Did you ever see the Terminator? Not the new shitty one, but the old one where Schwarzenegger fights the liquid metal version himself, the blob terminator? That’s what’s currently wrapped around my arm, trying to eat me molecule by fucking molecule. If not for my blend of exotic sorceries, I’d already be dead, and as of right now, I was in the process of dying. Even with my flesh sorcery deadening my nerves, the amount of pain coming through lighting up my brain was staggering. My earth sorcery was actually keeping it at bay and my consciousness sorcery was well, keeping me conscious, but it was also picking up the barest signal from the unfriendly blob. Same. Consume. Become. Meld. One.

My sheer surprise allowed my attacker to gain another inch on my arm. My right arm, my favorite arm, my writing hand, my pointing hand, throwing arm, was being devoured by a mother-fucking blob! Another surprise hit me from the other arm. The left arm gauntlet of Svalinn thrummed and pulsed, sending a wave of emotion and intent up into my brain. It was much louder than its competitor.

EAT! CONSUME! DEVOUR! DOMINATE!

Rath’s disembodied voice, the vessel of his instincts, roared through me. Even though his mind was long gone, his barren soul was in Svalinn, and it was angry. Dragons don’t get eaten. Dragons do the eating. And nothing should ever beat that which was able to beat a dragon, which was me. Raw indignation and pride swelled from Svalinn to me creating a tangential bridge of emotional power. Focusing my several mental processes on keeping the blob at bay, I grabbed onto my connection with Svalinn and pulled some of the power from my gauntlet shield in a way that I had never done before. Normally, my batteries and Gungnir are power sources, and Svalinn was the dedicated shield, but make no mistake. Svalinn contains more power than both of those tools combined. Svalinn contains the disembodied soul of a dragon along with its devouring nature. Its main purpose is to swallow as much energy as possible from enemy attacks and divert what it cannot intake. And right now, was the perfect time to utilize its last ditch functions. 

Power from a fire dragon is not something that I honestly wanted to handle as its nature is literally the opposite of my own, but I needed the raw power with the hungry nature of it right now. Pure animal rage powered through me as Svalinn’s stored energy ran across my body from my left arm gauntlet through my chest, skipping around the heart, and down my right arm. Red mana clashed with silver pseudopods in the battleground of my flesh. The somewhat consumed part of my arm almost disconnected in the initial clash, the metallised bone flexing out and bending like a freak of nature gone really wrong. Screaming with agony, trying to endure the sheer violation of what was happening, I called to Gungnir through our blood bond. 

My oldest and most reliable weapon flew from the table and slapped into my right hand, the solid wooden shaft met silvery skin through the blob. If blasting this problem with raw power from one side wasn’t enough to deal with this issue, then what was a real man to do other than hitting it with raw power at the same time from another side? I’m a smart guy, but not very complex. Brute strength fixes most issues, and if it doesn’t, then obviously you’re not brute forcing it hard enough. 

Gungnir’s pulse of pure white energy cannoned into the blob from one side as Svalinn’s hungry wave of power tore into the very fabric of the armor blob cube from the other side. As the opposing energies turned the tide, doing to the blob what it was doing to me, the ingrained enchantments holding the blob together began to fall apart. Now that it was under an incredible amount of distress and no longer shielded, my mana sorcery actually had a chance to read the basic enchantment structure of the cube blob. It wasn’t just a super cool suit of liquid metal magitech armor, which I knew now due to its less than friendly actions, but it was a form of control. Embedded deep in the nanobots was a kind of mind control enchantment that screamed “Evil”. Little runes that projected a mental image of tightly wound chains glowed red to my magical senses. 

Envisioning an angry dragon’s maw chomping at the bars of a cage, I channeled that image, that will into the current of Svalinn’s power, giving a focus to the constant firehose of raw energy. 

“Life is a lemon and I want my money back!” I scream-sang at the top of my lungs, adding my own power to the torrential outpouring of agony that was my right hand. When in doubt, Meatloaf always has the right lyrics.

The mystical chain symbols shattered as the armor cube bent to implacable waves of power. Before the entire thing liquified, I grabbed the twisted concept of the armor, the broken chains part, and shoved my will into it. It felt like making Gungnir for the first time, the outpouring of myself with my intention of making it mine, reclaiming that which was broken and forging anew. Gungnir and Svalinn, attached as they were to me, held the blob together with magic as my desire overwrote the inherent runic controls of the nanotech armor. Almost as quickly as the entire ordeal started, it was over. The metal stopped trying to eat me and became as obedient as a scared child. 

My flesh sorcery kept on working overtime, fixing the destroyed cells, but now it was hurriedly regenerating most of my hand that had been subsumed by the armor. Taking a second to stop Gungnir and Svalinn from pumping more energy into me, I established a mana-feed from the kinetic-river energy matrix to keep me going and fill up my equipment. The blob that was the armor cube reformed into an armor cube bit by bit as my own flesh regenerated. It was like watching the liquid Terminator dude reform himself, the silver sheen of the metal turning flesh colored as biology reasserted itself and technology taking the back seat.

Plopping my ass down on the cold stone floor, my entire body shook as I held that cube. I almost just died. And it would have happened too if I didn’t have stupid amounts of power in random areas on call. Nothing from Reeanth’s memories indicated that a simple nanotech armor cube would be the freaking blob from hell in disguise. My hand still shaking, I extended out a tendril of magic just barely touching the cube.

Contact established. Recalculating logic/language parameters. Previous directives overriden . . . . Scanning . . . . Scanning . . . . Dominance protocols adjusted. New host overrides genetic recalibration. Attempting to establish contact with Authoritative Directive Source. Failure . . . Magus Collective does not apply to current host. Alpha Centauri Sorcerer Killer protocol overriden and replaced. 

What, the actual fuck? 

Sexual activity between biologicals and automatons was banned in Collective Era prior to the invasion of the Hive. Reporting attempted crime per protocol 80324, ERROR! Does not apply. New host has overriden genetic recalibration and Dominance protocols. Highest authority established due to overwhelming power. Subspecies of fire drake detected, instrumental in breaking down of Hierarchical Order structure. 

[No! You stupid thing, I’m not trying to have sex with you! The word ‘fuck’ is slang!]

It was talking to itself, and me. My armor was talking. Fuck my luck, wasn’t Gungnir enough? Didn’t I put up with enough sentient items with their own opinions? Once was enough in my book. 

Previous orders have been made obsolete. Directive?

Now that’s more like it.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Swallowing a ration cube to help provide more biological materials for my flesh sorcery to work with, I considered my options. Are the rules of artificial intelligence at play here, or was that a bunch of bullshit that humans came up with to help out science fiction writers? Ehh, who cares.

[Directive one. All orders issued by me have the highest priority. Directive two. There is no overriding authority to orders given by me. Directive three. Your primary purpose is to function as armor for me. Directive four. Do not reveal yourself as an entity that can communicate in any way. Clarifying principle, do not talk to or communicate with anything other than me in any way unless I direct otherwise. Directive five. You will not harm or bring harm to me or my tools unless directed by me. End of directives at this time.]

Directives received. Communication and interspatial communication abilities have been disabled. Weapon settings placed on standby. Storage mode, activated. 

With a shimmer, the liquid look of the nanotech cube hardened into a solid block of metal. Setting it down on the table, I went back to my seat on the floor ten feet away. Several chills ran the back of my spine as the idea of the end hit me. If shit kept up at this pace, making it past a year in the apocalypse doesn’t look good, let alone the couple thousand years so see my damn woman. Fuckin’ hell man, this shit ain’t good. Wish I could hibernate inside of a damn cave for a slice of eternity and come out all bright eyed and bushy tailed chock full of enough power to fight a damn god. Which is what my fiance will be able to do if she can get there. It would make me feel better if I could build a damn fortress around her tree, but now I’m getting off topic. She’s way better set up to stand the test of time than I am right now. 

A nagging feeling began to poke at me. It said that I don’t know enough, or anything for that matter. The Greeks had a saying ‘know thyself’, which many people took as an excuse to not do anything with their lives because they were always on a journey to get to know themselves. I feel that my circumstances warrant such an excursion though, how many other humans go through the kind of roller-coaster ride such as my own? Be it far from me to make light of the fact that billions of humans were kidnaped by aliens. 

The act of mediation is more than saying ‘Kumbaya’ or ‘ooooommmm’ while sitting in the dirt. My fiance was a big fan of meditating every day, using ten minutes or so to sit in the quiet and ponder the events of the day, mulling over good and bad decisions while making sure that she was at peace with it all. Me, I never could sit still physically doing nothing for that long. It ate at me in the worst way, the quiet, the lack of activity. Maybe me and myself didn’t really get along, but now there’s a bit more to me than there used to be. Now, I have magic. 

Taking hold of the bit of inspiration that hit me, the energizing insight that provided a bit of motivation, I ran to the table and snatched the armor cube up. Going back to my spot near the generator, I set the cube in front of me and arranged Gungnir so that it was laying across my lap while Svalinn, both gauntlets of it, was in contact with my staff. Not liking the setup, I scooted forward until the cube, which was roughly six inches across every dimension, was touching my leg as I sat Indian style. Now that a part of me was touching all of my gear, I closed my eyes and centered my focus on my magic. This was the part of me that could be active without my body literally doing anything. This is what could make mediation useful for me. The very act in and of itself is supposed to be relaxing, the whole ‘breathe in, breathe out’ mantra, but the excitement mixed with inner turmoil was making this hard.

Grasping at my flesh sorcery, I forced my body to slow down, for my breathing to smooth out and the kinks in my muscles to loosen, and while that evened out, I used my consciousness sorcery to forcefully put aside the unnecessary thoughts that interfered with the required peace of mind. Ten minutes of manipulating my internal chemistry later, my inner mindscape came into view complete with the magical soul-tree of my sorceries and the projections of my equipment at its feet or roots. The glowing eyes of my magic stared at me, a question in its eyes.

“Yes,” I answered, knowing where this was going. “We’re making a new friend here.”

A translucent brown root picked up Svalinn in its united shield form while another picked up staff-form Gungnir. The silver cube sat directly at its feet, unmoving and still.

“That’s the one. It’s armor, or, it should be. Think of it as a seed cause I’m pretty sure that magitech nano-bots can be anything we want.”

The dirt under the cube lifted it up until it was at eye level with my soul-tree. Dirt tendrils popped out of the mound of earth and flipped it around so it could be examined from another angle.

“No dummy, it’s not a fucking rubix cube,” I said, facepalming. Reaching forward, I put my ethereal finger on the cube and injected a bit of will into it. 

Integration at the Quasi-Proton level requested?

“No!” I shouted at the cube. “You don’t do shit! Sit there and shut up! Tree! Establish dominance over the cube!”

I couldn’t let this get out of control. My soul-tree was supposed to subsume the magitech, treating it like the other tools. It would be seriously bad news for me if it happened the other way around. Luckily for me, I’m pretty sure that Svalinn and Gungnir already did most of the heavy lifting anyways. 

The manipulated pedestal of earth upon which the magitech cube sat quivered as my soul-tree stared at the weird display. I almost couldn’t believe it, this scene looked like something out of a wet dream from a hobo tripping on acid. I even felt like all I could do was watch, but bull-fucking-shit to that. This is my body, my mindscape, my tools, and my fucking soul-tree. I can do whatever the hell I want, and that includes balls to the wall improvisation.

“Alpha Centauri armor cube, what is your inherent designation?”

Project Living Armor designated the production line as ‘Flexible Shield’. All other labels are personalized per the Freewill Subversion Protocol. As the named owner, said designation is subject to change. All protocols have been disassembled and no longer apply. 

It needs a name huh? Fine. “Your new designation is ‘SAW’. It is an acronym for ‘Swiss Army Wall.”

Designation ‘Swiss-Army-Wall: SAW’ accepted. Primary directives applied. Integration at the Quasi-Proton level requested?

There’s that unnerving question again. Quasi-Proton? What the fuck is that, I mean, is that the techo-speak for ‘soul’? It would make sense as it’s right next to the magical incarnation of my soul and all of its elemental power. Uhhhhhh, I hate not knowing the exact right answer, but c’est la vie bitches. 

“Request denied. Stand down. New directive: accept all changes and integrations as initiated by the Quasi-Proton entity. Living Armor unit now known as SAW is directed to take a supporting role in the unification.”

Directive received. Supporting role assumed in line with new primary and secondary directives. Sub-molecular wavelength detecting . . . . detecting . . . . identified. Sub-protonic particulate structure detecting . . . .  detecting . . . . identified. Integration paths identified. Directive required.

Yup, still not smart enough to understand what any of that meant. Best guess though, the damn thing is ready.

“Define ‘Integration Paths’. What does that mean?”

Mutable structure of SAW allows for multiple options in accordance with unique Sorcery-based structure. Option 1, Living Weapon.

A small image appeared in front of me, a mini-blob at my feet, defending me like a personal attack dog. It bounced around and broke down numerous small enemies while shooting small needles of liquid metal.

Option 2, Living Shield.

The image changed to me in my normal set of gear, but with liquid metal octopus arms extending from my back and shoulders acting like shields to deflect all kinds of attacks. Each arm moved as if it were water, molding itself to catch thrown projectiles and smack away people trying to engage in melee combat.

Option 3, Hidden Shield.

The scene shifted to me walking in the woods, and my skin shifting tones to blend perfectly into the background. The image of me skulking through the woods was hard to follow until I jumped out at my prey, many spikes of metal goring the beast.

Option 4, Shifting Runes.

The image again shifted, but it was just me in my armor, chillin. “SAW, explain Option 4. I don’t see anything.”

Shifting Runes is a tool enhancement feature.”

“That doesn’t tell me anything. Break it down.”

Selecting Shifting Runes as an option will eliminate the other options. Shifting Runes functions as an energy transference network between enhanced objects. Projections calculate that this will be the most efficient use to Authoritative Host. All tools in use will have improved energy conductivity. All shielding functions will have adaptive runic scripts. All weapons will have mana divergence capabilities for combat overflow. 

The image of me shifted to mini-me defending myself from a magical blast in slow-motion. Svalinn was out, catching the fireball, and just before it hit, a thin metal covering morphed to have runes of ice, countering the fireball. Another shift and mini-me was projecting a blast of raw mana at a forest fire and a small bit of metal shifted to runes of water, allowing the raw mana to have characteristics of water and put out the fire. I had to have it. This could actually be the solution to my personal weakness against the Hungry Ones!

“SAW. Select Option 4!”