Early did Alexander Gerifalte rise, as was his habit, beating the coming daylight by an hour. He washed himself, breakfasted heartily, and spent the morning in study and meditation. By ten o’clock, he left his library and home, to begin shoring up some of his weaknesses in position and remove items from his chalk board agenda. Prior to the advent of the Yetis, he had been ready to complete his naginata made from the refined corpse of a silver ore golem he had dubbed Silver Stone. The metals purified from the creature’s animated mineral body he would use to strengthen his defenses and to permit him at least some hope of fending off monsters in melee. Today, Operation Naginata would be complete.
Slush made footing rather treacherous, so he went slowly toward the smithy. Every hump of snow and silhouette got a look, he was now even more aware to the types of things that might try to murder him, more alert to hazards. Careful strides took him to the smithy’s door and he pulled it open swiftly, raising the Hick cannon, as he had now officially dubbed the large bore lever gun, to ready, just in case something had snuck into the building hoping to catch him with his back turned. Nothing moved. A sniff revealed no unusual scents. All the piles of scrap and ore and whatnot lay right where they had been a week ago, when last he’d seen this yawning building’s interior.
Nothing.
Alexander pulled shut the door behind him and latched it, so that he could work in relative peace.
Across the dimly lit floor he strode and he lit the forge, the light of the coals would be all he needed to see clearly his work. He went to Sterling, checking over its riveted seams, inspecting it for any sign of fault, and found none. The steam engine was the greatest of his workings and today, coupled to George, they were going to do great things. Steel was gone for his planned naginata haft, the claws of a Yeti had determined that stuff to be too frail against what foes his spear might come across.
His weapon would be made entirely of the enhanced metals of a golem. Every pin, ring, cross piece, and fitting. The rings would be made of magically enhanced sterling silver, too soft to bite the metal haft he planned to make stronger by addition of carbon.
Alexander had thought long on the matter this morning and he concluded that iron, even iron reinforced through the animating magic of a golem’s heart, wasn’t good enough. Thanks to the coal forge, there was a reasonable amount of carbon naturally sort of infiltrating the iron core of the blade, but he doubted if it was more than a fraction of a percent, too low to truly count as a steel. Alexander would introduce carbon to the stuff and see if he couldn’t forge out some reasonably consistent material that would qualify, if he understood the rules, as golem steel. Did that mean he had to completely redo the naginata blade?
Very likely, yes. All that grinding, filing, careful treatment of heat and metal, would not go to waste, however.
The knife Alexander had used to stab the Yeti had broken when he pulled it free of its skull, cracked badly along the spine by his full body yanking, doubtless compromised when he drove it through the creature’s dense bone. The more than two feet of carefully shaped metal would become a short sword, another line of defense. It wouldn’t need to be as strong; Alexander couldn’t even hold the thing against the kind of forces that would break it. He wouldn’t be stopping a Yeti’s charge with a sword, no sir. Mama Gerifalte raised no fool.
So, today, the young man would finish the hollow grind, sharpen the knife, and make a copper hand guard, using the hickory he initially planned for the haft of the naginata for a hilt. One of the reverse threaded pins he’d use to attach the pommel he was about to forge out of more copper.
All things considered? Alexander had low expectations for this weapon. It was more a technique piece, something to practice his skills. It would serve though, sharp blades were always useful, even if they needed sharpening more often than he liked.
His wool gathering ended, the coals of the forge were hot, the copper ingot was ready for forging, and Sterling had reached operating pressure. With a throw of a lever, the engine engaged the drive belts connected to George and he grabbed the copper out of the coals with tongs, ready to ply the pedal to forge out the copper fittings.
The first stroke of the hammer drastically altered his plans, smoothing the bar more than he wanted. Damn. Alexander sighed and pulled the mashed ingot over to the anvil, around whose horn hung the five-pound blacksmith’s hammer. He was going to have to do this the hard way.
Strokes of hammer beat the crosspiece out and Alexander punched out the slot for the tang to fit through, he’d have to make certain that the shoulders of his blade mated cleanly to the cross piece, but that was file work, he only needed to leave enough material to be able to remove it appropriately. The rectangular prism of the guard he shaped, going for a slightly flared rectangle that got thicker at the ends, like a broadsword’s crosspiece. He figured the old-time weapon smiths probably knew their business better than a snot nosed wanna be pilot.
Once that was hammered out, he used more of the cut off from that same ingot, and pounded a long thin section, before he rolled the soft metal into a ball. A wedge cut the ball free, and Alexander then set about smoothing the ball with light hammer touches. It was tedious, tedious work, but it would save him filing, which was even more tedious. He drove a thin punch into the ball while it was cooling, digging a thin channel which he would thread to fix to the threading he was going to put on the tang.
Since the coals were still hot and he had a fresh bag of fuel ready, he went ahead and tossed two ingots of golem iron into the forge to work out how he was going to carbonize the metal. He figured he could forge weld with coal dust, over saturating the metal, then work it down to the correct percentage. That was going to be time consuming, careful work, requiring many heating and cooling cycles because he’d have to file stroke the bars to test their hardness or risk working all the carbon he added back out of the steel. Just for good measure, he added another eight ingots of golem Ferrum into the forge. Best to test in increments, with repeatability.
Day’s end found the Warforger blacksmith plying his skills to get a mate up of the guard ready for a final glue up. The wooden handle was already roughly carved, its final shaping left until after the gluing, it had been burned in on the tang though and he figured he was close enough on that. Careful, considering, meticulous file strokes shaved the guard’s soft metal until it fit without gaps to the shoulder of the San-mai jacketed blade.
When it fit, without rattle, without visible defect, the youth locked the blade into his clamps and used the threading dye to cut the threads into the tang. Then he mixed up the two part epoxy that would seal wood to tang, liberally coated the handle region with epoxy, coated the burned interior of the hilt more epoxy and hammered the handle down, pinching the guard in place. He scraped the excess glue away from the threads, preferring a slathering of Loctite to hold his copper pommel just a little smaller than his fist, in place. The last little bit of glue that squished out of the handle told him that the clamping of the pommel had tightened his work that extra little bit.
Sterling and George had long since been allowed to rest by this point and Alexander left the smithy with almost optimism. He’d done good work this day. The billets of maybe steel would keep until tomorrow, folding coal dust into the metal had been difficult, demanding of his skills with power hammer and tongs and he wouldn’t know how well it worked until he actually forged a piece of each out, quenched it, then broke it cold, to check the grain structure within.
If he didn’t see the fine austenite or hard as shit martensite, or, at least, a detectable carbide edging of the grains, he’d know his attempt failed.
That would be reserved for a different day!
No more creeping nightmares chose to assault him on his way home so he ate dinner, a far more reserved affair of chili than yesterday’s celebratory meal, in peace, if not content.
It wasn’t until he finished the Zen experience of sanding and staining the handle, filing and polishing the guard and pommel, and, lastly, hand sanding, polishing, and final sharpening and stropping of the blade that a twinge of expectation rang through his mind. He felt a mighty impulse and used Greater analyze on the completed one handed short sword.
Silver Stone Messer: a warforged blade crafted of Far Eastern techniques and western design, using the refined body of a silver golem. This war knife possesses superior cutting power, cleaving armor easily and heightened durability compared to average. Its silver will debilitate the undeathly or unclean that it touches, as if sanctified.
Ignores 10 soak. Sundering. Spectre bane.
Alexander was struck still. This was far above his anticipated result. The short, broad, curved blade with its clip point was a hacker, that was for sure. It cut things, all the things. Magical buffering nonsense, armored nonsense, and ghostly nonsense.
Well. Well, well, well. He couldn’t stop the slight giggle that bubbled up from his chest.
Prompted by a feeling, Alexander hefted the weapon and, with a full armed swing, brought it whistling down on the spring steel round stock he’d intended to use for his naginata haft.
Sparks flew as if from an angle grinder and Alexander was treated to the slightly reddening edges, swiftly dimming, of a cleanly cut quarter inch round of steel.
“Mother of all gods above, below, and in between!” He cried, jubilant.
Sundering. He made a sword that cut steel, with not a single nick in its edge to show for it. He had to know what else it could do.
A square stock of some of the golem steel he’d been playing with the day before he clamped tightly in a vise, standing upright. A wicked overhand hack threw more sparks and he felt the shock up his arm as the blade hammered half way through the ingot before stopping. He felt pure joy, even as he cursed and shook his hand, stung badly by the metal on metal impulse.
Three inches straight through something tougher than high carbon tool steel, at least. It took some effort to remove the embedded war knife from the block of metal. He inspected the edge, slightly rounded. He’d have to sharpen it. But. It cut. It godsdamned well cut.
This was beyond any hope. He could take an ogre’s arm off. He could chop through a Yeti like…like a Yeti had chopped through him. This magical bullshit, this was a game changer. He had to step up his game.
Would armor made from the same stuff grant him equivalent protection? He had to know. But first: Operation Naginata.
Alexander didn’t even lament the endless grinding, sanding, and filing that awaited him.
The enthusiasm carried him through the next week, whereupon he successfully created golem steel, the blue scroll-work revealing what he’d prayed it would:
Golem High Iron: refined golem ferrum infused by firestone dust, impregnated to form a high iron matrix. Greatly improved hardness and durability compared to golem ferrum. Challenging to work at low temperature.
That last line, he should have paid more attention to that last line. The “High Iron” he planned to have jacketed with sterling silver, just like before, forge welding the two together. Mokume gone, or the combination of layers of different qualities of metal was an old and well documented technique, as was the San mai method for making blades. His old man’s library had detailed descriptions of alloying methods throughout history, up to and including the synthesis of the high-performance tungsten-cobalt-nickle and exotic alloys used in all sorts of applications. The mass percentages were common knowledge, tabled explicitly.
What none of them mentioned, but that Alexander should have inferred, was that, as the materials performance indices grew, so too did the difficulty of shaping them. Alexander’s forge barely got the golem high iron to working temperature. Even when it did, without George, he’d never have worked it into anything but a rounded bar. Pinched between an anvil and a five-pound smith’s hammer, the hammer bounced off the golem steel as if from a stiff trampoline, almost flinging the tool from his hand. He ruined one of his rounding dies creating the blade blank, the die was flattened, blunted across its top. He’d ruin more of them creating the armor plates. As many as he needed.
A realization made him sit up from bed one night: If he didn’t make a replacement hammer for George out of the stuff sooner than later, he’d find himself without a power hammer.
That spooky thought had him creating more of the wonderful material and he spent three days upgrading his beloved tool.
Just after he’d affixed the meticulously shaped replacement head for George, he felt another welling need to examine the improved hammer.
Greater Forgemaster’s Hammer (George): powered by steam, the dwarven technology instilled in this hammer, along with the golem high iron of its head makes this device the envy of forgemasters across worlds. There is little this mighty instrument, guided by a skilled hand, cannot bend to its master’s will.
Grinning like an idiot, Alexander hugged the power hammer, its cool surface housing a comfort against his cheek. Why did the blue scroll genie of wisdom call his hammer dwarven technology though? No. No, insane world, the young man decided, snuggling into his industrial machinery, you do not get to take this happiness from me.
Life got easier after that, except that he had to reconfigure Sterling to run a belt sander because he was physically unable to actually file or grind the material. It ate through high grit belts like titanium. There was a very real chance the hardware store would run out of sanding belts before he was done with the armor he planned. Still, other than having to put Sterling on a pallet jack and wag it around the shop, very, very carefully, he made good progress.
It wasn’t until he noticed flower buds, spots of color on the still snowy mountain on his walk to the smithy one morning that Alexander became aware that Winter had, gently and without much fanfare, been replaced by Spring. That brought on a slight panic.
Spring meant warm. Warm meant his free refrigeration was at its end. That morning, instead of going to the smithy, Alexander scrambled to fill as many refrigerators and box freezers with snow as he could, so that he could keep as many perishables frozen as physically possible. That would buy him a few extra weeks, maybe a couple of months on some things. Every single, ironically enough, Yeti brand, freezer he could find he loaded up with snow and ice, along with as much milk as he could manage. Anybody who spent four hundred dollars on a freezer had been a lunatic in his mind, back before he truly appreciated what long lasting cold temperature regulation was worth.
Now? Each of those heavy coolers was worth solid gold.
When his bonanza of snow gathering and food preservation ended, it was dark and he spent the night reorganizing his to do list to include figuring out where he should plant crops. Once the ground thawed, he would need to see to putting garden beds into order.
Alexander continued through the ghost town, savoring his accomplishments in the crafting department. While he walked, his thoughts turned, to his class and its recent evolution. Entropic venator. Fancy sounding. Changes that seemed small but felt big, a culmination of his choices and actions, especially against the monsters that had nearly claimed his life.
He had been badly, traumatically, injured half a dozen times now and it never got easier. That last incident with the Yeti was the worst though.
“Gods above, below, and in between, I never wanted to see myself hacked open like that again.” Alexander invoked a prayer, a slight shudder at the memory, and the desperate moment he’d thrown himself into a half-frozen gutter to either die or live by morning’s light.
Ruthless. Venator. Baleful smite. Dubious connotations or no, he didn’t mind not feeling bad for killing something he’d decided needed killing and the extra strength and speed and abilities would be greatly appreciated, even if he didn’t know how the little black box that was the skills worked, exactly. Self-inflicted injuries…okay, so maybe don’t push it too hard. Alexander remembered watching football players, men of incredible physical acuity snapping their own tendons from their own strength.
Alexander wasn’t an athlete, or hadn’t been one in school, preferring solo sports to team games, so he’d never hurt himself like that before. Twisted ankles while trying to cross over your mom on the court were a different thing. Especially when she laughed at you before she iced and wrapped your ankle for you. It wasn’t a big deal now, anyway. On the third day he’d be healed of all his injuries.
“Alright, alright, that’s enough gawping around. You got work to do.” He reminded himself.
Onward to the smithy, there was a spear that needed some tender love and care.
Having witnessed his prowess against unmoving metal half as big as an elephant, nothing bothered him on his way to the old smelting plant. Almost completely gone from next to the door were the once enormous piles of shoveled snow.
The interior of the smithy, dim, as usual, greeted him with its familiar smells of charcoal, metal tang, and smoke. Today was the day for the long running project that the spear had become. Alexander had spent almost two months working through it, interrupted by one thing or another. He still didn’t think a spear, even a good one, was necessarily worth all this hassle, but the improvement to his technique, the attention to detail, form, and fit, made it a sort of journeyman’s test for metalworking. Especially when he was doing it with stuff as difficult as the golem steel.
The haft was complete, a six-foot length of golem steel, an inch in diameter. The sword blade spear tip was almost finished, slightly thicker than his knife, a bit broader, with a minor re-curve at its base. Those adjustments he’d made when he considered the size and power of some of the monsters he’d faced. A big ass slashing spear with a little forward weight to it would probably come in handy, and a re-curve, like a kukri added to the chopping power. Today he had to finish the rings and pins, file in the hollow grind, a meticulous process to do by hand and not ruin the consistent angles that made such a blade geometry so sharp, and lastly, the final fit-ups.
Unlike before, Alexander would use the golem steel for his rings and pins. He was also going to quench them hard, so that the metal wouldn’t flex a bit under pressure. If subjected to enough force to break they’d just shear off. Hopefully, it earned him some additional durability, anything needing that much force, and Alexander couldn’t afford for his blade to come loose. The rings were just a cast iron bitch to shape.
With Sterling puffing away, and George hooked up, Alexander Gerifalte locked into the focus of a craftsman with a job to do. Tongs nimble, he pounded metal to shape, curving, testing against the polished round metal of the haft, and adjusted it to fit. There would be file work and sanding to do the final mating. There was always file work and sanding. His entire life was files and sanding.
Late afternoon found the young man using the most of his Warforger traits, applying a blowtorch to the pins to heat them just enough to thread. His dies couldn’t cut the things otherwise, they were too hard. The naginata blade would have three rings and pins to hold it secure. He was going to drive hot golem copper along the seams between blade and haft, sort of like a brazing. Any imperfections of his fitting would be shored up, the softer metal filling the gaps.
At the end, when the metal work was done, Alexander was going to wrap the metal in shaggy Yeti fur, to protect his joining from water and to soak up blood from the blade, so that it wouldn’t run down to his hands.
Reverse threaded pins, like carriage bolts got a hexagonal golem iron nut to hold them in place, making three of which that were good enough to work had taken him an entire day. He had a couple of pipe wrenches, cheater pipes, and more Loctite to make goddamned sure the nuts weren’t going anywhere.
After the hammer work was done, the last Gerifalte hooked up the belt sander and began the utterly tedious process of making certain the rings fit up flush. When the rings slid over the inch thick round and sang as they glided down its length, he knew happiness.
This was why his old man had books on books explaining how to do everything from knitting to welding. It wasn’t because the man had known how to do everything, but that he could learn to do whatever he needed and do it well enough to be satisfied at the result. Alexander found himself with that same itch to be more than adequate. Finding a connection to the memory of his father was not a small thing to the lonely young man.
A sense of almost destiny pervaded him as he fitted the rings and bolts. His craftsmanship of this last iteration of the spear was nothing short of immaculate. The blade seated in the groove for it tightly and the rings locked it to a monolith with the haft, once the nuts had been tightened. Next the copper brazing, done with five-pound hammer and a thin wedge. He ground off the excess material and wrapped the foot of golem steel holding the pins below the blade, wet leather with holes punched for rawhide laces that his now strong fingers wrenched tight, a hold that would grow tighter as the leather dried and shrank.
Sharpening took a half hour of careful angling on the belts, a high grit to polish the hollow ground surface of the edge, and a compounded buffing wheel to bring the blade to glittering sharpness.
That surging urgency from before pushed him to turn Greater analyze on the naginata, to reveal the fruits of his labors, the payment for his dedication. But something was missing. Alexander ignored the impulse; his instincts told him that the project wasn’t finished. There was one last thing that he needed, though he was loath to part with one of the polar bear cores. This weapon needed a touch of the new rules, a last touch.
He made his way to the Laboratory and cracked open the wooden box holding the two polar mana cores, each creating a mist of fog around itself at the warm air that suddenly chilled. The last Gerifalte escorted the biting cold gem to his chemical cabinet, not so far from where he’d vanquished the construct whose body made this project possible. There a solution of nitric acid was brought to high heat and the freezing core was dropped into the orange-red acid, fume hood drawing the dangerous vapor up and away. The core shimmered brightly before dissolving within moments and the mixture separated into a layer of yellow liquid above a blue silver, almost liquid metal layer. Alexander knew, like a memory from long ago, that the yellow liquid was wasted, depleted of its essence and potency, and decanted it off. The blue-silver substance he poured over the blade of the naginata, carefully, slowly, as if he’d been born knowing the purpose of alchemical reagents. The high steel refined from a golem’s corpse drank the substance like sand drinks water, soaking it in. He applied the dissolved core evenly to both sides of the metal and, when the last drop had been drawn into the steel, gave into the urge to gaze on his working.
Winter’s Breath: a warforged naginata crafted using a hybridization of Far Eastern metal working techniques, dwarven blades smithing, and fae enchanting. The weapon utilizes the extreme limits of a silver golem’s forged body and a core rich in polar aether. This spear cuts like the Arctic wind penetrating flesh and armor, the blade covers its targets in bitter frost. Silver coated, the blade will debilitate the undeathly or unclean that it touches, as if sanctified.
Ignores 15 soak. Sundering. Frostbrand. Spectre bane.
Alexander Gerifalte laughed aloud, a pealing humor that sounded so rarely these last months. There had been so little joy to be found. This though, this was an achievement worthy of being recognized.
The naginata blade shimmered with a blue note to its silver steel finish, polished fine. White Yeti fur, thick and coarse fluttered in the air, a light frost on its fibers. A steady mist poured off the spearhead and Alexander could feel the potency of that cold from the other end of it.
Outside, in the streets of the ragged town that he had called home all his life, the young man, the newly fledged assassin, or huntsman, or whatever a venator was, spun the spear in an easy circle. It felt like it weighed little more than a mop, his hands had no trouble holding the polished metal of the haft.
With a wide sweeping stroke, he brought the naginata into, and through a six-by-six mail box post, the aluminum cube popping up into the air, both edges of the wood coated in dense white ice crystals.
He experienced a sense of fulfillment then, a kind of completeness.
This event, this culmination of trials, errors, and mastery, was a high-water mark for him. Intuition said that, if he’d had this weapon, he could not only have dealt with goblins, but with their higher tier ogre relatives, the Yetis, and even Silver Stone. Never would he ever have thought that he could try going toe to toe with a fifteen-foot walking silver ore monstrosity, but the spear misting the air from its bitter cold blade gave him confidence.
Now, he just had to figure out the armor situation. Already, his thoughts turned away from the uncomfortable, clumsy, and ultimately ill-fortuned half plate. Instead, Alexander thought back to the body suits worn by motorcycle riders, the plates of durable armor that nevertheless didn’t restrict their motion.
It almost felt like destiny, this day. His magic had transformed, which initiated an evolution of himself according to subconscious tendencies and, from his own perspective, rational decision making, and, finally, he’d finished a weapon that would let him stave off the beasts that tried to call him prey.
All things taken together, Alexander Gerifalte considered the past twenty-four hours a high-water mark.
Which was why he was going to be especially careful going home, because, if the past was any indication, something awful was now lurking just out of sight waiting to pounce on him.
Nothing did, he saw, heard, smelled, and detected nothing untoward on his journey back to the Laboratory. That didn’t mean it wasn’t there, just that it was being really sneaky, were his final thoughts before bed.
Alexander reached the age of majority that next quiet morning and celebrated with a day of rest. His board of topics to be investigated stood thusly:
* Acquire hides from probably heinous monsters (CHECK)
* Tanning procedure (to be adjusted upon further investigation of magical bullshit) TIME INTENSIVE
* Frame and Scrape: nail hides to box frame using tension lines, KEEP TAUT! Scrape fats, flesh, and ick from leather (sharp knife!); add ick to saltpeter bed.
* Salt?? Archives uncertain, salt reserves sufficient to test: perform trials 5 salted, 5unsalted result to be determined.
* Soaking: boil river water, submerge 72hrs, dry completely, re-flesh to be certain
* Liming: refresh water in submersion tanks, add hydrated lime (hardware store) ~12-12. 5pH for dehairing
* Pelt Deliming: neutralize by gradual addition of phosphoric acid fertilizer at the Tractor supply, double check
* Cold Soak: sink in creek 48hrs
* Bating? ? Sources indicate importance to tanning, bating solutions involve chickenshit? Gods above, below, and in between tell me I don’t have to soak the hides in my own feces. Pancreatic enzymes documented to serve, TRY grinding pancreas from beasts first!!
* Pickle: soak with vinegar 72hrs, scrape hair, pickle 24hrs, neutralize with baking soda.
* Tanning: grind acorns, oak bark, oak wood shavings, simmer 6hrs, reduce to half by boiling. Bottle solution. Submerge pelt in 50-50 water/solution mix, stir often first day Soak 1 week, stirring frequently boost concentration over time:
* 1week 50-50 split
* 2week 40-60 (heavier tanning solution)
* 3week 30-60 (heavier tanning solution)
* 4week 20-80 (maximal tanning solution) let soak 3 MONTHS!
* If still alive when leather tanned, incorporate into armor regime in May.
* Plant renewable food crops first of March (Raised beds maybe?) April first, ground still frozen.
* Check Mine Dungeon
Outside the mainline items, the research board was littered with notes and annotations as questions arose, were answered, or discarded as irrelevant to his survival in the immediate and near futures. Rebuilding human civilization was going to have to remain a long-term project, Alexander just didn’t know how long he could afford to sit in one place or how reasonably he could expect to have sustainable food supplies in the heart of Upta camp country. The early onset winter and rather late thaw had him thinking that there was utility in heading a bit farther south. He could also make his way toward the coastline, where the ocean could offer its bounty.
There were good reasons why human civilization blossomed outward from the coasts and junctions of great rivers.
The thought of leaving his home was…daunting. This little Podunk hicktastic piece of Americana might not have been much, and he’d once viewed it like a cage keeping him from spreading his wings, but he now found the idea of leaving it behind almost too much to bear. Here was where his parents stood, frozen in time. Still, all fledglings had to leave the nest, sooner or later.
Alexander shook of the contemplations of what might be. This was a day to bask in the now, and to appreciate the lessons of what had come before. Besides, the young man had spent most of four months slamming his face against sixteen hour plus days. He was due for a day off.
In the spirit of the holiday, the youth was mixing bread flour, sugar, and some of the last of his eggs and butter. Today, there would be cake! Meticulous, as had become his habit, he studied the cookbook directions and followed them to the letter. Creamed cheese whipped with sugar frosting, carrots shaved thin, walnuts chopped fine, it was going to be a wonderful cornucopia of carrot cake.
When the Dutch oven with its round platter of baked confection was opened, the aroma of sugary goodness pervaded, allowing the last Gerifalte, for a short time, to forget that he was all alone in a hostile dark age. For just a bit, he could pretend he was preparing a surprise for his family, to spring on them when they returned home from one of their trips. As flights of fancy go, it was a harmless one. Alexander was surprised at how much it hurt to let it go, when, at the setting of the sun that fresh spring day, he had to admit that no one was coming home to greet him. One more little tragedy to heap upon the major ones, one more taste of bitterness to offset the sweetness of being alive, against all odds.
Alexander found his bed and, with no small amount of gratefulness, slept peacefully.
The morning routine went like clockwork. Today was going to be a bit special. Special in a maybe fatal way. Today, he would go hunting monsters. Nothing was so apparent now as the certainty that his future success was intimately linked to exploiting these gifts unlocked by whatever had happened when he struck the crystalline matrix from which had spawned that gateway or subspace or whatever the fuck was happening that allowed creatures from some place called Tirnanog to infiltrate this plane. A source of energy from which had come goblins, and ogres, beasts of fairy tales. The dark ones. The ones that didn’t have happy endings because everybody died.
Gaia was outpouring mana into the world, that much was clear. It had done so with enough oomph to completely shit on everything that was finicky about where its electrons were supposed to be. It had done so in a fashion that warped some animals, and created others, somehow, like impressions on a surface raised to complete form by running charcoal over them. The magical juice was worth the squeeze, he had found. The golem, the Yetis, the bears, there were secrets lurking in the mana, opportunities.
Alexander would have to go forth and conquer these dangers if he wanted to thrive. He had to take their strength, harvest their powers, and make them his own. That meant putting his ass into the wind.
He didn’t like it. Risk aversion was a trait he’d cultivated while learning to pilot, that and staying calm in the face of rampant “Oh shittery”. When your trainer liked to turn your engine off at awkward times, or slump over on your stick in high winds to see how you pulled out of bad situations you got good, or you got consigned to be a land walker forever. Alexander was not a land walking dust sucker; he was one of the ones who would soar. Or was. Now, he was going to put those lessons hard learned to work on the local mega-fauna, preferably without ending up in a freezing gutter this time.
It was the second day of the cycle. Sunrise tomorrow would heal all wounds, so he had space for mistakes, so long as they weren’t immediately lethal. The plan was to make no mistakes, to use all his abilities to their maximum effectiveness, and to efficiently take his place as apex predator of middle Maine’s new ecosystem.
Which was how he found himself on top of the mountain mid afternoon, backing away slowly, spear leveled at some kind of Ent that had decided to stop pretending to be an old maple tree in favor of smashing him to paste. It had missed its initial clubbing and he’d gotten distance while it pulled itself up from the stony earth to give chase, all twenty feet of it.
Gnarled wood grains and green veins stood prominent on the bark-skin of the creature. Unlike the beasts, it made no sound, other than the wooden creak of its movements. Alexander had a flashback to Silverstone, the ore golem. The Ent was strong, but ponderous. Prior experience lent him a measure of calm against the yammering sense of wrongness associated with a tree going all Michael Myers on you and walking you down.
Alexander enacted his gift and scanned the blue scroll-work that revealed the monster’s nature to him.
Warped Maple Entling
Status:
Healthy, hostile
Soak: 35%
LifeForce/Armor
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Head
Mana: 100%
Might
56
Height
18’7”
LifeForce/Armor
Left Arm
0/30%
LifeForce/Armor
Right Arm
Grace
7
Weight
3,042lbs
0/30%
Entling Barkskin
0/30%
Impetus
5
Age
5 months
*Manaborn*
Entling Barkskin
LifeForce/Armor
Chest
Entling Barkskin
Cogitation
3
Core
Tourmaline, cushion
empty
0/30%
empty
Wisdom
7
Origin
Gaia
LifeForce/Armor
Left Leg
Entling Barkskin
LifeForce/Armor
Right Leg
Ingenuity
3
Monster Race:
Ent-2nd Tier (Mature, Maple variant)
0/30%
LifeForce/Armor
Abdomen
0/30%
Durability
30
Entling Barkskin
0/30%
Entling Barkskin
Valor
40
Entling Barkskin
Traits
Slothful, Grove guardian, Wrath of the Forest,
Skills
Barkskin, Tree-form, Shillelagh, Rapid Growth
Arcana
Drink the Earth
Mossy old man’s beard hung down from a jaw that was disturbingly humanoid. The jaw was the only thing humanoid about its head, with a gaping mouth which had far too many jagged, splintery teeth, like a lamprey mixed with a wood chipper. A single central eye burned with emerald light, and it stared hatefully as it steadily approached with long legged strides.
This wasn’t what he’d had in mind when he set out. But it would have to do. Alexander pulled on his reserves of energy, drawing on the magic to destroy creatures woven of magic. Concentrating on his spear tip, Alexander used the weapon to align his spell, sighting down it and a bolt of rampant energy crackled into being before rocketing into the tree-thing’s not face.
Instantly, the elemental creature’s bark covered exterior fissured, deep cracks winding their way around its head, black smoke pouring forth and whispers of flame appearing. The monstrous Ent-thing staggered to a knee and caught its bulk with great branchlike hands. Leaves fell away from its form, dead and withered.
Alexander hit it again, right on the crown of its branch covered skull and narrow fissures widened into gaping rents in its wooden flesh. A hissing roar broke the relative silence of the mountain top, and the creature tore up the earth without effort in its clawing attempts to reach him, prompting the young man to turn tale and flee another dozen yards away, pale with fear at what those motions would do to his soft human body.
Turning, eyes peeled on the struggling monster, Alexander decided that the flopping motions, disjointed and without organization, meant that he’d severely injured the creature. He didn’t know dick about tree person anatomy, but his evolved chaos bolts were, so far as he could see, brutally effective against it.
The scrabbling motions died down, the otherworldly strength of the thing fading, even as the dark black smoke that had risen from its head and neck/shoulder area dissipated. Alexander figured now was as good a chance as he was going to get to test a strategy that he’d plotted since finding out that his entropic field ate away the magical shield that his senses and gifts called Soak. An effort of will unfurled the anti-magic shell around himself. It did not, he grinned fiercely, dampen the frost encrusted haze of his spear. Which meant that his powers were selective and would not cripple his own use of magical horseshit, only that of his enemies.
With as much speed as he could muster, Alexander Gerifalte launched himself forward, angling to bring a vicious arcing hack of the spear blade across the finger thick as his forearm of the struggling monster in his passage. High Steel enchanted with polar mana slashed a deep line, the razor edge of his naginata exiting smoothly, the finger amputated cleanly. He jumped back, weapon ready in case the animate tree tried to counterattack.
For whatever good that would do him.
Frost spread from the stump of the digit down the monster tree’s hand, withering leaves and feathering white crystals along moss as it went. A digging, clawing finger broke off next to the one he’d cut, snapping from the embrittled cold that seeped into it, but that was all the defense the thing offered. He stepped into another cut, this time taking a deep slice into its side, where its floating ribs would be if it had any. Blossoming feathers of frozen greenery spread from the cut.
A hissing roar issued forth, but, while he stood close to the creature, it appeared to lose the majority of its remaining vitality, growing limp. The green mania behind that cyclopean gaze was dimmed compared to before.
“Okay then.” Alexander commented and plunged the naginata deep into the monster’s upper back, with a tight grip on the weapon.
That was a mistake. The spasm of the monster’s bulk, driven by fifty-six Might, whipped the young man through the air, slung by his grip on the staff. Fingers tore loose from the haft, and the Entling’s dying gasp was enough to hurl him twenty feet into a bruised pile. Battered by his aborted flight, Alexander raised himself up gingerly and saw that the weapon named Winter’s Breath was aptly dubbed.
Frost covered the still form’s back, refusing to yield to the sun’s light overhead, and mist poured away from where the spear stood buried in the creature.
Alexander approached and pulled his creation free, noting that the monster’s status now declared it dead, its mana dissipated, its life-force depleted by the force of the cold magic that had inundated it.
He had to wonder what the limits of his weapon were, at that point. It hadn’t exhibited any real decrease in its emission of cold, not that he could determine, but there had to be an upper bound. For all he’d learned these past months, he didn’t know all the rules to this new world, let alone be able to predict the behavior of enchanted weapons.
As usual, it would be up to him to sit down and do some testing to find the boundaries of what was possible.
Even dead, the Tree-creature was a massive thing, and its corpse was that of a newly fallen tree, tough bark, solid wood, and impervious to his belt knife. Alexander turned to the short sword made as a trial run for Winter’s Breath. That jacketed silver and high steel parted the wood with effort. It was like using a good, sharp, hook knife to cut away at pine. The blade shaved away material, but you still had to work at it to make progress.
It took almost half an hour to dig out the monster tree’s core. Alexander didn’t understand what forces permitted walking rocks and trees to move with such apparent ease, but he didn’t like it. What if there was a titanium golem running around out there? There wasn’t a weapon in his arsenal, other than maybe the Chaos strike magic, that could put a dent in something like that.
“Don’t think about it, Little Falcon,” He cautioned, “Problems enough to solve without inventing hypothetical unstoppable demons.”
A verdant core mixed with something darker, like deep green peridot interspersed with stars of smoky quartz. Its shimmer, the facets that caught and reflected light so cleanly, was enthralling. After a few more moments to appreciate the trophy of his hunt he stashed the gem in his satchel, dusted off the leaves and mud that he’d picked up in his accidental flight, and carried on. There were more monsters about, and Alexander Gerifalte was ready to be on with thinning the herd.
Nothing presented itself the rest of that fine spring afternoon. Across one ridge, down a heavily wooded valley, and halfway up the next he made before turning and retracing his path to return home.
On his way, Alexander used his fine short sword to beaver chew his way through the Entling’s knee and ankle. Sticky sap, pungent tannins mixed with the sweet note of syrup got all over his hands and clothes, the blood of the monster thickening in its phloem. Veins. Whatever. He almost laughed when he went to pick it up, just the Tree monster’s calf had to weigh some five hundred pounds. A little more chiseling of wooden monster and he had himself hefty sample of the Entling’s corpse.
What secrets would the sap and flesh of a living tree offer? Charcoal that burned hot as anthracite coal? A walking stick that grew apples? He entertained himself on his walk home musing over ever more outlandish impossibilities.
It took three days of backbreaking work to chop the Entling into pieces small enough to be moved back to his Laboratory. Preliminary investigation proved the effort more than worth the price paid by his back and legs.
The sap of the creature, a shot glass full, mixed with two thirds clay, a third bog peat potting soil, and some loose gravel in a wheelbarrow sprouted weeds almost before he finished mixing it. Amazed at the growth, literally before his eyes, Alexander scrambled to drag aluminum raised bed frames to his home and dumped the wheelbarrow of what appeared to be hyper soil. He planted a six-foot row of corn kernels, sunflower seeds, wheat, tomatoes, and hot peppers, six inches apart from each other. Too close together in normal circumstances, but Alexander was testing the compatibility of the seeds here, not upscaling to a full crop.
Drinking a thimble full of sap gave him a sugar high and he didn’t eat anything the entire rest of the day. So. Some kind of incredibly nutritious substance, jam packed with…life. Or something. Whatever the case, after a rush of heat not unlike a strong whiskey, only infinitely better tasting, Alexander’s Durability rose by three and his Might by two. The changes were felt immediately, and, for the rest of that day, he remained awash in the sensation of being more solid, more firmly rooted to the ground he walked. Very appropriate for magic tree blood, he had to admit.
Not all magic was bad, just the stuff that wanted to kill him. And whatever had killed everyone he knew. Moving along, Alexander, don’t make yourself sad.
The wood was just wood, it turned out. Granted, it was beautiful, vibrant maple color, hard as aged oak, and patterned with braided grains almost reminiscent of corded rope, incredibly tough in multiple directions, which was why cutting it apart was damned near impossible without the assistance of the golem steel tools he’d made. He’d have to put making a big broad bitted felling axe out of some of the precious material on his to do list. Alexander realized that he’d need wood for next winter’s fires. Another chore. Damn.
Anyhow, Entling wood was sure to be tough as hell and sturdy, whatever he decided to do with it. Maybe he could make a long bow out of it. The thought of a dwindling supply of bullets, whose effectiveness grew somewhat more dubious the more magical horseshit Alexander encountered, meant he’d have to work out a replacement for his work horse firearms. Problem was, he didn’t know how to shoot a bow. A crossbow? Sure, it was pretty much the same idea as a gun. But archery had never been his thing. Why bother when you can shoulder a rifle and do so much more? The fates had many such jokes for the attitudes of Alexander’s innocent youth.
Alexander brushed the sweat from his brow and re-gripped the draw knife he was using to peel paper thin layers of Entling finger held locked in table vises. He had a thousand or so shavings littering the floor and was about halfway through the finger. The plan he had in mind was to make a cross-grained plywood from the material. Most of the corpse was drying in a kiln one of his neighbors had used for cabinet making, a hobby he’d been entirely unaware of and only learned about in his excursions snooping about for supplies.
The young man had learned much of which he’d been ignorant regarding the former residents of his hometown and found himself with greater empathy toward them than before. Mostly. Some of the discoveries had explained a great deal about his classmates, and the failures of modern society to protect its young. Anyway.
He had plenty of Yeti bones to boil down and his plan was to render down bone glue from the Yeti’s bones and sinews. From the boiled bone he would skim away the fatty scum, treat with hydrochloric acid to demineralize the bone, then alkaline bath to neutralize. Once dry, if he did it right, he’d get a brittle solid that would still flex under gentle pressure and absorb cold water, instead of dissolving.
If it worked, Alexander figured he could soak the shavings in glue and create layers of laminated wood in big molds or frames, which would make sheets of a material that would be far tougher than the soft woods of his current dwellings. That concept seemed important, now that he’d encountered ogres, golems, and Entlings that could rip through a house with impunity. The unease of sleeping knowing that any sufficiently large monster could just tear his home apart to get to him was not to be discounted.
Late that afternoon, when he’d finished shaving down the fingers of the tree monster, Alexander stashed the immaculate wisps of wood in books, to both dry and keep straight the pieces, and stacked them to keep them pressed flat. By the time his glue was done, he reckoned he’d be able to try a test run of about a six-by-six piece of monster plywood, a good quarter inch thick.
His project lists abounded, and he hurried over to the test plot to confirm that, indeed, tree monster infused food was more than simply viable. Strong, tall, stems with picture perfect leaves were already risen, lush and healthy as a greenhouse on all the crops he tested. They looked close to flowering, which was unbelievable to him, since that shouldn’t have been possible for at least a month.
The tanning pits were, as per the usual, absolutely vile, and he only hung around long enough to confirm that nothing was rotting in the bating compound made from Yeti pancreas and, unfortunately, his own stool. Needs must when devil drives. He had four pits for four Yetis, one pancreas only, one stool only, one fifty-fifty split, one seventy-thirty split in favor of the pancreas. It was too small to be a proper test group, but Alexander was pretty certain he could, at least, tease out some reliable knowledge from the process.
Returned from his morning hunt, which had come up empty, his afternoon manufacturing tasks, which were fruitful but slow, and his evening experiments with destroying materials with Chaos strikes or stretching the Entropic field as far as he could, Alexander was content. In the corner of his bedroom, clamped in a jig to keep its form from warping while it dried, sat a bow stave made from Entling thigh. A string of braided Yeti Achilles tendon hung from the jig, waiting for its chance. There was a nonzero chance that Alexander Gerifalte, with his pitiful human body, would be unable to draw the bow.
Speaking of, the boon of the Entling’s blood was no small thing. As nearly as he could tell, the increase in his Might did equate to about a seventeen percent increase in his relative strength. Durability remained to be tested. That one he could go roughly forever without finding out about, thanks very much.
Mid-April arrived, without fanfare.
Alexander was picking corn, placing the fat kernelled ears into a wicker basket for shucking later. His larder was prodigious with tomatoes, peppers, and more or less anything he could put into the hyper-soil created from the blood of the jolly wooden giant. No more had he discovered on his hunts, although a host of other less overtly dangerous creatures had crossed his paths. Mutant raccoons that traveled in packs of a dozen, their black and white pelts somehow blurring their appearance, like camouflage, that had been fun. He’d had to regrow a foot, when the monsters managed to bury him beneath the weight of their numbers. Only the incredible sharpness of his short sword blade let him fight clear of the beasts. Out from under the pack, at reach, where his naginata, picked up from where he’d dropped it when they tackled him, was best served, he’d easily dispatch them. Bisected, frozen, or otherwise mangled pelts had been worth nothing and they tasted foul, not even worth cooking.
The little cores did make a powder that could create a blurring effect when applied to cloth though, so he had a wolf fur cloak impregnated with the stuff that seemed to ripple and blend with the background. Not quite “The Predator” level stealth, but damned tough to spot against the backdrop of the forest. That had come in handy against wolves, a panther, a different kind of bear, whose fur was like tiny razor blades, and an eagle as big as a pickup truck that had come very close to snatching his head off his shoulders in a wicked dive. The cloak caused it to misjudge the distance and merely tear his arm nearly off.
Alexander hadn’t managed to get a shot off, so shocked and violent was the attack. The eagle was still out there.
Basket full, a bushel of corn leaning against his hip, Alexander gasped when he saw a dozen vaguely humanoid shapes shambling down the main street of his domain. The young man dropped the food and hustled down to his Laboratory.
From the mannequin that held his motorcycle gear inspired light armor, Alexander did don the gear for joining battle. The things he’d seen had been straight from a John Carpenter flick, zombies, shells of the deceased, each bearing ragged clothing and most clutching some crude improvised weapon. Golf clubs, baseball bats, crowbars, a rake, that sort of thing.
The trusty old rifle he took with him, an instrument that had seen precious little use since completing his enchanted spear. It was safer to stab a pouncing panther than to shoot it, the frozen magic of the spearhead put them down harder than two hundred grain bullets. Against a mob of the undead though, he might find better use for the familiar weapon.
Wrong.
Alexander lined up an easy head shot, bench rested from a neighbor’s porch. A practiced squeeze of the trigger, a booming report, and a zombie head blew half apart. And the creature continued on unphased.
“Goddamned lying movies.” Huffed the young man, nervously.
Next plan.
A coffee can stuffed with gunpowder and nails rolled down the street into the midst of the horde, spark spitting fuse burning fast. The explosion slung shrapnel that ripped into bodies and blasted apart a few of the…juicier specimens. Those that lost limbs fell, but continued trying to crawl to join the others in their single-minded pursuit.
Only the ones that had had their spines almost completely destroyed were down for good. Whatever magic animated them was potent and cloying, Alexander thought he smelled the dry odor of a crypt when an errant breeze passed toward him.
Alexander cut loose with a Chaos strike next, and was rewarded when the zombie’s chest sprouted black-grey flame and the animated corpse fell immediately, never to rise. Snaking black mist rose from the destroyed zombie and dissipated. Alexander knew what had to come next, and he did not anticipate enjoying it.
Entropic aura blossomed from him, stretching fifteen feet in radius around him. The not so newly minted venator rushed forward, Winter’s Breath ready to redead the horde. When his magic disrupting aura closed over the constructs they froze, staggered, and clearly had trouble coordinating their motions. Whatever link to the will that directed these creatures, and directed they were, else they would not have randomly come to his town in the middle of nowhere, it struggled to manifest through his ability.
Winter’s Breath slashed in a wide arc, whirled by Alexander’s strong arms. The white, curved blade, High Steel wrapped in silver left smoking wounds that then froze over in dense feathers of ice. Doubly effective, he removed limbs cleanly with most strokes, like shearing silk with scissors. The danger was in getting surrounded, he knew that intuitively. An individual monster wasn’t so threatening. Having no room to maneuver and getting swamped was fatal though, and mama Gerifalte had raised no fool.
Sweeping a half moon low, taking several legs from the ever-closing group, Alexander retreated. Not too far, however. The longer the creatures stayed within proximity to his debilitating aura, the denser the wafting black pall that steamed off of them, the clumsier they became. Thirty seconds into this high-stakes game of keep away the first zombie collapsed, its unearthly life-force corroded away. Within a minute, the rest of the things succumbed to his influence, each releasing that same umbral smoke.
Panting lightly, more from nerves than real exhaustion, Alexander couldn’t help but shake his head looking at the mostly badly rotted corpses. Necromancy. The other, even more horrifying thought didn’t dawn on him immediately. Something tickled his brain, screaming that he was missing a key detail. Studying the bodies in their derelict clothing, he suddenly realized what it was: these were not statues.
The zombies were flesh, not stone. These people had survived whatever had petrified his parents and townsfolk. That, or the Pulse had manifested different effects in different areas. Alexander didn’t think that was the case, at all. He had a hypothesis that the Pulse had interacted with people’s latent potential for magic. Those that had too little resonance with the mana that rushed through them became stone. Those like him, with enough resistance or strength or something had survived the cresting wave of magic that had, for some reason, surged over the land.
Whatever had made these undead things had killed or obtained the corpses of killed survivors. Joy and sorrow, again. He wasn’t alone. But something was out there slaughtering those that lived by the dozens. Just like the goblins and ogres had eaten the people who made it through in his home town. Damn!
He was amazed at how little risk the group of zombies posed. So long as he saw them coming and had the room to kite them, that is. If he’d been inside when they arrived, if they’d pinned him inside close quarters, he’d probably have been killed within a few moments. What few grasping hands had brushed his spear’s haft had held incredible strength. Amazing what a human body can do when it feels no pain and doesn’t care if it breaks its own bones or tears its own flesh apart with the force of its motions.
It was also a good thing that the dead constructs weren’t fast or agile. For him, given his current weaponry and abilities, he had the hard counters ready to deal with a slow moving group of animate corpses.
“The million-dollar questions Alexander,” he posed to himself aloud, still standing in the street amidst the bodies, “Are how many more are there? And where is the thing that gives them their unlife?”
And therein lie the rub. Time was wasting, he wasn’t getting anything done standing here, so Alexander retrieved his corn and hurried home. It wasn’t until halfway that the shakes set in, vibrating the corn silk loudly against the wicker basket.
He deposited the corn on his kitchen floor, next to the bins containing the other evidence of the Entling’s plenty. From the kitchen he went to the “wine cellar” and poured a glass of a rich red to settle his nerves. The alarm bells would need to be restrung now.
Tomorrow, Alexander resolved, tomorrow he would try to follow the trail of the zombie troop back to its origin. The only weapons he had that were certain were his enchanted spear and anything incendiary he might cobble together. A dozen Molotov cocktails went into his satchel that night. So did a score of little glass cuvettes of white phosphorus in a foam lined bandoleer, fitted into a pouch sewn into the satchel. He only carried them when he thought things might get hairy, afraid to fall and have the things break open. A nitric acid flask joined the collection of alchemical weapons. You just never knew.
Dressed in black motorcycle leathers with matte painted dark green High steel plates riveted through the leather jacket and pants, a wide visored motorcycle helmet similarly reinforced, his spear, short sword, and satchel, with sturdy hiking boots, an eye twisting wolf cloak on over top, Alexander looked ridiculous. Looks didn’t matter so very damned much though, when you were the last man alive, maybe in the whole world.
“Not the whole world.” He reminded himself.
There was proof lying in the street outside that more people had come through the Pulse. More than just his town. If only they still lived through whatever liked to hunt humans, eat them, or turn them into a ghastly horde of meat puppets.
Taking off down the street to backtrack the undead, he pinpointed one of the sources of his anxiety since the Pulse. It wasn’t a good feeling, knowing that humanity now resided several rungs farther down the food chain. Even the plants were higher. He did himself the favor of cutting off that train of thought before contemplations of hostile sand-worms longer than a freight train could further demotivate him.
Back to the problem at hand: Ravening zombies.
They were slow, uncoordinated, lacking in complex movements, and, he had the impression, blind. Or, at least, they didn’t evidence any real response to the stimulus of a live human in front of them other than to try to close in on it and eat them. None of the corpse constructs had flinched or made sign in any way responsive toward gunshots. Neither had they altered their behaviors when stricken by his magical attacks, other than to fall apart. Cuts with Winter’s Breath had not created a pain response or any acknowledgment other than that of suddenly having limbs removed or frozen solid.
The only change in the creatures had manifested under his Entropic aura. It slowed them considerably, weakened their responsiveness, and, if he understood his previous experience correctly, eventually degraded whatever magic compelled them to the point that it failed and they became dead again. It took between three and six minutes of exposure to his influence to reach that ultimate effect. Too long, given how close the things had to be to him to be within the range of the aura.
Alexander kept his eyes focused ahead, noticing the small scuffs of dirt, footprints in mud, and other minute signs that led him along to the source of the zombies. The last Gerifalte did not make good time, he paused frequently to scan ahead and to stop and listen, as well as to examine his surroundings for any indications of threats such as pissed off Tree-folk, Dire wolves, Trolls, or whatever the hell else might try to eat him. Slow progress was still progress, however. Mid afternoon, probably some fifteen miles down the main road that led to town, the south-bearing highway transported him to the next burg’s outskirts.
It was a bigger town, more like a city, where everybody went to do any serious shopping, and Alexander was coming to its outskirts. The same symptoms of humanity’s demise were found in the form of out of control car wrecks, broken statues inside declaring that his suspicions regarding the widespread nature of the Pulse were not unfounded. He ignored the side roads and off-ramps, they just led deeper into the back country, to places like his humble home, and he didn’t need to see any more reminders of what happened to his world.
Besides, the zombie tracks led deeper into the city.
With a start, the young man realized that he wouldn’t be able to make it back to his home, not with the remaining daylight, and Alexander Gerifalte was not repeat NOT going to be hiking his way through the dark. That meant that he would need to keep his peepers peeled for a suitable respite.
Something defensible, something low key…There!
A little ranch style house with brick siding and a long, long driveway led off the main road. It was one of those places very wealthy people who didn’t worry about looking very wealthy tended to gravitate toward. All to its lonesome, private, and impressively cozy. Alexander used his short sword to cut an “X” into the pavement next to the mailbox that led to the planned stopover and tied an orange bandana from his pack to the post holding that metal repository of things important to a world bygone.
Deepening orange light helped the contrast with the zombie marks on pavement and Alexander grew less leery of running into beasts and more concerned that, with increasing population density, there might be more zombies than he was prepared to deal with.
There might, the now cynical youth thought to himself, be an approximate metric shit-ton more zombies than he was prepared to deal with.
All he could do was make his way slowly, pay attention to his surroundings, and be ready to vamoose at a moment’s sign of the situation going to hell.
Most of Alexander was convinced that he would end this day running for his life. So far, ever since losing consciousness inside the cockpit of the trainer plane, that seemed to be the safest, surest bet for the end results of exploring the unknown.
Farther into town he went. The density of homes increased, the evidence of chaos that had descended on the people left behind was obvious: fires had taken homes, shops and stores were looted, and everywhere had the appearance of a desperate flight. Depressingly enough, the shattered remains of statues was a grim reminder of the fate of many, perhaps most, humans. As nearly as Alexander could determine, it looked like about seven in ten of the people had gone the way of his home. Many of their statues remained behind, frozen in place. A greater number had been destroyed, either by the panicked actions of the unpetrified, or by whatever had come after, some echo of the horrors that Alexander had faced.
The difference between his home town’s fall and this city’s extinction became clear a few minutes later. A buzzing along his skin, the raising of hairs, instinctively sensing a wrongness. That was all the warning he got before his forward motion carried him across a line he could not see.
Tech Duinn Contested Space Entered!
It wasn’t as obvious as a big shimmering blue gate, but the entire city had been consumed by some kind of field effect, a divergence from the world of his birth to some warped mirror of it. Just like the silver mine of his hometown had only at surface level remained similar to what he knew, the city of Earth was not any longer. For one thing, clear blue skies that had followed him all the way along his journey were no more. From where he now stood, the entire sky was an oppressive, looming pall of grey. Roiling clouds, just on the cusp of loosing rain flung themselves about on a wind Alexander could not feel.
Rather than the wind, the air along the ground was still, dry, and musty. It smelled like an empty concrete room, long abandoned. Or, he supposed, not having first hand experience, a crypt.
The comparison was probably apt. He was, after all, here to lay to rest whatever was causing corpses to rise and shamble their way to his home. His destination wasn’t a mystery. It wouldn’t take the falcon’s eyes that Alexander bore to see the huge faceted crystal spinning slowly atop the roof of the regional hospital.
Unlike the one in his town, a brilliant azure, this one was a smoky black, swirling grey. Not entirely unlike his chaos magic, but, where his was dynamic crackling with energy, this one felt like a stilling, an ending to motion and change. The crystal was brimming with undeath. Whatever force or plane of being Tirnanog was, it was nothing like the inimical thing that sat on top of the hospital. No wondering now about the zombies.
Now the only mystery was how to find and destroy the will behind this undead place, and how to avoid being eaten by corpses in the meantime.
“Sort of a shame I don’t have a better idea how to do either of those things.” Alexander lamented quietly.
He’d come this far thinking that there was some kind of isolated incident, a church graveyard desecrated by a witch or some such nonsense. A dungeon tying his world to another of the places from which things like goblins sprang was not in his calculations.
Still. He’d come all this way, it’d be a shame to have done that walking for nothing. Besides, the young man contemplated, trying to use logic to build up courage against the foreboding black crystal hanging in the heart of the city, its malignancy palpable all the way from the outskirts, ignoring this shit wasn’t going to make it go away.
One thing he could count on ever since this weird stage of his existence had started, most of his problems seemed to have legs.
Alexander saw a confirmation of his attitude shambling down the street. About thirty former townies, in varying states of decay, were on the move. They were headed his direction, at a pace somewhere between a stately parade and a power walk. Again, his exceptional vision took in the details and he noted that the eyes of the monsterized people didn’t roll, didn’t move, didn’t scan the horizon. The zombies were blind.
So how did they know where he was? Alexander felt no wind, no breeze, nothing stirred but the dead. The constructs couldn’t be smelling him then. He wasn’t moving, hadn’t made much more sound than a few whispers and the brief crunch of boots on pavement since crossing the threshold of the dungeon.
Data was missing. As had become a fact of his life, he didn’t understand the rules in play that dictated how the zombies tracked his position, how they recognized his presence. Was it magic? Not a scent based on molecules carried through the air, but by whatever means the feeling of mana might be sensed? Maybe it wasn’t his body they detected, but his life-force. A slight chill ran down his spine at the idea of something following him by the trace of his living.
The thought of the horde being guided by some force he couldn’t see was disturbing enough, but it didn’t change the reality of the situation: zombies were closing in on him. Alexander had another four minutes or so before they were on top of him and he didn’t like his odds for dealing with that kind of mass of necromantic puppetry in close quarters. If he could somehow kite them and stay in the open though, that was a different story.
Ever since seeing the effect his Chaos strikes and Entropic aura had, he was certain that some amount of good fortune was on his side. Alexander’s powers were exceptionally suited to destroying the forces that kept the zombies animate. If he rationed his strength, he could probably deal with a much bigger group than this one. Entropic imbuement would let him apply that disruptive field to a very concentrated location, amplifying the already scarily potent spear. Silver? Check. Sharp? Check Check. Otherworldly anti-mage powers? Check Check and motherfucking Check.
The last Gerifalte was hell on undead nasties. He just had to play for space and keep himself from getting worn down or surrounded. His class described him as suited for tracking and destroying targets, sort of like assassination. Can you even assassinate something that was already dead? Why not?
“Let’s get it done.” Alexander announced, resolved.
With the street’s layout, the geography of scattered wrecked, alleys, abandoned and destroyed buildings, almost like a 3-D map in his head, Alexander went forth to cleanse the necromantic horde.
No awareness did the zombies display when he activated his skill and a combination of frigid blade and chaos magic began chewing away at their numbers. Within a dozen culled corpses, Alexander saw that he had underestimated how tired he would get hacking apart zombies in bulk.
Take batting practice sometime, a hundred swings doesn’t sound like much, until you’re fortyish in and your arms and back start throbbing.
A lurching husk of what had been a bookish looking woman, her throat opened like some animal had been at her, and half her arm gnawed off, tried to grasp him from the side, while he was recovering from a pretty clean decapitation of a form roughly a few years younger than him by stature. Alexander pulled his shoulder away from the snatching hand, feeling it graze him and he changed tactics. Instead of a broad, cleaving cut, he stabbed the librarian zombie in the chest.
Immediately the corpse crumpled to the ground, frost mist pouring from the wound. It was the spreading wave of black and grey magic that truly did the trick though. The young man stepped back and repeated the thrust into a ratty set of scrubs, stained and sullied by decomposition. The former healthcare worker folded when the anarchic energies unwound whatever precise weave of mana compelled it, sending the man to his final rest.
Faster now, falling into a rhythm, Alexander drove the spear home and gave the undead a final peace, back stepping rapidly all the while to stay at the outer reach of his weapon. The press of bodies began to encircle him and he broke from his waspish stabs to bolt down the street a few yards, both to rest and to keep himself free of the surround.
Half of the corpses remained. They evidenced no response to the loss of their fellows, nor to the flight of the human that some compulsion drove them to slay. Alexander was growing concerned, in spite of the resounding success of his plan. The reason was simple mathematics.
This city had once been home to over twenty thousand souls. If the ratios checked out, sixty percent or so hadn’t come through the Pulse unpetrified. That meant that if even ten percent of the remaining had gone zombie under the influence of the necromantic heart of this corrupted place, he faced over eight hundred of the animate dead. Even at peak efficiency, there was no way he would last long enough to redead that many of the things, assuming that it remained exactly this easy.
A nervous tingle slid down his spine, watching the corpses approach. Where were the rest of them? Were they looping around wide, while these distracted him? That sudden paranoia sent the young man sprinting away from the evident victory before him. He hadn’t gone a quarter mile back into the suburbs before the instinctive sense of danger proved prophetic: there were crowds of ten, twenty, sixty undead shambling along various routes toward him, boxing him in.
Heart in his throat, Alexander pounded down a side street, jumped a few low cul-de-sac fences, and wove free of the containment, hacking down a handful of corpses along the way. His second problem was becoming apparent, when his eyes took in the gilded horizon, the red clouds beautiful against the forests and hills of Maine in its spring. Sunset had come.
It was with great haste that the young man fled the dungeon space, running until he felt the loosening of subtle pressure on his skin when he crossed the threshold of the contested zone to whatever hell that place might be. Free of the place, he spent his stamina in desperate flight, eventually coming to the outskirts and the marker that declared his chosen haven. Alexander stole back the fabric signal and scaled the large iron gate, hoping that whatever guiding force aided the flesh constructs within the influence of the black crystal would not similarly be able to track him from outside.
He tried very hard to ignore the insistent whisper of his innate pessimism that said “How then did they arrive so near to the Lab, eh?”
Quite simply, Alexander had no way to know for certain what moved the zombies or how they were driven. He could outrun them, of that he was now sure. But he couldn’t outlast them, not without some way to prevent their numbers from simply enveloping him in some fortified spot until he starved or ran out of water. If it came to that, the young man would have to hope that he could use his Entropic field to erode the monsters passively until they were diminished enough to break through a gap in their lines.
Not his first choice, compared to not being surrounded at all, but even the most-dour eventualities needed to be considered. Especially the most-dour.
No water ran within the house, not being fed through a suitably elevated water tower, unlike his home. The electrical pumps of the city were, of course, totally shot. Nor was there a creek convenient to this particular shelter. He would have to spend his own water. What it had was the cover of trees from the main road, a tall fence, and long sight lines to see trouble coming. Cursory inspection of the old ranch house found no food that was edible, other than some canned goods. Alexander could prepare those over a small fire instead of from his own supplies, at least.
He found himself frequently popping over to twitch aside the window curtains and stare out into the failing light, searching for any impression of figures that might give him warning that the undead were, in fact, trailing him outside the afflicted region. When nothing registered in his view he returned to slowly simmering a tall, stainless steel pot of canned vegetables, tomato paste, and some rice. Beef bullion that was still good made that improvised vegetable soup into an unexpected treat. It hadn’t even been opened, wonder of wonders.
Deep into the night the pattern of frenetic scouring of the outside from various windows before returning to stuff himself with rich vegetable laden broth. He stacked sturdy furniture against every door and window in the building before climbing the stairs to sleep in the master bedroom, with every good solid, heavy as all shit oak dresser in the well to do owner’s room stacked against that equally solid door. Sleep came slowly and stayed fitfully throughout the long hours of dark.