~Mazoga~
Mazoga placed Eight on the Pedestal. Eight had been monitoring Thorben’s travel and alerted Mazoga when some of Duke McGuire’s men started contact. Mazoga was initially content that the Duke had followed his orders so well. On the surface, it looked ideal. They had overwhelming numbers and the cover of darkness. While he wanted to think that the Duke’s men had tracked the boys and planned a strategic ambush that couldn’t fail, the undeniable truth was his minions had stumbled across the boys, who had a new female traveling companion. Unbeknownst to the bandits, the boys were pretty decent warriors, and bully tactics had been destined to fail. Mazoga shook his head at their incompetence. They were attempting to intimidate the woman, which Mazoga knew from experience would only harden the men’s resolve. He never understood why some men felt the need to protect a woman. McGuire’s goons hadn’t realized that they didn’t stand a chance and had paid the ultimate price.
Even knowing it was going to happen, the defeat still sent him spiraling into a rage. It’d taken a bit to calm down, but he’d done it. This Thorben character was something else. The Order hadn’t caught up to the group yet, but because of their augmentations were gaining ground. Normal NPCs had more restrictive biological norms coded into their existence, which meant that they had to sleep at some point. Agents of the Order had no such restrictions as they were special NPCs secretly created by him, pre-ascension. Because of his less than savory computer files acquisition hobby, he’d been able to implant the code for these elite assassins. Not only that, they were automatically recycled. If failure reared its ugly head, it would only be a temporary inconvenience. He could only have a few of the order active at anyone time, but they respawned after death in his main keep. This was a convenient arrangement. Now that the boy was so close to death, they should be able to close the gap even further. He chuckled. It wouldn’t be long now. He’d have his prize. Maybe he could leave the soul in its current vessel and reprogram it. The boy had proved resilient, and Mazoga was sure he could pull some more surprises from the depths of his soul.
In spite of his frustration of the failed attempts at capturing Thorben, Mazoga found he was enjoying the chase. The thrill of the hunt flowed through his veins, and it was invigorating. Not that anyone would catch dead doing actual hunting, but he would watch it play out. It reminded him of the pre-ascension action tv show he had watched, 24. I mean, sure that asshat Jack Bauer always saved the day, but the villains sure got some good strikes in. That time in season 2 episode 19 with the ammonia, scalpel, and cauterizing torch was once of his favorite scenes. He’d TiVo’d that and damn near had it on repeat for hours after it aired. If he could only find a reliable source of resurrection in this game so he could torture someone to death, bring them back, and then do it again. If players ever arrived, he’d have more opportunities. Mazoga got goosebumps just thinking about it.
He glanced at his arm. Goosebumps? Why is that so familiar? He’d experience more and more of this sensation of déjà vu since the shattering. He sat for an indeterminate amount of time, thinking about it. “My favorite book series!” Goosebumps had been his favorite book series as a toddler. R. L. Stine was a literary genius and if anybody says different, I will cover them in bacon and force them to share a taxi with a grizzly bear hyped up on PCP. I think I have some PCP lying around somewhere. No, that was Big League Chew. He shuffled things around on his cluttered table.
* “Scuttle! Where’s my Big League Chew?” His ever faithful minion shrugged its prothorax. His mind was racing. The tenuous grip on reality was slipping away as his heightened excitement level ushered him farther and farther down the rabbit hole. A part of his mind recognized that he was losing his grip and reached for any way he could to regain his grounding in reality. Mazoga slowed his breathing and focused on the sound of his finches as he walked barefoot to get his son’s blanket. It wasn’t the real one, of course, but he had painstakingly coded a replica as he prepared for his ascension. He knew he would need it. His hands trembled as he brought it to his face and breathed in deeply.
That smell brought him back. He remembered the day his son had come home. That distinct smell flooded him with memories of the time he had spent with him during his childhood. With each slow breath in, he felt his grip on reality reassert itself. He focused on his breathing, the feeling of the stone beneath his feet, and let his memories ground him. Over the centuries, his mind had become more and more fractured, and he had needed these strategies with increasing frequency. It didn’t always work, but this time it did.
The hunt for this boy was intoxicating. Duck Hunt level intoxicating. He hated that damned dog. Laughing at him. No one laughs at Mazoga and lives. He’d put a stop to that damn dog’s laughing in the end. He’d trained, and by trained I mean coded in a damned machine gun, and damn near beat Kyle Nelson’s high score. 4,667,500. I’d been 200 points shy. Then I realized I didn’t need to shoot the ducks. They weren’t laughing. It was that brown fur, black-eared fuck that needed a lesson. So I bypassed the code that prevented me from shooting the prick, as well as the one that ends the game if you don’t pass a round. I let all the ducks go on their way so his pixelated ass would pop up laughing, and then I would reenact the Scarface ‘my little friend’ scene. I’d spent every evening after school for a month shooting that fucker. “Say hello to my little friend,” Mazoga said. His chuckles echoed off the walls. Fuck dogs.
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Almost had me there, you damned beagle. Mazoga brought the blanket to his nose and inhaled the scent to put a stop to the beagle baiting him into insanity. “Don’t worry, son, no beagle will laugh at you. I will keep protecting you from that sadistic canine.” Mazoga said into the blanket. Again, with each breath, he regained a bit of a grip on reality.
After his mind was stable enough, he tucked the blanket back into its alcove. His mind drifted back to the slaughter. The boy’s soul once again showed that strange energy malfunction before his collapse. Mazoga laughed as he thought back to how the boy had treated the bandit leader at the end. There was a spark of the same evil that lived in him. The Deepirons had done their best to bury it, to temper it, but it was there. That was something that he could work with. A chink in the armor, if you will. It could be a hard line to walk when dispensing justice. The division between justice and revenge, or even torture, could become blurry. Mazoga needed to exploit this weakness. That would be what brought this soul into his service, willing vessel or not.
He needed more information. “Scuttle!” Mazoga screamed, not realizing that the oversized insect was right outside the open door. Upon hearing his name, Scuttle hurried up onto his shoulder. “We need more information on those that the boy with the strange soul surrounds himself with. Eight is limited in his methods. Send some of our eyes and ears to learn what they can.” Scuttle obeyed. It scurried away to see its master’s will be done.
Out the door, it passed the first crack in the wall. He went farther down the cavern to a somewhat hidden fissure closer to where the master disposed of waste. Scuttle made his way further down this fissure into an unseen world of vermin. The writhing mass of dirty grey hairy bodies would make the most back away in disgust as they competed for whatever scraps of refuse made its way to their den, but not Scuttle. Instead, his hiss caused the mass to freeze and direct their attention to him. Mazoga had gifted his assistant with an ability to communicate with any creature that was required, so his chirps and hisses made perfect sense to mice. A large group of them peeled off from the disgusting cluster and began their journey.
Nobody paid attention to vermin. They made the perfect spies. Especially since Mazoga had been enhancing these particular mice for thousands of years. Normally their pea sized brains could only maintain their survival instinct, but these were on a par with dolphins for intelligence. Their muscles were dense, improving their movement speed dramatically. They would transverse the vast distance quickly and would be another vessel that Mazoga could see and hear through. He would soon know how to best torment and manipulate this strange boy.
He had work to do in the meantime. Making his way to his portal room, he stepped onto one of dozens of rune circles, and with a surge of power, he disappeared. Teleportation sucked. It sucked. It was like that feeling when you chugged a 64 oz slushy, gobbled down three churros, and give in to peer pressure to take one last ride on the tilt-a-whirl. A tilt-a-whirl operated by a somewhat intoxicated bearded hippy that laughed manically at the entire puke fest. Not that he would know that because the all powerful Mazoga would never do something so incredibly stupid.
The dark cavern walls dissolved and after a few moments, the barren expanse of the Arid Wastes melted into reality. He stood at the top of a gigantic ziggurat. At one point, his followers had worshiped him standing on this very spot. Their sacrifice had fueled his meteoric rise to godhood. If he closed his eyes, he could still hear their cries of exuberance turn to a wide-eyed panic. He took a moment to bathe in the memory of all the blood spilled that day. Blood magic was damned powerful. It had been one of his early plans that the good two shoes Aldwin had stopped, or so Aldwin thought. He’d stopped the final ritual, but the blood was still very much in play. Glancing down into the Forsaken Abyss, he could smell the potency of the ancient blood. Blood was like a fine wine that only improved with age. The sheer volume in the pit was mind-boggling, and would power one hell of an Armageddon level ritual.
Turning, he entered the ancient arched doorway that led down into the belly of his temple. To most, the layout would seem random and confusing, but to him, it was as familiar as the back of his hand. He made his way to his blood magic workroom. He preferred his workroom in the Edodalar Mountains, but blood magic didn’t play well with other forms of magic. Results of mixing magic were unpredictable and often ended in some violent display of power. So here he focused on developing his blood magic. Blood magic was a lost art in Baherune. Aldwin’s hero crew had eradicated it. All other schools of magic had some sort of prerequisite before one could become a practitioner. Blood Magic had no such stipulation. Anyone could play with it, and to top it all, it was the strongest of the various schools.
Crossing the blood wards that ensured no one but himself could enter his workroom, he glanced at his masterpiece in the corner. It looked like a steampunk espresso machine. They filled the hopper above with blood from the Forsaken Abyss. Rather than being magically powered to automate the purification process, the machine operated more like a French press. Mazoga topped off the hopper from one of the nearby vats and pressed the oversized plunger downward to force the blood through the first of the magical filters. Then gravity took over as the blood dripped through the remaining filters. Each filter purified it a little more in a process that took decades. The final product was the most potent source of power found in Baherune. He was getting close to having enough to set off the initial spark. Soon Baherune would be no more.