid to figure out how to follow a rising white spire of wood smoke to his home didn’t mean everything else was.
Winter was coming early to Maine. More days below freezing than not recently and he was hammering through ice to draw water from the creek a lot more. The woodpile out back attested to the increasing necessity of keeping a fire going to warm his cottage. Alexander hated splitting wood, but he was going to be doing a great deal of it if he had to hazard a guess. Maybe he could practice his skills.
In addition to the physical and mental parameters, magical nonsense, and core, he had a list of traits and skills that offered manipulations to his stats and abilities. Some of them were pretty nifty and useful, some had distinct drawbacks. Fantasia was a perfect example of the latter. It added half again to his mana pool. It also inflicted a negative five penalty to his Wisdom. Alexander was almost certain his almost dreamlike attitude towards reality, the certainty that none of this world was real, that it was all some kind of exotic fiction, lent him additional strength in the magical bullshit that surrounded him. It also made his judgment somewhat suspect, as he very definitely could not shake the suspicion that he had gone mad while flying his plane that fateful day.
Rage was what it sounded like, when he was hurt, fighting for his life, angry, he gained a boost to his Might, Valor, and Durability, at the cost of losing a proportional amount of Wisdom and the ability to use spells. He’d tested the skill against a wolf, after dispatching its pack-mates, holding his magical eroding aura, and fighting the beast with a knife. Alexander hated risks, but he had to know more about himself, he had to explore all options, even the ones that seemed most insane.
With an effort of will, a heavy welding glove on one arm acting as extra defense against fangs, Alexander activated the skill and instantly experienced a burst of strength, vigor, and a reddening of vision that brought an end to the aura and an incredible, overwhelming anger. It was hard to let go of the fierce passion for violence that came over him, that threatened to overwhelm him until the wolf was dead. Without an enemy to focus on the anger faded quickly, leaving Alexander shaken and disoriented for a few moments.
He didn’t test Rage again, just jotted its effects down in his notes and resolved to never activate it unless all other options had become futile.
Alexander left the house, scanning the skies for clues to the weather that was coming. Grey skies. A stiff breeze on occasion carrying Canadian continental air, dry and frigid. Nothing else to note. He resumed his steady examination of the ruined town from his front porch, noting nothing dangerous, or, at least, nothing obviously so. Down the stairs from the porch he climbed to the street, headed back to the forge in the old flea market.
The Ogre had overturned it during their mad chase and Alexander had been forced to repair it. He’d made a few improvements and was coming along nicely in his smithing. Hammer strokes were more precise now, a feel for the metal in his hands, and a better judge of the working temperatures by the metal’s color, all let him shape the material with more ease.
Pondering over that occupied him while the charcoal burned and he pedaled his ass off to operate the blower to stoke it to temperature. The current project wouldn’t be up to the right working heat for a minute yet.
Artisan of war. This little nugget in his skills was both more and less than the others. Alexander didn’t have any way to know how much he was the one that created this skill and how much this skill influenced him. What he did know was that the improvement to his attempts to manipulate the metal he forged was nonlinear and this skill had to be responsible for that. Alexander was sharp kid, highly motivated, and he learned fast. But he wasn’t some kind of genius. The blue scroll work that appeared when he summoned a concentrated attention on the Artisan of war skill purely freaked him out a little.
While the project in the coals took on a reddening hue, he made the effort and the odd gift of the dungeon core pulled the information he desired to within his view.
It was a whole heap to take in and he wasn’t sure he truly understood the implications that such a thing suggested about the way things worked in his new reality.
Artisan of war: committed practice to the crafts of conducting warfare, through operation of machines and weapons, the creation of traps, armor, knives, and spears, forges, and the study of means and methods by which war is conducted grants proficiency in the following:
· Lesser Blacksmith: craftsman of stout metal. Iron, steel, copper, brass, and bronze may be worked with improved ease. Weapons, armor, tools, and brackets made by the smith may take on special properties, depending on the skill of the craftsman and the materials used in the work.
· Lesser Silversmith: craftsman of precious metals. Brass, silver, gold, and other soft metals may be worked with improved ease and engraving gains improved precision. Fittings, guards, buckles, brackets, rings, necklaces, and the like may take on special properties, depending on the skill of the craftsman and the materials used in the work.
· Greater Alchemist: advanced craftsman of the materials of Gaia. Substances may be synthesized, decomposed, and replaced to create solutions that take on special properties, depending on the skill of the craftsman and the materials used. Greater alchemists may now use materials not of Gaia in their craft without spontaneous incompatibility failure.
· Lesser Chirurgeon: healer and surgeon, this craftsman of the body is skilled in the repair and recovery of wounds. Improved effectiveness of first aid, basic surgery, and treatment of disease.
· Lesser Mechanic: crafter of moving parts, gears, wheels, belts, pulleys, and levers. Machines may be constructed with improved efficiency and precision. Constructs may take on special property, depending on the skill of the craftsman and the materials used in the work.
He pumped his legs hard for another minute to get the steel bar stock that was twisted together with re-bar. Whether his own random assortment of knowledge or, somehow, instilled by the advent of this freaky blue scroll-work, Alexander was making a laminate alloy for creating a spear head. More like a sword blade he was going to mount to a spear haft, really. The reason for it was fairly simple: his primary weapons, firearms, were a limited resource whose effectiveness was blunted by the existence of this magical buffer called Soak.
The unusual toughness of the wolves, the goblins, and, most especially, the Ogres, had revealed that weapons designed to put small holes in soft humans or slightly tougher animals like bear and moose, weren’t sufficient to be viable against things that could absorb a measure of the energy of the cartridge. Alexander had been about a step and a half away from being slaughtered by the first Ogre that ambushed him and he’d been using the hardest hitting firearms he could find in his former town. The monster ran him out of ammunition, in spite of his aiming at critical joints and taking lethal shot placements.
If you’re fighting things that can shrug off bullets like they’re wearing armor, then you start using things that can defeat armor.
Alexander’s magic, Entropic aura, ate through the magical buffer. He could, as long as he stayed within about three meters or so, degrade their defenses. But that meant getting close. He didn’t like the thought of doing that without something to keep a wolf or goblin at bay. Hence the spear.
He pulled the metal from the forge, cherry red and ready to work and laid it across the anvil, hammer rising, then falling with a loud clang of steel on steel. The stock wrapped in re-bar flattened impressively. More than it should have, Alexander knew he wasn’t strong enough to move that much steel in a single hammer stroke. Up the hammer, down again, *clang*, and the stock flattened.
San mai was the name for this kind of forging. Another mysterious bit of information he had no business possessing. A high carbon steel core jacketed by softer mild steel, he would produce a bar that, when ground away during profiling, would reveal the high carbon core at the edge only. The resulting blade would be springlike, flexible, and withstanding of the kind of abuse that came with using a bladed weapon, but with an incredibly sharp edge. There were better ways to do this, he had a feeling like an itch that suggested it, but he didn’t know how to figure out what those ways might be. So. Alexander hammered, put the steel back into the forge coals, and resumed pedaling like Lance Armstrong, the low gear spinning the blower blades to drive air through the coals.
Another reason for making a blade himself he’d discovered after completing his attempt at a knife. The finished product, more like a high-quality prison shank than a real knife, had possessed the property “Deep Penetration: ignores 2Soak/2AP”
Artisan of war let him make weapons that were better than guns, in terms of pure destructive power. Ignoring that magical buffer was the same as adding kinetic energy. If he could figure out how to manufacture his own guns, he might be able to use firearms that had the same lethality he was used to. That would require reinventing the techniques to gunsmithing though, which required precision machining. Alexander had simple forge and hand tools. No lathes. No drill presses. No machine tooling at all. Making a gun without those was asking to blow your hands off.
So. Alexander took the bar from the coals again and continued to pound the metal into a flat bar, thicker than the stock he started with. Then he started forge welding layers. Flatten, wire brush, sprinkle borax flux, fold, flatten. This cycle he repeated for three hours, completing some few dozen cycles. He had to be careful not to overwork the metal, doing so risked losing carbon, the binding component of the steel migrating out of the metal and being lost to scale. Most of this was going by feel, he wouldn’t know how successful he was until he was done, which wouldn’t happen today.
Alexander sat the cooling bar down across the anvil, soaked with sweat. He worked bare-chested inside the hanger-like building of the peddler’s mall, in spite of the cold outside. The charcoal burned hot and he would ruin his clothes with sparks if he wore them. Clothes Alexander could not replace. Small burns on his skin from metal sparks would heal like new, especially on the third sunrise. It was an easy decision to make.
Leaving behind the building as he shrugged on his coat, breath fogging in the cold, Alexander had some less easy decisions. Such as, how long should he stay in this ghost town? He had supplies. He had shelter. He could, very likely, manage to scratch out a living in these hills just about as well as the old frontiersmen had. But. The goblins dungeon had revealed to him that he had been mistaken when he thought himself alone.
Sometime between the Pulse and the world going insane, the old silver mine had become a nexus for magical power with a huge geode in its heart, a magical engine that, somehow, brought the goblins from a place called “Tirnanog”. Wherever the fuck that might be. The goblins had rounded up whoever hadn’t been turned to stone and ate them. Alexander hadn’t known. Not until he mounted an assault on the goblin camp after decimating the forces sent to kill him and scour the town for fresh food, after they’d run out of people. He found the bones and clothes of his friends and neighbors and cold cook pots.
Part of him wanted to blame himself for their deaths. The rational part of him knew that was madness. He was barely surviving. Three times he’d nearly been killed by wild animals and the invading goblins. The whole damned world was crazy. That he was still alive at all was wild luck.
His boots crunched on the pavement and he picked his way back across the small town’s streets, headed back to his laboratory. The rifle he carried, heavy three hundred win-mag shells, didn’t comfort him like it used to. He knew better now.
Green and golden-brown rimmed eyes took in the town under the reddish cast of fading light.
Another change. Or, maybe not a change. More like a natural gift that found its true nature when the world shifted.
Raptor gaze was described as a trait, a characteristic that he possessed that passively increased certain aspects of himself. In the case of that particular skill his vision was something better than strictly human. Alexander had always had twenty-ten vision, perfectly clear eyesight. He could see insects on trees now, from across the valley. Anything that moved registered to him, he was damned near able to see air currents, from the slight shifts in density as the air moved if he concentrated. His amplified sight was particularly adept at finding weakness in animals and predicting their movements. When you could see the muscles shift beneath the skin you got a pretty good idea what they were going to do. A limp might as well have put neon paint on the creature.
Other traits and skills synergized with that awesome targeting vision. Lethal was another trait, it increased his ability to find a way to hit vulnerable locations for inflicting critical damage to vulnerable anatomy. Eyes to see the weakness, a natural inclination to slide the knife into that weakness, and, an active skill called Heart’s blow that, as far as he could tell, increased the raw damage that he could do when he struck vital locations.
How did it do that? He didn’t know. Against the lone wolf he put a perfectly placed knife thrust into the monster’s chest and, after he opened it up later, found a wound channel that belonged to a weapon twice as large as his knife blade. He had a theory that his mana was somehow used to amplify the attacking weapon somehow. No, theory was far too generous a term for what he had.
Alexander had a wild-assed guess that his mana could infuse critical strikes to amplify them.
As much as he wanted to know the rules, there were limits to his ability to see everything that was happening, especially when a huge dire wolf was trying to claw his stomach open and eat him.
Up the stairs he hopped lightly, enjoying his improved dexterity, and he slipped indoors quietly.
Two weeks of scavenging, organizing, tabulating, and cataloguing the town’s supplies and Alexander knew he would not starve this year. Probably not next year either, even if he grew no food of his own.
After stoking up the fire once again he put a cast iron skillet on the stove, and cracked open some of the last good eggs he had. His diet had been heavy in perishables the last little bit. The early Winter was helping him quite a lot, refrigeration wasn’t absolutely necessary, but even with the cold he didn’t have long to enjoy fresh produce, eggs, and milk.
“I will miss milk so damned much, by all the gods above, below, and in between, I swear it.” He sighed as he scrambled eggs.
Milk. Eggs. Oranges. So much he would miss. But not quite yet.
He sliced some green onions, green peppers, put a heap of shredded cheddar into the skillet to start melting, and stirred everything together. A big, cheesy omelet for supper was just the thing, after the exertion of smithing.
The hot meal finished, Alexander pulled the cork free from a bottle of wine, a dark red that tasted rich and dry when he took a pull from the bottle. A satisfied sigh filled the room before he ambled about to light a pair of oil lamps for light, before the sunset threw him into the total darkness of a long winter night.
With that done, he retired back to his laboratory, carrying the lamp by its wire handle.
It only took a few minutes to change into heavy sweatpants and a thick plushy robe, his preferred evening attire.
While he reclined on a big cozy couch he’d pillaged from a different house, he summoned the mysterious scroll-work that defined Alexander Gerifalte in these crazy times.
Alexander Gerifalte
Class: Entropic Neophyte
Status: tired
Soak: 15%
LifeForce/Armor
Head
Mana: 150%
Might
9
Height
6’2”
LifeForce/Armor
Left Arm
12/0
LifeForce/Armor
Right Arm
Grace
12
Weight
160lbs
9/3
None
9/3
Impetus
13
Age
17
High quality Cotton robe
LifeForce/Armor
Chest
High quality Cotton robe
Cogitation
14
Core
Black Fire Opal, brilliant
empty
14/3
Crude Steel Knife
Wisdom
12(-5)
Origin
Gaia
LifeForce/Armor
Left Leg
High quality Cotton robe
LifeForce/Armor
Right Leg
Ingenuity
15
Sapient Race:
Human-2rd Tier (Shaggoth)
10/4
LifeForce/Armor
Abdomen
10/4
Durability
11
High quality Cotton slacks
10/3
High quality Cotton slacks
Valor
25(+10)
High quality Cotton robe
Traits
Raptor gaze, Fantasia, Spatial adept, Back from the brink, Gaia’s child, Lethal, Artisan of war, Scholarship
Skills
Heart’s blow, Rage, Greater focus, Greater analyze, Lesser stalk
Arcana
Entropic aura, Chaos bolt
Relaxing in the soft lamp light, a bottle of wine in hand, a comfortable couch on which he could just recline, he mulled over the revelations he’d had since clearing the goblin dungeon.
The shimmering doorway hadn’t opened again, and the insides of the mine were exactly as he remembered now. No weird corridors or goblin camp, just the shafts, the lifts, and all the detritus of a venture that had been abandoned when it proved not profitable enough for the mine owner to keep employing most of a small town.
What was that place? He didn’t know. What was the voice that spoke to him? He didn’t know. There was a lot that Alexander didn’t know. He had come to accept that.
Which was why he focused on this blue page, to decipher what he could know. Back from the brink, a flat additional ten to his Valor. Just about dying gave you spiritual resilience, huh? Whodathunkit. Gaia’s child, a passive increase to ability and skill gain, and…complete revitalization every third sunrise. Also, the reason he was listed as a Shaggoth. You know what? He didn’t even want to know any more about that.
So. There was the secret to his seventy-two-hour cycle. Gaia’s child. That was how he’d survived being mauled by the wolves. That was why he hadn’t been laid up crippled, to starve or succumb to exposure from his wounds. Good to know.
Greater analyze was what granted him the sight of this scroll of knowledge about himself and his surroundings, with additional details for the greater version. Lesser stalk, the ability to move with reduced notice, provided you were concentrating on stealth, with a specific target in mind. Spatial adept, he was able to visualize in three dimensions his surroundings and the structure of objects, animals, or whatever. Scholarship improved his memorization speed and sharpened his recall of studied knowledge. He hadn’t been imagining learning more quickly, then.
All told, Alexander was, seemingly, rather well suited to making single devastating attacks to the vital organs and to learning and improving his skill set at a rapid pace. What that told him was, he’d better be smart, or else. His potential was high, but not so front loaded. Alexander Gerifalte was not some kind of juggernaut like the Ogre. He had distinct limitations. Those limitations, if he was understanding this correctly, were not permanent. Unless he was interpreting this insanity wrongly, because the world had stopped making sense a long time ago, and he was just trying, vainly, to rationalize his madness.
Being crazy had kept him alive so far, however. Alive was better than being petrified with his parents, wasn’t it? Best to avoid that train of thought all together, he told himself.
A swirl of wine in the glass before he swallowed it whole in a gulp. Bitter alcohol, grape tang, it went down surprisingly smoothly. He poured another serving from the bottle and added wood to the fireplace. The wood stove was more efficient, as the owners of this home had known, but the open-hearth fireplace was more aesthetically pleasing. Above all, it was calming. Alexander needed calming, he needed something to take the edge off his nerves that wasn’t booze. He couldn’t indulge too heavily in something that might inhibit his senses too greatly. Always in the back of his mind he considered the possibility that some monstrosity might smell smoke and come looking.
Even his paranoia had limits, however. He simply couldn’t predict or respond to every eventuality. At some point, Alexander just had to be lucky. He was due for it, right? Just a little?
Anyways. The young man contemplated the hearth flames, the hypnotic dance of fire over charring wood, the play of smoke as it drew up the chimney, alongside the blue scroll of magical information. December was coming, Winter was arrived, Alexander was staring down the barrel of a cold season unlike anything in the last decade. He’d have to be considerate of his food options, balancing the nutrition with what spoiled fastest. There was a feeling in his gut that he and peanut butter, normally something he avoided, were about to become fast friends. At least the canned fish would be tasty. Soy sauce went bad, like, never, so that was a plus.
When Alexander turned into his blankets that night, long after the early sunset, he was almost hopeful. There were many projects that he had lined up, and reason to believe that he would find success in them, eventually.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
Upon rising, the last remaining human in this tiny little forgotten corner of middle Maine went to work with a vengeance. The ring of hammer on anvil echoed for hours through the valley. Steady snowfall buried the town, except for the track that was shoveled between Alexander’s stopovers. He traveled regularly between a wood shop, not for its equipment but for the collection of hand tools and seasoned wood, the improvised smithy in the old Peddler’s mall, a hardware store, and the supermarket.
When the snow path started to become more like a tunnel, Alexander realized that the weather was not quite normal. Maine got snow. It didn’t get this much snow. Not a week before Christmas.
Despite the abundance of fluffy white bullshit, he continued to persevere. A calendar in his Laboratory ticked down and was replaced by a chalkboard for the new year. January was gone and Alexander continued to study, to design, to attempt, fail, assess, and repeat until failure become success.
Operation Naginata was in full swing, he was almost certain he had the trick of creating the jacketed carbon steel blade. His initial failures, about a dozen of them, had each taught him something new. Those pieces of flattened steel he had hammered into banded rings, riveted together and bound by leather cords into a sleeve of steel that flexed easily with his arm. A mechanic’s glove served as a template to create a gauntlet to wear, a welding glove with metal backing that would withstand even the bite of one of the black panthers that haunted the mountain.
Probably. He wasn’t going to test that theory, not if he could help it.
Some careful study of football pads revealed how to create a wearable set of pauldrons that could be slipped on over his head and tied into place rather easily. Side project Half Plate was coming along nicely, it wasn’t nearly as demanding from a skill perspective. Tedious? Oh dear, yes. But not as difficult.
Other activities were proving fruitful as well. Alexander had a working gasifier, as of three days ago. He’d gotten it mated up to a small generator and, for the first time since the Pulse, produced a current of any significance. That had been a cast iron sonofabitch. Every leak, every sloppy cut in the metal, every hose clamp had to be sealed or the pressure needed to drive the gasifier would be squandered. Its power output wasn’t mind blowing, but it didn’t have to be, all Alexander needed the thing to do was crank a generator, for now. This was a proof of concept for when he tried for a steam engine. Now that would give him some horsepower!
February marked a turning point when, after learning enough circuit theory to figure out how to put a charge into the dead battery bank and regulate its current, he got an incandescent light bulb, hidden away in a basement, to light, briefly, before it exploded. Alexander Gerifalte had electricity. Sort of. Except that the battery then, for reasons unknown, slagged itself shortly thereafter, leaking acid all over the shop floor next to the gasifier. Batteries, it seemed, were off the table, and so too was dead his dreams of a generator, when, a few days after the battery died, it burned a hole in itself with a massive electrical discharge that zapped the piss out of Alexander, putting him on the ground wheezing.
Nothing digital had survived the Pulse, so nothing with a semiconductor chip or circuit board would operate, not until he figured out how to do analog circuit driven motors. That was close. It turned out that most resistors, being little bits of dielectric wrapped foil, hadn’t been destroyed by the Pulse. Capacitors? Toasted. But not the resisters, which meant he had the means of regulating voltage, Ohm be praised. After the near electrocution, which shouldn’t have happened according to any literature he read later, he had to concede that electricity might be impossible for now.
That was more than disappointing, it was heart breaking, but, the youth threw it on top of the pile of heart breaks and soldiered on.
Sixteen-hour days without much in the way of distraction made for a lot of getting shit done. Alexander forged in the night, using the light of the forge fire to work. He studied in the morning hours. He fiddled with his engines, gears, belts, and machines in the afternoons. Only when his arms were too tired to raise the hammer did he pack himself off to bed, rifle held at ready in case anything sprang from the drifts to try to eat him.
Three times they did, and three times the heavy caliber rifle just barely managed to put the critters down before they got close enough to hurt him.
Two bears, big, shaggy brown fur, longer claws than they should have had, and glistening brown and white cores inside them. One an Elk, but this one made sunlight between its antlers and tried to blast him to bits, the solar lance cutting a steaming streak through the snow before Alexander shot it between the eyes.
He had to shoot it three more times to put it down for good. That was a learning experience, standing next to seared, flaming pavement shaking while a Sunlight wielding animal twitched in death throes. His Greater analyze revealed that the glimmering golden core of the beast, Heliodor in a trillion cut, was full of solar mana. He didn’t know what that meant, really, but he figured he’d find a use for it, so into the growing collection of cores it went. The glass-like antlers proved to be totally internally reflective, like fiber optics. Go figure.
Bear hides were similarly interesting, they reflected the cold. Not blocked it, reflected it, Alexander’s gloves grew stiff and his knife blade snapped off, brittle, when he skinned the creatures, or, did until with his second knife he pulled the polar mana containing cores from them. He had solved his refrigeration problem by alternative win condition. The fur, absent its cold reflective properties was simply very thick bear hide, which he tanned in their own brains. The meat was inedibly foul. Rank, tough, so tough he would spend more calories chewing it than he’d get digesting it. Claws and fangs went into his stash of bits and parts for eventual use in his experiments with crafting using imbued materials. The rules, as he had suspected, were different now.
Greater analyze was a godsend, giving him little tidbits such as:
Polar Grizzly Fang: hardened bone capable of withstanding incredible pressures, channels Polar mana, binding agent for Frost solutions when ground fine.
Just because Alexander didn’t currently know what a frost solution was, didn’t mean he wouldn’t find out. The fangs and claws both had similar properties and now he had a load of them sitting in his stash. Polar mana was, as it suggested, the magic that produced cold, and the bears’ cores were loaded with it. Didn’t that mean that if they’d gotten close enough to bite him, he’d have, like, shattered like that old movie where the cop-robot fell in liquid nitrogen? Abort, Alexander, do not envision that fate.
Experimenting with voodoo alchemy, Alexander put to the side, for now. His goals this Winter were to try to establish a base of civilization and not die. The old rules still worked, mostly, and he was going to make the most of them before throwing himself into the new ones. Still. Those antlers were giving him ideas.
If not for the incredible amount of time he spent keeping occupied, it was likely Alexander would have gone completely batshit. Batshitter. Isolation in the Maine wilderness with snow nearly to the eaves of the houses, almost total silence, and nothing but his own mind and hands to distract him from sharp pangs of grief, that, slowly, etched their way into his bones. And, alongside them, a scalding fury.
Morning came, bright and cloudless, by the light pouring in through his window. Alexander ignored the slight chill and traced familiar steps to the wood stove, stirring its coals and replenished its supply. The smell of wood ash and char were old friends by now. So too was the breakfast of oatmeal porridge. Frozen milk, it turned out, kept very well, stretching out a supply that Alexander had not expected to maintain through the months. Once thawed, it went bad rapidly after, but there was a window for palatability that he exploited gratefully. Bacon sizzling lent its own cadence to the morning tradition.
A devout believer in breakfast was Alexander now. Hard work demanded calories to maintain the effort and he horked down a thousand calories in a sitting. After he’d eaten, he cleaned the kitchen and utensils in a bucket of creek water that sat thawing next to the stove, replenished daily with icy water. A touch of soap, a scrub brush, and out the window the dirty water went, clean dishes replaced in cabinets.
By rote, he went outside to a small hole in the snow to shit, covered his waste with snow, and returned indoors to a rag bath dipped from a metal pan that sat heating on the wood stove for that purpose. Once he was clean, he scrubbed his previous day’s clothes in the bath water and hung them from a drying line that ran across the attached garage, its cars dead and useless. Chores complete, a naked Alexander dressed in comfortable cotton slacks, thick wool long-sleeved shirt, and a fluffy robe before he returned to his Laboratory to study.
There was so much to learn, to rebuild civilization. At his desk, stacks of paper neatly compiled held the current topics that held his interests. He took a look at the chalkboard with the big bold title “ACTIVE PROJECTS” nailed along one wall of his library, chalk dust thick on the floor below the text that read:
* Acquire horse powers: currently in design phase to power motors driven by steam-sterling engine schematics available, electricity nonviable until circuitry review of disassembled machines complete. Boiler construction ongoing, gearing and pulley system laid out, wheel/axle needs testing
* Acquire personal defense: Operation Half-plate ongoing, nearing final fit up. Operation Naginata in secondary bevel grinding phase, file work…eternal. Link gasifier engine to sanding belt apparatus? Investigate.
* Decipher joinery: nails/fasteners considered nonrenewable resource. Continue practicing dovetailing, dowel, and arcane Japanese/Korean techniques to mate lumber. Mission critical all new structures must rely on hand carpentry. Sharpen your saws, idiot!!
* Alternatives to firearms: ongoing. RDX stabilized charges field test needed. Possible option in Solar Elk antlers, demands research, solutions not found in classical physics. Magical bullshit!!
Alexander’s active project list was much the same as it had been for the last month. He had determined the initial approaches to solving these problems before the snow got too deep to see over, but the devil, as always, was in the details. Certain things he had assumed to be easy, or, at least doable with some slight finagling, had, as he should have known they would, made an ass out of him.
Fingers steepled, Alexander mulled over where to start. He needed that steam engine. A stable way to produce rotary motion, at high revolutions per minute, was critical to his plans. Everything from drill presses to hydraulic pumps, demanded a reliable mechanical energy source. After tearing apart the mechanisms for a lathe, a band saw, and a few other items to see how they operated, he was confident that, if he could secure an engine, he could figure out a linkage to drive them. He’d have to rebuild the damned things to operate by analogue control though, none of that computerized digital stuff would work anymore. It was fine, gearing systems and transmissions were something to work out once he had power. His engine was nearing its final build, maybe even ready for testing.
The naginata would be finished soon, he was down to the tedious stages of bevel grinding, polishing, and fit-up, having quenched, straightened, and heat treated the blade blank already. It was difficult to work with the hardened steel but he did so gladly rather than to waste his time preparing a blade geometry only to ruin it with a failed quench that warped. The metallurgy and forge work he’d learned while creating that instrument were proving invaluable. How many times had he needed to fashion a coupling or bracket or some such? Those thread cutting dies in his shop were worth more than the Hope diamond to him.
Skip joinery today, the geometry made his brain hurt, and he was progressing nicely on the concept. The real problem was not flubbing a chisel stroke and ruining hours of careful sawing. Keep sharp tools, go slowly, and finish the project faster, was what he was learning about woodwork. Once he got an engine to turn drill presses and saws, he could work exponentially faster.
Alternatives to firearms? Skip. For now. Pairing the Solar core to the antlers had released a series of finger thin lances of light from the tines that had scorched his workshop and started several spot fires. He wouldn’t play with that until the snows were off and he could find someplace he didn’t mind burning down.
Steam engine it is, Alexander decided. Safest project with the biggest return on investment. But only safe if he was confident in his metalwork. A boiler that over pressured was, from what his texts suggested, catastrophic. That was why he had used thicker steel plate than the schematics called for, had cut the plate into segments that he had riveted down to a sturdy skeleton of a frame. The boiler should hold.
Every day of this construction, he’d thanked all the gods above, below, and in between that acetylene torches weren’t electronic. Just a good old pressure gauge and a couple of compressed gas tanks hooked to a regulator and a nozzle. Without that, he’d have been unable to cut the steel he needed to make the steam engine. Smithing small objects was one thing, pounding out sheets of steel with a hammer? Nope. He’d die of age long before he ever got enough steel at consistent thickness to attempt this project.
When mid-morning had passed, Alexander bundled up in his cold weather gear and marched out to the smithy that had been a Flea market.
Ensconced inside, out of the reach of the still bitter wind, he attached the flywheel and pulley system that should turn the up and down stroke of the steam engine’s piston into a radial motion. Alexander had that contraption rigged to turn an axle with multiple car tires on it. He’d have a good idea how much rotational power he was getting from how fast the heavy set of tires spun. A few calculations would give him figures on torque and output. That final fit-up took an hour. Another hour went by while he went back over every rivet, every joint, every possible failure point on the engine. He found nothing. The steam would find everything though, so, he wiped down each joint with soaped water in hopes any leaks would reveal themselves in time to vent the steam.
Moment of truth, the last Gerifalte declared silently, as he lit the charcoal.
It took time to get the water up to temperature. The pressure gauge rose rapidly inside the boiler once it did, the steam expanding. No bubbles formed in his work; his joints were holding. The pressure gauge continued to rise. When he hit the operational threshold, Alexander opened the feeder valve that would inject the steam into the piston system, the pressurized super heated vapor driving the first piston up, turning the motor in a fit, one half turn at a time, hitching, until the engine began to stroke cleanly, driving a smooth circular motion, a motion that accelerated drastically.
Now, Alexander thought, and engaged the belts that connected the engine to the axle holding his car tires, belts spun for a moment, caught, and the axle spun almost violently fast, turning the wheels without effort, heavy as they were.
Alexander felt radiant, watching those tires spin. His old man would have been proud of him for this. His ma’m too. This was a bold step towards reclaiming the world of men. He fed the engine more charcoal, carefully dosing the machine to prevent it overheating. No leaks presented themselves. The wheels continued to spin. He let the system run, keeping hawkish eyes on the pressure gauge for any fluctuations, for an hour before he bled off the steam and let the fires die.
What would he use his engine for first? Alexander considered it. An old power hammer was sitting unused in the old factory machine shop. It hadn’t been used in decades, but that was mostly because the machine shop closed when the machinist retired without any journeymen to take over the place. Getting the massive thing from there to here, now that was the problem. If a hydraulic jack were laying around, he might just do it with levers, shims, rollers, and a shit ton of patience. It might not be possible though, the old power hammer weighed literal tons and dying crushed under heavy equipment wasn’t how Alexander wanted to go.
A power hammer would speed up the forging process exponentially. But a drill press, lathe, and band-saw were honestly just as useful to him. Decisions, decisions. Ultimately, he decided on the hammer. Mostly because neither of the other machines utilized the high power of the steam engine and he still needed to test its upper limit work output and the power hammer was sturdy enough to probably survive if things got a little out of hand. He was already dreading the slow process for moving the damned thing.
Just about the time he considered the test finalized, the blue scroll-work unfurled, unbidden, before his eyes. He knew why immediately.
Alexander Gerifalte
Class: Entropic Neophyte
Status: tired
Soak: 15%
LifeForce/Armor
Head
Mana: 150%
Might
11
Height
6’2”
LifeForce/Armor
Left Arm
12/0
LifeForce/Armor
Right Arm
Grace
12
Weight
160lbs
9/3
None
9/3
Impetus
13
Age
17
High quality Cotton robe
LifeForce/Armor
Chest
High quality Cotton robe
Cogitation
15
Core
Black Fire Opal, brilliant
empty
14/3
Crude Steel Knife
Wisdom
13(-5)
Origin
Gaia
LifeForce/Armor
Left Leg
High quality Cotton robe
LifeForce/Armor
Right Leg
Ingenuity
16
Sapient Race:
Human-2rd Tier (Shaggoth)
10/4
LifeForce/Armor
Abdomen
10/4
Durability
11
High quality Cotton slacks
10/3
High quality Cotton slacks
Valor
25(+10)
High quality Cotton robe
Traits
Raptor gaze, Fantasia, Spatial adept, Back from the brink, Gaia’s child, Lethal, *Artisan of war*, Scholarship
Skills
Heart’s blow, Rage, Greater focus, Greater analyze, Lesser stalk
Arcana
Entropic aura, Chaos bolt
Artisan of war was pulsing against the backdrop. He instinctively reached his attention toward the indication and saw it open.
Artisan of war ►Warforger
“Uuuhhhh…” Alexander hummed, looking at the script, forehead wrinkled, “Okaaay.”
Accepted, Hierarchy adjusted, first Warforger of Gaia
Warforger: the architect of war’s designs, laying the foundations for greater conquest through arms and armor. Dedicated application of the crafts of conducting warfare, through operation of machines and weapons, the creation of traps, improvised explosives, armor, knives, and spears, forges, and the study of means and methods by which war is conducted grants proficiency in the following:
· Blacksmith: craftsman of stout metals and other realm materials. Mundane metals may be worked with improved ease or alloyed with other realm materials to synthesize novel materials. Products made by the smith may take on special properties, depending on the skill of the craftsman and the materials used in the work.
· Silversmith: craftsman of precious and aberrant metals and Gate materials. Worked materials using correct tools are shaped with improved ease and engraving gains improved precision. Products made by the smith may take on special properties, depending on the skill of the craftsman and the materials used in the work.
· Master Alchemist: penultimate craftsman of solutions and substances. Substances may be synthesized, decomposed, and replaced to create solutions that take on special properties, depending on the skill of the craftsman and the materials used. Master alchemists may now use Gate materials alongside Gaian without spontaneous incompatibility failure. Skill: Mana Extract, Analytic Ingestion.
· Chirurgeon: healer and surgeon, this craftsman of the body is skilled in the repair and recovery of wounds. Improved effectiveness of first aid, basic surgery, and treatment of disease. May utilize Gate materials in medical care.
· Mechanic: crafter of moving parts, gears, wheels, belts, pulleys, and levers. Machines may be constructed with improved efficiency and precision. Constructs may take on special property, depending on the skill of the craftsman and the materials used in the work. Skill: Schematic
Skill: Entropic Imbuement
A rush of information induced vertigo and Alexander rushed toward the ceiling, or so it felt, but it was the floor that caught him. None too gently, either.
Gone was the insistent pulsing in his mind, the blue scroll-work having returned to its usual form, with the minor exception that Artisan of war was gone, replaced by Warforger. He noticed that several of his base parameters had increased, Might, Wisdom, and Ingenuity. No wonder, he’d beaten metal until his arms wanted to come off for weeks. He’d cracked his brains over how to solve his problems and studied his ass off to find solutions to his problems as well. Alexander was a better man than when the apocalypse had found him.
And now, when he found it, he would be an even better man. Warforger. Now that sounded like it had some kick. The description made it out like his skills in manufacturing his projects had increased qualitatively. So, by completing as complex and precise a task as the steam engine he’d, fucking, evolved himself or something. It was true that the machine was a game changer. Mechanized power. Machine powered tooling. Alexander’s options just increased exponentially.
Now, he was going to go see about that heavy freakin’ power hammer. While he did, he reviewed the additional skills that had cropped up from the advancement of a gaggle of maker professions that seemed all bundled together with the Warforger trait.
Mana Extract: decomposition in appropriate solvents, and the presence of a suitable vessel permits the retrieval of magical essence from infused materials or cores.
Neato. His hoarding of the goblin cores and Nick-nacks from the beasts that tried to eat him had been rewarded. He would obtain the pack-rat trait, the relentless hoarder skill, and he would create a hidey-hole of treasures that would make a dragon cream its jeans. Whenever he figured out what the hell constituted an “appropriate solvent” and a “suitable vessel” for magical bullshit, watch out!
Next.
Analytic ingestion: consumption of small quantities of materials and burning of core energies, renders them to aether and reveals their properties and limited intuition of interactions with other analyzed materials.
Caution: Toxins will still apply their effects.
Caution: Energies released may take time to dissipate, do not mix aethereal components within, interactions not controlled.
“Aaalrriighty then,” Alexander drawled slowly, “Do not eat poison. Got it. Do not make monster part salads and try to examine them, double got it.”
Kicking his way through some fresh powder to get to the old factory, he knew those two skills were big time useful. They basically cut down his R&D time by orders of magnitude. Alexander didn’t know how exactly all this stuff worked, but he did know that it worked. Goblins launching fireballs at him told him in very certain terms that it worked. Polar bears that took that term way too literally told him that it worked. It was on him to figure out how to manipulate the new rules to his advantage.
Those thoughts occupied him until he dug his way through to the door of the factory, where within his prize awaited him.
It took both hands, hauling with all his strength to budge the frozen metal door. Its hinges were iced over but, amazingly, he managed to pull the portal free by brute force.
Panting, bent over with hands on knees, Alexander nevertheless knew victory. He was without a single doubt stronger than before. That door would have needed a hammer and a spud bar a few weeks ago.
Grunting his way through dragging the metal all the way open, he revealed again the innards of what had once been a smelting and refining factory for the ore that got pulled out of the mountain. Here they would bring the stuff in by the ton, separate the different ores physically, then pitch the stuff into the furnaces to burn them down to liquid and separate the metals chemically, before doing some other fancy shit Alexander wasn’t quite familiar with yet to separate them. The other half of the huge building was devoted to testing, cleaning up, and inventory of the riches of the mine.
Now that he knew a hell of a lot more about metallurgy than he had the first time he came here, he understood what an absolute treasure this old factory was. He’d never be able to recreate the facilities for handling large amounts of metal, ore, or thoroughly processing them.
Grinning despite the musty, dim interior, Alexander Gerifalte all but cackled and washed his hands like a super villain in their nemesis’ lair. Here though. Here he had everything he needed.
Too bad the place functioned on the premise that there would be electricity to power everything. All the digital controls, just like everywhere else, were burned out. That rendered the vast majority of the machinery inoperable. However, the forges could still be lit, if not their temperatures regulated with computerized precision of digital thermometers and complex control systems. The big chain winches would still work to lift and hold large pieces while he worked on them. Most of the tooling and equipment was intact and left behind, being too heavy, cumbersome, and expensive to transport for a mine that had been shut down fairly suddenly.
Suddenly, Alexander was questioning his initial idea to move the power hammer. It might be far better to just move his smithy here. He had the space to work. He had the big toys to play with. It was, even better, fireproof, being designed to accommodate the possibility of a vat of molten metal and slag tipping over. Yes, indeed. This might do nicely for the newly minted Warforger.
The testing room even had an, albeit small, chemical lab. Its stocks would probably be nonexistent, there were rules for the storing and disposal of most of the kinds of compounds used in metallurgy. But Alexander could make it work.
He thought back to the remains of his first chemical lab, where he’d followed exceedingly clear, explicit instructions, annotated as being chosen less for efficiency, than for ease and safety, for the manufacture of a certain nitrogenated ring compound that was developed in the forties and called in the field RDX. More commonly though, it was called C-4. His first lab had not survived the achievement, and he had come remarkably close to joining its demise. That hadn’t stopped him, because he was seventeen, already dead, and his continued existence depended on coming up with a way to deal with ogres that didn’t end up with him being pulverized.
The young man only wished that he could produce the stuff at a larger scale, he was coming up with only a few hundred grams of product at a time. Upscaling was what had nearly gotten him killed. Note to Future Alexander: When red smoke begins issuing from your ice bathed RDX drip flask, it is time to dump and run.
“I will hug you, and squeeze you, and we will be the best of friends, George.” Alexander purred to the power hammer, already envisioning great things they would do together.
George did not reply, but Alexander knew it appreciated the sentiment.
Rumbling from his left startled him into turning, half crouching in reflex to the unknown. He held his rifle at low ready, to meet whatever threat might present itself. Alexander peered into the gloom, trying to pinpoint the source of the grinding sound, like stone scraping over steel. A massive fist of glittering stone closed over the edge of a crucible and Alexander Gerifalte nearly voided his bladder when fifteen feet of silver-slag golem, rough stony approximation of humanity that it was, pitched over out of the crucible and crashed to the ground. It rose from a mass of crumbled rock, reforming from the thirty-foot drop, reassembling itself into the caricature of human form.
Why does it have pointy little rocky teeth? The part of his mind not yammering in animal terror questioned, detached. The yammering animal part got his legs going without his permission, and he was fleeing the behemoth before it finished its self-repair.
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Alexander chanted as he ran, boots pounding through snow.
He heard the mass of living ore tear apart the door he’d struggled with like it was paper, and the walls of the sturdy building around the door frame with it. A hasty glance behind him confirmed the nightmare that the creature, whatever it was, was chasing him. More slowly than he fled, oh praises be to all the gods above, below, and in between, but chasing nevertheless.
A plan! He needed a plan. Instead of thinking of a plan, Alexander’s panicked thoughts were focused on the fact that he needed a plan. He was across town before he started coming up with one, the distance between himself and the golem tripling as he’d run.
Gulping air, his breath’s puffing steam, Alexander saw the problem, like it had neon lights attached to it. The golem wouldn’t get tired. He was already winded. It was going to walk him down.
What did he have that would kill rock? His trusty old rifle would do exactly fuck all to the creature pursuing him. So why are you hauling it around making yourself tired, idiot? He tossed the gun into the snow off his path, to keep it from getting stomped. The spear? He almost giggled at the thought of trying to stab fifteen feet of silver ore, right up until he mentally envisioned the monster snatching him up and feeding him face first down its toothy maw.
Magic? Magic!
“I have magic!” Alexander exclaimed and turned to point a hand, like he was palming an imaginary basketball.
It helped speed up the casting and aim. He didn’t know why.
A sizzling Chaos bolt came into being, black and grey, churning magic that beckoned for release. Alexander obliged it and the magic tore ahead as if shot from a crossbow, leaving without exchange of momentum, its weight purely metaphysical.
The spell struck the golem in the chest and Alexander saw pieces of silver-slag gravel fall to the ground, smoking, raising steam where the chunks hit packed snow. It didn’t slow though. The “wound” from his spell was a baseball sized divot in a Mack Truck. Inconsequential.
Again.
Alexander summoned another Chaos bolt, sent it hurling into the monster, and was rewarded with an impact a foot away from the first hit, with similar effect. The creature came on, undeterred.
“It’s gotta work!” Alexander prayed.
Another bolt. Another hit. More silver-ore falling to the snow. The golem came on. No divine intervention.
Alexander realized his head was pounding and he’d run out of whatever energy it was that powered his magic. He was back to the old rules, while the golem got to cheat by being a living rock impervious to any weapon he could bring against it.
“The charges!” He yelled, taking off around the back side of town, hoping that if he broke sight the monster would lose him.
It did not. Some sense, smell, radar, something more than physical, guided the monster like a blood hound along Alexander’s trail. He tested the tracking by running through the remains of one of the burned-out houses, climbing the stairs, jumping from the second floor to the half-collapsed porch roof, which sent him pitching into a rough landing in snow when it became a completely collapsed porch roof.
“Huagh!” He grunted, picking himself up, brushing snow off himself from habit, not because he gave any particular shit about anything but the creature that hunted him.
Green and brown eyes scanned, and he saw his adversary approaching, the same steady gait eating up the space between them. The space where its eyes should be glowed with a blue-ish silver light. The impacts from his Chaos bolts had sent cracks streaming from around their little pitiful pockmarks, but the monster minded the damage not at all. He turned and ran, crossed the street, and back through the square that had heralded his goblin regicide.
A loud crash of wood splintering and collapsing announced that the golem had walked through the house Alexander ran through. It didn’t slow as it tore its way out of the remains of the two-story home, endless strength against the kindling around it.
He’d confirmed his theory, and took off again, this time jogging at a sustainable pace, if not one that gained him ground on the golem. The young man ran, ran to lead the creature on a merry chase through the tiny town’s streets and byways.
However the magical construct followed him, it did so exactly. It was recreating his path and that meant getting to the C-4 would mean leading it home. He might make it to the shaped charges stored in his Laboratory ahead of the thing in time to extract them from his lock box. He might even be able to arm one of them before it caught up to him, the little magnesium fuses weren’t too hard to get going with the lighter in his pocket. But. It would then walk through his home and destroy not only the place where he had all his comforts, but also his research. It would ravage his notes, his plans, the stored cores, and materials, all the work he’d put into these last weeks. His father’s books.
Unacceptable.
The Laboratory was more than just survival it was his life. If he lost it, other than what lived inside his head, he would be back to square one. Only as a last resort.
Onward Alexander continued to jog, mind racing as fast as his legs to find an alternative win condition. He had guns stashed around town, little weapons, and emergency food caches just in case. But he didn’t have any field artillery. If only he had a lava pit. Or a disintegrator. Or acid. Acid? He had all kinds of acid.
“You are a fucking moron, Alexander!” He derided himself, but with a mad grin on his face.
Alexander had acid. He had concentrated nitric acid, kind of a lot of it, left over from making the RDX, which did a number on most minerals. It did a number on a lot of metals too, including silver, which was resistant to most other acids. He had to get to the second chemical lab and now.
His legs were growing tired and the stitch in his side was a throbbing agony, but adrenaline was a hell of a drug and not being eaten by a golem was one of the most powerful motivators known to a young man being chased by said golem.
Boots pounding on the packed snow of his paths, Alexander put on as much speed as he could dredge from his body and came to the final stretch. The tiny little high school, its sights heavy with memories of a life, long gone, blurred past in his desperate run. He skidded across the gym floor, falling from his fatigue but throwing himself up, and fought to drive his legs into coordination to sprint. A hand on the corner of the hall, pitched him into lockers, banging against the metal hard but saving him precious moments to cut down the hall to his destination: the science wing, with its tiny little one room lab, containing the unlocked closet that hid a big, harmless looking Styrofoam box holding a two-liter flask of orange-red smoking liquid. It was beautiful to him at that moment.
Alexander hauled ass back down the hall with his treasure held to his chest, fingers worrying the paraffin tape that sealed the flask before he realized that he was being a clownishly stupid animal. He was just going to throw the flask anyway.
The clamor of destruction announced that the golem had found the school and was working its way down the halls, legs shattering the wooden floors as it stamped its way down his path. Alexander met the silver-ore beast in the gym and let the flask fly in a sidearm throw. Glass shattered easily on the stone of its chest, and acid did what acids do, sending up brown fumes while the monster’s chest bleached white. Fuming nitric acid does not fuck around and the golem stopped for the first time since rising from its fall out of the crucible. An almost fearful flash of blue lit animated eyes before its arms began to beat and claw at its chest.
Stone fragments, glittering with silver, pelted the floor and the golem made a grinding, low pitch sound like a ton of gravel falling. A scream, Alexander realized. He was transfixed by the sight, shaking legs too exhausted to move, whatever he wanted. This was the gambit, the bet on his life.
Rocky fingers broke apart as they were corroded by the acid, the nubs continued to scrape and claw until they too broke off, and the golem’s chest opened to reveal a pulsing core of pure silver metal, cut in the shape of a gemstone. Its heart. Two liters of acid was a shitload of acid, but the golem was a massive pile of stone and metal. Alexander couldn’t risk the creature recovering, he had to take this opportunity. No magic, exhausted by half an hour of continuous running, the last Gerifalte was down to the last fumes in the tank.
Alexander gritted his teeth against the insanity of his last card played, his ace in the hole.
Concentrating, burning up the last of the mana that had returned while he ran, he summoned the field of anti-magic and threw himself on shaky legs at the golem, the knife on his belt in his hand. The golem froze like it suffered a glitch when his field passed over it. The fumes pouring out from the cracks left by Alexander’s Chaos bolts showed that his attack earlier bore fruit, the acid was clawing down through the thing’s body.
Screaming fury, denial of his mortality, the young man launched himself at the struggling monster and scrambled up its back, using the craggy material as handholds. It swatted at him once, bone crushing force against its damaged body, but then it returned to scrubbing the devastating liquid away from its core, ignoring the fleshy soft thing that could not hurt it, and yet stoked its hatred so greatly.
The beast turned suddenly, and he lost his grip with the fingers clenching the knife, choosing to keep the weapon rather than the hand hold, and he dangled one handed from the shoulder blade of the golem.
One last burst of energy, and Alexander swung his legs, bringing himself around the creature’s side, fingers scraping as they dug in for purchase on the rocky frame. Before strength failed, he launched himself up past a snatching nub, one that would have squeezed him to paste had it not melted off, and drove the knife into the core, his Entropic field slowing the golem and weakening its defenses. Just enough, the roughly forged steel of the knife blade slid into the metal crystal, and the golem fell backwards, dissolving around Alexander.
He must have blacked out for a moment.
Gasping for air, Alexander realized that he was lying on his stomach, half buried in rubble, the remains of the golem.
Still clenched in a death grip, the last Gerifalte held a hand forged knife on which was pinned the heart of the golem. He tried to rise and failed. After a few minutes of quiet breathing to recover, he tried again, this time shifting the heavy metal and stone mix from off his body.
Alexander climbed out from the remains of the inorganic monster and raised the knife over head in victory. Sweet victory.
“Take that, you crazy fucking world! You messed with the wrong motherfucker today, Silver Stone!” He shouted into the echoing gymnasium.
He didn’t know why he shouted; he was completely alone. Still. It felt like it needed to be said and he felt better for saying it. Sometimes you have to let the other guy know how it is, so he can hold that loss nice and deep in his chest. The other guy, from Alexander’s point of view, was this entire messed up world and all its messed-up monsters, and its glowing gateways to wherever the fuck those goblins came from.
Aching from the strain of running like he’d never run before, bruised from being pelted by the remains of the golem, Alexander limped his way back home, the silver-ore monster’s heart still on his knife. He ate well and slept like a corpse as soon as he got there.