V – 00003.4 – Storm.
[Necromancer Spells.]
[Corpse-Walk – Reanimate a corpse for a short period of time that can follow 1 basic command.]
[Burial – open up the ground to swallow a target into a 6 foot deep pit, which will then refill itself.]
[Death Pulse – Release a pulse of deathly mana that will kill or sicken lesser flora and fauna.]
[Black-Speech – Speak with death's own tongue into the mind of a target, cursing them to hear your maddening whispers.]
[Bone-Forge – reshape and forge bones to fit your desire]
[Spectral Hand – Create a ghostly hand that you can control mentally for a short period of time.]
[Spirit Bind – bind a spirit in place, restricting its ability to flee or use magic.]
[Reanimate – reanimate a corpse to do your bidding]
[Miasma of Death – Manifest a thick fog of death that reduces the visibility of all within and sickens those who find death's embrace inhospitable.]
I glared at the options before me; they seemed great, and I desperately yearned for them all, yet they felt almost paltry for the efforts I had gone through to achieve them. Once again I was struck by the feeling that details necessary for it all to make sense were being withheld from me.
“Reanimate and Burial,” I said aloud, deciding that more minions never hurt, and burial just seemed like a total fuck you to anything and everything.
[Burial and Reanimate Acquired.]
[Would you like to spend your general spell point?]
“Yes,” I said quickly.
This time an absolutely enormous list opened up; pretty much every generalized spell you could think of from the fantasy genre was present and accounted for. I scrolled through the list quickly before deciding to take a spell I had a hope would teach me something new about my magic and how different elements work.
[Frost Touch Acquired.]
[General perks may be used to upgrade any perks you currently possess. Would you like to spend your 2 points now?]
“Fuck yeah, I would throw one of those into undying.”
[Undying 2/6 – Timeless: Death may not claim you while your main vital organs are mostly functional: Heart, Brain, Lungs; You no longer age.]
I was silent for several long moments. “Did I just freeze my aging… as a fucking teenager?” I took a deep breath before screaming my frustrations and driving my fist hard into a nearby wall. “Fuck you! Is a little warning too much to fucking ask?”
“Memento Mori,” I grumbled in an almost pouty way as I came to terms with the fact that hormonal mood swings and zits were going to be a part of my eternity, apparently along with juvenile depression disorders.
[Memento Mori 2/6 – Animalistic.]
I swiped the notification away, ignoring whatever changes the upgrade made to the ability, as it was obvious what it did; they would make my undead have the intelligence of a lesser animal rather than barely functional.
With my notifications all accepted, I sat down and distributed my attribute points. “Two for strength, one for infernal and death, and one more for my dexterity.”
I braced myself for the coming changes to my stats, knowing I was in for a hell of a ride considering I was about to let 30 points sink in.
The usual horrors struck my body; my flesh writhed, my mind warped and reshaped, making me greater than I was moments before, my sinister attributes inflated, energy surging into my core as they did.
Shaking the pain off, I pulled myself to my feet and tried something new with the status page. “Show me only the parts of my status that have recently changed.”
The page trimmed down, and entire sections were deleted to fulfill my wish.
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Name: Viktor Bloodstone
Title: [Dying Breed]
Level: 5
Age: 18
Species: Human [Legacy Beast]
Archetype: Occultist
Classes: Necromancer
==== ATTRIBUTES ====
Strength: 15 (+3)
Agility: 12 (+3)
Dexterity: 12 (-1 + 3)
Vitality: 12 (-1 + 3)
Sense: 15 (+7)
Wisdom: 27 (+7)
Intelligence: 22 (+4)
Death: 14 (+9)
Infernal 14 (+10)
Glamour: 10 (+3)
==== SPELLS ====
Frost Touch
Burial
Reanimate
==== ABILITIES ====
Parasite – 1/7
Unbound – 1/4
Undying – 2/6
Memento Mori – 2/6
“Huh, this is convenient as fuck.” I started walking around what was once the reapers HQ, feeling hungry and annoyed by all the food I couldn’t eat surrounding me. Rifling through a few dead men’s pockets, I came away with quite possibly the only thing I wanted at this moment.
“You know, I hope the thing that kills you is lung cancer.”
Said one of my more hateful voices as I lit and dragged on a bloody cigarette, sucking in the glorious tobacco. “Your just jealous you can’t enjoy this, and I can.” I stated in a very matter-of-fact tone.
I kept going through the reaper's possession, netting a truly unholy amount of cigarettes, cigars, and even a few pipes with tobacco, and even better, a shit ton of joints.
Stepping outside the factory, I saw massive, swirling storm clouds gathering in the sky, and they made me shiver, not from the cold nor the ominous look the eye of the storm held. No, what shook me was the unbelievable amounts of mana I could feel in the air; just looking up set me on edge as I stared at the hypnotic, almost enraged violet energy in the sky.
“Mm, this is what we in the business call a fucking nope!” I said as I quickly turned back into the reaper's HQ and started stealing candles and lanterns. I stuffed as many of the light sources as I could into a makeshift sack made from a couple of bunched-up shirts.
“Well, let's fuck off while the fucking off is good,” I said as one of the asinine voices in my head started singing, The drug in me is you. Running from my past, I’m praying feet don’t fail me now.
I almost didn’t start running purely out of spite for my own thoughts, but a massive, booming thunderclap in the distance slammed a wave of volatile energy against me, the mana in the sound wave so dense it made my own blackish aura flare up to deflect the aftershock of the boom.
With no further motivation needed, I broke into a sprint, drawing on both my adrenal vault and the ohm rune of torture to empower my run; the world twisted into a strange, stuttering mess as I practically glided across the earth like a lizard on ice.
I darted through the city, and when I leapt over the guardrail, I cleared it by a good 15 feet before I landed. My improved stats, combining with the overdrive state I had forced my body into, were insane, but so was the strain it was putting on my body.
My knees were throbbing, my hips screamed, and my ankles protested with every long stride, my enhanced vitality hating every second of the abuse, and I was quite certain if I did this with my original vitality score, my tendons would have exploded or my ligaments would have torn.
I swept through the forest like a specter maneuvering through the underbrush until I forced myself to slow. I twisted, trying to stop, only for my feet to dig into the frozen dirt and rip through it as I was sent skidding nearly ten whole feet. I quickly twisted and planted my feet as I came to a stop and barely avoided falling face-first into my fire pit.
I’d made it home in record time, and immediately I relaxed the rune in my chest that was pushing my body to its breaking point, heaving a sigh of relief when reality went back to its normal speed. I shifted my door slab just enough that I could get inside and replace it.
Emptying my spoils of war, I set some lights up for my cabin and sat on my prized possession.
“My beautiful stool,” I said, relaxing my aching body on some real honest-to-god furniture; it creaked as it took my weight in a way that made my heart sink.
I’m pretty sure if this stool breaks, I’m going to have a breakdown… I just can’t handle any more loss right now.
“Yeah, fair enough; you did spend an insane amount of time on this little thing.”
I sat there in content silence for a few moments, enjoying my home. I had shelter, I had light, I even had an amazing work of art that definitely wasn’t filling my ass with splinters, and to top it all off, I had vengeance and smoke.
“Holy shit, my life is empty.” I said, staring at a drafty, somewhat uneven wall. “And I’m a really shit carpenter.”
“Seriously, can we not leave you alone with your thoughts for even ten fucking seconds without you saying some depressing shit? Like dude, give it a rest for an hour.”
Blow me. I thought towards the critical voice as I pulled out a joint and lit it up and took a long drag on my plundered weed.
I was enjoying a decent buzz when the storm finally hit my little part of the forest; rain hammered down on my roof in a way that would have been unbelievably chill and soothing if it hadn’t been for the fact that every droplet that hit my roof seemed to carry as much water mana as my entire lake did.
Every crack of lightning and boom rattled my little hut and twisted the knife of paranoia in my gut that my home was about to be ripped away; the energy constantly hammering me made the blackish-red aura that protected me a constant sight.
As the hours passed, I could feel the constant defensive flaring of my aura was drawing on my core; for the first time since I’d gained the infernal attribute, the chains no longer seemed infinite, and the fog that guarded me was losing volume by the minute.
I tried to make my shades protect me from the concussive energy blasts like an undead wall, and that was just a total fucking waste. The first thunderclap literally exploded them all into nothing but lingering smoke in the air; the mana ripped through them like tissue, and I was forced to reconstitute them and pull them back into my core.
Rage painted the rain, the sky, and the entire forest as I and every other living being were assaulted by the vicious mana storm. I stared upwards and said, “Thank fuck I have a roof to cover me.” Immediately after I heard every voice in my head scream and cuss at me, several of them saying I was jinxing us, one of them even told me. “Eliminate yourself!”
I held my breath for a good ten minutes waiting for my roof to actually blow away; fortunately, that version of events never came to be, yet I didn’t find any relief in that; a small part of me even wished it would so I could get a proper look at the outside; the information my mana sense kept feeding me was… disturbing to say the least.
The ambient mana was massively ramping up in volume to the point that the space around me felt wrong and twisted, like the air was building in pressure and getting ready to burst; the nature and water mana was taking on a wild, malevolent feel as time passed. It felt strangely hostile, like the open and welcoming nature of my valley that I had come to be so in love with was dying.
The idea that this storm was going to somehow take my home from me filled me with a sense of fury; a seething impotent rage took hold in my mind as I realized how helpless I was, how stupid it was to be angry with and trying to fight nature, yet I knew at the very least I wasn’t giving up my home without a fight.
I flexed my will, leveraging my massively inflated will to twist and flex my mana, making the dark fog expand and flow out of my core like a dome of smoke around me. I pushed hard, expanding this dome until it lost almost all its volume, being so thin you could see through it as it expanded to encompass my small valley.
Infernal chains raced alongside the edge of the dome, constantly reinforcing it, pumping teal soul energy into my deathly barrier, reinforcing it against the mana that was hitting it over and over again, as if each thunderclap and raindrop was a hellish artillery barrage.
I held my position for hours, sweat pooling underneath me as I constantly forced my barrier to expand any time I regenerated even an ounce of death mana. Eventually the rain stopped, and so did the thunder, and I finally felt the siege end; my knees hit the floor, and I fainted, satisfied that my home would not be taken from me again.