“Huh,” I grunted, taking in the conversation and pairing with the generalized holograms in front of me. “Got it, Liches, bad news, yup. But you said, ‘enemies’. What else am I supposed to be worried about?”
“Short term, not much other than that,” Kraken answered, waving his arm and replacing the holograms with a new set of images. “Long term, warlocks.”
“Bet I’m not going to like this answer either.”
The three images were now instead showing two, one normal looking dude with some pretty wicked tattoos and the very stereotypical demon towering over him. “This is a warlock. Generally speaking, they tend to be someone who either has just enough magical talent to be dangerous to normal beings but not enough to threaten someone like you without a lot of planning or backup. And next to him, is a demon.”
“So we put the two together which makes a warlock right?” Putting some of the pieces together wasn’t really hard but nothing is ever easy nowadays.
“Yup, but the magic user makes a contract with the demon, and it is that act that makes a warlock. They can bargain for power, sorcery, teachings, meldings, life, pretty much anything that the demon has and the magic user does not. And because there are so many kinds of demons, not all of which are diametrically opposed to humanity, there’s no telling what kinds of contracts you’ll run into.”
I held a hand up, stopping the conversation for a moment. “Let’s focus on the short term now, what can you tell me about harpies? I mean, I already know how to kill’em, but where can I find them? Other than a few mountain peaks around here there’s really nowhere for them to-”
I smacked myself in the head. “FUCKING FLOATING ISLANDS HUH?”
“Got it in one.”
Taking a deep breath, mentally since I was already inside of my own head, I had Gungnir pull up a map of the area as far as we knew. From what we could tell, there were several floating islands in the area by which I mean at least four. The closest one was fifty miles away and several dotted red lines criss-crossed the sky of my map.
“Lemme guess, predicted flight patterns of moving floating islands? How’d you get that info?”
Kraken looked at me smugly. “There are trees up on those islands, so I used your nature sorcery to tap into Yggdrasil and got a pretty good picture of any area with flora. Apparently floating islands count too! Wanna know the weirdest part? Some floating islands have literal rivers running through them! The water just evaporates at the edge of the island as if it’s not fully a part of this world!”
“That’s too cool for me to blow up, which means I have to find the exact right island and invade it. Troublesome.”
The holograms changed again, this time to show me harpies. “The ugly looking one on the left here is the typical harpy. It’s got a beak for a mouth, the arms are the wings, the hunchback for extra muscle used for carrying off heavy prey, and the grunginess to just complete the nasty image.”
“Well what’s with the hot one?” I asked, pointing at the other image. “It’s like night and day, ugly ass feral looking monster over here and the supermodel angel version over there!”
“The one on the right is the magic user,” Kraken chuckled. “You know it’s not an angel because its presence doesn’t actually burn mortals and they don’t rant about hunting demons 24/7, but these particular harpies can use magic. Control of air and light are typical while the less common ones are full-on Storm Riders. We’re not sure if they’re attractive due to being able to weave illusions or if that is how they actually look.”
“I’m not gonna get close enough to a damn harpy to find out,” I declared, looking back and forth between the two. “Most likely a trap used to lure in unsuspecting idiots. And I assume when you say ‘Storm Rider’ that means those harpies are weather manipulators?”
“Yup.”
“Fuck.”
We spent the rest of the afternoon discussing different kinds of enemies that I might run into. All of this was pulled from the parts of Rath’s brain that Kraken had been able to decipher so far; there’s a lot of good information still in there but that hunk of brain matter was its own bestiary. The funniest part about it was that the list of creatures in there was divided up into two categories: tasty and yucky, because that’s how dragons apparently view the world. What ended up pissing me off about the information that Kraken had deciphered was the bit that he skimmed over because he thought it ‘wasn’t important’. The little bitch had information about wizard towers! And the more I learned about them the more I freaking wanted one.
“You don’t need it! You’re a goddamn sorcerer! What in the world would you need with a freaking wizard’s tower!”
“Every kid wants a wizards tower! Correction, every MAN wants a freaking wizard’s tower! How the hell did you not know this?” I screamed, dancing around. “AND, I already know the PERFECT FUCKING PLACE FOR IT!”
As I was still inside of my mind/soul space with Kraken, I grabbed the mental fabric generating the scenery and twisted it. Blazing heat hit the both of us like a Saharan sandstorm, the sun so bright that it hurt to look around even though the rushing river cutting through the dry rocky landscape begged for someone to jump in it.
“Welcome to the ass end of Arizona! Where the Colorado river makes the arid piece of shit land just bearable enough to make the fishing worth it!”
“Uhg, I hate it,” Kraken grumbled, shielding his eye from the brutal sunlight. “Why the fuck did you bring us here?”
I couldn’t keep the grin off my face. “Ok! It’s just for shits and giggles, but I want this to be your side project! Picture this!” Waving my hand, I forced the mindscape to bend to my will, a giant tower made out of textured sunstone mixed with runed granite bursting from out of the riverbed. Epically contoured solar panels extended from the top of the tower like flower petals that had sex with dragon wings, crystal cannons shaped like spears jutting from the sides, and an oddly twisted cactus tree spiking out of the top.
“What in the fucking world is that monstrosity?!” Kraken gasped. “It’s HIDEOUS!”
“Oh calm down, it’s just concept art right now. I’m thinking sunstone mixed with granite will boost the solar energy gathering to the max as Arizona is literally the desert. The cactus plant is the Yggdrasil root I’ll have to magic up to survive better in the desert. Those are crystal focusing lasers to be my siege weaponry and the little satellites in the cracks will be mana sensors or soundwave blasters! And in the base . . .” I continued, waving my hand again so that everything turned into a black and white computer design view. “The base will have the largest crystal battery I’ve ever made. This can be my jump point or main base to set up for assaulting the poles!”
Kraken waved two of his tentacles, returning the mindscape back into a bachelor pad. “Dude, that was the dumbest shit. Wizard towers are supposed to be hidden fortresses, not out in the fucking open point blank in your face eyesore!”
Crossing my arms and glaring at my familiar didn’t carry the weight of authority that I hoped it would. Childish, yes, but usually effective. Waving my arms again, I brought the scene back but with some crazy modifications. This time, five stout wizard towers about two stories high and sixty feet across sat in a pentagram formation connected by sandstone looking walls. In the center, connected by rooftop bridges was a six story wizard tower with a tree poking out of it that towered above the flat landscape.
“Fine,” I grouched. “You wanna argue? Work on that! A wizard castle! Complete with solar gathering walls in a magic formation and a Yggdrasil core so I can send ARMIES to the North Pole if I wanted to! Whatcha think about that?” Adding some more finishing touches, I made sunstone spikes grow out of the upper parts of the walls while the walls themselves smoothed out so that nothing could get a grip to scale them. More and more rune shapes colored black began to appear on the walls as I mentally wrote ‘durability, solar and heat siphoning, storage’ all across my castle.
Stolen story; please report.
“This is a waste of time and resources!”
I genuinely laughed at Kraken. “Come on man, I’m a sorcerer with some pretty good picks for power. The only thing this is going to cost me is time, and I’ve got plenty of that. The sun will provide all the power I need.”
“What happened to one portal tree and a small field of solar panels? That plan was nice and simple and above all, EASY!”
“Yeah, but you forgot to factor in one possibility. What if we simply get our butts kicked? What if we get our asses handed to us and we have to retreat? I’d rather retreat to a tricked-out wizard bunker with enough firepower to level a continent.”
The argument finally came to a close when I bargained to let Kraken use Rath’s brain to help with some of the mental load of designing all the things I wanted to do with the wizard’s tower. The way he explained it made sense, that the more of Rath’s brain that he unlocked and deciphered, the more he could use it as a biological computer. It also hastened the overall decrypting process as the unlocked portions of the brain worked to bring the rest of it into submission. The estimation I got was about another two weeks before we could fully dive in and get everything we needed from it and by that time all of the tower schematics would be done too.
And since I was able to put his lazy spiritual ass to work on the things I wanted done, this allowed me to work on my as of late favorite pastime, experimentation. The flesh golem experiment seemed to be a roaring success once I managed to work out the minor bugs, and the ammo maker for the magic rifles as a proof of concept held up pretty well. This meant that magic automation is possible. What I didn’t show the residents of that little town is how the creation process actually worked, because honestly, I cheated. Inside of the machine was an example of the finished product, one of each kind of bullet, and then moving the switch put the ‘conjure a copy’ rune pattern over the bullet and turning it on pushed power into the diagram creating another bullet. This would go on until it either ran out of power or someone turned it off.
That simple concept worked for simple products, but the next step was to add another layer of complexity. I was thinking of making earth elementals composed of diamond and sunstone but held together with basic dirt. The summoning of the elementals themselves would not be part of the automation process, but I could make a machine that would make all of the bodies for me.
To start, I figured that I’d follow the old model in which I make the first body and the machine copies it to make more, but this time there’d be a layering process. I exited my mindspace and headed for the Lab, where I etched schematics on the granite workbench. “Sunstone core with an extra large crystal battery,” I muttered, bringing my vision to life. “Diamond focusing crystals for eyes with sunstone blades hidden in the arms. Can’t forget the binding runes on the core to give the dirt body some cohesion.”
An hour's worth of drawing and conjuring later and I had my test earth golem, roughly four feet tall and four feet wide, the body resembled a basic cube given limbs. I probably went overboard in the dirt to precious stone ratio but sometimes more is actually more. Conjuring a small crystal square, I began to input a complete picture, a mental matrix of the structure of the golem into it and then set it off to the side. My conjuration machine was basically going to be a 3-D printer and the crystal plate was going to be the harddrive with the blueprints of what’s being made. Taking another couple minutes, I made twenty blank crystal plates for later as I thought about all the things I’ve made that can be put on them down the road.
Rubbing my hands together in anticipation, I got to work. Conjuring a crystal battery block the size of an old school VCR was the first step as it’s the base for the entire operation. Then I placed the sunstone golem template crystal on top and made the battery grow up just enough to form the edges of a slot. On the back side of the crystal, I conjured a coating of silver to function as the governor so that no power surges would blow the entire device and then formed thumb-sized sockets for metal wires that would connect to whatever power source I decided to use.
Using Gungnir as my test battery, I conjured copper and braided it into a thick wire to which I tied one end around the crystal speartip of Gungnir and the other I molded into the socket of the conjuration machine. Realising that I had a spacing problem because I didn’t have a conveyor belt or an actual place to put all of the conjured golem bodies, I formed somewhat bendable wire arms that extend out to where the conjuration process would actually occur.
When I had finished, Kraken examined my work, did his usual displeased huff and added some more commands to the matrix to automate the process to make five bodies at a time and then move the arms to make five more. As I had never gotten into programming, I was quite happy that he did that for me. Although it did backfire on him when I gave him the mental blueprints for all of my projects and asked him to put them in each one of the crystal records so we could automate things in the future. The only thing we really had a consensus on was that we could probably get Everest or Lyra to do the elemental summoning themselves instead of us as we provided the bodies.
“How is this going to help you again?”
“You can’t have a freaking sunstone castle without sunstone elementals guarding the damn thing Kraken!” I yelled, as my maniacal plans were coming together. “And if I need an army, then I can just portal them straight to the battlefield, after I make a base out of ice of course. Cause what sorcerer doesn’t want a badass holy water ice fortress huh?”
“You can’t be serious!”
Of course I was. Putting aside one container of Nephilim as a snack for Spot for whenever he decides he needs something a bit more exotic, I drew up plans to have an ice and stone fortress to be my first forward operating base up in northern Canada. The general idea was to have my water elementals do most of the heavy lifting for that and the obvious cheat is that I’m going to meld another World Tree seedling with a big ass pinetree and use that as a pipeline of power to siphon energy from the overabundant nature of the deserts sweltering sun. The Nephilim bits would be a perfect deterrent against evil undead for obvious reasons and putting that into the very structure of an ice fortress would make the entire thing anathema to them!
“He’s insane!” Kraken moaned mostly to himself. “Out of all the new humans that rejoined the universe and I had to get the absolute worst pick of the bunch!”
“I heard that!”
Saving the other half of the Nephilim bits was mainly to cover my ass. I hadn’t forgotten that the Antarctic stood a solid chance of being an undead stronghold. I wasn’t as worried about that one though as there’s no landbridge to another continent as far as I know, but the Arctic pretty much has its greedy fingers in every damn pie. After another week of driving Kraken up the wall as we argued, I mean discussed, all of the plans and how to make them perfect, there wasn’t much left to do but the doin’.
Five of the new young elementals were put on border duty of the forest and the rest were all hunkered down in the clearing to charge up their extra stores of power and wait for my signal. I had done an incredible amount of preparation for the next leg of my journey; pulling out a thin plate of slate, I set that down on an inactive golem’s head right in front of me.
[You don’t need a checklist, you have me,] Kraken said from inside Gungnir. Popping out, he flew around and inspected all of the sitting golems. [Tell me why you’re doing it this particular way again? Why do you need a whole base instead of just a jump point?]
I sighed. You would think that a spirit that had access to all of my memories would be able to put it all together without me but I guess spirits aren’t perfect either. “Ok, what is island hopping and why did it suck for the United States Marines in World War II?” A blank look was all I got.
“Good grief Kraken, ok. The question of, ‘what will we do if we lose’, is a valid question. So what I’m doing is taking the two-fold strategy of the military when we fought Japan and folding it into one. I’m going to be an island hopping nuker.” The blank look continued. “Dude, the main base is right here, guarded by Everest and Meliad, whenever she wakes up, and a bunch of water and earth elementals that have been infused with Nephilim matter. The second base will be a freaking sunstone castle in the middle of the DESERT! See where I’m going with this?”
I scratched my head as Kraken didn’t move one ethereal muscle, looking at me as if I was nuts, which I’m not, well, not completely nuts. “And the final piece is the ice castle plan infused with holy water made from Nephilim AND an energy pipeline of mana and sunlight straight from the desert. And I’ll have another army of elementals and I can’t forget about Spot.”
“So what’s the ‘nuking’ part?” Kraken asked, finally joining the conversation.
“The nuking part is the very makeup of the bases. If I lose my fight up in the cold, I can retreat to the ice castle, which is basically a defensive nuke. And if I lose there, then I can portal to the desert and collapse the ice castle while destroying that World Tree fragment. And if I somehow get followed to the desert, which is the worst place for the undead to fight, then I can make them suffer for every inch they take and then retreat to here where all my other big cannons are, Everest and Meliad. See, I’m not the Marines in this scenario, I’m Japan, except I’m fighting offensively. The bases are the ‘islands’ and the fortresses themselves are defensive nukes.”
Shaking his watery head at me, Kraken rolled his big eye. “I knew it. You are crazy. But do you have all the things on your list? Got the Yggdrasil quick-growth seeds, the 3D-Conjurer machine, the copies of the crystal memory plates, and the bits of an angel’s bastard?”
“Yup.” Feeling a bit restless due to all of the excitement, I hopped on my hoverboard to go find Spot. The furry eating machine wasn’t too far. Our mental link let me know which direction he was in and I wished I hadn’t really gotten to see what I saw. Hopping off my hoverboard, I stood in front of the mouth of a cave, one big enough to back a plane into. All kinds of weird growls and excited howls were coming out of it. Two much bigger than normal wolves who looked like they were supposed to be standing guard were lying at the sides of the cave mouth, sheepish looks on their faces. So weird how they can have such human expressions.
They didn’t even look at me, deliberately looking away as I took careful steps towards the dark entrance of the cave, Gungnir out and glowing menacingly, my gear fully powered up with a mana shield covering every inch of me. It only took me a second to assess that I wasn’t in any danger here so I extended my senses into the cave. Sex. My dog was having sex, rough fucking with a she-wolf big enough to take on a tank and win. And the worst part was, I wasn’t using my eyes to view the cave but my magical senses, which means the damn image was burned into my brain.
“FUCK! DUDE! WHY!” I screamed, shutting down my magical senses and turning around, completely understanding where the other wolves were coming from. They were the animal version of putting a sock on the doorknob, but wolves don’t have socks. Angrily composing a mental message in my head, I blasted it down our link and took off on the hoverboard. “Damn, gross,” I gagged. “Human sex is great, beautiful even, but that, that’s just wrong.”
Kraken chimed in. [What did you expect? You put dragon in him, and a dragon’s sex drive is not a small thing to contend with. They either eat anything that moves or they fuck anything that moves. Just wait till you visit the Dragoon villages in the spring. It makes your Valentine’s Day look like a boring day at the office.]
“Stop it!”
[Just wait till you see the shenanigans all the fuckers get into at the Multiverse Magic Academy! You have to visit when you get the chance, it’s like your West Virginia University parties and takes up whole streets, but bigger!]