“And I didn’t forget about Svalinn. There really wasn’t much to improve on your split bladed shield as it has a dragon soul in it and would probably try to eat me. It’s almost as if wild magic helped you make that damn thing,” Kraken snorted, peering closer at the intangible energy representing Svalinn that rested on my soul-tree. I watched as my soul-tree ignored Kraken and studied the thought projects of all the various armor ideas.
Kraken mimed scratching his non-existent chin. “Maybe feed it some nephilim, maybe not, who cares. It’s a ridiculous shield and lives up to its name. It attaches the same way to your arms and you’re done!”
At Kraken’s pronouncement, I didn’t even take a breath. I thanked him profusely, running out of air because of my excitement. Kicking myself out of my mental/soul place and back into the real world, I numbed my body so that I wouldn’t be able to feel a thing and used Flesh Sorcery to transcribe the runic diagrams on my very bones and skin. Kraken helped to direct the effort, making sure that I didn’t make an error in my haste. The sigils shaped into my bones were orderly, organized, inordinately structured, and generally easy to put on.
But the ones etched into my skin, those were graceful dancing lines of power that caught the eye, those were art. Under my direction and Kraken’s lone eye, the runic tattoos on my skin flowed like water around the natural lines of the body creating a raw sensation of power, as if I had opened the doors of potential that my body had kept secret from me. My magic finally was expressed on my body, and I LIKED it! My Consciousness Sorcery allowed me to perfectly transcribe what I had seen onto my body as if Michaelangelo himself had done the work.
Grabbing my old suit and laying it out on the solid granite workbench, I lifted Gungnir and pulled power from its stores of energy, slamming the point of my weapon down into the chest plate of my armor. Weaves of pure power flowed from Svalinn, Gungnir and myself at the same time into the armor as tendrils of silver magitech nanobots poured over the old gear. Following the schematics in my mind just as Kraken had made them, I couldn’t help it as a small tear leaked out for the old armor.
“Goodbye old friend,” I said with a soft, sad laugh. “Time for an upgrade.”
Pushing my sentimentality aside, I worked with Kraken for the next four hours until the massive undertaking was finished. By the time mid afternoon rolled around, we had even included some light-bending camouflage along with sound dampening boots, put enchanted knives that channeled Flesh Sorcery to rend overly jagged wounds into sheaths at various places while two holsters were made for reworked Centauri pistols that had a channeled connection to my powerpacks of mana.
[This, this is a masterpiece] Kraken said, panting with exhaustion from inside Gungnir. His usual bright glow was fairly dim, as if he had invested most of his own energy into the project. [I”m just gonna, just gonna, pass out over here and recharge.]
“You do that buddy,” I said, slumping in my chair, staring at my armor. It really was beautiful, in a magically ominous sort of way. The whole getup screamed ‘BADASS SORCERER’, which is where I’d be in about ten years. Although I was proud of myself, I felt like a kid playing with his father’s gun, not even being able to pull the damn lever back. The rune diagrams made sense as Kraken was explaining them to me, and my Mana Sorcery agreed with him that that is what it was, but this level of design was at least twenty years ahead of my current ability. It was the difference of knowing how to skate and watching an Olympic ice skater do crazy flips on top of someone else while you barely hold on to the side rail.
Forcing myself to stand up, I pulled on my Flesh Sorcery to refresh me a bit and then slowly put the armor on piece by piece. The last component we had added was a sympathetic blood bond tied to a central ruby from the armor pieces to Gungnir. My main weapon was already blood bonded to me, which meant that no one could use it or take it from me, ever. This blood bond however, was of a different nature. This was a subset blood bond between each armor piece and Gungnir which would allow me to store my armor in Gungnir and then put it on instantly whenever I need it. I had gamed out my armor so that I could take it off or put it on instantly and at will.
Recognizing that I had accomplished more in the past day than I had in a long time, stressing out my magic, my soul, and my brain to the fullest, I downed two meal cubes and used my Flesh Sorcery to put me in a deep, healing-centric sleep until the next morning.
*******
As the sun broke through the curvature of the world allowing dawn to arrive at my little slice of post-apocalyptic heaven, the needs of the morning were less pressing than they used to be. I mean, I still had to pee, but it just wasn’t the urgent need of a dying man like it used to be. Walking outside, I inspected the clearing before conjuring water to clean and rehydrate myself before banishing it away.
“Perfect dryness,” I breathed, twisting and turning to stretch out the kinks of my deep sleep. “What an awesome cheat,” I said even as I used a bit of Flesh Sorcery to perk myself up back into the land of the living. Not having coffee anymore sucks but I had a way around it
[Oh come on, test it out! I worked on the pocket generator and the spare all night!]
Peering into Gungnir, I saw that Kraken had set up two mini-pedestals in there on the opposite wall from the angel sword display. The generators looked way different from the ones I had previously made. They both were cubes about the size of a small moving box with an upside down bowl seamlessly attached to the top. Sticking out of the bowl were what looked to be silver and gold antennae.
[Yes, yes, I’m awesome, thank me later. The inside of the cube is solid slate with a limestone core. While they won’t last as long as a core of granite, I used those two kinds of rock instead because they break down faster so they provide more mana output. Now, with the base ingredient being converted into mana, the outside is layered with cold iron and platinum with so many runes to govern the amount of power going out. I also repurposed a bit of World Tree wood on the outside of the entire structure so that no external mana could get in here to disrupt the delicate regulation process,] Kraken gushed, geeking out just as much as I would be if I had made it. [Don’t mind the antennae, those are mostly nanotech transmitters tied to your armor through sympathetic magic, and HERE!]
The sexy version of a hoverboard popped out of Gungnir’s storage space in front of me. It was more like a longboard had a bastard child with a freaking Tesla. Metallic flames shot up and down the length of the board in the coolest paint job I’d ever seen with bits of and blue where the tips of the flames almost looked alive.
[Yes, it’s also tied to Gungnir, yes I added retractable wings to the sides similar to your backpack set so it should add another hours worth of flight along with increased maneuverability.]
No more words were needed. With a leap, I landed on the board and leaned forward, my magic wrapping around it and through the runes, instinctively letting me know more about it as I flew. The fifteen or so minute walk to the riverbank took just over a minute as I barreled down the path. Hitting the river itself, the hoverboard held true to its nature as we did our own rendition of Back to the Future with magic power. Waves of water cut out to the side as I turned downriver and poured on the gas.
“YEEEEEHHHHAAAAAWWWWW!” I screamed, loving how the wind whipped at me, urging me to go faster. Once I hit the point that I felt the board might not be controllable due to the insane speeds, I leaned back as it shot me into the sky at a fifty degree angle.
[This is awesome BUT GET YOUR WINGS OUT!]
Laughing like an adrenaline junkie, I recalled the board into Gungnir as I flared out the suit’s wings with my magic. The wind grabbed me and hoisted me higher as I fed power into the runes. I was flying, freaking flying on my own. The Rappahannock River lay out before me like a long greenish blue road, strange rock formations and giant hills pushing it north and south as the river did its best to run west towards the Atlantic ocean.
Mentally pulling up a list of auto-mental processes that I had made a while ago but not used, I grabbed the ‘learning modifier’ one and engaged it. Muscle memory is something that all humans have, and it allows them to perform actions unconsciously. It’s the way that some people drive to work and not really remember the trip because they’ve done it so many times that their unconscious mind does the work instead of the conscious side. This process allows me to not only shorten the amount of time it takes to learn a physical action, but it moves it over to the unconscious side so much quicker.
And so I flew. I flew down the river, attempted steep dives and nailed some awesome twisting maneuvers while blasting out some crystal rounds from Gungnir at full speed. I had fun exploring how to hoverboard down the river and through forest paths and then experimented more with powered hoverboard to flight takeoffs and vice versa. This day was dedicated to me and freedom.
There are multiple kinds of freedom. One such freedom was the one I was currently enjoying, the uncompromised ability to travel up while the rest of the human race walks. The other kind of freedom, well that one hit me from above. That freedom was the sheer freedom from thought, it was the freedom from the thoughts that would be saving my life as something big and mean and loud cannonballed straight into my back as I was five hundred feet over the river.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
The river welcomed me in a nicer way that it would have anyone else who didn’t have Water Sorcery. A blast of water erupted before I hit the surface, breaking the surface tension and catching me as all of my new runes served their purpose in preventing my death. I overcame the disorienting effect of being hammered out the sky quicker than I would have thought as I crashed into the silty water.
Forcing myself to stay underwater, I did a quick status check. None of my bones were broken, my shields were intact, and my suit of armor was relatively undamaged.
[The wings were almost sheared off but they retracted in time,] Kraken reassured me. [The nanotech will have that part fixed in ten minutes but you probably need to have a chat with whatever the hell that was.]
[Agreed,] I replied mentally, gripping myself and a minor tsunami’s worth of water and vaulting up to the surface. A long gray winged form flew by, the wave of air buffeting the surface of the river. [The fuck is that? Sickly dragon? Wyvern? Flying snake?]
[That my friend is a wyvern, and where there’s one, there’s more.]
My answer to Kraken’s doom and gloom answer was more than one high powered crystal round lighting up the son of a bitch. I pointed Gungnir at the monstrosity and fired two hammer rounds and three penetrator rounds in quick succession, using magic to effortlessly switch between the different kinds of bullets. Keening screeches emitted from the bleeding reptile as my rounds softened it up and then blew through its tough scales.
[Overkill?] Kraken wondered. [Are you actually overkill for wyverns?]
I smiled with my teeth. [Good.]
Diving back into the water, I traveled a hundred yards downstream before popping back up and scanning the sky. It was so bright that I couldn’t see. Instead, I relied on my magical senses, opening them up to their fullest and feeling for fast moving sources of life.
Kraken had to put in his two cents. [This is where those bound spirit animal senses would come in handy right now . . .]
[Shut up and let me fight dumbass!] I snapped, searching for the bloody corpse’s friends. Reacting to the sudden flare of magical presence behind me, I spun and blasted the river water in front of me with the force of twenty firehoses quickly following it with a shower of crystal rounds. Pushing myself to the side with Water Sorcery, I dove back in just in time to avoid having my head taken off by another wyvern diving from above.
[They hunt in packs like wolves.] Kraken informed me. [Even dragons think long and hard before putting up with these kinds of tactics with animals of such size and power.]
I hate not knowing for myself how these creatures hunt but I did trust Kraken to give me the facts I didn’t have. Diving deep, I grabbed the two wrecks of wyvern bodies and froze them together at the bottom of the river. Damn I hope Spot is hungry. Rising back to the surface, I hopped on the top of it like it was pavement.
“Come and get me fucker!” I yelled to the sky, pivoting to stay on guard as Gungnir glowed an ominous kaleidoscope of yellows and greens. “You want a magic snack?!”
There! Behind me, of course, and off to the upper left, I felt the wyvern tuck its wings in and dive. I didn’t even have to turn as Kraken shot the right kinds of rounds at the wyvern in perfect sequence. While he took care of that one, a far larger version of the wyverns, one with four wings instead of two, plummeted out of the sky and slammed into the water causing his own tidal wave.
Of course that didn’t do anything to me. Flexing my will, the incoming wall of water enveloped me harmlessly and slid past. Arching one eyebrow, I was a bit perplexed at the sight of the big one floating on top of the water, his four wings out to the side giving him surface tension to almost sit on top of the river. Eyes blacker than coal stared at me as the Alpha lay there in the water, judging me.
His breath stank.
[Should I kill him?] I shot to Kraken, [I mean, he’s not doing anything but I think he’s outta peeps.] Reaching out again with my magical senses, I double checked to make sure nothing was diving outta nowhere.
[This is weird behavior, especially for wyverns. They’re oddly primal in that they just want to eat, fly, and fuck.] My spirit familiar’s lack of a helpful answer did not provide the information I was hoping for. Knowing that if these winged creatures sort of hunted like wolves and had a pack mentality, then I know that backing down wasn’t an option. Right now, this big creature was deciding if I was either dangerous enough to listen to, if it was brave enough to attack and win; it was all a game of dominance, but only if I was right.
A soft tapping sound came through the mental link I shared with Kraken. [Yes?] I sent back, maintaining eye contact and a dominant attitude in the direction of the wyvern.
[That wasn’t me,] Kraken replied quietly, [I think it came from the wyvern.]
Making sure that my mental defense and focus runes were fully powered up, I followed the pinging back to its source.
[When did the males lay claim to this new realm? What group of wizards do you call your own?]
The voice was very feminine, raspily high-pitched with an unbelievably haughty tone. My shock traveled through the mental link before I could completely tamp it down.
[Ah, a young wizard then. My dear, you didn’t have to kill my pets, you simply could have run and there would be no bad blood between us,] the sultry voice said, hitting all the right spots that would have any normal red blooded man dizzy from lust.
I let my anger leak into my voice as I yelled out loud, “I don’t deal with bitches who sick their guard dogs on me. Especially when I killed them so easily. Who the fuck are you and what do you want?”
[The Winged Witches control all that flies my dearest, our hearts belong to the freedom of the sky even though at times we feel the need for the restricting arms of a man.]
[I could be wrong,] Kraken said on our private mental link. [But I think the Winged Witches are harpies or half-avian women who used to be normal and used their magic to get prettier. They rule several odd magical realms where it’s pretty much only floating islands or solid clouds.]
[Great,] I huffed back. [And are our myths about harpies true? Do they capture men and fuck them to death and then eat them? Just spitballing’ here.]
[That’s pretty close. As you can see, they’re really good at mind control. They mind control flying creatures like wyverns and dragons when they’re really little and raise them to be their muscle. Their men, they use to get themselves pregnant and then drain them of life and magic to feed to themselves or their pets.]
The witch seemed to catch on that I was talking but not to her. [Don’t bother contacting your superiors now, you’re already mine sweet morsel.]
I laughed out loud. The more I talked, the more I allowed the current of the river to load me up with mana. “Where do you call home, you ugly excuse for a hag? Everything you see around you is mine. The river, the forest, the mountains, and yes, even the fucking sky!” Taunting her to get her blood up, I pulsed a mental message down in the water and in all directions, calling for some friends of mine. “I’ve flown around a lot and not run into you which means that this isn’t your home. That also means you’re new to the area. And the name is Ben, by the way.”
[Your name doesn’t matter, manling. You’ll be twisting in my aerie soon enough, just let go into my sweet embrace and peace will be all you know-]
Her words were creepy enough that I just had it. Giving the command to Kraken, he used Gungnir to fire two hammer rounds and three penetrator rounds directly into the skull of the Alpha. Unlike normal firearms, the magical propulsion of my crystal rounds is quiet, there’s no explosion to make a sound. Instead, there’s a quiet pop, like a small fourth of July firecracker that all the kids look at in disappointment.
Bloody meat exploded from the wide flat plate of scaly armor on the wyvern’s head as my first two rounds broke down the solid structure of the armor and the following rounds drilled deep into its brain and out the back of its head. It didn’t even have the time to flail about as the body caught up to its brain before my water elementals grabbed the body and yanked it to the river bottom, securing it there in ice.
“Hellooo?” I called, looking around with a smarmy grin. “I can’t hear you? Any other fat skanks need some learnin’? Cause if this is a big dick contest then I’m winnin’!”
[Dude, she can’t hear you.]
“It’s called gloating,” I shot back, unable to stop smiling. “Did you get it though? I left that mental link up long enough.”
Kraken couldn’t help his own evil grin. [Yup, just before you killed that beastie, I managed to dig out where their roost is.]
Given a few quick orders to my elementals, I pulled up the mostly whole bodies of the wyverns and froze them, watching as my liquid workers started pushing and sliding the masses back to my Lab. Hopping on my hoverboard, I checked real quick to make sure that my suit’s wings were back to normal and took off down the river towards home, humming the whole way,
“A-hunting we will go
A-hunting we will go
Heigh-ho, the derry-o
A-hunting we will go”
*******
Expanding my freezer was a bitch. Why are my hoarder instincts the way that they are? I mean, are they gamer instincts too, should I just be a packrat and hog all the gear and the available ingredients in the hopes that somewhere down the line I’ll need the piles of crap I’ve kept? Well, ya keep whatcha kill, is the saying I believe and live by.
So I did what I had to do, which was burrow deep into the Lab, quadruple the size of my stasis freezer, and then construct a way to get in there from the outside. The outside door, the new second entrance to the freezer, reminded me of an underground flight hanger, big enough to move dragon-sized masses in and out of the hideout.
[Is this necessary? I mean come on, Ben. This can’t all be for Spot . . . can it? Isn’t that damn dog powerful enough?] I just let Kraken ramble, knowing he’d eventually get to the right conclusion. [So much damn meat, and you can’t eat the fire dragon, and the wyverns are downright poisonous, so you can’t give it to the humans, why are you blocking me from what you’re thinking?!]
“Oh come on,” I teased, spinning around knife-form Gungnir around like a small baton. “You’re almost there. For once I have an answer that you want.”
[Ngnshrns,] Kraken grumbled, stumbling through the long list of plans I had stored away in my brain. [WAIT!! You don’t mean . . . really? That’s your plan? A flesh golem?]