“What do you mean that’s not how it works? I fucking made it and it’s been working great ever since. Shit man, I even blew up a goddamn vampire and gigantic witch’s pet with that bad boy!”
My professional complaints fell on deaf ears, or ear holes. Kraken didn’t care that Gungnir is an epic work of deadly art that’s served me well for months now. The stupid spirit squid just took my mental schematics of all of my gear and shredded them. In short, and I quote: “This pathetic rune work is unsightly and befit only for goblins and their ilk.”
According to my graciously arrogant Scion of Order, the only reason I’m still living is by pure luck and all of my equipment only works because of luckily choosing good materials in the production of my stuff. I did catch a mutter in there somewhere about my sorceries being a complete break in the system, allowing me to get by via incredible synergy.
[Shoddy! Shitty! Shite! Shovel this to Sheol!]
“Your alliteration is asinine, you abominable anus!” I yelled back. Kraken had actually kicked me out of the shared mindspace, grumbling the whole time about how he could do it so much better. Our relationship had improved over the past couple weeks but we still fought like siblings. I left Gungnir in a slot in one of the solar panel mana converters to charge up the piles of batteries in there while I experimented with my collection of sunstones.
Thankfully, sunstones are a new form of naturally occuring kind of mineral that my Earth Sorcery was more than happy to conjure for me now that I had examples. I just couldn’t do it earlier because I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for until the dryads brought me some samples.
“So if they sit in the sun they charge, duh, but at night they just blow through their energy,” I muttered to myself as I held my samples at my temporary outside lab. “So, it’s either gonna need runes to get them to hold on to their charge throughout the night or put them in a specially shaped crystal battery to govern the energy dispersal.”
My main weapon Gungnir had been already altered by the Angel Maalik to have some kind of ‘star-iron’ metal that was inimical to the undead, but it wasn’t something that I could recreate. I was wrestling with an idea about manipulating the sunstones in such a way that they could function as weapons wielded by the guardians of my chunk of Virginia, Everest and Meliad. With the new sunstone weapons, they’d never have to worry about the undead ever, but I had to come up with more viable solutions in case I needed to arm other people. I knew that while I’m alone here for right now, humanity isn’t completely gone off of this planet.
Reeanth warned me that some humans would be coming back as well. Various alien organizations and empires would be looking to settle a new world, and Earth used to be prime real estate way back in the day.
In one of my experiments, I did find that the sunstone material was much better at gathering sunlight than my own freaking solar panels, so I spent a day reworking every single of them to have sunstone coverings to maximize their efficiency. The power intake spiked beyond what I had even dreamed to the point I was forced to put in a governing rune function to prevent explosive accidents. Underneath each solar panel embankment, I buried a giant crystal battery capacitor to handle the overflow just in case I wanted to do some power intensive enchanting or crafting. Each power bank had multiple crystal spikes with flat tips that came up through the surface of the earth and the main spike connected to the solar panel providing an avenue for the energy to drain safely. The other spikes were just out there for me or Kraken or the dryads to grab onto, allowing any of us to drain as much power as needed.
With the energy-experiments mostly completed, I had also taken the time to make about eight more Yggdrasil seeds so I could see about making a personalized travel system for me. They all were taken from the same root of Yggdrasil that bulged out of the earth on the left side of the glade, and I was hoping that there would be enough compatibility between the seeds so that I could put the travel trees and be able to basically teleport freely around the North American continent. I had the actual World Tree to start from, which was powerful enough to keep anything from using it to get to my main base, but the others I planned on putting elsewhere.
The first seed would be planted somewhere in Death Valley or the deserts out west if they’re still there, one to serve as my forward base in northern Canada, and one at the staging base near my brother in Florida. The others would be get out of jail free cards if necessary. I tested one seed just to see and it did work.
All I had to do was plant the seed, shove enough energy in it so that it could handle travel to the main tree, and step through. I consulted with Lyra and the other dryads as I ran the experiment. Forcing the plant to grow that fast does cause it to completely burn out which is both good and bad. Good because I won’t have to fear anyone following me by the same method.
I found the ‘Bad’ when I ran back to the original travel point of my experiment and found a large pile of ash where the travel tree was. To be fair, if I wasn’t facing a life or death situation, this did leave me the choice of planting the World Tree seed and growing it like normal to be a travel/teleportation tree. But, it was good to know that I had options.
Another item on my never-ending list of things to do, one that I had been too afraid to do but had forced myself to get over my fear of was communing with the World Tree. It’s hard to describe. Every time I walk past the World Tree or open the door to my home and walk beneath Yggdrasil, my Nature Sorcery screams at me. I mean, Yggdrasil is that which holds the universe together, so the legends say, but the fucking thing also currently has my wife. AND, it is the epitome or . . . the living manifestation of the concept of Nature and my own magic couldn’t let it go.
I made it a practice at least once a week to merge my mind and magic with the tree hoping to find some conscious trace of my wife up in there somewhere. What I found instead was the local network of arboreal life that my section of Yggdrasil was attached to. From the perspective of my magical senses, it was like looking at an aerial map but one only composed of different shades of green. In fact it almost looked like rivers of green and brown flowing around that I kind of assumed to be ley lines for the surrounding area.
Now, it was real clear to me that the damn World Tree doesn’t look at things the way we humans do, so traveling around was a bit of a pain. Plenty of plant life extended up and down the eastern seaboard and a decent distance out west but it stopped in the east probably due to the Atlantic Ocean out there. At least that’s what I’m assuming. Areas it doesn’t touch are gray and black. And as far as I could tell, there were big dead spots in the west that the World Tree really didn’t touch either. My educated self planned on starting there to see where the deserts are.
I loved the fact that my plans were coming together. I wasn’t finished with any of them really but the simple fact that progress was being made on multiple fronts was exhilarating. With Kraken’s help and my solar panel and sunstone experiments nearly complete along with the travel-tree concept working as planned, taking on the Arctic to rid it of the Hungry Ones seemed more and more likely.
One of the things that fascinated me the most was the ongoing study of the two swords that Maalik stored inside of Gungnir when he left. While they both burned slightly different colors, one pure white and the other with a shade of light blue mixed in with the white, it was hard to get my mind close to them. The issue wasn’t really the fact that the projection of my body in the mindscape of Gungnir’s storage couldn’t get close, it’s that my eyes constantly shifted away as if the swords were covered in oil and my focus kept slipping off.
Kraken simply laughed at me, saying something about being ‘too mortal’ to understand the Adamic or Enochian runes and ‘some things are not meant for mortals and others really aren’t meant for mortals’. When I summoned the sword out of the storage space and onto the stone table of the Lab and bent to physically pick it up and examine it, Kraken had shrieked a blast cone of sound waves that knocked me away. When I questioned him about it after regaining consciousness, he explained that touching the blade would have either blown my hand off or burned it to ash. Instantly.
Refusing to give up all hope about learning anything from the angel’s gift, I continued to spend time magically meditating as close to the swords as I could get. After a few days, I could make out the inside of the little globe that hovered where the blades crossed in their display. It was a tiny feather from an angel’s wing.
It was magic all right, but not any kind that I could handle or replicate. There was something inherently alien and painful about it. The more I studied the aura that I can only describe as ‘clean’ and ‘burning hot’, the more I could feel just how different my power was to it. The swords possessed a quality of fire that was more powerful than sorcery, definitely not something my magic was capable of handling.
I came to a conclusion after a while. If Maalik had wanted to do anything to me, I would not have been able to stop him. I tossed rocks and water and raw mana at the swords and they just shrugged it off like water off a duck’s back. Enchantments lasted a bit longer in their presence but I don’t think half seconds count. For fun, I enchanted a stick to be harder than steel and threw it at one of the swords. The damn steel stick just fell into two pieces.
[Quit playing with Heaven’s blades. Did you ever stop to think maybe you have a duty like Merlin? Didn’t he carry around Excalibur for a while looking for the rightful owner of the sword? Sheesh mortal, not everything is about you or even belongs to you.]
[Fuck off squid,] I growled inside my head. [Either tell me how the damn things work or put some of those ever-shifting runes on those armor schematics. Stupid drawings give me a headache just lookin’ at’em.]
[What do you think I’ve been doing for over two weeks? Higher Runes don’t just get slapped on? They have to be properly aligned, and be set in the right material, and they also have to be attuned so that they don’t burn your less than perfect self to dust!]
Sometimes, magic fucking sucks.
Gripping the bridge of my nose, I took a deep breath so that I wouldn’t reply with irritation bleeding through my voice. [Then make another schematic not using those particular runes. I’m going to need an upgraded suit of armor now-ish and then we’ll actually work on the way more detailed powered-up one later.]
[Grumble, grumble, snark, snark.] Or at least that’s all I heard coming down the shared mental link.
[Hey! It’s time for our session anyways. Come on dude.] My excitement rolled through our link. Kraken wasn’t the best at answering all of my questions about the universe at large as he’s still just a young Scion, but his powers of deduction and knowledge in regards as to how magic works were invaluable for me.
One, I had real questions but two, it was fun to pester the little squid guy. He would always get into his ‘teacher’ role and it was freaking hilarious. How could having one eye allow someone to be so expressive?
[I still don’t get the distinction between mages and sorcerers, and what do you mean I have to train my mana capacity? I have generators and batteries and power banks and solar panel converters, come on dude?]
Kraken just stared at me. His bewilderment was clear but it carried the tinge of an adult watching an idiot child ask a really dumb question. [We have been over this!] he sent, frustration making our connection a bit tenuous, [Sorcerers use the element and Mages COMMAND the element. They are the element. You throw water at a water mage and he takes it away from you while laughing and drowning everything around you. But, the mage can only use the one element he has, so you throw a rock at him and he better get the fuck outta the way. It’s why mages tend to settle down and never leave their area of influence. Water mages live near the ocean or in river-boats, nature mages never leave the forest, and fire and air mages fuck like rabbits and are inseparable.]
[Ok, that does make sense,] I thought, rolling my eyes. Mulling it over further, I composed more questions. [But what kind of training do I have to do that wizards do? Aren’t they pathetic in terms of holding power, which is why the crystal batteries are sort of a huge deal?]
[Yes, wizards don’t have the same mana capacity in the beginning that you do but have more later. This is due to training. They train themselves to hold more mana and stretch their holding capacity over time. Also, yes, wizards are not as powerful as sorcerers but if you ever run into an old ass wizard you better run like the Hells themselves are coming for ya.]
[Yeah, I hear ya, but I’m not seeing how that’s possible. I command water and earth, what’s a wizard going to do with it that I can’t?]
[Think with me for a second,] Kraken chuckled, his mind pulling me into his own. A live-action cartoon movie started playing. [Ok, the blue humanoid over there is the water sorcerer, and the old man is the wizard. Watch the wizard shoot a couple sharp icicles and see, the sorcerer just laughs at it.] And sure enough, the young man arrogantly waved his hand at the incoming missiles which transformed from deadly ice blades into harmless water vapor. [But look, wizards use implements far more than sorcerers or mages and it gives them an incredible amount of variety to use.]
If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
The old man chuckled, icicles pouring out of his wand like a machine gun and the young man barely paying attention at this point as the projectiles turned into vapor to the point that fog was starting to hamper visibility. The old man grinned for a quick second as his other hand held a different wand that quickly blasted a spiky ball of solid rock that plowed right through the dense fog into the sorcerer. The impromptu movie cut off.
I leaned back on the comfy couch. Gotta love mindscapes. Any piece of furniture can be made out of clouds. Propping my feet up on a conveniently generated table, the scene replayed but this time without sound effects.
[I get it, wizards use tools as their preset spells and pump mana through it to up the number of spells in play, but they have a bunch of wands ready for variety. That wand belt was pretty cool. Do they normally carry around that many?] I asked, replaying it in my mind. The old man had slim holsters at his hips but also across his chest like an ammo sling for a shotgun. A thick but short staff was slung across his back and a bandolier of small vials filled with liquids was around his midsection.
[Yes, they really do, and they stress their mana capacity every day too. Eventually, they get to the point where they hold almost as much power as you do with your batteries on their own but that takes decades of dedicated work. They’re big fans of living near ley lines or having familiars or elementals to supplement their mana expenditure.]
Kraken’s answers were enlightening. Kinda scared me a bit too. I felt like I was missing out on the grade school education that everyone else got.
[So how’s it work, how do they gradually increase what they can hold?] My question prompted a two hour discussion on basic mana manipulation training techniques and breathing exercises that were frankly exhausting. Kraken ended up throwing his curriculum away after finding out exactly how much power I carried around in my batteries.
[You’re already doing the craziest workout I’ve ever heard of?! Just being near that much power 24/7 is forcing you to expand your mana capacity, and that’s not including your blend of diverse sorceries and proximity to the World Tree!] At the end there, his voice through our link was getting a bit raspy. [Did you know that most humans are simply not durable or resistant to the level of mana being put out by Yggdrasil? Stars above! Most creatures can’t handle that. It’s like dragons nesting in a volcano not just because they want to but because they’re really the only ones who can!]
I stifled a giggle. [So, I don’t need to do all that hippy shit?]
[Meditation and breathing exercises are not ‘hippy shit’! Communing with the foundation of the multiverse is NOT hippy shit!]
I laughed him off as I opened up my magical senses to feel the surrounding area. Nothing but forest and raw power as far as the magical eye could see. “Feels like hippy shit to me,” I grumbled with a small smile.
[Look, haven’t you noticed that even your canine companion doesn’t even stay around here for long? He comes by for some fetch, belly rubs, and then runs off?]
[Yeah . . . but that’s what dogs do man. He’s got private parts to lick and deer to chase.]
[This area is hard to live in for things that are not plants you freak. You should not be alive. Besides, you’re probably gonna die as soon as the other realms start traveling here. You are pretty squishy and can’t even fight with a blade.]
That for some reason got under my skin a bit. He was dismissing me as non-threatening, like a child with a loaded gun but with no actual strength to cock it or pull the trigger. Reaching into all of my batteries, I pulled as much power as I could handle and surprised myself to find that my personal capacity was not even full from the batteries on my chest. Linking my aura to the power banks, I pulled even more, draining one out of three, until my head was pounding and my heart straining.
My gear activated, every rune lighting up across my body even as Svalinn expanded to its long-bladed shield form and Gungnir crackled with power. My presence, magnified by the weight of all the mana cascading off of me, was starting to make my limbs shake before I let it all go back to storage. Gasping for breath, I managed to mentally send as I couldn’t voice the words, [See? You’re telling me that’s vulnerable?]
Kraken just stared at me. [You know anti-magic weaponry is a real threat, right? All of that does not matter one iota to one of the many groups that hunt magic users.]
[You’re kidding!]
Kraken shot a snippet of a memory at me, hordes of armored warriors in the sun cutting down magic users left and right, the silvery metal of their full plate armor shrugging off spells while their weapons knocked aside or nullified their spellforms. The last few seconds showed several wizards fighting back, their staves now maces or swords.
[You’re fucking kidding me right?] I scoffed, grabbing Gungnir and tossing up a large 30-06 bullet. [We’ll just do this the American way, shoot them. Gungnir has Centauri rifles and I’ve even modified bullets to blow up. Magic may not work but physics is hard to ignore dude.]
[This is why teams are important,] Kraken stressed, shaking his one big eyeball. [We’ve talked about this. That’s why the Centauri still fight like your ancient Romans did. Formations of many kinds of weaponry ensure success far better than being a lone wolf. Even mages work in teams with enslaved creatures to cover their blind spots. Wizards learn how to fight with physical weaponry, and the Hive races use the swarm tactics combined with environmental and situational evolution. You can’t protect against everything perfectly. There are even accounts of the Hungry Ones’ overlord arming their hordes with anti-magic weaponry complete with gauntlets to shield them from their own weapons!]
[So, bullets don’t work? Is that what you’re trying to say man? Cause I’m definitely short on manpower over here. There’s some hillbillies that I might want to check in on, but we won’t be making SWAT teams out of them.]
[Your normal human definition of ‘bullets’ won’t work, and you being all alone really won’t work either. You’re squishy, like me, but I’m the spiritual form of squishy which means that I’m way less squishy than you. Most things tend to be either too durable for bullets or they’re a bit advanced and have some basic shielding against high-velocity projectiles. It’s really why wizards don’t use guns. The craziest ones use big longbows with crazy enchanted arrows, and most use swords while the rest use beefed up staffs.]
My temper flared for a split second before I tamped it back down. [So . . . I do need an army, or, fuck, a fucking team. Fuck! FAAWWWK!] My stomping off ended the conversation but it didn’t end the fact that maybe the little shit was right.
[Wait, fuck you!] I mentally yelled back as I turned right around and stomped back up to Kraken. [That can’t be all the options. Can’t I just hide out, go rogue, not really show off and be unnoticeable? If Spot the dragon dog can do it then so can I right?]
[Maybe in about three hundred years of practice if you’re lucky,] Kraken scoffed, poking me with one barely corporeal pseudopod. [You’ve shown me your magics, and if you were smart, you would have stolen some weapon skills from the Centauri you killed. Up close combat is your greatest danger, followed by your own idiocy.]
Well my plans to leave in the next month or so got kicked back by at least six if not more. Anytime I thought I was ready, gung-fuckin-ho to kick some ass, Kraken would emerge from Gungnir, laugh, and then shoot me a made-up vision or scene of me getting annihilated in some stupid way.
And it’s not that I’m actually an idiot, it’s more like I’m ignorant. Egg-nah-rah-moose. The multiverse is inconceivably huge, and I just don’t know anything compared to some child who’s had magic his entire life. It just frustrated me that Scion, who openly considers himself young, a veritable baby of his race, has so much more knowledge than me. I did manage to get some grudging respect from him when he first examined my armor as he noted that platinum is especially difficult to work with.
I spent eight days just straight up coming up with runes that I could use to conceal myself and my magical signature better than a dryad. I tried to use them as test subjects but they could naturally vanish into any form of plant life and not be found. So I had to do better.
The runes on my armor do a pretty good job at muting my magical signature, but actually vanishing from sight is a really hard thing to accomplish. The best I could come up with was a sort of lame blending, but magical creatures that survive by hunting either with their noses or mana fluctuation would be able to instantly notice me as they tend not to be vision oriented. My worst enemy would be a damn dog since they’d probably smell Spot all over me. And to make it worse, personal control over my own magical aura or mana capacity overflow was abysmal.
That conclusion led me back to where I started, survivability. My focus of magical self-improvement has been based on staying alive. Defense. And defense is great for sittin’ tight and surviving, which is my main plan. The problem with defense is that you don’t go out and assault an enemy with a castle. You need some freaking offense to go with it.
For all of my power, I still felt some reticence in using all of my abilities to the fullest. My Flesh Sorcery so far has been utilized in relatively minor ways, healing, fortifying my body, conjuring bone armor that self-heals, but I know that I could take that way further. The biggest issue with that is time and ignorance. I could grow a freaking monster army to assault the North and South pole, but monsters have to be fed, and they can die which means they could be resurrected by the Hungry Ones against me.
Also, experimenting with life itself is incredibly dangerous on the macro scale as well. If I introduce a new life form, there’s no guarantee that the new life won’t wipe out a natural ecosystem or go mad with power. Playing god is not what I want to do. The Mana/Rune sorcery is perfect for long-term figuring stuff out, kind of like what I’m doing right now, and it has seriously buffed me in the defense and implement department. Even my Nature Sorcery is perfect for defense or localized ambushing, but air or fire would have rounded me out to be a better magical fighter.
Meditating in the clearing was helping me to go through my options. If I couldn’t solve this problem then there would be no point to me ever leaving this area ever again. I’m still human which means I’m still squishy.
Offense, offense, offense.
Using the process of elimination, I managed to define what was left once I removed enchantment, earth, and nature as options. Primarily, those are for defense. What was left was flesh, water, and Mind Sorcery.
“Damn,” I grunted. “There's still a lot left, more versatility if I can just pound my brain to give me a bit more.”
Let’s go back to flesh. Keeping in mind that it’s probably not the best option against the undead, it can still buff me personally. I can alter my body so that I myself can be a singular weapon. I can wield a sword or staff or mace and fight off opponents while being enhanced with Flesh Sorcery. The constant healing as well as alterable bone armor and bone spikes would make me a pain, hahaha, to deal with. If I got close enough, I could probably even attack a living thing’s internal workings from the inside, and if worse came to worse I could use blood as a weapon. I’m pretty sure that if I tried hard enough, I could literally rip the life out of someone, but again, that would not work against the undead.
My Mind Sorcery is definitely something I could use as a weapon. In the past, I dominated the mind of Kong and Norn, but that really made me sick to my stomach, in the moral sense. Fighting someone inside of their own mind is also an avenue of offense, but one that is singularly focused, not the kind of widespread magical destruction that a good fireball would provide.
Which leaves me with water.
[Now you’re getting somewhere, just think about where you’re going, eventually]. Kraken’s mental interruptions are something that I’ll never get used to. It’s not that his voice is like a weird oily sensation in my head, cause it kind of is, it’s that the deeply sonorous tones of his voice just don’t fit the almost cute image of the aquatic-based spirit familiar of knowledge. His voice should be high pitched and cute, or that’s what modern cartoon culture has taught me. He should be like a squeaky kitten, but he’s not. His fucking voice is smooth and dark, like Mr. Clean combined with the Koolaid Man coming out of the woodwork to wreck my concentration.
But the melodious little shit had a point. Everything past the upper part of the former United States and on up through Canada is frozen, which means that ice and snow with a little bit of dirt mixed in is where my Water Sorcery will fucking shine. Instant ice coffins, easy to use blades of water and firehouse cannons of magic power combined with tons of available dirt, the very material of the surroundings at my beck and call, yeah, maybe I won’t be so weak up north.
[Keep going, think harder . . .].
[FUCK YOU SQUID!].
[Don’t be like that,] Kraken teased, condescension dripping from every syllable. [It’s just so fun to watch your hamster wheel turn but with no one running on it.]
[I swear you insignificant speck, if you don’t SHUT UP and let me work I’ll summon a whole bunch of elementals to hound you forever! And I’ll make sure that they’re water elementals too. That way, you won’t even be able to hide in the depths of the damn ocean!]
[Bingo folks! Ding Ding Ding! We have a winner!] Kraken cheered, doing a little tentacle dance on top of Gungnir. [The monkey has won the prize, the mouse has beat the maze and earned the cheese!].
I was so mad at the annoying familiar that it took me a second.
Water elementals. Perfect.
They would literally be perfect for what I’m trying to accomplish. They won’t have a problem up north; slicing up some zombies is right up their alley, and they don’t even have to be big elementals like Everest. Even the cold wouldn’t bother them at all.
[Yes monkey-boy, that train of thought is exactly correct. Sheesh, anyone with half a brain could see you aren’t using the full range of your magics,] Kraken lectured. [You could even attack from the ocean if the Hungry Ones had a coastal stronghold. Ice and snow are not hindrances to one such as yourself and little elementals would do anything for the chance to spend some time on this particular plane of existence.]
I stared at Kraken, wondering the whole time why it took me so long to figure it out. Guess I just got stuck, pigeonholed into the viewpoint of what I’ve been doing that’s worked for so long. It’s as if a fighter used his fists for every single situation even though it’s clearly not the answer. Closing my eyes and taking a deep breath, I let out the rest of the annoyance that led to a stroke of genius.
“Water, fucking water. Great, no problem, none at all,” I mumbled to myself as I got up and started walking off to the nearby river. “Easy day huh, stupid fucking easy answer staring me right in the face the entire damn time. God, I’m such a bonehead.”
My hands were in my pockets as I walked, one foot at times kicking small rocks out of the way. You know how when you mess something up but the answer is so simple? Kind of like when you have your alarm set for the right time number-wise but put PM instead of AM and then you’re really late for work? I felt like that kind of idiot.