Present Day

The whole trip sucked moose wang. I wanted something soooo simple, but instead, everything got all screwed up. Arriving back at home with Spot was a gigantic relief. With my luck, I half expected the forest to be up in flames upon my arrival.

Grumpily complaining to Spot the whole flight back sort of allowed me to work through the emotional turmoil of the past chunk of almost wasted time. Were there good things that happened? Sure. Found little, errr big? Brother? Found family, got good news and bad news in excessive measure.

Then, Reeanth was unwillingly stationed back in the mutated wetlands of Miami guarding my brother and Johnny was tasked with protecting the budding town, more importantly, guarding the tertiary root of Yggdrasil that I’d planted there. Binding the budding branch of the World Tree with blood was no small feat, but my Nature and Flesh Sorcery was more than up to the task.

Now, nobody would be able to access, use, or harm that important little plant. While securing it with runes and enchanted traps, I kept feeling a weird sensation of home emanating from it. I mean, I know that Yggdrasil is one tree that holds the universe together, but this particular side branch of it emitted the same energy but a bit weaker as the generator that I had in my under-tree hideout in Virginia.

Exhausted from being put through the emotional wringer, I went straight to bed after arriving home. Nothing can beat the under-river hideout for security and safety. Spot didn’t pay any attention to me as he took off into the dense forest at his normal gigantic size right after he dropped me off at my doorstep, and Tuki flew around with his group, his murder of eagle-crows, and set about making their nests leaving me in peace. I laughed as Norn quickly set the pecking order, making sure that their nests were smaller and well below his on my ever-growing tree. I couldn’t even make out the top branches of the Yggdrasil tree without climbing another tree at least fifty yards away.

The next day found me earlier than I had hoped. As much as I wanted to sleep in, my Flesh Sorcery made sure that my sleep was as efficient and restful as could be, so after five super intense hours of unconsciousness, my ass woke up at roughly four in the goddamn morning. Fixing the bit of leftover grogginess with a pulse of energy, I snagged some of the ration cubes that I discovered and stole from the Centauri.

After having Gungnir altered to have a magical storage space by Maalik, I grabbed two whole boxes of the supplies when the sentries weren’t looking and stuffed them in there along with three changes of clothes and two of the Centauri nano-suits complete with matching rifles. This wonderful innovation of pre-packaged meals was the kind of technology that Pre-apocalypse Earth militaries would have killed for, not including the futuristic weaponry. Each ration cube was roughly twice the size of a normal sugar cube but contained at least four thousand calories, and each box held two thousand of the compressed ration cubes. The Centauri needed around three of these cubes a day to keep going, but normal size me only needed one on an easy day.

With a solid supply of food for at least the next two years stashed in my staff, I could worry about things that actually mattered, like showing the undead bastards who’s boss.

In case it wasn’t apparent, that would be me.

During my flight home from Florida to Virginia, another train of thought that I’d entertained concluded that technology would be the perfect way, really the only way, to shore up my personal weaknesses in my offensive capabilities towards the undead. Gungnir aside, without having a sorcery over fire or lightning or air, my options were limited in dealing with the undead in the normal fashion.

My entire childhood was filled with stories of epic wizards flinging fireballs or lightning strikes and wiping out hordes of moaning zombies, but my dumbass had to go and pick powers with a ‘long-term’ focus. That’s fine, because you know what? Dumbledore and Dresden ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

And for those that can imagine what sort of insanity my loose morals can justify, just add in the fact that all is fair in love and war, and this sorcerer plans on bending even those rules. Part of my motivation to explore is that I didn’t really have any kind of timeline to stick to, I figured that melding my particular abilities with what I stole would be a damn good place to start.

Ignoring the exuberant welcome of the curvy lesser dryads in my homey glade, Meliad’s grove, and their insistent pleas to play, which I took to have a different meaning than what an innocent child would mean, I barricaded myself in my under-river bolthole for the foreseeable future. Sexy dryads have nothing on the wonder of magical exploration.

Or at least that’s what I told myself.

Science before boobs. And ass. Oh the filthy lies I say to stay the course.

My slate worktable was bigger than it had any right to be. The solid gray stone with overbuilt granite legs and reinforced top was more than capable of supporting any kind of weight that I would need, but it just felt good to have a table that big. I felt like a Roman general overlooking the map of the world that I’d loosely constructed from sand and little miniatures that represented my enemies and the shifting terrain.

Laughing at my little daydream, I turned my attention back to what was actually on my table. The deconstructed Centauri rifles were placed out in orderly pieces as I took my time in understanding how each piece worked. Being in the Army Reserve for a couple years and having a Marine for a dad instilled a love of firearms in me, but this technology was a bit beyond me.

First issue, there was no firing pin. Secondly, I couldn't find a bolt carrier or bolt to save my life in this unrecognizable mess. And thirdly, what I knew for a fact to be the magazine was all kinds of fucked. The parts of the Centauri rifle, for the most part, simply didn’t translate to our 20th century knowledge of firearms. The mechanical process of shooting a piece of metal simply did not compare, obviously, to energizing a sliver of hardened runed glass and spitting it out several times faster than the speed of sound, creating for lack of a better term, a blaster bolt. The speed at which the round came out combined with the infused mana turned the glass into a highly energized particle beam that could easily cut through any metal.

I’m glad I didn’t have to fight these Centauri soldiers before examining their equipment. I would have been woefully unprepared for this kind of firepower. The only protection I could see that would legitimately work against something like this would be magical shielding combined with an excess energy bleed-off conduit, and even then it would have to have a massive power source to hold off more than a few rounds of fire.

The magazine of the Centauri rifle puzzled me the most in terms of ‘how the fuck did they think of this?’. A normal AR-15 semi-automatic rifle has a magazine that holds thirty rounds, and any normal human can pick up a magazine, unload it and then count the rounds. The blunt end of the bullet is the back and the pointy end goes forward, duh, and then makes holes in whatever you're pointing at. But the magazine for the Centauri rifle was solid. Imagine a slender black brick that was just heavier and slicker than expected.

As far as I could tell from deciphering the runic craziness that my Mana Sorcery was decoding for me, where the bolt carrier and firing pin would be, was a magical mechanism that shaved off a needle-like piece of the magazine, imprinted runes into it, charged it with mana, and then hurled it faster than anything normal humanity could come up with. The Centauri rifle system looked to run out of power before it ran out of ammunition. The coolest part of the entire thing though was the super condensed line of runes that ran down the inside of the barrel.

They literally hurt my eyes when I shined a light on them and looked at them. Using Mana Sorcery, I could do a sort of blind copy and paste function, but doing so hurt my brain in such a way that using magic for a day simply wasn’t possible. Whoever the genius or madman was that came up with that combination of runes certainly didn’t want people figuring it out.

Another genius alien thing to figure out when I had the time.

The handle, the grip of the firearm had vampiric runes with a gradient sigil surrounding them, leading me to believe that the gun pulled its energy from the hand or glove of the Centauri wielding the rifle. I also took plenty of mental screenshots of the runes for later examination. Potential uses for auto-draining mana from prisoners ran through my brain.

Above the orderly display of dissembled rifles were the two solid cubes of nano-tech armor. They looked like silver blocks carved out of solid steel, but these two were special, these two weren’t keyed to anyone’s DNA. I designated the one on the left as Cube A and the one on the right as Cube B. The first was my experimentation cube, and the second would be the ‘final form’ for when I got every kink worked out of the first one.

Oh lordy me, I had so many plans, so many ideas that I just couldn’t wait to play, no, fuck, no, institute, no! Taking a step back from my worktable, I pushed my excitement down and took a deep breath.

“Need some goddamn liquor,” I muttered, staring at the meticulously organized chaos. My overstimulated Consciousness Sorcery was bubbling up like an excited child that had gotten into the fucking cookie jar from trying to decipher the new runes and their uses via background processes I’d set up. Random ass concepts kept bouncing around my head, nano-tech armor combined with dragon flesh for Spot, diamond golem guardians with enhanced intelligence and armed with nano-tech weapons while metal-girded hamadryads wielded Centauri rifles.

Shaking ideas of the far future out of my head by dialing back the brainpower going towards my background mental processes, I settled for what I could accomplish within the more immediate time frame. Without peering too deeply into the enchantments of the rifles, I took snapshots of them and stored them in a separate mental process and sprinted for the crystal brain vats. Barely making it in time, I deposited the rough schematics into Reeanth’s clone brain. Pulsing packets of information slammed into the fleshy mass, unburdening my mind from knowledge too weighty for my current self.

I cursed as my headache immediately disappeared. “How the fuck does data hurt?! It’s just information!” Shaking my head and pounding my fist on the massive crystal vat in front of me, another . . . more dangerous idea teased at my newly unburdened mind.

Rath’s much larger brain floated silently next to its tortured compadre, alive in only the most technical of senses. “You’re next fucker,” I promised, glaring at that just-out-of-reach-nexus of information, the sweet nectar of immaterial power. “You know what? Fuck later!” I said, not caring where this burst of confidence came from. “I’m fresh! I’m fit! I’m at the top of my game. Bitch, I kicked a witch’s ass and threw down with a monster from Stephen King’s nightmares. What’s the point of overwhelming power if it can’t fix all your problems?”

Setting up a physical link of conjured copper between myself and the matter-to-mana generator, I cranked it up to full and plastered my face to the crystal vats like a kid staring at a fish in an aquarium.

“You’re all mine.” I growled, wondering why I had ever been so cautious around these two brains. It’s not like the soulless balls of flesh have a will in and of themselves. Rath’s soul was gone, eaten by Svalinn a while ago, and Reeanth’s clone brain didn’t have one because I freaking grew it out of Rath’s unused brain matter!

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

Well, I grew a copy of the original, but who cares about semantics. In fact, I had probably gone about this the entire wrong way. ‘Work smarter not harder’ was one of my father’s ‘dad-isms’ that popped out every time I tried to brute force something that required a more delicate touch, and the magical equivalent of brain surgery certainly denotes using a bit of finesse.

“Be the brain, be the brain. We are the same brain, I am you, but you are mine.” My mantra helped to center my focus, creating the intent to give my Flesh and Consciousness Sorcery something familiar to grasp onto. Gently lowering my hand into the vat, my outstretched fingers caressed the bulging slimy lobes of the fleshy mass, soft waves of persuasive magic slipping into the unsuspecting nerves of the cloned brain. After a second of lightning fast communication, my delicate argument delivered by enhanced neurons managed to convince the brain that we were one and the same, and because of that, the decryption vanished!

Desperately tamping down on my excitement of the classic hacking move, convincing the system that you do in fact belong, my mental probe moved deeper until the mental manifestation of the silvery Centauri security cube presented itself. Last time I saw it, it was solid, like a bright box of forged steel, and now, it was moldable as if each molecule of it was alive, shifting with every minute pulse of brainwaves.

[Magi-tech armor, show me the controls of the magitech armor . . . . come ooooonn!] I thought, scanning the random incoherent fragments of thoughts. Brains without souls are like computers without programmers. There are background processes that run but without direction, there’s no real power behind the intent. Consciousness doesn’t exist without a will, and I became that will.

Using my Consciousness Sorcery as an operating system that I understood, I reworked the mental visualization until the entire experience changed to become me sitting at a normal laptop computer. True to the commands of my will, the brain was more than willing to organize itself in ways that I would understand and find useful. There were several really cool folders that I copied and put on their own harddrive for later, awesome concepts like Centauri tactics and spaceship piloting training, and then another folder held all kinds of hand-to-hand combatives as well as instinctive weapon handling for all of their military’s standard weaponry.

I whistled at the sheer amount of available data that I couldn’t wait to get my greedy hands on. “And . . .made a copy of that. And that! And ooohh, that too!” I snickered, continuing to hastily sift through the data.

Because the brain thought it was necessary, it kept bringing up the vital processes of breathing and blood pumping like a pop-up window as if I needed to know how to constantly do that. Shoving that to the side like an annoying notification, I kept browsing until I hit an early memory for Reeanth.

Making sure to keep myself as the outside viewer so as not to be the one ‘experiencing’ the memory, I carefully watched as her father handed her a silvery cube. I didn’t recognize the language at first but the intent bled through after a hint of puzzlement became apparent from me to the brain.

Her father, Tarkon Alsarond Le’Talv, placed the cube on her left hand, and as she looked at it he quickly slashed the other palm with a knife and pushed her hands together. The blood seeped into the cube, its metallic form melting and stretching like the blob to cover her forearms. Bond with the armor. His voice was more of a vibration in her memory, but even from my outsider’s perspective, it shook me. Feeling that it was coming to a close, I backed out with my copied folders and downloaded them to my brain after making sure they stayed unencrypted.

Shaking my body and lightly pushing on my magic so that looking at Rath’s brain didn’t make me queasy, I cleaned my hand off with a blast of conjured water. The mental journey seems to hold its own kind of rigors. My body felt fine but my mind was a bit shot. That one can wait a few days. I got more than enough from Reeanth’s clone brain to keep me busy for at least that long.

“Dobby has a sock!” I cackled, sprinting down the tunnel from the under-river hideout. Hell yeah I was happy, having a good ole time solving problems that I wish my brain had figured out a long-ass time ago. You can only get so smart before it actually gets in the way. Plans of hacking the brains using some kind of Flesh-Sorcery enhanced virus were at the top of my mind for a while, as if that couldn’t go wrong. And then there were great little ideas of making some sort of brain eating monster that digest the brains and then spit out the answers to all my questions, a sort of flesh based Gungnir when he was alive and kickin’. The little devil sitting on my shoulder cackled at the thought of all of those ideas running amok.

I can’t be the guy who unleashes potential plagues of brain-eating monsters or viruses that hack into brains turning people into zombies. I mean, I could, but I really shouldn’t.

A Hail Mary idea came straight out of the background of mind, pinging off the others that really should not be thought about. The shapeshifting spear-staff weapon I have, Gungnir, was just pimped out by a dragon to function as an extra-dimensional storage space.

What if I simply broke the game?

What is to stop me from filling up a bunch of crystal batteries to the brim with mana and storing as many as I could in Gungnir? It may not be the perfect endless mana solution that I had in the beginning, but wouldn’t this be the next best thing? Besides, I’m still American at heart, and what American doesn’t fucking love overdone firepower? I mean, I could build my old giant crystal battery that I used to power the shields of my house before a goddess blew it away and stick that in Gungnir, virtually creating a power bank of immense proportions!

The little devil on my shoulder popped up again and whispered in my ear. “You’re right, evil-me,” I chuckled just a bit, letting out my inner Invader Zim. “I could fill it up with one big power bank, OR, I could fill up Gungnir with a thousand little batteries and rig them to explode on impact after being launched at high speeds!”

Perfect. I could imagine it now. A mana-crystal based grenade launcher situated inside of a magical spear wielded by a stunningly handsome Earth sorcerer covered in upgraded Centauri nano-magitech armor. Awesome.

Forcefully retrieving my soaring ego, I gathered up my plans and more supplies from the pantry and headed back to my worktable in the under-river bolthole. By the time I got down there, I made the mental transition of coming up with a brilliant name for said hideout, the Lab.

Now the Lab has always been the hideout under the river, but actually naming the damn place always seemed to slip my mind. Weird right? Especially for someone with literal magical control of their own brain, but even I can’t get past the inherent flaws of humanity. And since I’m naming the river hideout as “the Lab”, it just makes sense to call the under-tree hideout “the Hole”.

But back to the Lab, as I never fully laid out the actual placement of things. The tunnel coming from the Hole opens up to a giant cavern with a huge freezer on the left that was filled with a mostly dead dragon and on the other side, my right, of the cavern sat a makeshift experimental garden full of oddly hungry trees. My work table was near the freezer but between the entrance and the freezer itself and the stone wall above my work table was smooth and shiny for me to put ideas on.

The center feature of the Lab was one of the two remaining overbuilt matter-to-mana generators that was actually still able to function. The other one was in the Hole encased inside of one of the roots of the World Tree. As far as I can tell from my limited knowledge, there are several reasons that they’re still stable. First, the enchantments for durability that I place on them from time to time are starting to add up and the second reason is that they’re in a closed environment.

The generator in the Hole is protected by the World Tree root, and the one in the Lab is in a sealed cavern that has enchantments covering the walls and ceiling. Also, I’ve made sure to put the energy output to either very low or off so that the enchantments governing the process wouldn’t be dealing with much stress at all.

The part of this dwelling that really made me tip my hat to myself was the kinetic energy converter enchantment built into the ceiling that extended up past the threshold. That particular set of enchantments were tied to several stone pillars sticking up from the river-bed of the Rappahanock and bleed off the energy of motion from the river’s current, basically creating a more efficient magical version of a hydroelectric generator. Now that power creation method didn’t scare me at all as it didn’t play with the building blocks of the universe, it simply turned mechanical energy into magical energy.

I couldn’t help but sing a bit even though the song didn’t really apply as I looked at my creation with pride. “What is it good for? Aaabsoluuutely nothin!”

Walking over to my work table and downing a ration cube, most of me couldn’t wait to get to work. Using the abundant energy of the sources around, I conjured a hundred small bits of crystal about the size and shape of a .223 rifle round and placed them in an orderly pile in front of me. Repeating the same process, I made a hundred round pile of shaped crystals for .45 pistol ammo, 30.06 rifle ammo, and then a pile of fifty small crystal orbs the size of a tennis ball. Rubbing my hands together, I categorized my creations, uncaring that talking aloud to myself is a clear sign of early onset madness.

“.45 caliber ammo for small arms fire against human size enemies or smaller, .223 for further away but roughly the same size targets.” Holding two 30.06 rounds in one hand, which were considerably larger than the .223 caliber rounds, and the ‘grenades’ in the other, I admired my handiwork.

“For you,” I said to the big rifle rounds. “Big targets, armored enemies, and people I really don’t like. That’s what you’re for.”

Gently tossing up the crystal grenade and catching it to check its weight like a pitcher contemplating his next throw, I softly murmured to the grenade. “You’re for everything else my little pretty. We’re gonna blow up buildings, hordes of zombies, and soooo much more!”

Maybe I was a bit too excited, but who cares. Being an Army Reserve paralegal and an IT guy meant that I never got to play with the good stuff, but in the new reality where I could make my own shit, I say it’s time to indulge the good old American pastime, testing explosive items with wild abandon.

Two hours and no explosions later, I felt like bringing down an entire mountain just to get my frustration out. The fucking bullets wouldn’t actually explode! I put my enchantments on the crystal rounds and filled them up with a tiny bit of energy so the boom wouldn’t be big at all, and then used Gungnir to magically shoot them at a giant stone wall covered in three feet of thick Virginia clay.

Nothing. Zilch. Bupkis.

I was missing something, something small but vitally important, like the idiot who built a perfect engine but forgot to actually put the stupid spark plugs in. “Work on something else, ya dummy!” I growled, realizing that beating my hyper focused brain up over something like this wasn’t super productive. I put a few mental background processes on the problem while I concentrated on something else that needed work, my armor.

Ten deep breaths and a sliver of a ration cube for lunch later, I chugged some conjured water and glared at the cube of magical nano-tech. “You better be easier than some fucking magical bullets asshole!” I growled, forcing open the skin of my right palm with Flesh Sorcery and slapping it on top of the cube. “Mine!”

My exaggerated yell was completely unnecessary as the alien cube greedily absorbed the blood, sparks flying off it as it dissolved into a moving blob of quicksilver. Pseudopods of flowing metals arced up and around my arm as I quickly used Flesh Sorcery again to open up my other palm and stick it on the morphing futuristic technology. Injecting my authority over metal with my Earth Sorcery into the blob and backing it up with my iron will, I felt a skin-like connection, as if it wanted to be covering, to sit and rest as another layer, a protective covering on top of another skin.

Directing my Flesh Sorcery to step up red blood cell production, I put the rest of my focus on manipulating the Centauri tech to conform to my needs, which were simple; I need a last line of defense that nobody sees.

Humans are very squishy creatures and some would argue that we’re poorly designed as well, be it by deity or nature. My current armor, the Flesh Sorcery conjured and strengthened bone plates covered in runed platinum is pretty damn awesome, especially with all of the added-on enchantments to catch, convert, store, and deflect mana and kinetic based attacks. But my paranoid way of thinking demanded more. Unfortunately, the magical blob also wanted more. Instead of covering my skin and forming an epic suit of flexible armor, the pseudopods turned jagged, stabbing into every bit of open flesh that was available.

Using my blood as a power source, it went from timid skin covering to ravenous flesh devouring machine in an instant. I had watched the memory of Reeanth bonding with the armor more than once, I had even tasted the emotions of the joining.

Pain, agony, fear, none of the emotions I was feeling were in that block of time. “FUCK!” I screamed, my seizing hands shaking as all of my magic concentrated on the metallic invader. Earth Sorcery gripped the tiny razor metal bots attacking my very body while my Consciousness Sorcery kept the pain at bay. Nearly seizing up with fear and panic, I drove my Mana Sorcery into the nanobots, overcharging the magic tendrils with as much mana as I could channel. As I held off another wave of agony and being torn apart at the molecular level, my magic analyzed and attacked the miniscule runic structure of the nanotech while my Water Sorcery froze the liquid in my body as a last ditch effort to hold them at bay.

I hate it when a plan doesn’t come together.