Hell hath no fury like a frustrated sorcerer, I’m sure that’s how the saying goes. At least, it does in my post-apocalyptic slice of the back-end desert of America. Be it far from me to actually feel comfortable in a place like this, the darting shadows of the dreary former nightmare that was corporate life making sweet love to all the horrors that concentrated dark magic could bring. The main lobby, where business people used to love to greet their clients with the vaulted ceilings and nice furniture, was scattered with trash and remnants of bodies. A few strategically tossed grenades and shotgun flamethrower blasts cleared that area quite nicely, illuminating the center of the building where the elevator wrapped around the column that used to serve as the elevator.
“Honey!” I called, giving in to the inspiration of the moment, “I’m home!” Shadows flitted from their disgusting hidey holes, screaming their rage and wild hunger even as my lovely rifle spoke for me. Bright flares of magically converted fire and force from my Centauri/dwarven rifle kicked harder than a wrecking ball, smashing the fiends even as I laughed, my holy water arms smacking away any of them that got too close.
[Hurry up! You’re attracting too much attention from the other skyscrapers that are probably in the exact same shape as this one! Besides, you don’t know how to close a portal, do you?]
I contemplated that question as I continuously lit up the growing horde of zombies, thanking my lucky stars that I had piles upon piles of charged grenades, ammunition, and mana batteries stored in Gungnir. Planting Gungnir next to me, Kraken took that over as well, accurately firing rounds and grenades from the spatial storage like secondary artillery. The last time I dealt with portals, they closed due to a device a dwarf tossed into it, and the first time I saw a portal I just sealed the damn thing with stone so nothing would even be able to come through. So my deductions leave me with a few options within the scope of my abilities, I could seal up the portal with stone, toss a couple seriously overcharged grenades through it and hope it blows up from the other end, or bring the whole building down and just let the thousands of tons worth of rubble serve as a fitting tombstone.
[We know that the stone-sealing works, right?] Kraken mused, confirming that my train of thought wasn’t completely off base. [And since we don’t have whatever it was the dwarf chucked through the portal to close it, then determining if the other two methods work should be a priority, especially if you have multiple portals to close. Let’s figure out what works if we can. Although, you have to be careful, night has fallen and we don’t know what else is lurking around here.]
[Fine, divert all extra power from the mana generators that currently aren't being used into three grenades, charging them up right to the brink.]
[Roger.]
The ambient sounds in and of themselves were starting to freak me out, especially since my rifle doesn’t sound like a normal firearm thanks to the magical design. There is no bang, no combustion, no pressurized sound wave that leaves your ears ringing as fear makes your trigger finger squeeze faster than it’s ever done in its poor little life. My rifle when firing the crystal rounds emitted a quiet whoompf and even the shotgun-like blasts of fire sounded like slapping a tight beachball with an open hand. The grenades were the only modern-ish weaponry I used that actually sounded like its pre-apocalyptic counterpart.
Reaching into a pocket on my thigh, I pulled out a handful of pre-charged planttrop seeds and flung them around the entrance of the building as I stormed in swinging Gungnir with one hand as I fired my rifle with the other. One of my holy water arms stole into my leg pocket and pulled out the rest of the planttrop seeds, firing them at what remained of the doors and hallways after charging them up to help thin out the incoming crowds of feral zombies. Another holy water arm nabbed the cryoshards, my almost forgotten ice bombs in the shape of playing cards out of the other leg’s pocket, and slapped them against any available surface behind me as I descended into the depths of the basement.
[Just let the damn cards blow the stairwell shut already!] I yelled inside of my head. [I can force my way through the floor of the concrete and earth travel outta here when I’m done.] As soon as I got through four screaming freaks with no eyes and way too many teeth and to the bottom of the stairs, the snap-hiss of ultra-frozen energy exploded behind me, collapsing the stairs and creating a gigantic plug of ice.
[That won’t last long.] Kraken said, shivering from his very safe space in Gungnir even as he conjured more water, blasting it at the ice cap and freezing it to make it considerably thicker.
[Do that behind me!] Turning around, Kraken hosed and froze all incoming monster missiles as I covered the prodigious ice cap with a thick layer of conjured stone, easily sealing off the entryway. Not stopping until the stone was at least six feet thick, Kraken covered my ass with the rest of the cryoshards and wildly whipping holy water arms that hissed as they sliced through the living dead.
The four water arms reacted at the speed of thought, not even slowing down as they whipped like living scythes through the masses. [Hey, you’re gettin’ pretty good at this!] I chuckled inwardly. [Ya think it’s got to something to do with the fact that you have tentacles? Is it just like home for you?]
[How do you say it, ah yes, I believe the proper term for disparagement is, ‘fuck you’.]
Laughing at Kraken even though this certainly neither the time nor the place to do so, especially with exploding bits of dead things flying everywhere. Furiously combating the surging flood of dark things for a solid three minutes, the basement was quiet.
“Don’t say it.” I couldn’t have Kraken fall into the trap that any idiot who tempts fate might do. The dreaded phrases such as, ‘I’m glad that’s over’, or “It can’t get any worse’, seem to invoke the Higher Powers that be to actually pay attention and send a bit of personal fuckery your way. “Say nothing, absolutely nothing,” I ordered, sending a bit of mana down our link to let him know that I wasn’t joking. Extending my senses outward yet again, I pushed to search the hidden dark corners as I conjured light stones and tossed them out five feet or so, slowly working my way to check every room and entryway.
Keeping at least a solid twenty feet between myself and the portal, I made sure to never turn my back to it. It was a magnificent work of art, as if some urban punk with actual skill grew the damn portal out of the cement flooring and steel rebar to attach it to the ceiling of the basement. The circle of protruding runes framed the mixture of deepest blank and sickly glowing purple that formed the liquid surface of the hole in space even as the stark white of the concrete framed the entire thing like a giant rectangular block. “How are them grenades looking?” I asked, still conjuring and placing light stones. The entire room at this point was very well lit even as the shaking in my hands stilled.
[Need about twenty more minutes before they’re ready,] Kraken answered. [Do you think searching the rest of the basement is a good idea? Why not just seal it up and call it a day after blowing the portal?]
“Fine.” Taking one last magical look around and seeing nothing on my version of radar, I plugged up the two hallways with an immovable amount of stone. “Now to take care of the exit strategy,” I grumbled, willing Gungnir to shorten the staff handle while lengthening the blade. It took me longer than twenty minutes to magically charge and sharpen the blade to the point where it effortlessly cut through the concrete until I had reached the dirt and stone underneath. From what I could tell, the concrete went down way further than fifty freaking yards so I dug down about six feet and then tunneled to the side which was way shorter than my original idea. When I hit dirt, I sent a pulse of power through it just to make sure that it would work. “Nothing but good ol’ earth, tight.”
Climbing back up, I pulled out the three grenades and right as I was about to lob them in like the world’s worst carnival game, because who could miss that eight by eight foot target, a lovely lady with blood red eyes and jet black hair sauntered out. I’m not really sure what she found so funny. Maybe it was the way that I had gotten into the bowler’s stance to gently lob the over-charged grenades through or the fact that she considered me and my grenades to be absolutely no threat. Whatever it was, it was annoying, no, condescending, no, irritating. That’s it, it was irritating to watch her look at me and laugh, laugh as if I were a clown who was there just to make her smile. In those alien eyes, I was not a threat, I was less than a threat, I was a joke.
[Vampire!] Kraken hissed. [Old Blood! I think, if she smells like a dead body then she’s Old Blood. If she’s New Blood then you’re in way less danger. They’re big on honor like the Luneks but they’re not stupid about it! Vampires don’t live long if they’re stupid, and both kinds prune their own family harder than your granddad drank!]
Pulling just a smidge of mana out of each of my three grenades just to make sure I didn’t blow us all to kingdom come, I slipped them back inside of Gungnir even as I slowly and gracefully stood up straight, conjuring water to clean the gunk and gore off myself and banishing it. [Not sure anyone can do anything harder than how gramps drank but if she means business then crank up the generators. I want them doing double-time while I stall for time,] I explained even as I said nothing out loud.
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The lady said something that I didn’t catch, the syllables more like liquid hissing than anything language I’ve ever heard. Raising an eyebrow, I said nothing even as I examined her. My armor shimmered with barely contained power as Gungnir continued to charge from my two internal mana-generators. I had used an incredible amount of power so far today in crushing the hordes of undead and night terrors. My experiences so far had been quite at odds with the vision in front of me.
Aside from the blood-red eyes, she could have easily passed for a gymnast moonlighting as a ‘model’ for some extra cash. At just over six feet tall, she tucked her dark hair behind her pointed ear as she smiled and tried another language. I did manage to catch a glimpse of her elongated canines as she worked through all of the languages she knew. Her brow furled as nothing proved successful to which I held up one finger. As she quieted, I pulled out a dwarven translation amulet that I had saved from my last run-in with them and held it up. I hadn’t had too much time to study it and unravel it to figure out how it worked like I wanted to, but that doesn’t mean my mana sorcery wasn’t more than able to copy the enchantment and paste it on something else. I had ten copies of the damn thing tucked away for times like this.
Her eyes lit up as she snatched it from my hand. Almost faster than the eye could see, she drew a dagger and stuck her finger with the tip, pushing the amulet into the cut so that it was covered in her blood to which she then stuck the whole thing to her forehead and hummed. Now I was curious, seeing that she so obviously knew what to do with it when I had had it for months and could barely get it to work. A moment later, she put the chain around her neck so that the amulet hung between her generous cleavage.
Forcefully tamping down on my masculine drive to stare, I could barely pay attention to Kraken as he kept up a running diatribe in the background. [New Blood vamps are blood magic specialists and love doing elaborate rituals on a scale of crazy you can’t imagine. Still roughly alive, New Bloods like a more sensual path to power. The Old Blood on the other hand is basically Superman stuffed into a zombie. They can do magic with the force of a dragon and have no time for bugs, ehr mortals.]
Keeping our conversation flowing at a higher speed of thought, I asked for more clarification. [New Blood, easy, they still live. They like blood magic because they can have the same activities as standard mortals. You can’t fuck an Old Blood, they have no bloodflow, ergo, no sex. New Blood like to still drink, eat, smoke, fuck, the usual mortal vices. But don’t let her kiss you, they’re made to be your sensual kryptonite. That’s how they lure you in for dinner.]
Figuring that I’d move this right along, I cocked an eyebrow as I checked my wards and shields. “English,” I said softly, looking this Venus flytrap over. “I don’t suppose that trinket has basic-ass English, huh?”
Her instant jerky action of looking at me reminded me of an insect, the motion completely unnatural to the human form even as I watched her chest neither rise nor fall. Creepy. I noticed for science. Taking a deep breath as she fiddled with the amulet, I decided to keep talking as I gently extended a heavily guarded mental tendril towards her. “Anyways, we’re probably not going to get along. You drink blood, I take out undead but you may or may not be one. You don’t smell like one,” I continued with a care-free lilt to my voice as if I were explaining to a baby the process of changing its diaper. “You smell rather nice actually, kinda like a beautifully rare steak after the ten minutes of rest. But your portal here, this damn thing has to go so . . . I got a couple glowy presents here-”
My mental tendril was yanked by an unseen force, pulled and split into two threads, one to the amulet and the other to her forehead as the vampire stared at me. My connection to be her and the amulet began to turn crimson as her control over it began to take over. With a thought, I snapped the connection as I took a step back, readying Gungnir and the grenades.
“That won’t be necessary, mortal.” The silken tones were off putting to say the least, especially with the way that her motions smoothened out to react at a more normal human speed. The insect-like jerkiness was gone and the balance of professional gymnasts was present. “English it is. The idioms took a while to parse through, cat got your tongue? Intriguing wordplay . . . does this mean that I’m the feline that holds your ability to speak or felines are found to be sexually attractive by the way you look at me as if I’m a delicious mouse?”
Fuck. Smart vampires, double fuck. Clearing my throat, I went for the ostentatious route. “Perchance milady, the context of the phrase was lost in translation. Felines are not attractive to humans but they embody a beauty all their own. While I do find you gloriously beautiful, the idiom refers to being rendered unable to speak due to shock, as if a literal cat had grabbed your tongue, rendering you unable to speak due to obstacle and the shock, for what cat goes for a tongue?”
Her laugh was music putting Beethoven and Aerosmith to shame, a haunting melody to the harmony of hormones that she effortlessly put off. Her spell of charisma was unconscious, bleeding off in ways that would have had me on my knees if not for the many layers of control my flesh and mind sorcery had put up. With another cleansing wave of power, I gestured at the portal. “Would you be so kind as to aid me in my quest?” I asked graciously. “I have been charged with purging this city for the safety of my comrades and I would rather not harm your person in the pursuit of my goal if necessary.” It was already happening. My body was trying to get me to view this creature as less of a threat over time, a weakness borne of flesh that should not be possible and yet here she was and she hadn’t even done anything yet.
[Careful, fleshling! Remember, PAR-A-SITE! Evil, deadly, not good in the extreme!]
[I got it, squid!]
Mirroring my earlier expression perfectly, she cocked an eyebrow at me. “And your quest is, my good wizard?”
“Closing the portals and purging the land.”
Looking me up and down like I was a five course meal at her favorite restaurant, she took a step forward. In the magic spectrum, I could see a cloud of a few million tiny bright red specks floating towards me, her personal hormonal attack. I knew what this meant, the unspoken truce had come to an end. Trusting in my personal defenses to last for at least a minute with Kraken at the wheel, I focused on the portal, conjuring a growing cap of stone to grow up on every side to seal it off. Screeching in fury, the vamp moved so fast that she vanished. A semi hit me multiple times from the back, flinging me forward even as the kinetic runes instantly reacted with a blowback of energy.
Activating Svalinn’s standard counter, my dragon-infused gauntlets conjured a runed dome of alternating steel and granite that nothing short of a magic nuke would even dent. The portal at this point was completely swallowed up by a column of conjured granite that boasted a radius of six feet. The front side of the rock plug did have a small slanting tunnel where I would still be able to fit my grenades in and roll them down so that I could still deliver the farewell present to the other side. My dome started to shake from all sides as the woman vented her fury, unable to actually get to the soft meat insides, me.
[Do you see the problem with ‘turtling’ up? Now where ya gonna go?] Kraken asked even as the vampire screamed for my blood. Thinking fast, I applied my method of sneakily infiltrating New Miami to now. The only difference was that I wasn’t surrounded by stone, but I could be. Leaving Svalinn’s dome up that gave me plenty of room, I willed Gungnir into a small knife that I attached to my belt as I started the world’s slowest escape.
In hindsight, it was brilliant. In the moment, it was raw, unhindered terror. All I did was divert the flow of power from my generators to my ongoing spell, which was filling up the entire room with conjured stone. Because of my earth sorcery, moving through stone was fairly easy, not exactly fast but it cuts down on multiple problems at the same time, and I’d like to point out that I’m growing. Instead of burying my opponents in the earth, I’m bring the earth to my opponents.
Ten minutes of concentration yielded several metric tons of stone that completely filled up the main room in the basement as well as the escape tunnel. Here, I was king. Here, I ruled with an earthen fist. Little Miss Bloody Sunshine had nowhere to go thanks to my earlier efforts at sealing off the room and now she was trapped in a little bubble of stone that didn’t even give her room thrash about. Banishing Svalinn’s dome, Kraken and I took a good long magical look around.
[Well that’s one way to cheat your ass off.]
[One way to successfully win!] I corrected. Flowing through the stone, I made my way over to the little fist-sized tunnel and pushed the three overcharged grenades down the slanted mini-ramp, watching as they rolled through the liquid portal. As they vanished, I quickly filled in the tunnel and any leftover space with conjured platinum, making sure to etch runes of sealing and anti-tampering as I went.
Two hours of work left me even more exhausted as my body begged for a rest even though my magic could keep me going. Forcing down a Centauri meal cube, I regarded the trapped vampire. [It would be a mercy to kill her,] I remarked as I contemplated how to do it. [She doesn’t need air so leaving her here just like this won’t kill her. Decapitation, does that work on them? Fuck it, I have holy water arms, burn the bitch.]
Moving until I had about five feet of solid stone between us, I carefully banished a tiny tunnel of stone from me to her even as I filled the space with Nephilim tainted water. When I finally reached her bubble, the water sprayed through and Kraken and I watched her burn as I manipulated the water to make sure that I properly put her down. First, I cut her in half and then followed that up with decapitation and then burned her heart and brain with the holy water. Even as I wanted to turn away, Kraken reminded me about the nature of this creature. Vampires feast on blood, they live off of the life of others, this very fact means that they are not a part of nature’s cycle. They steal from nature’s cycle making them the antithesis of everything that I am and have been working towards. And so I watched. I watched as she melted. I watched as she burned. I watched because I should, because someone should witness the demise of evil, to remember the fall and tell the tale of evil’s end.
Extracting the holy water, I made sure to carefully filter it through conjured sand so that it didn’t bring back any particles of the vampire. Sealing her remains in a sphere of stone, I grabbed that and moved through the surrounding stone with the coffin down the escape tunnel, taking the time to bury the coffin several hundred feet below the surface of the earth to make sure it would be undisturbed. [You’re lucky you cheat,] Kraken grumbled. [Anything else would have instantly died to her, whatever her name was. You just trapped, disintegrated, and buried a New Blood vampire that who knows was however many centuries old, I don’t know if I should be shocked or proud at this point.]
[Just be happy I’m alive!] I snapped, cautiously moving under the earth in the direction of where I left everyone. As I got closer, I could See that the devastated area was completely empty for now even as I sat safely underground. Following the trail of my link to Acantha, I kept going until I hit the outskirts of the city where a low-rise building sat. At least twenty Luneks stood guard at the top and another twenty patrolled at the base. Acantha, Remy, Fernando and my two new vassals were inside. As far as I could tell they were still alive and healthy.
Deciding to make a statement in front of the Luneks even as I knew I needed to catch some shuteye, I popped out of the ground and began conjuring a squat dome of pure stone. Kraken made sure to include runes on the inside and outside while winding conjured iron throughout the structure to make it even heavier and stronger as I shaped the entire structure around a small bedroom at the very center. This was to be my temporary bomb shelter with no doorway, allowing me to basically be my own key. After an hour’s worth of conjuring and making sure I had enough pinhole tunnels to supply me with fresh air, I washed myself off with conjured water and conked out for a flesh sorcery enhanced power nap.
The best part of flesh sorcery in the morning is the fact that I can literally program an alarm clock and force my body to be instantly alert, but the best part about flesh sorcery at night is the ability to stuff a full twelve hours of rejuvenating rest into three hours of unconsciousness. With Kraken keeping watch and Gungnir steadily charging, I had nothing to worry about at all until the light of the morning sun bled through the teeny tiny air holes. “Ooooo buddy!” I yipped. “My army’s a-comin’ today!”