Tunnel after tunnel there are more carapaces, and I’m beginning to see full corpses. They aren’t exactly like the mite-hulks that I know from Can’Z’aas. Hopefully that means they’re Rayileklian natives, and that we weren’t followed by the queen, or the hyper king. Judging by the various holes in the carapaces, Teuila has definitely been through here, fighting with either spear or sword, and occasionally fist.

Wrath tugs my lips into a wicked grin. Imagining Teuila destroying hostiles, taking it on herself to go deep to protect the kobolds, satisfies my wrath. I’ve got about six blasts worth of power left in the staff, but I’m feeling energized, almost looking forward to entering melee combat with something. Cal- No. No I won’t calm down. I am done with these friggin’ solo adventures, with being alone in my head, with hostility across region after region, across worlds. Things want to threaten and harm others? Then they just die. Period. I’m done. I’m almost certain Teuila is acting on that same feeling. She was likely attacked, and realized the kobolds would be in danger if she just left an open tunnel, or even an obvious collapsed tunnel, for these creatures to travel or dig through.

Hm, I’m still quite a bit more injured than I thought. Perhaps it was adrenaline upon waking up that’s wearing off. I forgot how badly my bones were fractured, shattered, and pulverized. I’m walking around on broken limbs. Crap, no, I can’t give in to pain here. Passing out would be really bad. I might wake up trapped inside an ooze monster that’s dissolving me, or being de-limbed by mite-hulks.

I could probably avoid that fate if I focus for eight minutes, and adopt my own mite-hulk king form. Ugh, do I dare risk letting King out on Rayileklia? What if he bides his time to take over my consciousness? It would take eight minutes to switch forms, to ditch him. I’d, I’d, glp. I’d lose myself. I pant nervously momentarily. I’m quite attached to existing. I’d rather continue to be me as I do it. Inhaling a deep, ragged breath I sigh it slowly through puffed cheeks.

Gazing about the tunnel structure, I’ve been following the right hand wall rule, so I’m not lost, I could turn around and follow that same wall back keeping it on my left side. Still, not being lost isn’t the same as knowing where the heck I am, or where I’m going. I passed plenty of dead ends. I’ll go back to the most recent one. I have to recover. The pain in my broken legs and ankles is building by the moment. How in all the hells did I not notice this pain for this long? Ugh.

Maybe that was the effect of the heart, or maybe Kozzurth’s blood. The Colossi ingested her blood to gain some kind of power, size mostly. Well, also apparently morphing into supernatural beasts and creatures. But it sounds like that took a long period to reach its current state. They kept partaking of the blood to feel safe. Did it dull their pain senses, like my electrokinesis? How often did they drink it? How much got in my mouth compared to the droplets they drank? Am I going to mutate?

My limbs give out and I tumble forward onto my face. During my fall, I smash my aching head against a stony outcropping along the wall, and end up bouncing to the floor. My eyes roll about in their sockets as I inhale another ragged breath. Sighing, I use my core muscles to inchworm my way down the tunnel hall, sliding my face across the stony floor. I’ve always felt safer, and stronger when I’ve had a wall at my back and both sides. Taking on hostiles from one direction is so much easier than being surrounded.

I probably should have felt more comfortable being surrounded later in my life on Can’Z’aas. I’d never done it, but I could theoretically, near the end, go full porcupine, or uh, videogame porcupine anyway. I could conjure enough daggers to basically form a dome around myself, and fire outwards, striking basically anything in a massive radius. Well, area. Each dagger would travel up to the radius.

My right arm twitches, spasms, and seizes. My inner-elbow-pit feels like it’s tearing apart. Huff. Come on Reggie, get it the heck together. Is there anything in the staff that could protect you while you sleep? Oof, yes, sort of. I could unleash an elemental into this realm. Like hell I’d unleash a stone elemental though. Even if there is some sort of coercion in the magic to keep the creature from being hostile immediately. The only air elemental spirit I’d ever known was non hostile, but she couldn’t actually protect me from physical danger. I have terrible, terrible experience with water in tunnels, so I’m not going to remotely risk a water spirit elemental. A lightning elemental just sounds stupidly dangerous, since I died once to lightning already. Well, twice? One in that abandoned timeline. I wonder if mana is an element. What would a mana elemental be like? That sounds potentially catastrophic if it like, animates all of the mana in the realm.

Hm, what about fire? Haha, hahahaha. It’s perfect. I don’t care if it’s hostile. It can sit around blazing atop me as long as it likes. As long as it’s not hotter than lava. Plus, I can just extinguish it if it gets too rowdy. Hell, I could do an old standby, a steam explosion. It’d be rather funny if a water elemental and fire elemental perfectly canceled each other out in the resulting steam explosion. I wouldn’t use a water elemental though, I’d just conjure an ice storm, and let it extinguish itself as it melts the ice. Alright Reggie, let’s do something stupid.

I withdraw the staff, and I allow its magics to flow into my mind where I can pick them apart. The knowledge still is hard to decipher, there are more spells within it that I don’t recognize. I mean, I don’t recognize spells in this fashion at all. What I mean is, there are other spells whose knowledge are still undecipherable to me. It’s like knowing how to say the words to, fire, and cold, in a language, then trying to read the rest of that language. Almost literally, since fireball, sleet storm, and lightning bolt, and some stuff with keys, and the hand, are six of the only spells that I know from it, other than the size-changing spell, the aura-vision, and uh, not sure if there are any others. Not sure what the key ones are about. I think there’s a spell to lock things without a key, and another spell to unlock things without a key. When I conjured up the idea of animated elements though, the staff tried to let me know about one of its spells.

Alright, yes, this spell is definitely an elemental spirit conjuring spell. My jaw quivers as I pant, nervously, and in pain. This is risky, and dumb Reggie. I know, I know. Do you want to pass out here with no protection? No. No I don’t. Alright, here goes a bit more drain on the staff’s power. It’ll absorb and refine the mana from the air over the course of the night, hopefully refilling. It’s a tad random how much it refills. I inhale a deep slow breath, and slowly exhale it through puffed cheeks. Tapping into the staff, I reach into some other universe, some parallel dimension, and I offer my hand, figuratively. I try to entice a fire elemental specifically. I avoid cool or wet sensations, and once I feel the bright heat, I withdraw my senses back to this universe, pulling the spirit along for the ride. It manifests as a vaguely humanoid series of flames.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

I stare blankly at it, waiting for it to act, but it does nothing. I glance side to side, hoping nobody sees me in my foolish attempt. I know no one sees me, but this is embarrassing. I casted a new spell, and seem to have succeeded? Failed? I have no idea. I inch upwards against the corner of my dead end, flopping into a seated position to rest against the wall.

Lamely addressing the flame, I ask, “Would you possibly be willing to watch over me in my sleep? If something attacks me, could you try to drive it off?”

The fiery form doesn’t answer, but it takes a seated position, mirroring me, in the other corner of the dead end. I guess we have an accord, or something. I can’t fight unconsciousness any longer though. I shove my staff back into its miniature holster and allow myself to pass out.

Wait, he’s releasing a new book in that series, and doing a live action film? I loved those characters. The total girl power strong female lead was great. The romance was a little awkward to deal with, since they were teens for the first couple books, then the whole apocalypse scenario was sorta crazy, a meteor and flooding of the entire planet except like, one synthetic island or something? I wonder where he can even go from there. I mean, it started off low sci-fi, just some genetic engineering and like, limb-grafting. It was mostly kind of like a sneaky escape survival drama. Then suddenly there’s telepathy, morphing, and an apocalypse on the horizon that she didn’t believe in. Still, she was a pretty great main character most of the time, despite the weird direction the series took. Hell, I’d have reacted the same way being told I have a genetically perfected partner to repopulate with. Yuck, gross. Hm, still, I definitely want to see the movie. Hopefully I remember it around its release date. Same with the next book. Ah well, might as well close this tab and get back to work.

Ugh, Zee Sharp is such a pain to program in. Ah well, at least I’m just being paid to debug. Yeah, semicolon there dude. Let’s see if it compiles and runs properly now. Pft, hah. Oh man, poor client. Ugh, I almost hate that I need the cash from this sort of stuff when it’s sometimes this easy. Other times though, it’s like I have to learn a whole new set of concepts, dig through entirely new knowledge to fix stuff. I can charge a bit more for those ones, but I can’t really afford to charge less than my minimum for a job. Ugh, it makes me feel like such a dick. Y’know?

And sent. Well, fudge. I honestly thought, by his description, that the job would be one of those crappy ones that takes me days of learning new stuff to fix. Or well, at least a few hours. Hm, I wonder if I could just pop stuff into a text editor, and replace any line break with/without preceding semicolons, with a line break after a semicolon. Huh, yeah, pretty simple, even if the text editor doesn’t have a natively strong enough find replace function. Could script it. Hell, I could do it in a little HTML box on a self-hosted slash local host webpage. I should really do that later if it turns out my tee ee doesn’t have it natively in the find-replace function.

Well, now what? I’ve had this flick on for background noise, but there’s been almost no noise at all for a while now. I’m not sure I even want to keep watching this movie, all first person perspective, all the time, and the main character just went to sleep next to like some weird fire monster. It was silent so much during all those times the emm cee was alone. Like, I dunno, hire a narrator or something. The dragon fight was kind of cool, I don’t think any movie I’ve ever heard of has set the fight inside a dragon’s throat, especially not in first person view. The spinning though was kinda sickening and dizzying. Yeah, screw it, I’m sure the main character gets woken up by something and kicks its ass, or wakes up and goes to find their partner and the little blue guy. I’ll just bookmark this timestamp in case I ever feel like finishing it.

Alright, I guess let’s put our vitality pet on. We can get in a jog. Wait, what’s this? Disaster alert? It’s showing up on ALL my devices. Alright, let’s switch on the news. Huh, isn’t she like, some DC anchor? Yeah, she won like, an award or something that showed up on the main news sites. Something about journalism integrity or something, exposing lies in the news media or something.

She’s saying, “We bring you this breaking news report. As of four PM, a state of national emergency and an exclusion zone with a seven hundred mile radius originating in Chicago Illinois has been placed into effect. Reports coming in claim that even at the edge of the radius, people die nearly instantaneously from what officials are assuming to be potent radiation poisoning. Shielded drones have been dispatched, and we will now bring you live footage of the exclusion zone.”

Holy effing hell. What? No way. This has to be some sort of War of the Worlds stunt. I’m like seven oh four miles or so outta Chicago. Chelsey though, she, crap. I gotta call her, see if she’s in on whatever this is. Come on Chels, pick up. I know you’re awake, we were just party watching cartoons before you were going out for ice cream. It’s only about an hour and a half since then. Come on babe, I know how much you love that ice cream place, you just sit and vibe for hours while snacking all slow-like. Seriously gal. Okay, just, text back or something.

I start to pant nervously, and shut off the tee vee. I scratch my scalp hard as I run my fingers through my hair anxiously. I rock back and forth. What about Chels’s brother? He’s pretty quick about responding to texts, but he doesn’t accept phone calls. Okay, text sent. Maybe if I call, he’ll know to check his text, because of how much I’m freaking out. As I expected, he didn’t pick up, but that’s usual. But not getting a reply back in the first five minutes is not usual. Come on dude. I’m freaking out over here, I just need to know you guys are okay.

I gotta cycle out there and check this out, hm, should I take the Suzuki? No, let’s just bicycle, Chelsey doesn’t like the noise of the Suzuki. I swear I’ve had it noise adjusted as quietly as it can get without affecting exhaust backup. It’s way quieter than any biker with a big hog. It’s one of the lowest cee cees still considered a full on motorcycle, tiny engine block. Ugh, it’s like eleven miles on the road, but like fifteen to twenty on the bike trails. Actually, heck with it, I can get there five times faster on the Suzuki. This prank is just too nerve-wracking.

Kick starting my bike, I take off northeast towards Chi-town. I know I shouldn’t, but I’m doing like fifty in the thirty five. It opens up to a county highway just a ways down, it’s fifty five over there. No cops as far as I can tell. Hell, I’d show them the DVR of the news broadcast. They’d probably consider that a state of emergency, right? I mean, seriously. A legitimate news source claiming a nuke went off at the windy city!? Alright, county on over to the interstate bypass on-ramp. Wow, this traffic is backed up. Good thing my bike is this small, offroading and shoulder-hugging aren’t too hard. Still, I’m going a lot slower on the interstate than I expected to be.

Wait, is, is that like a thirty car pileup? What the everliving hell? There, oh my god. There’s, there’s people, just, just bodies. They’re all kinda glowing. Is that radiation? They’re weirdly grouped together, like, like some sort of invisible line. Paramedics are rushing through towards the pileup. Wait, is that Josh? I’d better not distract him. Saving lives is more important than my paranoia.

What. What. Just. Happened. They, they just stopped. Josh crumpled, dropped like a rock. He, he just tried to cross to the other side of the bodies to check pulses or something. He, he just. No. I’ve known him for decades. I don’t think I’ve ever had an anxiety attack before, a panic attack, whatever thingies are, the uh, non neurotypical crowd stuff. Now I feel like a dick for not looking up more of the stuff that my friends go through, because I’m pretty sure I’m hyperventilating and losing my shiz.