My plans to leave got wrecked at the last minute. What made me stay another freaking week longer than my already extended plan was not only the magic users coming to me for advice, but several men had started bonding with nearby dryads. That entire event almost turned into a fiasco as even the taken men were eyeing the unique seductiveness of the women of the forest. I couldn’t really blame the men though as a lot of them spent time in the woods either hunting or scouting the area. The wizards though had a lot of questions.
Sitting in the new meeting area, a beautifully constructed amphitheater, I stood in the bottom fielding questions as a good thirty people sat around. They didn’t really want to learn from the memories I had put into the flesh golem, they wanted to hear it straight from me even though there were certain issues I had carefully avoided such as Kraken’s existence, the fact that I was a sorcerer not a wizard, and anything related to my wife in stasis inside of Yggdrasil’s newest splinter.
“Yes, Cassandra, let’s start with you,” I said, pointing her out. Figuring I’d start with their leader, I almost started laughing while looking out across the crowd. The sheer amount of model-level beauty was staggering. Not one woman or man had neglected to put the flesh golem to good use over the past week but to their credit, I only had to intervene about three times. One woman made her skin so shiny that it sloughed off because she kept growing it way too fast and one of the Glyph Blades didn’t think before putting a rune similar to a bomb on his wrist. The last one was a young woman who went full on into the transformation schtick. It took forever for me to unravel the dragon heart and spine that didn’t want to work with the minotaur skin immunity or the dwarven bone structure that kept trying to leech all of the magic out of her flesh.
“Thank you. I have several questions, one or two about you specifically and one in regards to the wider implications of the changes you’re responsible for.”
Cutting her off real quick, I answered sharply, “First, I’m not responsible for the ‘wider implications’.” My fingers made quotation marks at ‘wider implications’. “I gave all of you tools and how you plan on using those tools is up to you. I’ve got my own problems that I’ve put off for too long so next question.”
Frowning at me, she continued. “So you plan on leaving us so soon?”
“Yup,” I answered, moving on to the next girl even as Cassandra looked at me in shock. “You in the back, dark red hair, yes, you.”
The young lady stood up, her eyes partly turned down. “When you leave, are you taking anyone with you?”
“Nope. Where I live is too dangerous. According to what I know so far, the ambient mana levels are so high that all of you will die. You’re not magically altered in such a way that it would be feasible, and just to head off the next question, no, I will not be altering anyone in that way. Too much work and it’s not worth it.” What they didn’t know is that my sheer amount of sorceries combined with all of my gear and living through the Ripples changed me fundamentally. High levels of mana mean nothing to me but I wasn’t about to let them know that.
A young man stood up, raising his hand. “We’re not in school, man, just ask your question.”
He gulped, looking around briefly before meeting my gaze. “Can you uh, maybe uh, help us out in the weapons department before you go? Some of us are still unarmed and a decent chunk of us don’t have magic at all or that weird tattoo magic.”
I hadn’t thought about that. There’s a good chance that I could give people magic, but that would lessen my own abilities and I’m not about that. I’m sure it might grow back if I gave them a seed of it, but I am completely out of the Chaos crystals necessary to do the heavy lifting. It was only possible to give Spot a seed of flesh sorcery due to a Chaos crystal. I quickly shot down my own idea of crafting magical weapons that siphoned life from enemies to power enchantments and while making crystal batteries for everyone was definitely feasible, it would make this settlement a target if it ever got discovered.
[Yo, need some help here,] I sent to Kraken. [People who can’t do magic at all. Can I bond them with an elemental or can I use the flesh elemental to give them magic via magic organs like the way Jamal got a bit of fire magic from the dragon heart?]
[This is new territory. Just about everyone has magic of some kind, even if it’s beyond weak. Mana is integral to life as we know it, except this forsworn planet behind the Veil apparently. Shit, try it out.]
Coming back from my nigh-instantaneous conversation, I looked back at the young man. “I’d recommend using the flesh golem for personal body enhancements. Once it has ingested the right ingredients, magic may not be out of your reach. For now, use that to give yourself more strength and speed, harden your body, give yourself heightened regeneration or modified body parts. I have given this new town everything it needs to survive, if you’re creative enough.”
Two stick thin people stood up, a man and a woman who looked to be twins. “We read your memories left in the golem,” the woman said, looking at twin and then back at me, her hands trembling on her wizard’s staff. “Is it true, about the undead at the poles and the demons in Europe?”
“Yes, and what do we do about it?” Her brother chimed in, his hands shaking as well. “How do we prepare against such horrors?”
“Better questions, thank you,” I said. “First, the pile of sunstones I’ve planted for you in the center of town grow over time. Those can channel mana that I believe will hurt or destroy the undead. This is what I’ve been told as I haven’t had a chance to test it yet. The demons, I’m not worried about them as much as from what I’ve been told the Vatican stands on more than equal footing. If I were you, any of you, I’d say your best option is magic research and bonding with elementals. You can talk to the rascals I helped the other day. Earth elementals can help build pretty much anything and are nigh indestructible in a fight. Water elementals are powerful if you can keep them focused. Both of those together would make this place a fortress.”
Just as I finished, three incredible smoking hot blond babes stood up glaring at me. “And just what do you plan on doing about these, these, DRYADS!? They take the men and keep them out to who knows how late?”
The middle one joined in as the first one took a breath. “Dryads are wrecking our community! We need the men to defend this town! Food needs to be brought in, land needs to be cleared, and where are they?”
“Banging the forest sluts!” Yup, there was the third one. God this is annoying.
“And this is my problem, how?” I chuckled. “How is it my fault y’all can’t keep your men? I bet the dryads are nice and sweet. In fact, they also can help y’all out with the new greenhouses if you ask nice enough.”
“It’s not right! It’s not natural? What if they get pregnant? What kind of monsters will we have running around?” These women had worked themselves up into a righteous fury. I can only imagine they were ‘Karen’ stereotype, trying to talk to the damn manager when the apocalypse hit. Now, thanks to me, they looked like supermodels but that doesn’t change their personality.
“Let me give you the truth ladies, in fact, let me give everyone the truth here. Life as you know it is over. America doesn’t exist. Government does not exist. You are here and you are free, if you can keep it that way. There is no police to run to, there are no rules to live by unless you so choose, and no HOA to make your neighbor behave. I am not your king, I live far away and do not want to be bothered by pitiful neighbors and my conscience wouldn’t let me leave young women and children out in the cold, so to speak. Your men can bang whoever they want, AS CAN YOU. So, get over yourself and live your life. Prepare for the worst and hope for the best.” My rant wasn’t over even as I watched their faces fall while others perked up.
“Magic is real. Real fucking magic, is real. Power is now an individual characteristic. Equality of capability is now a myth. Notice I didn’t say ‘worth’ because that’s not what I’m talking about. Some of you will be able to fly, maybe move some mountains on a whim and others will do some freaking amazing things, but no one is equal anymore. And in that sense, everyone is equal. Everyone with magic now has the equivalent of a loaded gun in their back pocket. Now, you can use this to make your own version of utopia, or you can use it to rule with an iron fist. I don’t care. What you do need to look out for is that magical threats are also real. Dragons that fly and eat and burn everything are real. Dwarves, demons, minotaurs, monsters, giant gorillas, spirits, vampires, undead, fuck man the list just goes on! It’s all real.”
You could have heard a pin drop in that amphitheater. Nobody expected this, and they sure as shit didn’t see me getting angry and happy all at the same time. My voice got softer as I continued, “This could be the best or the worst thing to ever happen to any of you, but it’s completely up to you. Oh, and to answer your accusations, ladies.”
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Glaring at the three women now trembling before me, I called Gungnir to my hand in spear form, the swirling blade glistening with red light. Slamming the butt down, I looked at them each in turn. “You now have to work to keep your man or the dryads will happily take them away. There’s no divorce court here to drag a man through. I’d advise you to be nice and above all, useful. And that goes for all of you, there’s around two hundred of y’all, which means there is more than enough work to go around. I’ve done plenty to get y’all started but the rest is up to you. I recommend teamwork as a general rule and letting peoples’ talents dictate where they work. Don’t put your best enchanter as a fisherman, duh.”
With that, I summoned my hoverboard and took off towards the side of town. Three solar panels had been set up near the greenhouses and the young teens with the smaller kids were working with the two that had bonded earth elementals. I had given Jenny and Simon, the two with the earth elementals, a secret assignment a couple days ago and I wanted to know how it was coming along. Those two were building houses and erected stone walls with their elementals doing most of the heavy lifting as the children were taking turns with the earth wands putting in the detail work like doorways, windows, and stairs. The children took turns with the wands when they ran out of mana, scurrying back to the solar panel for more in a rush to do more magic. Their assignment was to eventually make this entire town secure and I let Scott know so that he could secretly organize the entire thing.
Moving on after watching them for a bit, I got to the other set of wands being wielded by mostly teen girls and a few young men in the greenhouses. They had the other most important job of planting and tending crops, which they had three solar panels to assist them as none of them were used to this level of constant power output. The two water elementals bonded to Kyra and Jackson were watering the plants as several others with the plant wands were coaxing them to grow. Two earth wands users were out making the rows nice and perfect as the outside crops were to supplement the greenhouse ones.
“There you are!” Turning around, I saw Jamal jogging up to me with Scott. “You can’t be leaving just yet! There’s so much to drink still and you know Scott can’t hold his liquor!”
“Ha, sorry man,” I said, just a bit of sadness creeping in. “I got too much work to do on my own right now. Also, I have too much power to stay here for long, people will want to start putting me in charge and that’s something I hate. Also, I hate having a boss so that’s a no go there.”
Scott punched me in the shoulder, just soft enough that he didn’t hurt his hand on my armor. “Dick,” he said, a smirk creasing his face. “Ya come, show us all up, make all the women swoon and then dip. That’s cruel. I like it.” Grinning at me, he pulled his new rifle off his back, the spare one I had made for myself. “Sure you don’t want this back?” He asked, offering it up to me. “It's pretty sweet.”
“Already got one,” I said, punching him back. “Besides, this baby is the real weapon.” Hoisting Gungnir up, I changed it from a spear into a knife and then shifted it to a mace, finally lengthening it so that it looked just like a wizard’s staff. “Shoots better than any gun. Anyways, got somethin’ to show ya.”
Leading Jamal and Scott to a small hut near the pier, I opened the door and walked down the earthen stairs. This was the only building in the settlement made by me, the arms room. The pier had two solar panels on top of its roof that were attached to wires that I had buried and connected to a contraption deep in the arms room.
“What the hell is it?” Scott said, looking over the stone contraption with four crystal spikes sticking out of the top. Four slides stuck out the bottom leading to four wooden buckets.
“Behold! Your ammo maker!” I said grandly as if it were a brand new car. “This bad boy right here will conjure, rune, and charge your ammo all in one go. When y’all finally learn how to make your own guns, you’ll be happy about this machine as it makes .45 pistol ammo, two kinds of rifle ammo such as the .223 and the 7.62. The last bit is for making grenades. The solar panels from the pier feed into this so all you have to do is turn it on. It’s slow but it’ll work all day when you’re gone.”
“Stop, please, my dick can only get so hard!” Jamal crooned as he hugged the machine. “Oh sweet baby Jesus this is the best gift! Unlimited ammo for a dragon cannoneer!”
“What could go wrong,” Scott joked, pulling Jamal off. Seeing an odd package off to the side, Scott poked it with his foot. “What’s this?”
“That my friend, is a sample box. I’ve included as many kinds of metal as I can conjure in there. Your two family friendly earth elementals in town can either find or slowly conjure whatever metal you need. Which means, y’all are set.”
******
Leaving was a relief albeit a sad one. The children were an absolute joy to be around as their innocence gave them no preconceptions on how to ‘properly’ use magic. Several of them called out for friends in the woods one random ass day and had freaking familiars gladly accept their call. I saw three mountain lions, a lizard-spider, and two big ass birds bond to the children much to their guardians’ shock. I might have also contributed a bit of chaos by making a few more plant, water, and earth wands for the kids and swearing them to secrecy. Before I actually left via hoverboard down the river, I saw little stone castles instead of sandcastles on the riverbank and a couple tiny treehouses hidden pretty well unless you had vision in the magical spectrum to do all the hard work.
Getting home was a breeze though, surfing just above the waves without a cloud in sight. Gungnir was out as I hadn’t forgotten about the harpies’ tendencies to send freaking wyverns as a welcome party, but the overall mood was good. Whistling, that’s something I don’t recommend when traveling eighty miles an hour down the river. The wind just rips it right out of your mouth but damn I tried.
Finally arriving at the clearing in front of the Hole, I yelled out, “Hey Everest! Is Meliad out yet?” A grunt I took to mean ‘no’ rumbled out. “Well fuck,” I muttered, taking out a meal cube and downing it.
[Hey, before you get started on some more projects we need to get some schooling done,] Kraken said just as I sat down. [This’ll be quicker and easier if you just join me. I got questions for you too.]
Closing my eyes, I dropped off into a meditative state to join Kraken in my upgraded soul space. “Education for what?” I asked, looking around. There were more tvs here than last time and the space was a bit bigger with various holographic statues decorating the place. “And what the hell are those?”
“These, my good friend, are possible runic tattoos for Glyph Blades and some for you as well, and over there are my latest incarnations of your armor. Over there we have some viable long term and short term plans we need to discuss but most importantly, your enemies. We need to talk about them, but first I have some questions, ” My spirit familiar’s tentacles crossed like a teacher dealing with a smart but lazy student.
I waved for him to go on. “Fine,” Kraken said. “What the HELL were you thinking? Giving all those humans so much goddamn shit?! Weapons, I understand, and maybe some solar panels but all the other stuff too?”
I looked him in his big watery eye. “Damn it Kraken, I’m an over-gifter, and I get that that’s no excuse but come on man, there were kids there! Children are the future, and yes, they have way more than what they need to survive, but I don’t want them to just survive. I want them to thrive! Besides, I’m a sorcerer, it didn’t really cost me anything other than time which we both know I have plenty of.”
Kraken huffed at me. “Fine, well, if that’s the way humans do things than whatever. I have basic information that you seem to lack on the other subject, due to you growing up in a magic-less environment. As such, I’ll assume you don’t know much. Let’s start with your greatest long term threats as of now. To be clear, it’s not the deities you’ve tangled with before due to the Angelic cloaking runes hiding you from their sight. We’re gonna talk about Liches.”
Conjuring up a footrest as I was inside of my own head, because why not, I leaned back. “Aren’t those undead wizards that live forever and build zombie armies? I asked.
“Well yes, but you completely missed the most important word in your own sentence, ‘wizard’. Liches are undead ‘wizards’,” Kraken stressed. “They are not sorcerers, they do not have the instinctive command over elements that sorcerers do. Why are Liches the way they are?”
I shrugged. “Dude, I don’t know, I just need to know how to kill them, right?”
“Wrong, it does matter. Liches are wizards that willingly hang on after death, usually by a necromantic ritual that binds their soul to a crystal or set of crystals called a phylactery. They also may keep their original body, using magic to strengthen it far beyond what any normal living body would be able to tolerate. Now, Liches usually become Liches because they’ve run out of time. They couldn’t get to their dream of either eternal life or incredible power before death.” Kraken lectured, waving one tentacle and bringing several holograms of Liches into view.
The first one looked mostly normal, the skin grey instead of normal peachy flesh color and the eyes were grey. The middle rendition looked more like a corpse that had spent some time in the sun, the flesh drawn tight and it looked like it wouldn’t be winning any flexibility contests. The hunched over posture and gnarled hand spoke of years getting used to being undead. The last one was mainly bone with bits of tied flesh adorning the joints, blue orbs of fire where the eyes should be and odd growths of bones sprouting in random places.
“Liches are wizards,” Kraken said promptly as I took in the disgusting sights. “And . . . the reason that matters is because wizards, for lack of a better term, are what you would call OCD. They obsess over power or how things works beyond reason, following their compulsions methodically until it becomes a disorder. Wizards plan, and when an OCD wizard hasn’t reached their goal, they hang on and make the decision to become a Lich. And what happens when an OCD wizard becomes an OCD Lich with infinite amounts of time? They can plan and achieve pretty much anything at this point.”
“So you’re telling me,” I said, trying to make sure that I got the picture from this fragmented explanation. “Liches are wizards who couldn’t reach some goal in their life and decided to pursue that goal into the next life as well? And also that because their compulsive need to reach their goal was so strong, they willingly became one of the undead just so they could reach it?”
“And?” Kraken said as I worked through it.
“And . . . once they become a Lich, they turn their OCD, which initially led them to become a Lich, into strength which they channel into learning magic far better than any mortal wizard simply due to the amount of time they can practice it. So comparatively, a Lich could work on a spell for a hundred years to perfectly understand it in every scenario because he’s immortal so who cares about a hundred years. But a normal wizard will just learn how to cast a fireball and be content?”
“Exactly!” Kraken said, conjuring a pointer stick and poking his hologram. “Liches are not just feared, they’re also respected. They more often than not are the forerunners of magical research because they have the time to take the time to do the research. Most of the entire discipline of alchemy was pioneered by one Lich, Eugen the Poisoner. He wasn’t nearly as bad as most Liches, he didn’t really make undead hordes and prey on the living. Eugen simply worked in a hospital and experimented for two millennia to make the most insane discoveries!”
“Huh,” I grunted. “So this means that I have to either plan like a Lich, which isn’t probable, or fight like a meteor sent from God if I want to win?”
“Exactly,” agreed my familiar. “You probably won’t win the planning battle. They tend to plan decades in advance. Short of nuking the area, victory will be out of reach for you.”
“So what do Liches fear then? I imagine with all that time on their hands, they’d have spells to shield them from sunlight and pretty much any kind of magic.”
Kraken’s eyelids for his single eye creased up like a smile as he didn’t actually have a mouth. “I’m so glad you asked. That’s the exact right question. What do Liches fear? The answer is nothing. Liches are still technically mortal, which means that angels don’t get to mess with them unless they start summoning demon princes, which has happened before. But other than some kind of angelic intervention, wytchfire and dragonfire and maybe some seriously packed holy water would have an effect on a Lich.”