Starship’s log, day one hundred twenty-six since the Pulse. Supplies are holding steady, but the ship’s computer suggests that the Captain is sick to damned death of oatmeal porridge and chicken taco soup.” His voice echoed faintly, muffled through his hands to resemble an intercom.
Alexander dropped the ruse and stirred his porridge with a spoon, anticipating the joyless nutrition to come. According to his calendar, February had come to an end, one day longer thanks to this being a leap year.
The last Gerifalte liked to spend his mornings resenting breakfast and reviewing events. Pregaming the day, as it were.
Progress in some areas had been swift after disposal of the silver golem. No others had reared their craggy heads, but Alexander had prepared four more two-liter flasks of the acid that won him the day against the first. It wasn’t like the stuff would treat goblins, or ogres, or whatever the hell else much better. But, before that, in a fit of mild insanity, Alexander had hurried in the day after his bout with Silver Stone to load up the furnace in the old smelter factory and he’d smelted up the golem’s corpse, one wheelbarrow load at a time.
A taste of a small, powdered piece of the golem revealed it to be an anomaly. Most silver containing ores were mined concurrently with ores predominantly of some other metal. Beneath the mountains of Alexander’s home were rich lead-iron-copper-silver deposits, dominated by galena a lead sulfide and chalcopyrite, an iron copper sulfur mineral. The town’s silver mineral was argentite, a silver-sulfur mineral and polybasite, a complex of copper and silver along with antimony and sulfur. The golem was none of that. It was pure silver metal embedded in a matrix of, from what he could determine, iron, copper, and sulfur. Nothing in Alexander’s books said anything like that was possible.
That discovery prompted him to toss aside his other projects and unlock the mysteries of magically animated constructs in favor of cooking down the monster’s ore-based corpse.
Bath time.
While he scrubbed himself with hot water and soap, the young man reviewed his notes on ores and metal alloys, continuing to organize himself for the day. His initial research into the monstrosity made of inorganic materials had been eye opening.
He knew the composition of the animate rock and metal of its body because he slowly brought the temperature of the smallest furnace to a roaring 2,500OF, at which point all of the metals were melted, the sulfur burned off, and the silver was left unoxidized but it spontaneously combined with the copper in an alloy and refused to separate outside of very specific conditions. From there, he applied a few passes to separate out the iron and was presented with what tested to be sterling silver, the ninety-two percent eight percent split of silver to copper. Sort of, anyway. The almost iron sat in bars in the corner of his new smithy area, alongside the sterling silver bars. Almost and sort of because, while tasting a sliver of metal was intensely unnatural to his senses, the ingestion analysis skill paid dividends.
The golem was native to Gaia, that is, not from some other land, like the goblins had been, but its composition was warped by magic. Very fortunately, that stopped the creature from dissolving when the renewing light of the third sunrise hit Gaia’s surface, which gave Alexander time to process the damned thing. The results were worth the effort. The iron read back the identification Golem Ferrum, and the sterling silver read back Golem Argentum.
A test smelt of ore that never got processed, along with a taste test, revealed the regular old metals silver, copper, lead, iron, and just a little zinc. Somehow, even the rocks of the planet had been altered in seemingly random ways.
Alexander’s great mystery of why he survived wasn’t solved by breaking down the golem, but an extremely nervous and minute taste test of the concentrated nitric acid, revealed itself to be the “appropriate solvent” spoken of by the extraction skill from before to use on basically all the metals he had on hand, and also the golem core. The vessel he still didn’t know about, but he had a feeling the Golem Argentum would work just fine to house the essence of the core that once powered it. A glassful of baking soda solution neutralized the acid and helped ease the burn to his tongue with minimal damage.
Worth it.
In related news, he lost all the dissolved parts of his animate rock enemy, unable to retrieve them from the gymnasium floor, courtesy of the acid eating through the broken floor and delivering the dissolved golem bits into the gravel below.
Alexander wasn’t going to dig through acid coated gravel for scraps, he had about fifty-fiveish golem iron ingots, eighteen golem silver ingots, and the two golem copper ingots and twenty pure golem silver ingots told him he could refine the special golem metals if he really worked hard at it. The nitric acid had more uses as a reagent than as a weapon.
Greater analyze indicated that Argentum, the name for the sterling silver derived from animate metal creature he’d defeated, was far tougher than regular old sterling silver. Same story for the golem variants of copper, silver, and iron. His silversmith skills were absolutely necessary to fiddle with these tougher materials, just like the blacksmith skills were required to deal with golem iron. Neat.
Done with the scrub down and dressed in his fuzzy research robe, he returned to the library and the chalkboard.
When Alexander contemplated that he now had potentially far stronger materials to make arms and armor with he grew momentarily sad. He would have to re-make his half-plate and naginata, and drew an angry, chalky line through that note on his board. On the other hand, if he understood things correctly, the golem metal equipment would be far sturdier than vanilla steel. He might not even need to dick with the San-mai methods of creating a jacketed blade. Or…perhaps he could do it with the Ferrum and Argentum and get a truly potent weapon out of the deal.
The near-death encounter with the monstrous giant almost made him rethink the armor and spear altogether, but just because he’d encountered one threat that those items were useless against, didn’t make them altogether useless against the wolves or panthers running around. If he encountered more goblins, both would prove useful, if they managed to corner him. Hell, Alexander wasn’t above casting golem iron bullets and reloading for his rifle. A harder projectile than soft lead might be just what the Warforged Chirurgeon ordered.
His plots were coming close to fruition, as he’d just finished rebuilding his forge in the smelter factory and his steam engine now sat enshrined next to George the power hammer. Today, they would make beautiful music together. First though, Alexander took up the almighty chalk and began to inscribe his designs. The skill he acquired from his Mechanic aspect of Warforger was the key to his rapid progress.
Schematic: drawing detailed blueprints and plans for the design of components and machines enhances their fabrication efficiency. Once a schematic is completed for a particular item its effectiveness remains until a new schematic is created.
By planning out his designs here in the Laboratory, Alexander gained an almost instinctual appreciation for the interplay of gears, pulleys, dimensions, and steps for the construction of almost anything he understood how to make. It did nothing if he wanted to make something with which he was unfamiliar, like a nuclear bomb or something, but joining a pulley system on his engine with the drive system of George? Very doable.
Better yet, the skill was cumulative. The more he designed things, the more he understood them, the more he understood them, the more insight he gained into how other machines functioned. It was a positive feedback loop, by every definition.
Fair was fair. If discarded silver ore got to up and walk around trying to kill him, he got to figure out how to tinker his way to creating ways to kill them back.
So, for the next two hours, chalk scratched and tacked against the slate board to inscribe the mechanism for bringing George to glorious life again. It had taken most of two weeks to blacksmith twenty of his fifty-five Ferrum ingots into gears and drive chain. Chain making was now right up there with a vegetative state for the most mindless thing Alexander could think of doing with himself. It would all pay off when he was able to harness Sterling, the steam engine, to George and let their powers combine.
It no longer bothered Alexander that he named and befriended pieces of equipment. In a world where his parents were statues locked in their bedroom, not much really bothered him anymore. Aggravated him? Sure. Terrified him? Frequently. But he was well the fuck past bothered.
When the last notation of dimension was complete, the quotation mark indicating the inches and feet, the drawing on the board congealed in his mind like glass cooling into crystal. He could see the shape of the connections between Sterling and George, he could almost feel the movement of power from engine to hammer. A twinge in his temple graced that awareness, because, in that moment of insight, he found the fatal flaw that would have driven George’s hammer up through its housing, the slip between power stroke and neutral gearing he had not accounted for earlier.
Back to the drawing board.
Well past noon it was before Alexander managed to complete a schematic that did not give him the programming equivalent to a compiling error. The skill was, unexpectedly, even more profoundly powerful than he’d thought. Knowledge was, indeed, power.
Flames fed with coal, bags of the stuff hauled from their repository in the hardware store, because there were still no few yokels who loved to heat with the dirty stuff in his beloved microcosm of rural Maine. Or, at least, there had been no few yokels. He missed those yokels now, their twangy accents much like his own, their wisdom in the ways of navigating the realities of life out here. Having to do everything yourself made you appreciate how damned useful community was.
Tangent, Alexander, return to task. He was getting the fire good and hot, bringing the water up to boil to produce the steam that would put Sterling into action. Just for good measure, Alexander checked the drive connections to George one more time, even though they had been perfect a minute ago. He was nervous. This was a defining moment, the first hint of modern industrial capacity since the Pulse. The forge was already lit, 1090 steel bar stock, golem Ferrum, and golem Argentum sitting there at working temperature inside.
The young man patted the shaped charge under the welding coat he wore, clipped to his belt by a carabiner, a wooden frame holding a cone of plastic explosive with a golem Argentum needle at its tip, aimed forty-five degrees above horizontal, the magnesium fuse ready to be lit and whatever he pointed it at would get to know what armor penetrating munitions would do to them. Silver Stone had opened Alexander’s eyes to new types of danger. It wasn’t unreasonable to create tank buster type weaponry.
The vault door of the town’s bank, freshly ventilated, had proven his prototype’s effectiveness about a week after the demise of Silver Stone and his metallurgical bonanza. It was also a lesson about eggs and baskets, never again would he just leave his home without a variety of implements to deal with threats.
It was a damned good thing, Alexander contemplated, as he watched the temperature and pressure gauges rise to operational levels, that he hadn’t attempted to shoot the golem using the imbuement skill and his gun.
He tested it last week, another experiment that proved both successful and not.
Entropic Imbuement: channeling the unraveling mana within into a held instrument concentrates it within the item, transferring the effect of Entropic field into your tool or weapon. Concentration increases the potency of the field and also reduces the duration the item can retain these energies.
Focusing on the .300 win-mag, its combination of steel match barrel, polymer stock, fine trigger assembly, instilled the rifle with the same kind of hazy grey-black aura that accompanied his Chaos bolts. The bullet he fired retained none of the aura, however, and it bled out from the gun a few moments later, before he could fire a second round. If he had attempted that to kill the construct, his mana would have been exhausted completely and he wouldn’t have had enough to deploy the field that crippled the thing just long enough to get at its heart.
Lucky boy, Little Falcon, he teased himself.
“Time to rock, George!” Alexander shouted, pulling on the earmuffs.
Throwing the crude lever that permitted the chain drive transmission to link the incredible power of Sterling’s pistons to George, Alexander grabbed the steel bar stock in his tongs and laid it on the flattening die of the industrial hammer, put his foot on the pedal, and, for the first time in thirty years, George gave a great peal as the hammer fell on steel.
Sparks flew and metal flattened, Alexander flubbed the pedal and got a short stroke. He leaned in too hard and bounced the stock off the die, failing to get it in place for the consecutive stroke which knocked the bar out of his tongs.
Cursing, Alexander got the still workable steel back on the die and took more care for his boot on the hammer’s pedal. It took three heats of the bar stock to figure out how to get the timing right, and he learned his tong skills needed serious improvement to make full use of George. Even so, his inexperience couldn’t offset the sheer power of the multi-ton hammer and he held up a piece of flattened bar stock, a third longer than it had been when he’d started, within fifteen minutes of forging. It was unbelievable. This was the exhausting work of half of a day at his anvil.
“George, you loud sonofabitch, you’re beautiful!” He cried in glee.
Next the Ferrum. It came out of the forge softly orange and flattened with more resistance than the steel. It kept its heat longer too though, and Alexander was able to get a quarter inch piece of flat bar in the same quarter hour as the steel. He fed Sterling, frequently checking the gauges to make certain all was in the green. Next, the Argentum. The sparks that flew from this ingot in his tongs burned whiter than the other two, hotter in their flight. The ingot flattened with far more ease and Alexander felt like he was molding a cold modeling clay in his hands rather than metal under a power hammer.
Frowning, he noted that the Argentum lost its heat much more quickly than the other two materials, which made sense. Silver and copper were both fantastic conductors, they needed less temperature and force to become workable, but lost their temperature faster, making them more challenging to shape. This one actually got hotter than the other two ingots but lost that heat rapidly. He had to know what strokes he needed before he pulled the super-silver from the forge.
Inspired, his arms unburdened by relentless swinging of a five-pound hammer, Alexander combined the golem smelted iron and silver, according to the protocol for the jacketing technique he had planned for Project Naginata, and laughed, though it couldn’t be heard over the steam engine and the hammer, as the metals shaped to his will.
Forge welding by hand had taught him much about the technique for this process. With the power of George, he held a cooling blade stock of Silver Stone alloy within the hour in his tongs. One more heat, and he used a wedge to cut off the unalloyed end that his tongs gripped, giving him a completely forge welded blade stock. Hard as shit iron core jacketed by still hard but much more flexible Argentum, in his guts he knew it would quench true.
The impatience of youth railed against the hours that would be needed to raise the temperatures of the blank to normalizing temperature, a process that shrank the tiny crystalline structures of the metal and made it more uniform, thus tougher. Then he would have to thermal cycle it before annealing all to ensure the metal of the golem iron and sterling silver were at ideal hardness for his file and grinding.
Alexander rode high when he disengaged the transmission and vented the steam from the engine.
The primary bevel was already roughed in, his hands had felt like they knew exactly how to hold the bar to achieve a smooth taper. A day of file work would see the primary nearly complete and a secondary bevel to reveal the hardened metal edge not far after.
So it was that the last day of February passed in glory for the youth, and he was able to find his sleep untroubled.
Another day, another bowl of porridge. The youth inhaled his food without tasting it, so eager was he to get into the day’s activity. He had to very deliberately not skip his rag bath in excitement, after all, even though he had George now to do the donkey work, standing in front of a forge and working tongs was still a laborious, sweaty process. Clean meant less chance for disease and getting sick because he wasn’t practicing optimal hygiene was not in the playbook.
Now that the blank was completed and properly annealed, Alexander went to the chalkboard and rubbed his hands eagerly. He sketched out the form of the blank first, its dimensions and shape. Then he roughed out the blade geometry he wanted, the length of the tang, the positions of the iron bands and cross pins that would hold the naginata sword point in place in its haft. He’d settled on three rings and pins separated by four inches. That meant a foot of tang, in addition to the two and a half feet of curved blade. He had more than enough thickness on the blank to work with, having already done this part of the project three times before.
Practice made perfect, and all that.
Then he sketched out the bevels, the profile that he wanted for the sharp curve. Alexander decided on a clip point, the very tip of the naginata sharpened for six inches on the reverse side. It would make the tip more fragile, but allowed the weapon to cut when swung from two directions without changing grips and gave it better piercing ability. He briefly entertained serrations down the reverse edge until the thought of the thing getting caught in an ogre’s rib cage so it could haul him in by the handle dissuaded him.
Don’t get cute, Little Falcon. Keep it simple, keep it smooth.
A ruler and a protractor lifted from the school let him get detailed with the exact thicknesses of metal he wanted.
Schematic worked better the more detail you fed it, so Alexander went ahead and calculated all the final dimensions for the sword part, the haft, the pins, all of it. He had a mockup of the final fit drawn out, certain parts detailed at different angles for comparison, before he was satisfied that it was complete.
Upon deciding that his design was sound, Alexander felt the rush of analytical power that sought to connect all the dots on the board to reality. The intuitive error checker didn’t generate a catastrophic failure, so he knew his concept was sound. All that remained was to go to the smithy and execute.
There’s not much to say about filing. Nor is there much to say about using a sanding belt nailed to a little jig to do your grinding by painfully slow increments. His enthusiasm died somewhere around the fourth hour of profiling, and the other eight passed him by in the almost Zen trance of repeated motions.
Primary bevel, clip bevel, all set, secondary bevel roughed in. Eat. Cloth bath. Sleep. Repeat.
This first day of March, Alexander realized that if he didn’t drill his holes before the quenching and heat treat, he’d never get them done without using forge heat and a punch. The metal of this blade was harder than his hand drill bits. He’d have to either do the holes now, while the alloy was slightly softer, or move getting the drill press operation up in his queue, which meant redoing the schematic for the naginata, since he could only have one in his thoughts at a time.
Damn.
Holes meant a bigger chance of bad warps in the quench. He’d risk it, he decided, his instincts regarding the blade staying true said the metal could take it, especially since the tang was deliberately a little thicker than the blade, with a gentle shoulder to reduce stress concentrations.
Hand drilling metal is just about as slow a process as filing and hand sanding it. The young man remained diligent and careful; these holes needed to be clean. Onto the geometry of the blade. The journey of a single bevel begins with a thousand strokes, or something like that.
Tedious, mindless, easy work, Alexander could do. That was what most of public education amounted to, and he’d excelled without any trouble whatsoever. It was Papa Gerifalte’s program of curriculum that had introduced him to real challenge.
That thought made the young man pull up from his work, wincing. Grief stabbed him seemingly at random. He never knew when it would well up and threaten to paralyze him with its intensity. He’d never gone back upstairs in his old home to see the statues of the ones who had raised him. He didn’t think he could bring himself to leave if he did. Alexander was very certain they would have been proud of him, he had carried himself with the best of both of them, in this world gone mad. But he’d never really know, because they’d never be able to tell him, and that thought turned the bitter sadness into rage.
Hands moving again, the anger sharpened his concentration. Greater focus tuned out everything but what he was doing, the skill zoomed his thoughts in on what he was doing to a tremendous degree, the feel of the sanding block in his hands, the pattern of the metal shifting ever so slightly as he shaved microns off at a time, the clean sharpie line that told him where the bevel ended, all of it as clear and hard in his thoughts as good glass.
Once the final stroke was done, Alexander held a two-and-a-half-foot curved blade whose coloration blended from lustrous silver to a darker gray, the golem iron showing through where the edge formed. It was a convex grind, harder to do than the constant angle of a flat angle, but it bought him extra material on the blade, extra strength. The secondary bevel he wouldn’t complete until after the quench and thermal cycling. That was going to be a hollow grind, a concave curve that created a truly razored edge along the naginata’s blade. This weapon Alexander wanted to be able to slash an ogre to the bone. After seeing how tough their hide was, that required sharp, his strength alone wouldn’t be sufficient. Hence the deformed s shape of the convex blade profiling into the hollow grind.
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Alexander smiled as he held up the blade and examined the hand drilled holes, sanded to remove hard edges, and thus strengthened. Reverse threaded cross pins in the rings that he would use to bind the blade in its handle would tighten with use, rather than loosen. Speaking of the haft, after much debate, he had decided on using steel. A quarter inch diameter of round spring steel would be strong enough to not snap like kindling if he encountered something big. It would give the spear a little flex, a slight whip action too, which he hoped would add a little to the cutting power.
The weight didn’t bother him, good hickory didn’t weigh much less. Besides. Months of swinging a blacksmithing hammer until they couldn’t lift it had turned his forearms into ropy things and his hands were like a rock climber’s. The extra mass was worth the gain in strength.
Such were the doings and thoughts of the youth while he finished his work and lit the forge for the moment of truth, a PVC pipe full of vegetable oil ready to immerse the metal and grant it its springy strength. Just as his instincts had shouted to him, it quenched true. A rasp dragged across the metal sounded high, announced the hardness to be exquisite. From there, he had to go slow, spending most of an afternoon tempering, bringing the metal up to about 1250OF for a couple of hours, which, in a forge, was basically staring at the blade to make sure it had the right color and lifting it from the coals or closing the vent on the blower to reduce the temperature if it looked like it might be getting too hot. Boring. Boring. Boring. But crucial. Greater focus again lent him its aid, tightening his mind on the procedure.
It was nice to have a kind of reverse ADD meditating on a specific task skill.
Were the skills part of him? Reflections of him? Were they tacked onto him in some way by the Pulse? Who the fuck knew? None of this was probably real anyway and he’d wake up one day in the cockpit of his plane, being told he’d blacked out from excitement or something. In the meantime, he accepted his gift of being tied to the madness of this world and its quirks.
Eventually, the temper ended, and he beheld a blackened length of golem stuff crafted into an almost weapon. But he was now tired of smelling charcoal burning and looking at glowing hot metal.
Outside the old smelting factory, it was already nearly completely dark out.
Alexander returned through the snowy beaten paths to his Laboratory. While snow still blew, it wasn’t new snow, but rather that coming off the tree branches, or off the sides of the mountain. No new snow in a week, now he thought of it. Winter was about wrapped up. He was damned glad of it; the young man had had about all the cold he could take.
Caution born from repeated attempts on his life by feral monsters, sentient little green demons, and landscape made him freeze. Alexander’s penetrating vision scanned slowly in the fading twilight, he turned his head by gradual increments, still uncertain what subconscious datum had caused him to alert. There! To his eight o’clock, a hump of snow that hadn’t been there when he’d come through this noontime, and which didn’t sit beneath any roof that might have deposited it.
The shape was what triggered his instincts, it was too big, too out of place compared to the terrain around it. No, this here was far too sketchy, and Mama Gerifalte had raised no fool.
Slowly, Alexander thumbed the safety off the rifle and shouldered it, tightening the sling to stabilize the weapon. Through the optic, illuminated but not great in this light, not necessary at all for the scant fifty yards that he’d spotted the hump of snow, Alexander saw a slight motion, rhythmic, subtle. Breathing. There was something hiding, buried, waiting. It was just off the entrance to a little town park, not much more than a walking path around a circular clearing amongst the side streets of the town, some well-tended old oak trees, and a few swing sets for the little ones.
Nothing he’d encountered so far had used the frozen precipitation for cover. The bears prowled through it, plowing their own paths with their great strength, the panthers liked to use the trees to leap down on you, and the wolfs, big as they were, had wide paws that distributed their weight like snowshoes, letting them run atop the snow effectively. Whatever this was, it was a fresh hell for him to face.
“If you be a thinking thing, know that you do not hide from me! Nice and slow, show yourself! Nobody needs to die today, if we all here be reasonable.” Alexander called, firm and calm into the not quite night.
It was a low probability that anything he encountered would be non-hostile, but you thought over a lot of things during those days while winter storms hurled blizzards around. Just because he hadn’t met anything that hadn’t tried to kill him didn’t mean he wouldn’t. Right?
Wrong. Powder erupted and a huge shaggy, white-haired form launched from the pile.
Alexander fired and missed, the sudden motion, the gloom, and the too high magnification of the optic ruining his aim.
Cursing, he worked the bolt and reacquired the apelike thing that sped toward him. Firing again, he knew the bullet hit, saw the creature slap at the stinging strike to its breast and blessed his eyes that could see even in the low light.
Alexander worked the bolt again but did not fire. Instead, with thirty yards between them he raised his hand and sent two Chaos bolts into the monstrous ape-wolf thing that charged him. Grey and black magic hammered into the monster, and it staggered, a leg crippled by the chaotic energies degrading its knee and thigh. It crashed headfirst into the packed snow along the street, digging a trench and now Alexander put the rifle to work again, shooting into its exposed back.
*Crack* called the rifle and he jacked the spent shell free, slammed home the next, and fired again, this time hitting between neck and shoulder.
The strangled howl of the monster told him he’d hit something important, but it levered itself out of the snow divot its fall had made, and it loped on four limbs, like a gorilla, fanged maw wide.
Twenty yards.
Alexander put his last Chaos bolt into the Yeti’s slavering mouth, and, while it shrieked from the pain of the energies ravaging its face and throat, put the final round from the magazine into its head, just above its right eye. The heavy round snapped the creature’s head back and it fell, twitching.
Heart racing, he lowered a smoking barrel, let the rifle hang from its sling and drew the heavy caliber pistol from his chest holster. Methodically he emptied the magazine of the forty-five into the creature’s head and upper neck. The spasming limbs stopped moving and he reloaded both pistol and rifle from his belt.
Only then did Alexander Gerifalte approach the newest nightmare to haunt his dreams.
“It’s gotta be almost nine feet tall…” He whispered.
It was a little less imposing than the ogres, but it was faster than they had been, lanky, wiry limbs covered in that dense, long fur lending it speed. He saw four long fingered hands, more like a gorilla’s feet than a humanoid hand, the thumb not truly opposing. The claws on those digits were all three or four inches long and cruelly hooked.
He knelt next to the monster and inspected it, dark red, almost black blood oozed from the wounds. That head, shaped not like a wolf but like a fanged baboon’s maw, now that he stopped and thought about it, with a largish dome shaped forehead and heavy brow. Or, it had been, Alexander had done a number on that cranium, it was closer to bone shards than a skull now.
Chaos bolts had ravaged the face and throat, looking like a combination of badly healed burns, acid, and scar tissue. The flesh of the monster’s upper abdomen and lower chest, hit dead center on its gut, looked no better. The awful scarred and mangled wound the entropic magic left was terrible to behold. Which was why he’d put the second bolt on its knee, risking the miss to buy himself time.
Even a quadruped will slow down if you suddenly take away one of its legs mid run.
Preliminary inspection done and starting into the adrenaline shakes that always seemed to come on when he finished being afraid for his life, Alexander Gerifalte utilized the gift of the magical geode, the voice that had demanded his desire and granted it, if not in the way he’d meant it.
Greater analyze brought up the shaggy furred monster’s blue scroll-work, the image appearing only for him to reveal its secrets.
Immature Yeti
Status:
dead
Soak: 0%
LifeForce/Armor
Head
Mana: 0%
Might
28
Height
8’4”
LifeForce/Armor
Left Arm
0/10 Chaos burned, catastrophic brain damage
LifeForce/Armor
Right Arm
Grace
11
Weight
522lbs
0/8
Dense bone
0/8
Impetus
16
Age
2 months
*Manaborn*
Yeti Fur
LifeForce/Armor
Chest
Yeti Fur
Cogitation
6
Core
Tourmaline, cushion
empty
0/8 lungshot, perforated diaphragm, Chaos burned
empty
Wisdom
3
Origin
Gaia
LifeForce/Armor
Left Leg
Yeti Fur
LifeForce/Armor
Right Leg
Ingenuity
7
Monster Race:
Sasquatch-2nd Tier (Immature, Polar variant)
0/8
LifeForce/Armor
Abdomen
0/8 Chaos burned, crippled
Durability
19
Yeti Fur
0/5 lacerated liver, multiple organ failure, Chaos burned
Yeti Fur
Valor
14
Traits
Cunning, Ambush predator, Frost resistant,
Skills
Savage rend, Cold blooded, Hide, Stalk, Lesser charge
Arcana
Lesser regeneration, Frost claw
Hah! So, it really was a Yeti! But where did the fucking thing come from?
Twice in rapid succession the young man’s heart fell into his guts. Firstly because he saw that the Yeti was “immature”, meaning there was a bigger version of the menace that absorbed four rifle rounds and three chaos bolts, and still needed a close-range rifle shot and a pistol magazine to the noggin to dispatch, much like the ogre had, while being even faster on the move. Secondly because the age of the monster in front of him was only two months ago and that it held a tag that said “manaborn”. It was from Earth, or, rather, from Gaia, but born from magic? How?
Groaning, Alexander cursed loudly and lustily against the nonsense that sprung up with regularity. He should have known. Manaborn. That explained the golem. Were there other sources of mana than the Pulse? Something that catalyzed the transformation from the stuff of the old rules to the new?
What about that crystal core in the mine? It had bathed itself in what Alexander could only describe as mana, had exerted enough influence to create a pocket dimension, so far as he could tell. When the blue threshold was crossed, the mine’s interior was not that of his old world, he’d seen that for himself. Going back, it was as he remembered. Magic. Gates to beyond. Corridors through which things and magic could come through to his world.
Kneeling in the snow over the corpse of a monster, nothing was off the table.
“Things are different now though, you bastards!” Alexander cursed quietly, hating these monsters, and whatever hell had shat them, pulling free the crudely crafted knife, and opening the Yeti’s chest.
Now he had the eyes to see, to be able to make visible the secrets first hidden from him. Now he could penetrate the mysteries and find the clues that revealed Gaia’s rules. Later for that though, for now, he had a Yeti to harvest.
First the core of the monster. Then he’d field dress and skin it. Not because he wanted to eat the now obviously disgusting smelling fucker, but because it might have utility to one of his next major agendas: alchemy.
The old-time chemists had been called alchemists because people suspected them of using magic to dabble in the transformation of matter. Alexander’s father, ever the eccentric and with an undeniable fetish for collecting literature on how to make just about anything, had in his library the methods to do everything from metal plating to fabrication of high explosives.
While not the genius that his father had been, Alexander wasn’t stupid, he could read, and he was thoroughly trainable. If he applied the techniques in those books to the otherworldly shit he was carving out from monsters, like this Yeti, he thought, pulling free a four-inch-long canine from its jaw, ignoring the nasty squelching sounds that event made, then there were likely to be ways to fight them. Maybe ways to undo whatever had been done to his parents. To fix everyone in this rinky-dinky town. A town he’d always wanted to escape from, and which he now wished he would have appreciated for what it was: home.
Samples of the Yeti he rolled up in its own fur, a surprisingly heavy pelt, and he dragged his grim prize home with him, with determined steps. It wasn’t until he was almost halfway back to the Laboratory before the horrifying thought “What if Yetis were pack animals?” occurred to him. His hands shook as he ate chicken taco soup that night, thanks to that haunting idea.
There were now had a handful of encounters that even what he considered excellent marksmanship with heavy caliber weapons had nearly failed to bring him victory. Whatever permitted these bestial creatures to survive what should have been damage enough to knock a moose down on the spot made them incredibly dangerous when they had the initiative.
“What can I do about it?” Alexander wondered, laying in bed.
Traps, he decided. He would use the anti-goblin strategies for early warning, but, this time, he would have traps prepared for anything that prowled around uninvited. First, an early warning system of bells and fishing line. Then, an interior perimeter of cruel devices and lethal mechanisms. He had three of the shaped charges, and a fifty-milliliter beaker of crumbled product that he’d scraped from his glassware. Not good enough to be used in his charges, but, maybe good enough to be made into a coffee can shrapnel bomb, alongside the gun powder he had stashed from the funstore.
Too bad nobody fur trapped anymore around here, the young man lamented, some steel foot catches would do wonders to discourage guests.
“If it makes you feel any better, Little Falcon,” he mocked himself in the dark, “An ogre wouldn’t even notice the annoyance before it pulls free and squeezes your guts out of you.”
With that, he strained to quiet his thoughts and, eventually, passed the night in sleep.
Next morning, instead of spending his post breakfast time in the library studying, Alexander hooked up his early warning system. Before the sun was two fist widths higher than the horizon, he had each of the main streets and many of the streets around his beaten paths set with bells and fishing line.
A coffee can with a hole punched in the opposite sides of it, with a match connected to a tripwire run through, which pulled said match across fine sandpaper, thus igniting the match as it was pulled into the can’s black powder and nail loaded interior, made for an effective antipersonnel mine. There were about a dozen of them scattered around the approaches to his usual paths through the town by noon that day.
Alexander looked up from the last of the bunch he had ready and considered whether it was worth posting warning signs in case anybody happened through. It probably wasn’t worth the time, he judged.
Since the Pulse, not a single sign had he that he wasn’t the last human being on Gaia’s surface. Given that some of the townsfolk had survived the pulse, if not the goblins that captured and ate them, he knew he wasn’t actually the only person alive. But whatever had happened had definitely put movement across distance on hold. Without a vehicle, or horses, or some way to travel and haul goods, moving was a tremendous challenge. Doing it in Winter was right the hell out; only a complete moron would try to move in the bitter cold and heavy snow.
Softly whistling “Ring of fire” he finished setting the trigger on the trip wire. He didn’t even like Johnny Cash, but for all things a season.
Morning was long gone, the sun stood high overhead, just past its apex.
“I think it’s about time I get Operation Naginata off of my to do list.” Alexander decided aloud.
*Thoomp*
A flash from across the town square accompanied by the sound of one of his traps going off had adrenaline singing in his veins and Alexander ran to the courthouse to climb to its roof and get a high ground vantage. He wasn’t going to let whatever set that trap off even get to see what was shooting it if he couldn’t help it.
Waist high drifts met him, his legs churned, and his boots kicked deep into fresh snow, because this wasn’t one of his usual routes. For fifty feet he fought hard through the snow-pack to reach his destination. It took another two minutes to clear enough snow away to get to the door and step into the darkness within. Another two minutes to run to the maintenance door and climb the ladder to the snow laden rooftop.
Eight minutes after the explosion until Alexander Gerifalte turned eagle sharp eyes on the spot where the improvised explosive device had gone off. There, in the once pristine snow, was a wreckage of flesh. It was also vindication to the sneaking pessimism that had clung to him the night before: lying in the snow was another Yeti. Bigger, this time.
But where he’d met the last one with small arms fire, this one had gotten a taste of close-range shrapnel. The sight that greeted him was a grisly one. Black powder sucked as an explosive, but, if you put enough of it in one place it could be made to work. Not this well though, what had it done, sat on the damned bomb?
The creature’s left leg was mostly torn free. From his vantage, he saw easily that its intestines were strewn steaming on the ground, a ropy mass of grey and red. Half its baboon head and face were gone, and the left arm ended mid forearm, the big claw ridden hand missing entirely. The wounded creature made no noise that he heard and didn’t move. Neither did Alexander move, he sat his ass still as a gargoyle and watched.
Patience was a hunter’s great friend. Patience saved his life again, as, an hour after he made the roof, two more Yetis, one large, one small. crept down from the mountain side to pay homage to their dead kin. He thought they were eating it until he watched them begin to cover the fallen monster with snow. Empathy never crossed his mind for the bestial creatures, what he was focused on was that the creatures were demonstrating complex behaviors, which meant that they were as intelligent as the goblins, maybe, which meant he had to be incredibly careful about how he approached dealing with them.
Option one: do nothing. He had eleven more IEDs scattered all over the place and those traps worked. The monsters were bound to wander into them if he sat tight.
Option two: engage from high ground and try to put them down from where they couldn’t reach him, like this rooftop or the water tower.
Option three: leave out poisoned meat. There was rat poison, insecticide, all kinds of nasty things he could use and, if these monsters were following the biological rules of everything else, they wouldn’t last long after ingesting it.
Option four: put the almost finished half-plate on and go meet the beasts in the field in fair and honorable comba-
Okay, he couldn’t get through that last one without breaking, he giggled quietly to himself.
The problem with options one and two were that, while he was dressed for the cold, he didn’t want to contemplate what spending a night in the open on a rooftop would be like. Hypothermia would almost definitely kill him, the nights were still somewhere in the mid-twenties to low thirties, according to the mercury thermometers. Melting snow would soak him if he lay here too much longer, accelerating that process.
To judge by the sun, Alexander had perhaps six, maybe seven hours of daylight to work with. Once the monsters had turned the corner of the street, he’d lost sight of them. They went back up the mountain, most likely, which meant that it was going to be dicey to spot the camouflaged creatures again, even with his eyes.
Think. Why were they moving around? Why cross into the open? Didn’t the analysis have them listed as ambush predators and they had particular skills to indicate that that was how they hunted, not roaming around at random but stalking and lying in wait.
An idea blossomed in his head: they were looking for the missing juvenile. Somebody stayed out too late partying and they were hunting for their young pack member’s whereabouts. Alexander had probably confused them by hauling the scent of the dead one around town, forcing them to search through his trapped lanes. They’d covered their dead comrade and left the way they’d come swiftly, as if keenly aware that danger lurked around close.
Come to think of it, Alexander thought, stuffing cold hands into his jacket to warm them beneath his armpits, the Yetis were smart enough not to set off his bells. No alarms sounded, and he’d made sure to put bells wherever it was most likely anything would cross into the town.
Had he simply gotten lucky with the shrapnel bomb? Had the smell of the gunpowder got its attention and cause it to investigate? There was such a thing as using a predator’s investigative nature against it. Poison now made all the more sense. It would also let him hunker down out of the weather. Alright, Alexander decided, he liked door number three best. Time to get the hell off this roof before the wind froze him to it.
One thing the young man knew was certain: the Yetis would return, and they would kill him if he let them.
It took him an hour to reach the Tractor supply, grab his selection of anti-Yeti solutions, and another half hour to cross the quarter mile to his home, so slowly and carefully did he stalk to reach safety. Alexander figured the strong smell of canned fish would hide most of the poison odor, so he went heavy on the application and darted out into the late afternoon to set his newest trick for pest removal out. He’d be damned if anything survived a combination of fast and slow rat poisons in the volume he’d sat out.