By the end of her story, Judy’s face had gone through every emotion, and as she blinked away her tears, a stony coldness took their place. I know that expression. It’s the one where you realize that there’s nothing left to do but push on. Complaining about it won’t help, sympathy from others only makes it worse as you know that the pit of life will cave in around you if you do nothing. Only the agency of self backed by an iron will is sufficient to stand the thought of losing your family while fighting for your life and plaguing doubts. I at least had some closure in comparison to Judy. My brother was a room and a hallway away while the rest of my family’s well being was still technically up in the air. She had nobody.
The human side of me was tugging on my heart strings, begging me to be a white knight to the gorgeous blonde and reassure her that everything would be ok. The other side of me, the post-apocalyptic sorcerer who’s finally learning some lessons, was holding the reins though, reminding me of what I’ve already observed.
One, she’s a damn necromancer that’s survived as long as me, which means that she’s not weak and does not need anyone’s help. Two, she has five revenants the size of Centauri warriors, each clad in black Centauri armor with an inner layer of bone armor filled with necromantic power underneath that. The scariest thing about her souped-up zombies is that each wielded a shield and a battleaxe, both of which were big enough that a normal man wouldn’t be able handle those. An axe like that would require me to use both hands and that shield was taller than I was.
And last but not certainly not least, my magic recoiled at the thought of doing battle with her. Something about the very nature of her power made my stomach turn and even my soul-tree on the inside quivered with fear. The more I felt the aura surrounding her and her revenants, the greasier I felt, like my grip over my own magic was slipping. Nothing about being in the same room as her, let alone her with minions, felt ok. The situation to me personally felt even more disgusting as she herself was beautiful but her magic was vile, like meeting a Victoria Secret model in person and she blinds you with her beauty and smile but then starts ranting about wanting to eat children and drown old people. The dichotomy of her existence repulsed me further.
[If you can’t handle this,] Kraken said, laughing at my discomfort. [Then the Hungry Ones are going to, how do you humans say, fuck you up real good?]
[Are they worse?] I asked, keeping a straight face. [Her shit feels concentrated, like she managed to condense evil itself and stick it in a corpse AND make it obey her.]
[Not everyone’s path to power is littered with rose petals. Some climb over mountains of bodies and others swim through oceans of blood. You my friend, are nowhere near the top of the totem pole. Did I say that right?]
Mentally rolling my eyes at Kraken as he could rustle through my memories himself, I conjured a cup made out of ice and filled it with conjured water, delicately taking a sip as I thought over the instinctive nature of my feelings. For a while, I would have thought that the element of fire was the opposite of my composite of magical abilities, but it seems that I was wrong. The very nature of my sorceries are the basic elements of life, earth and water combined with nature and mind are the foundations for life itself, and enchantments with mana sorcery are simply the next steps that life can take. But death, necromancy, corpse manipulation, the thought of it sends shivers down my spine. Maybe unconsciously, my drive to wage a war against the eventual invasion of the Hungry Ones wasn’t just proactive self-preservation, but my own powers trying to influence me to get rid of my opposite, the one thing I don’t really stand a chance against.
“Cat got your tongue?” A wry smile graced her lips as she joked. “Or did you freeze it solid?”
Downing the water, I banished the ice cup and looked her dead in the eye. Get it, dead? “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, making sure that my voice was sincere even as I ignored her verbal poke. “I do know what it’s like to unfairly lose someone to circumstances you can’t control.” Keeping my voice steady really wasn’t that hard. I was honestly sympathetic to her plight, and making sure that I didn’t piss her off or make her an enemy was high on my list of priorities for the moment, regardless of how my magics felt about her.
Reeanth tensed as she watched our conversation from where she leaned against the wall near the front entrance of the building. Johnny, oblivious to the rising of the oddly natured tension, crashed into a seat next to me, dropping armfuls of food on the table between everyone.
“I don’t know the crazy science behind it but they got MUTHA’FUCKIN’ HOHOS BABY! Check it!”
A particular whiff of something special tingled my nostrils. “Is that . . . Taco Bell?” My eyes zeroed in on a box that must have come straight from Heaven itself. Right in the middle of the assortment of all the worst foods that Ronald McDonalds and the Taco Bell Chihuahua could have dreamed up together on a mushroom trip sat a lovely almost pyramid of Doritos Locos Tacos and Gordita Crunches.
“Those are mine! You just ate!” Johnny thought his posturing and flexing was enough to scare me off, but I’ve fought worse for worse at worse times. The tension of the moment was cut as Judy reached forward and snagged a Double Cheesy Beef Burrito from the side, toppling the pile of food.
[Kraken, now.]
[I don’t think this is a good-]
[NOW!]
Not a moment too soon, my spirit familiar snatched the Taco Bell from the table as I waved Gungnir over the food.
“Hey! I was gonna share anyways,” Johnny grumbled. Grabbing two Wendy’s Baconators, he leaned back as he pushed two Chick-Fil-A wraps over to Judy and then tossed an Arby’s Roast Beef to Reeanth. “Eat up, shit’s never calm with this asshole in town. Trust me,” he said, bits of food crumbling out from the corners of his mouth. “Some douche is about to either kick the door in or nuke us from orbit.”
My moaning was embarrassing even as Judy’s much dirtier version distracted Johnny. “What?” she said, glaring at the both of us. “It’s not my fault fast food is this addictive! Besides, the food recombinator is a work of magic in and of itself. Don’t ask me how it works either, I’m just glad it does. Besides, I can’t get fat thanks to magic.”
Lowering her face, she dove in her wraps like a rabid pitbull. [Is that something I can steal?] I asked Kraken while I prayed to anything that would listen.
[Sorry boss. The size of the storage space is based off of energy put into making it as well as the amount of energy stored. Angel relics plus your batteries PLUS the two generators I basically refurbished, dude, you’re outta room. Besides, it’s that entire left counter in the kitchen that does the work.]
Cursing a very quiet but very vehement blue streak, I slowly ate as I hunched over my food like a caveman, protecting my meal. When I finished my quick roundabout trip to Heaven, I wiped my mouth and looked back at Judy. Clearing my throat, I repeated what I said before Johnny interrupted us. “Judy, I truly am sorry for your loss.”
Her downcast expression didn’t change as she ate but I did manage to get a nod out of her. Finishing off her meal, she licked her fingers like a cat and looked at me and Johnny, her intense gaze going back and forth. “I assume you both have lost people as well?”
“Yeah,” Johnny answered, his tone oddly a little snide. “But my family sucked. Be a doctor, Johnny! Be a lawyer, Johnny! We found a nice Korean girl for you to marry, Johnny!” His face screwed up as he rolled his eyes. “All I wanted to do was skate, smoke, maybe have a bit of a good time before growing up in the business world. Then this shit hit and most of my town was gone.”
Taking a deep breath for part two of his rant, a loud boom and even louder cacophony of roars shook the city. It was an earthquake of sound that rocked every person in it to full attention, completely activating the lizard hindbrain of every human. Even with my flesh sorcery granting me complete control of my body, I couldn’t help the instinctive surge of adrenaline in my body or the mad grab for power that my mind pulled out of my mana batteries.
The only person not appearing to be affected was Johnny. Quickly downing the last of his burger, he threw his head back and groaned. “Every time! They never attack before I eat, only after!”
Answering the question that had yet to spill from my lips, Reeanth looked at me as she placed her meal back down on the table. “Aqualans, my lord. Oceanic masters of genetic manipulation, renown for creating monster armies that they sell to the highest bidder. They hate technology in all of its forms and lay claim to planets so they can terraform them into breeding zoos. They’ve attacked at least once every ten days for the past two months.”
“Maybe I can add to my posse . . .” Judy mused, rolling her shoulders to relieve the tension. Snapping her fingers, her revenants filed out of the Centauri house with her taking up the rear position. “See ya later boys,” she said, winking at Johnny who, completely oblivious to her flirting, stuffed another burger down his gullet and grabbed his staff.
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“Fuck that!” He yelled. “I’m comin’ to!”
“My lord I-”
“Go Reeanth,” I said, making a shooing motion. “I can’t leave my brother here alone. Do what you need to do, and come get me if things get outta hand.”
As soon as I was alone in the room, I had Kraken cast his senses outward, using Gungnir as a focus for my power. My own magical senses were pretty detailed but my range really wasn’t that great. My spirit familiar on the other hand, due to his ethereal makeup, could scry or look around unseen up to two or three miles away. What I saw made my heart sink.
Colossally enhanced megalodons, prehistoric sharks that ate whales, were slowly swimming right off the coast with hordes of twisted deepwater freaks of nature clinging to their backs, as if the sharks were troop transports. Black armored crocodiles with gnarly serrated scales half the size of the megalodons crashed onto the beach and halted, roaring over and over in a show of intimidation. Other things crawled out as well, octopus people wielding twisting snakes that fired acid, mutant crabs bigger than tanks with claws that shone a hideous green inner light, and even what looked to be a spiny lionfish big enough to swallow an elephant climbed on shore. It wasn’t just a small group, a veritable army had shown up on the beach and was getting bigger every minute.
[Uh, fuck that.] Returning to myself, I ordered Kraken to keep a lookout as I hauled ass back to my brother.
[What’s the plan then? I don’t imagine you’re gonna leave the others to die.]
[They’ll be fine for a few minutes. I should be back in plenty of time] I said, reinforcing my body with magic as I hauled my oversized younger brother off his bed and onto my back. [He’s the only one I’m worried about right now.]
Plodding heavily, I made it outside to where the threshold of the pyramid shaped building ended and Mother Earth began. Closing my eyes, I and my human backpack sank into the earth and so very carefully traveled to the underground root base of the Centauri portal. Weaving another mind working on my brother so that nothing short of a nuke would wake him, I touched Yggdrasil’s root and cast my mind into it, establishing a connection to what I mentally call Home Base and traveling home.
Arriving at my clearing in Fredericksburg, I lay my brother on his back and propped him up against one of the trees. Conjuring two stone boxes, each with a lid, I put several Centauri meal cubes and two Taco Bell burritos inside one and inscribed ‘food’ on the lid, and then conjured water in the other and inscribed ‘water’ on that one. Placing the boxes at his feet, I then conjured a stone pillar and etched a quick message on it so that it would be the first thing Andy saw when he woke up.
You’re alive, you’re cured, and yes, that’s Taco Bell in the damn box.
Feel better and don’t be afraid, this is my home and these are my people.
The tree lady is either Meliad or Lyra and the big rock dude is Everest.
I’ll be back hopefully in a day or two.
Sincerely,
Your much better looking brother
P.S. Yes you can have any fruit in the smoothie forest to the east
With my mind put at ease, I traveled via World Tree to Sunstone Castle and took quick stock of the area. Unfortunately, Spot was nowhere in sight. Remembering that Spot the last time I saw him was in the act of making little Spots, I groaned as I realized that I wasn’t going to have my big gun for this fight. “Test run time it is then.”
Linking my mind to Kraken, I had him send out the activation code I had keyed in to my four elementals that were the captains for my sunstone golem army. It was a beautiful sight as I stood at the top of my castle, looking down at the two hundred strong army of fully charged golems wielding maces and bladed arms. In unison, my soldiers started marching towards my baobab Yggdrasil. As they arrived at the Tree, they put their hands on it one by one and walked into the tree, traveling down the connection I established to the one in Miami. Kraken made sure that my orders were clear, once arriving fifty feet underground in Miami, which wasn’t a problem due to being earth-based golems, travel to the beach outside of the city and kill anything that wasn’t vaguely human.
Eight minutes of single minded channeling was so boring that I assigned a mental background process to it. Thirty seconds to establish the connection between the tree and stabilize it, each of the two hundred golems then took about two seconds each to touch and step into the tree, and then finally, I went through myself and closed the connection.
Arriving at the beach was an awe-inspiring sight of absolute bedlam. I almost wiped a tear from my eye as one sunstone golem smashed a crabman from hell while bisecting another with a laser from its other arm. Fighting side by side under the command of their Elemental captains, the unorganized chaos deepsea army came under fire from the march of organized death that was my beautifully crafted elementals. The divisions of my army acted in perfect tandem, splitting into squads of ten to form a frontline dedicated to holding the press of twisted flesh while the backline functioned as laser artillery. And as the inner reserves of power ran dry, the squads switched roles as the other divisions filled in the gaps.
[Do you even need my help?] I asked Kraken, as I climbed up a tall dune for a better look. My familiar gave me a grunt that I took as a no. Using my magic as a scaffold, Kraken connected with one of the Elemental captains, giving orders for him to connect his division of golems to the city wall of New Miami. Within two minutes, the rearmost group of golems had connected themselves to the wall and begun broadcasting power to the other hundred and fifty golems, using their sunstone bodies as antennas.
[Watch this!] Kraken said proudly, sending off a quick list of orders to the captains. As one, the forefront line of golems lashed out, creating space for themselves as they beat a quick retreat, running behind the middle of my army. The hundred in the middle were all lined up, and as soon as the front fifty were clear, the air blazed with heat from the laser barrage. Absolute carnage exploded the length of the beach as concentrated magic lasers moved from target to target, making sure that nothing aquatic escaped alive. Watching the connection, I could barely make out the string of commands that Kraken was giving out at the speed of thought, conducting this battle like a symphony, each order leading to absolute decimation of the enemy.
Seeing this from the outside was humbling. Kraken’s perfect orchestration of the sunstone golem army was so precise that even the Centauri warriors that were out on the beach emerged unscathed from the barrage of lasers as the Aqualan fodder fell into lumps of seared meat around them. As the main body of their army was cut down in the sand turning it blue with their blood, the larger monstrosities started returning to the depths as the diamonds atop the Centauri pyramid formations began to emit a hazy light.
There was no sound, only a series of bright flashes. Beams of light thick enough to swallow a truck lanced out, each either detonating when touching a monster on the surface of the water or creating an explosion of steam when they missed. The salvo lasted for thirty seconds before the last of the invaders vanished under the Atlantic.
“They’ll be back.” Reeanth said, coming up behind me. “I assume your army-” I nodded and she continued. “Your army surprised them. The city’s defense forces have been systematically shaven down. This is the first time they’ve had to use the cannons.”
“Well, that army right there is for the undead, but this was a pretty damn good test run.”
“THAT, WAS, AWESOME!” Johnny’s tackle came out of nowhere, plowing me and Reeanth into the sand. “Did you fuckin’ see?! Aw I wanna fight one! Can I?”
Shoving him and banishing the sand that had gotten into the cracks of my armor, I used earth sorcery to blast a barrel full of sand at Johnny knocking him into the dune next to us. I knew that was a love tap to him. Turning around, I watched my currently busy golem army which split in two, one half of it cleaning the beach while the other half was recharging at the city wall. As I watched, I could see visible cracks in their armor seal up and the inner light in their chests started to grow brighter.
“Go fight with Judy, I bet her soldiers would give you a good run for your money,” I said, mesmerized by the amazing sight of my creations. Speaking to Reeanth without turning, I informed her about Andy’s whereabouts and my next plan. Mentally taking a note or two, I put in a reminder to have my Sunstone Castle upgraded with an auto-generate feature for the golem army, so whenever I go off to war, I can have the castle get busy on making and charging new golems if I need it to.
As my sworn follower broke into a light jog back towards the city while Johnny rough-housed with Judy’s revenants, I closed my eyes and pushed the base of Gungnir into the sand, feeling about for ley lines. The wall of the city shown like a gigantic bonfire behind, its presence palpable in size and intensity even from where I stood. The portal at the center of the city did sit on a ley line, but from what I could tell, it was the genesis point for that river of power, probably from the root of Yggdrasil. That channel of mana spread in a westward direction, as the energy here near the ocean was at the same time more diffuse and yet quantitatively more than what was available up here on shore.
[Ocean ley lines function differently,] Kraken clarified for me. [Yes, thinking of them as similar to rivers is accurate for up on land, but under the ocean it’s more like pools of power instead of rivers. The Mariana Trench would be one, certain ritualistically important spots such as underwater mountain ranges or buried cities would also probably qualify. Mana is more abundant in the ocean but it’s more spread out. It’s why creatures can be so much bigger there as well, it’s a function of gravity seeming to have less of an effect underwater due to surface tension but also there’s simply more mana.]
“So what now?” I grumbled.
Turns out, my golem army was good for a number of things, one of which was using them to brazenly secure the building with the highest density of mana I could sense other than the city walls themselves. With overwhelming force comes overwhelming authority. My golem army had broken itself down into various squads and secured chokepoints inside of the building that was disguised to look exactly like all the other buildings. Kraken had ordered that no blood be shed and those orders were taken literally, my brother’s political visitors were all being held in a less than dignified position.
The witch Sybella was being held down by one golem and the other had its bladed arms on either side of her neck with a laser fully powered up and ready to go. Rolf and his crew were being sat on as five golems were aiming lasers at their faces. I strode in like I owned the place, which for the moment, I did.
“Thank you all for attending my brief showing for the day,” I said as I bowed, smirking at each of my temporary prisoners. “If all goes well, I shall leave your lovely city safer than I found it, and hopefully with no one foolishly losing their lives.” Planting Gungnir into the floor, I willed the crystal top to turn into a wicked three-bladed spiral spear. Keeping it pointed up, I communed with Kraken.
[We’re looking for info here, anything we can find. I don’t know what a futuristic Centauri database or server would look like, shit, I don’t even know what their computers look like. Do you?]
Lightly scoffing at my lack of forethought, Kraken pointed out, [We may not but I’m sure they do.]
Walking over to Rolf, I squatted down and asked, “My apologies sir, I do believe I am mistakenly wanted for murder so I’ll make this quick.” His eyes squinted. “No, I’m not going to kill you. I just want to know where the information of this city is held, and I’d rather someone just tell me.”
Sybella opened her mouth and spat, “Release me at once swi-”. The rest of her tirade was cut by me conjuring dirt and shoving it in her mouth.
“Ah, sweet blessed silence.”
[Coming off a bit too strong here man, maybe tone down the megalomania?]
Chuckling internally, I turned back to Rolf. “Seriously,” I said, letting my genuine sincerity show through. “I’m a native that doesn’t know shit about shit but definitely has way too much goddamn power, not that I’m complaining. I need knowledge and I know there’s a bunch of it in this city. I want that and only that, I swear it.” Making sure that his eyes didn’t waver from mine, I spoke softly. “Andy is my brother, and I’ve got a hunch y’all were friends.”
Appearing to think it over for a minute, Rolf grunted, “In the room behind us, big piece of Aetherium shaped like an obelisk, can’t miss it.”