I can’t believe it. The little, I mean big, SHIT brushed me off! My fucking dog told me ‘no’. It’s definitely a word he’s familiar with but to actually hear it from his mind directed at ME? My mental command hit a wall of sheer joy and unrestrained happiness that was disgusting, revolting, sickening. Grabbing our link with a vitriol only a rejected owner could muster, I peeked at what could make him act like a puppy who got in the snacks, children. He was playing with children. Running through the happy memories because Spot simply didn’t care if I wandered his mind, I looked at the events of the past day.
Hide, hide, watch, ball? Stick? Am seen, play? Small humans play? Stick, woof, stick! WOOF! STICK! PLAY! JOY! FETCH! Small humans . . . too big, be small, self be small, like small humans! Play now? Afraid? No, joy, happiness, small woofs. Run, can’t catch, play!
His running mental monologue was simple but the accompanying images almost broke my heart. He had been caught watching by some of the children as they played with makeshift balls and swatted at each other with sticks. When stepping out to fetch due to instinct, he had initially scared them due to his size and shrank down to be less frightening. Apparently being small and cute with a wagging tail can make even the adults trust you as they watched the playful dog scamper around fetching all manner of sticks.
[LYRA!] I called, blasting down our thin mental link. [What did I say about staying hidden? That meant Spot too!]
Due to the distance, images more than words were sent, but what I received was a laughing scoff that conveyed, ‘As if I could stop a giant dragon dog from doing whatever the hell he wants’. Fair point, but still fucking annoying. I need that damn dog, I mean, I HAVE SNACKS FOR HIM.
[He can’t fight his nature,] Kraken interjected, giving the feeling of patting me on the back. [Lighten up. Besides, letting Spot ingratiate himself with the group for a bit won’t hurt your chances if you want to say hello. From your memories, people trust other people who have nice dogs. Humans are weird, ya know that? Basing basic suppositions on the disposition of a simple canine.]
[That’s cause you’ve never had a dog,] I shot back. “Guess we’re waiting on that plan for a bit,” I muttered to myself. Figuring that Spot was more than capable of taking care of himself, and since nobody else could blood-bond with him like I did, letting him have fun with the human group for a while wouldn’t harm me or my interests, especially in the long run. I might have been working him too hard and being too close to Yggdrasil is apparently painful for most creatures. Odd to me that I never considered that that might be the source of most of my peace. I’ve been walking on eggshells expecting a helluva lot more incursions and enemies to pop their unwanted heads into my business.
[Kong does a pretty good job keeping most pests away as do the giant birds who patrol the forest,] Kraken interrupted.
“I’m never going to get used to that am I?”
[Nope.]
Rolling my eyes at him even though he wasn’t out of my soul-tree area, I picked up Gungnir and shook it. “You done with my armor yet or what? Sheesh, I thought this would be fast dude.”
[Almost . . .]
“Almost?!” I yelled. I knew that I didn’t have to yell but I felt that the situation warranted just a bit of volume. “You said -”
[I know what I said!] Kraken half growled, [There were complications. In order to figure out how best to go about this while still taking into consideration what you want in an over-powered super magic suit, I had to go through your memories.]
“If you hadn’t been given to me by an angel . . .” I snarled.
[I know, I know, but calm down. I’m literally tied to you on a level you really don’t want to understand, and trusting Maa’lik was the right thing to do. He had just been freed by you and wanted to clear his debt so his intentions of helping were genuine. I’m not in the dominant position here.]
I had figured as much. Trusting anyone is fairly difficult for me, blame it on the stupid decisions I’ve made in the past but other than tree-wife, there are few people I get along with. Kraken’s post-conversation silence was odd.
“Well?”
[Humans are weird. I mainly skimmed through your life to see how you think so I could help you but damn, as the humans would say, ‘you need a therapist’, or, ‘you got issues man’.]
Taking a deep breath, I forced my hand to stop gripping Gungnir so hard, imagining that I was wringing Kraken’s slimy neck. “Duh, we all do,” I retorted. “Humanity is by and large fucked up, and I’m nowhere near the worst, trust me.”
[Oh I do, I have to, hell, I’ve seen it through you. Your teenage years were pretty sad if I’m understanding it right, but-]
“Ok, skip the shit that doesn’t matter. My teenage angst is well behind me. Yes, high school sucked but it does for most nerds,” I answered, a bit of heat in my voice. “Besides, before the apocalypse, I was definitely nowhere near the bottom of the trash can like some of my classmates. I had a good tech job, was making great money, about to get married to a hot sweetheart who loved me and loved making me sandwiches. I had it good. So let’s get past my life because that part is over. Where’s my SUPERSUIT!” Sorry, couldn’t resist.
[Sheesh, I’m almost done. Might as well come on in. Such a grouch.]
Gathering what passed for a semblance of inner peace, I walked into the Hole and sat in a chair where I could be comfortable for an unknown amount of time. Breathing in and out, I easily slipped into my soul-tree area.
“Check it out!” Kraken’s now-audible sounded like an announcer for the WWE. “Here he comes folks, all the way from the Shattered Lands of Altered Earth, the former capital of the Arcaneum, the Scion of the Mad Sorcerer himself . . . .”
“Dude, what the fuck did you do to my soul-space?” I wasn’t complaining, it was the shock that made me sound angry but I really wasn’t. My soul-space looked like a banging bachelor pad complete with three giant floating televisions, a huge water bed, and my soul-tree acting like the lamp that made up the spine of the domed room.
“It’s your dream bedroom! This is your soul space, it can be anything you want!”
Soul-tree and I glared flatly at Kraken, both impressed but not really amused. “Seriously, I come here for a supersuit and you deck out the inside of my brain?”
Kraken flew in front of the tvs, gesturing at them with two of his arms as they lit up with very different pictures. The one on the left had two images, the human bone structure and a naked representation of me. The middle tv had a line dividing two sets of complex interconnected runes while the right tv had several pictures of different suits of armor.
“Just wait, I promise, you’ll love it,” he promised, shades of yellow and orange coloring his pointing arms. “Ooooh, I’m so excited! I don’t think any Scions back home will believe that I got to do this!”
“What?”
“Moving on! All right! I’ve divided up the three relevant layers as you can see here, your body itself on the left split into the inner bone and outer skin. Both can function as a canvas for runes due to your flesh sorcery. The display on the right is the suit you had versus the suit the Centauri have with your probable modification and the suit I want to make by melding the two together. The center display is the rune structure, one for you to inscribe on your bones and by extension your skin, and the other to be laid out on the armor by the Centauri nanotech function.”
The sections separating the three TVs joined together to form one giant curved projection as sections of the runes split up crossing the expanse of the screen to burn their way into each bone of the skeleton. The flesh image welcomed its own set of runes as it covered up the skeleton taking its rightful place as a normal naked body. The last couple sections of runes formed a beautiful twisted artwork across the suits of armor and they smashed together in a cartoonish explosion to make a new set of armor.
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“It’s, too beautiful,” I breathed, a bit of air getting caught. “I can’t wear that.” The silver tones of the nanotech were smoothed out over the ivory of bones spikes at places convenient for combat like the elbows and knees. If you took the most wicked looking spiked armor from a demon and then had an angel purify, that’s what I’d be wearing.
“Psshhh, it’s nanotech, mostly,” Kraken said proudly. “You can make it look however the hell you want! My personal favorite is the Redeemed Wrecker! The formerly fallen angel who smites his foes even as his heart bleeds for their pain!” The outer shell shifted to more futuristic look similar to the Alpha Centauri getup, but with silver wings and a spiked tail.
Kraken continued as if he were showcasing brand new cars to a first time buyer. “And here we have the Vorpalian Vengeance, the terror of Deep Space, where even seasoned Fleet Captains dare not travel! This suit is far better adapted to water and aerial combat as the wings are made with a combination of flesh and mana sorcery to complement the natural shifting abilities of the nanotech!”
And on it went. I made notes of the ones I liked but too be honest they were all a bit too over the top. They gave me some serious ideas about what maybe I could do in the future but it was just too much. Since I was inside my own brain, I magicked up a glowing tablet and took pictures of the different suits and put my own ratings next to them. After about ten suits in, I held up my hand to get Kraken to stop.
“Dude, I love it, I really do-”
“Buuut . . .”
“Buuut . . . I need something on the tanky side of slender, ya get what I’m sayin?” I said, letting my mind wander just a bit. “Imagine something like a souped up Power Ranger, everytime they get hit, they might spark a lot or a little but they never really bleed. Let’s start with that. Or where’s the classic sorcerer look? The one with black armor striped through with ominous silver runes with crazy magic leaking everywhere?”
“You don’t like them?” Kraken’s big eye quivered.
“Keep it together!” Reaching over, I pat him on the head. “Dear lord, it’s all right. I liked them all, but you didn’t have to draw all of your inspiration from animals did you? We need to table some of this for when I get some real life minions dude. I can make more than one suit, and I’m pretty sure I can either get the nanotech to replicate or I can steal some from my little brother.”
“Fine,” he grumbled, waving one tentacle arm and making all the images vanish.
“No!” I yelled, waving an arm and putting everything back. “I didn’t say it was crap, I said we need something with a different direction. What did you have in the way of innovations for current tech? We gotta work our way up or I won’t be able to use it as effectively as I could, ya know?” I waited as he gave a grudging nod.
“Ok, so, let’s start with the basic framework of runes on the skeleton and skin. I love the idea, but help me out with some of these runes please.”
Huffing ever so softly, Kraken pulled the diagrams of runes on the skeleton and body off the screen and in front of me. “Runes are multiplicative in nature, and when you line them up correctly, their effective capability can even become exponential when you factor in resonance. Synergies are the hardest diagrams to plan as one bad placement can cause the opposite effect. These runes here . . . all over your skeleton, are runes of kinetic redirection, energy absorption, and disbursement. This entire setup is to keep your bones from melting under high intensity explosions. The bleed off channels are set up here, here, and here . .” he pointed out the wavy lines that flowed between the clusters of runes. “These will allow the extra energy that would have killed enter feedback runes of healing and focus so you can stay conscious through pain and not die.”
“What’s this over here?” I asked, pointing at a cluster of runes that I hadn’t seen before. They were set in an octagonal formation at all of my major joints.
“Those are neuro-link bypasses. If you can’t move any part of your body yet due to injury, these will function as joints until you do. They keep a power charge of about ten minutes worth of movement giving you time to haul ass if you aren’t in a position to heal. The other runes on the spine that look similar are siphon runes. Those will allow you to greatly speed up your internal intake of mana if you need to without the issue of burnout. You may need some new bones but as a flesh sorcerer, that shouldn’t be a problem.”
Layering the image of the body over the skeleton, the runes were a bit more edgy, a sort of tribal look crisscrossing the skin. “Now all of these are pretty much your standard combat runes but with all kinds of Heaven rune-based camouflage. No demon, angel, or deity will ever be able to divine your position in the universe unless you allow it or carry something of theirs. These runes bounce off similar ones on your skeleton allowing for a broader muddling of your personal signal. And then you have your mental defense runes coupled with a focus diagram and a hardness frequency on your skull, mana channeling combined with absorption and bleed off runes for physical combat if necessary, and your legs the kinetic expulsion runes for uber jumps and devastating charge kicks.”
Blowing up a small diagram located on the chest, Kraken continued as if it were a standard college lecture. “This particular diagram is an elemental refraction field upping your resistance to the basic elements. Fire, electricity, raw mana, sympathetic strikes, as well as wave-based attacks will all be seriously blunted and maybe even absorbed as raw mana. These babies are sort of all over the body as well as between other rune channels to maximize the coverage.”
A low and slow whistle escaped me. I couldn’t even begin to think of what it took to pull this off. This was way above my paygrade and I bet the damn squid knew it. “Here are the standard anti-teleportation runes with the voluntary enhancement array if you ever need it, which all wizards do. You don’t need the regen runes as your flesh sorcery does that for you and you don’t need the under-water setup either which gives you a ton of room to play with some more risque’ stuff like bound tattoos. You capture the soul of some creature, tattoo it on your body while pouring its power into the ink and you have a tatted protector as a secret watchdog. Venomous snakes, vicious cats, and wolves are usually the recommended ones as their enhanced senses really work better than anything you have.”
Adorning the feet and hands were impact runes, I recognized those on my own. My mana sorcery was helping me piece together the runes bit by bit, but some of them I had come up with before. “Those there, those will help with hand to hand combat right?” I asked, trying to show off just a bit.
“Hehehehe,” Kraken tittered. “I know you don’t know shit man. I went through your memories. Hahahaha, trying to bluff your own familiar! Hahahaha!” Fake wiping a tear away, Kraken moved on. “Don’t forget about these, these are the basic bio-enhancement runes that most humans use. They make your stomach process waste far more efficiently, regulate your body more so that your muscle tone never falls below a certain point, and it even tweaks your flesh sorcery to always keep you fresh without having to waste a background mental process on it. Sleep can also be instant with a rune tattoo but I don’t think you need that one . . . Oh! And the scent removal array so that tracking you by scent will be an absolute bitch.”
“What’s with that channel? The one from the shoulders to the collarbone and then to the spine all the way down to the forepad of the foot and heel?” I asked, getting closer to examine the spiky blue lines.
“That my friend, is an experimental channel I came up with based off of your water and earth sorcery. That will allow you to transfer any extra energy or kinetic motion into the river or dirt if you’re standing on it. It also allows for reverse channeling of power from ley lines even easier than before. Basically, this turns you into a fortress if you’re in your element.”
“Oh hell yeah!” I freaked, I mean geeked, I mean shrieked. “Let’s get this shit done right fuckin’ now!”
“Hold up!” A wet smack of Kraken’s tentacle pulled me back from my excited momentum towards the real world. “We still have your suit dummy!”
Grumpily sitting down, I looked at the screen. “Let’s go, come on Squishy. Whatcha got?”
Rolling his big eye, Kraken made all of the suits disappear except for one. “Here, since you’re so eager, this is the final product since you pretty much hate all the other suit ideas. Lame ass,” he said, muttering the last part to himself.
“This focuses more on streamlining your power storage capabilities as well as some brand new features you might like,” he continued. “Most of your current power storage is in batteries that you’ve now stuck in Gungnir. Well, I took your initial design and combined it with your second design. Listen before you say anything, because you haven’t thought about this in a while. I recreated your matter-to-mana generators and fixed them so that they’ll work in a mana rich environment. It took a lot of rune work as well as platinum coverings to keep everything stable, but small generators can now work as long as you keep it inside of Gungnir.”
My jaw hit the ground. “How did you, wha-”
“Yes, I figured it out. I had to re-rune the entirety of the storage space in Gungnir, but now it actually can hold energy related things much better and the outer structure is no longer super permeable. That being said, you won’t have the kind of power flow you used to with it, but its passive output will be more than a solar panel. That being said, the crystal batteries have been reworked as well. They’re more of a solid energy now providing at least three times more energy before. You won’t understand the math but every ‘brick’ of power you had now equals at least three.”
“So where are they?” I asked, looking over the suit for the battery pack holder.
“They’re in your suit, not in Gungnir. The plan is to have you conjure the bone enamel armor like before, lay down the initial rune patter, and then put in the small batteries as you layer more bone enamel armor on top with another layer of runes. Then, the nanotech coating will be coupled with microscopic bits of platinum so all magical attacks will be blunted against you. Notice anything odd on the back?”
Walking around, I noticed that there was what looked to be a form-fitting backpack on the other side. “These look like solar panel runes,” I said. “Hey, that’s my old hoverboard!”
“Yup! These solve the issue of your mobility! The hoverboard works pretty much as before but with an upgrade. It uses runes based off your earth sorcery to project anti-gravity allowing you to skate around. The upgrade is that it can go ridiculously fast if you’re near a ley line and can even pull extra power from it to put into you or your batteries if need be.”
“And the solar backpack?” I said, motioning with my hand for Kraken to hurry up. “What’s the point of that if I have my generators back?”
He looked at me like I was dumb. Reaching one tentacle forward, he slapped the hologram on the back, the smacked rune glowing, forcing two wide, thin wings out. “Solar wings. These will let you fly, slowly, but they’ll let you fly. They combine anti-gravity runes projecting from the bottom and solar-panel runes on the top that pull in power from the sky as well as effect-amplifying runes on the edges to create a much larger surface area so that you can actually fly. This is not a set of combat wings, but flying is something you’ll be able to do, albeit clumsily. It is a super-intense drain on your power which is why you won’t have much airtime but it’ll work in a pinch. This pack also has two large independent batteries if you need just in case, giving you about ten times the amount of stored power you had before. Three hours of flight time is the max of what you can get, hence, the attachable skateboard.”
My jaw hit the ground again. “Flight?” I croaked. “Kitty Hawk kind of flight? One small step for man, a giant glide for sorcerer-kind?”
“Yes, it’s not perfect,” he continued, straight up ignoring my sheer amazement. “This is why the hoverboard is perfect. Over ley lines and water, you’ll be able to go incredibly fast. The wings are also for the hoverboard as they can flare out to passively intake heat and light while also functioning as steering apparati.”
“And I didn’t forget about the craziness you were doing in the lab either. That water you made with nephilim goop is a perfect candidate for an experimental weapon you made.” Kraken said, making four sets of ice blue glyphs glow on my armor projection. “These are the water conjuration and control runes for up close defense. If you’re going to fight the undead, I added four sealed storage containers in your armor for you to put four capsules of nephilim matter. Conjuring the water at these points will free the nephilim stuff, mixing it with the controlled water and allowing you to have four holy water arms controlled by your sorcery. With Gungnir who already has holy star iron in its makeup, you now have a personal arsenal that works perfectly against all undead and unclean things.”