Seven days later . . .

The worst part about it was that it didn’t really hurt as much as I thought it would, the rejection that is. I spent a week nursing all of the unconscious Centauri back to full health and explaining as much as I could to them while conjuring nicer than average homes out of stone for everyone to sleep in.

I even put details into my work. Beautifully shaped marble fireplaces stuffed with ready to burn wood and lovely stone stairs complete with oaken railing adorned with living vines that sprouted multi-colored flowers that actually glowed in the dark. Damn swimming pools with a filtration enchantment to purify the water sat behind the houses with lovely trees for shade.

In my free time, as healing didn’t take too much effort for me, I put a serious dent in my offhandedly concocted plans to build the start of a town here. With a touch of whimsy using my underutilized Nature Sorcery, I brought the landscape to life. I made the entire area bloom with lush grasses and fruit trees heavy with produce, and then made several trees grow into bungalow houses right over the water reminiscent of the cool vacation houses that rich people got to go to in the Maldives. The last day I completely zoned out and worked on the building housing the small piece of Yggdrasil, what I was calling World Tree part two, to push down my feelings.

It wasn’t really my fault.

That’s what my brother said. It wasn’t my fault that he didn’t feel connected to me anymore. To him, I had either been dead or missing or enslaved for over four freaking years. But to me, it’s only been a couple hectic months. The time dilation that Earth experienced fucked me over in this almost as much as losing my wife. To make it worse, all of the Centauri that Andy was here on Earth with, they were all a part of some mutual magical bond experiment. Every single one of the former normal Earth humans was not only a Centauri soldier, but they were linked magically as if they were their own giant hive-mind or witch coven.

They could share magical or physical energy across their bond. They could disperse damage across twenty bodies instead of just one allowing them all to tank far more damage than any one body could. They were more of a family than anything I’d ever seen, and I wasn’t a part of it. Shit, they even got along better with Johnny and Reeanth who sort of meshed with their whole setup.

“What do you mean you wanna stay?!”

My puzzled rage bundled up in the loaded question most likely did not help the situation, but at this point I didn’t care. “I AM YOUR BROTHER! I fucking found you after hounding a goddamn Angel and Merlin himself, and that’s AFTER killing a FUCKING dragon!”

The stubborn little shit, who coincidentally was much taller than me now, glared down at me with a confidence I’d never seen in him before. Suffice to say, my little brother had grown up. And up. And up.

“You were dead! You were dead or gone or something, fuck! I thought at worst you were a mindless slave to the Conglomerate by now!” His foul mouth matched my own. Growing up with a Marine Corps father will do that to ya. “And you attack us, kill my blood-brother, and slaughter our guardian Leviathan! How the fuck are we supposed to keep our beachhead?”

The normal older brother response to this would be to punch the younger brother and show him who’s boss, but that dynamic went out the window now that the overbuilt fucker tops out at almost eight feet in height and at least a good hundred and hefting fifty pounds of solid muscle on me now. I bet if I kicked his ass with magic that he’d view it as cheating.

I punched him anyway.

I was angry. I felt betrayed, and more than a little hurt. My fist didn’t do much, in fact, it crumpled when it met his jaw. Flexing my Flesh Sorcery, I healed the shattered bones in my hand, and then punched him again.

“You’re not bigger than me anymore,” he said with a smirk. I wanted to wipe the grin off his face. “You’ll never beat me in a fight ever again. And besides, I have an entirely new family now.” He gestured all around at the silent circle of soldiers glaring at me in the light of the bonfire. “We’ve fought and bled together, for years! And where were you? Sitting here on Earth having a good ole’ time?”

The next punch wasn’t just human. Even though I wasn’t wearing Svalinn right now, I had more than enough tools at my disposal. Flesh Sorcery strengthened my bones and skin to boost their durability and a quick conjuration covered said fist with bone and then again with mana-hardened stone. That punch, well that one took him down, or would have if he hadn’t caught it as if I were a child.

“Yeah Andy! Kick his ass!”

“That’s my squad leader! Hell yeah, show the normie who’s boss, fuck’em up!”

His squadmates had formed the classic high school circle in the parking lot to watch us fight, and it seemed like we were more than happy to oblige. There’s not much a mundane would be able to do against a fully trained Centauri warrior, but I don’t fit that category anymore.

Armoring my body similar to my fist, I concentrated most of my mana into my brain to speed up my perceptions. My brother’s fist barely missed my face as I ducked and sent my left fist up into the elbow of his arm holding mine. Not worrying about his injuries, because I could heal them, my empowered strike shattered his elbow letting me get my right arm free. Squatting down and focusing, I pumped power into my legs as I did a mangled jump-uppercut right into Andy’s gut. As he sank to his knees trying to pull air into his struggling lungs, I used Flesh Sorcery to deaden his nerves and fix his arm.

I lifted his chin so I could glare right into his wide eyes. “It hasn’t been a ‘good ole’ time’ brother. Elizabeth is a fucking tree now but somehow still alive and I’ve been protecting the goddamn area!” I snarled, shaking his face. “Zombie cats, goblins, nightmares, dragons, aliens, you name it, I’ve killed it. Elizabeth and I were drunk and happy when shit rolled through and kicked off the magical apocalypse, and pretty much everyone else was gone. It’s been a roller coaster from hell.”

Finishing healing his body and dispelling my armor, I continued on. “And then some messed up excuse for an Angel comes through and tells me that you’re alive! Then I get a flippin’ slice of hope in me and then as I fight my way to see you, you aren’t even happy to see your fucking brother! Fuck you asshole!”

Standing up while still holding his stomach, my once little brother glared at me. “Months!? You’ve experienced months of hardship? Boo-fuckin-hoo you little bitch. Me and my new family have been at war for years! And let me tell you, the Hive don’t just kill you, they fucking eat you alive if they get the chance! And to start the whole damn thing, the Centauri fixed our gene sequences but it was six months of torture at the cellular level. I can’t tell you how many I saw die just from the fucking pain!”

I returned the venom. “I didn’t kidnap and experiment on you! Why the fuck are you mad at me!”

My brother’s presence seemed to grow as his anger hit a boiling point.

“Because YOU were supposed to be there!” He roared as he threw a rocket of a punch. It slammed into my magical force field that I hastily erected.

“You were supposed to protect us!” Another punch rocked my shield.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“James is dead!” Slam.

“Mom is dead!” Slam.

“Dad is sold!” Slam.

“And” Slam. “You” Slam “Weren’t” Slam. “There!” Slam.

His fists were a bloodied mess, but he wasn’t cowed at not being able to touch me. It hurt my heart. My little brother is all grown up. I used to change his diapers, drive him to school, fight his bullies, and here he is right in front of me, a full grown warrior. He was right, I had failed him. And while I knew in my head that it wasn’t my fault, I understood his pain.

He was really mad at the world, but me, I had plans to make it burn.

******

Coming back from my memories on the back of my mutant bird Tuki, I pondered my next steps as we flew back towards home. Blaming my brother was pointless though. In his mind, I had been dead, he had moved on with his own crazy life and built something to cherish and protect. It’s the classic ‘coming back home to a small town after a year at college and all of your old friends weren’t really as welcoming as they used to be because they all stayed and their lives went on’ situation. This was the softest version of the cold shoulder that I’d ever experienced.

I wrestled with what I’d learned even after I left my brother and his squadmates behind in Florida. One of his squadmates pulled me to the side later after our fight and explained to me that the witch that I killed was not really regarded as their slave master, even though that’s technically what she was. Real magical slavery is considered a crime worthy of capital punishment to the Centauri.

But work-debt is treated like a sacred contract. The worker gives the master the labor that he’s due but the worker is treasured by the master in every way. Breaking the spirit of the contract is just as dangerous as breaking the letter. Magic doesn’t play around. With the witch, these soldiers looked at her as their big gun, their sword to fend off the dragons that they couldn’t handle, their nuclear option, and I had just taken that away from them. I had given them freedom, but they didn’t really want it, not even my brother. I gave them freedom, but removed any semblance of a safety net.

Every conversation I had to try and get to the heart of the matter, the irritating part that just wouldn’t allow me to shut up, every single one of them would just huff and stomp off while the rest would glare at me as if I had just shit on their mother’s grave. It also didn’t help that I killed their beloved Captain too. The reason they were surprised about Fugly coming through the gate is because the witch and her pet weren’t due to be here for at least another week and they had never seen a gate of that size activate before.

Technically, I did start the whole thing when I killed Casparai looking for my brother, but then learning that my family had been bought and sold put me in a state of mind where I wasn’t thinking too clearly when I came to the surface to the sight of a witch torturing my dog didn’t help. They were expecting the witch but not her monster. That’s what spooked them.

I was the enemy. Me. I scared them.

I had stepped in enough shit that even my own brother couldn’t stand the stink, and it pissed me off. He didn’t want to be free. He didn’t want to leave his comrades, and when I offered to make them awesome weapons so that they wouldn’t have to depend on a witch for protection they just scoffed at me. I even stealthily scanned their brains at night to see if it was some kind of magical compulsion to love the witch and . . . nope. This group of Centauri honestly believed that they were in a good situation and didn’t want to fuck it up, that is, before I came and killed their witch and their guard-dog-monster godzilla lookin’ thing.

I was the problem. Their side-eye looks, straight glaring me down, begging me to take a swing so they had an excuse to jump me as a group. Spot didn’t leave my side, always trotting next to me in his biggest form. Nobody wants to fuck with Clifford the Big Red Dog’s cousin twice removed from Hell.

But I couldn’t just leave. Coming all this way to find out my family didn’t want to see me hurt, but I was still the big brother, and big brothers do what big brothers need to do. Even if we fucked up. Even if nobody asks. You do your duty.

Where I planted the knob of Yggdrasil, I had spent another week feeding it energy and making sure that its root system was particularly deep. Florida, to my knowledge, was still hurricane country and trees pick up a tendency to fly around here. Also, the soil gets sandier the closer you get to the coast.

My planted knob became an arboreal fortress, complete with a Nordic style carving in the Yggdrasil interior from my imagination and a thick cover of enchanted stone for the outside, making it virtually impenetrable. Everywhere I went, I created houses that were extremely reinforced, inlaid with sigils of reinforcement and mana capacitors to toughen the structural integrity. Each building had a set of conjured crystal solar panels that fed into the house to serve any and all of their energy needs. Plus, each building was connected via a buried network of cables I made from conjured copper. It was my first attempt, a successful one too, at making a mana power grid.

And since I was already completely disregarding their wishes, I took the time and created massive stone boxes full of enchanted melee weapons that could feed off of either ambient mana or whatever the wielder decided to pump into it. My nights were filled by upgrading their shields and fixing whatever enchantment problems I saw on their weapons.

For the final touch, just to make sure that my asshole brother knows that I still cared, I crafted the most powerful shield necklace I could. Two days worth of planning and meticulous crafting went into it. The work of art was based on the enchantment design of Svalinn. The platinum mixed with iridium covering would allow him to have a coveted portable power source that was undetectable to any magic users. Although, I did sort of cheat as the design wasn’t just a shield.

Several enchantments were meshed together to form a network of energy feeding inputs governed by a simple system that would intertwine with his armor. The new apparatus functioned as an alarm system, so that if he was near death then he would be able to access all of the energy in the battery. The two that I liked the most were the nightly overboost enchantment that would run an internal cleanup process while he was sleeping and the one I call the daily pep. That one was based on new work I’d worked out for myself using Flesh Sorcery. The first enchantment would speed up the normal processes that a body does while sleeping and also coax his body to slowly overcome his normal physical limitations, so while other people will eventually hit a cap on what they can lift, he will be able to slowly improve even past that. The second setup functioned as a magical coffee effect, where all of the unused or waste matter his body produced would be broken down completely and then converted into pure magical energy so that his endurance would be off the charts compared to his comrades.

The last two enchantments I put into his necklace made me think about redoing some of the enchantment matrices on my own gear, but it could wait until I got back home. I also thought about what Reeanth and I discussed right before I left with Spot.

Several days prior . . .

“I respectfully refuse my lord.”

“One! I don’t give a shit what you refuse, respectfully or not! Fuck your feelings. I’m giving you a goddamn order and that’s that. You’re the one who wanted to be a sworn vassal, and now I’m telling you to do it.”

I let out a frustrated growl and rubbed at my eyes. “Two, hearts and minds. Do your best to let the Centauri here know that I’m not their enemy. I might even get the chance to send down some tamed-beast creatures to help keep’em all safe.”

Her glare didn’t dissuade me at all as I carefully put the final touches on Andy’s shield necklace amulet thing. This working was meant to be a final defense, but ideally there should be multiple layers of defense and planning to stave off death, and one of those would be Reeanth.

“For the last fucking time, I order you to stay here and guard my brother as if he were me. Protect him with your life. Shit woman, Johnny and the bear are staying too, so you probably won’t have to do much. Just keep him alive.”

“Yeah crazy lady, this shit’ll be fun!” Johnny joined in. Not sure how he managed to sound that exuberant from where he stood, directly on the tippy top of his upright serpent staff. “Fightin’ gators and wreckin shit while clappin alien cheeks! What more is there to life!” Leaning in close to where Reeanth and I were arguing, he whispered. “There’s like, two or three tall ass hotties who wanna get with this lusciousness if you know what I mean, right?” His hands traced his skinny biceps as if he were showing off for a photoshoot. “I mean, what kind of lady can resist this much power?”

Rolling my eyes, I focused back on Reeanth. “See, just give in to his power,” I joked, “You got nothing to worry about.”

I mean, it’s a solid plan. The wrong kind of action seems to follow me around, and while I’m an uber kind of powerful, people can get caught in the crossfire. Johnny and his bear were more than happy to be the big guns around the budding settlement of perpetually grumpy Centauri and Reeanth would be a perfect bodyguard for my brother while I took the madness that seemed to follow me elsewhere. It did hurt knowing that I wasn’t actually welcome here, but it would make me feel better to know that one brother was taken care of. What I do know, is that after the Hungry Ones are taken care of, I’m coming for the Centauri.