Turns out, each one of the soldier guys had their own flask, and Mark, their de facto leader, had some secret ring that functioned like Gungnir in the way that it could store an incredible amount of crap. Before we got too deep in our cups while we were all talking, I had Kraken turn invisible and go add in the Glyph Blade functionality to the Flesh Golem and return. Sitting around a big bonfire for a few hours, we all swapped stories as we sipped on potent liquor from different flasks that Mark kept surreptitiously filling up from his ring. The one that made us laugh the hardest was their retelling of how they nabbed twenty huge kegs of thick brown rum from a Dwarven caravan, but they all got quiet when I asked where they kept it. Keeping my gaze flat, I pulled out Gungnir and had it pour out a pile of bullets.
After that, we were suddenly best friends. All of the guys who were ready to kill me as soon as they saw me accepted when they figured out that there was really nothing they had that I wanted. My own power, the kinds of things I could make, as well as the overt generosity let them view me as another one of them. To which, we found ourselves in front of the flesh golem off to the side of the entire party where the light petered out into the dark forest.
“Come on Scott, you do it. He’s your butt buddy, which means you’re first.”
“Fuck off, you know me Stacy are having fun.”
“That’s why you’re right here! Hahaha, can’t satisfy her can ya?”
I looked around at the guys who were nervously looking around at each other while still cracking jokes, all knowing what they wanted to do but not really trusting anything about it. Holding in my laughter at this moment was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. For all they know, they have to put their dicks in the golem for it to enlarge them, but I fibbed a little bit knowing something like this would happen. All they had to do was stick any body part in there and the flesh golem would do the enhancement anywhere. If they were going to replace a leg, then sticking that particular leg in is what they’d have to do. So here they stood, all of them wanting bigger dicks but not man enough to just shove it in.
“What?” I said. “Don’t look at me. I’ve already done this.”
Total lie, but worth it.
“All right you sick fucks, we’ll do this the way we pee in the woods together. No eye contact, and look up if you have to.” After giving his drunk order, Scott pulled his pants down and shoved it in. Shouts of ‘just do it’ and ‘fuck yeah’ somehow gave them all the courage to do the same, except for Jamal who just sat there.
“What?” he said, as I looked at him with the question clearly on my face. “Dude, I got nothing to complain about down there.” Chuckling at his buddies, Jamal took another pull on his flask and leaned over. “Just between you and me man, they bout’ to learn about big dick problems.”
We couldn’t stop laughing and it got even worse when Scott took a step back, proudly showing off an extra appendage. “I know for a fact Stacy ain’t down with both lanes!” Mark said as Jamal and I howled with laughter. Grumbling at the fact there were more men than women in the group, Scott used the flesh golem to remove the extra dick. “Oh my god! I can’t wait to tell Stacy what you were thinkin’!” Mark said, tears streaming down his face.
I leaned on Jamal for support even though he was making it difficult due to his full-on belly laughing. After five minutes of making fun of Scott, who eventually joined in laughing at himself as well, Jamal looked at the flesh golem and then back at me. “Anything huh? Just touch it and I can do whatever I want to my own body?” A quick shrug with a nod was all he needed. Placing his hand on it, Jamal closed his eyes, whispering out loud, “Shredded as a mofo, and uh, let’s put the heart of dragon in me too.”
My eyes bugged out. “Wait, what!?” I yelled, lurching forward to put one hand on the golem and another on his back. Enveloping them both with my Flesh Sorcery, I watched as the flesh golem sucked Jamal in until most of his chest was inside of it but his head was still exposed. Tendrils of invasive red magic speared through Jamal’s heart, twisting it, devouring it while simultaneously replacing the bits just like he drunkenly wished for. I was so glad that I put in the automatic pain-numbing programming in the golem because otherwise the pain itself might have killed him. Regardless of not feeling the pain, the sheer speed and power of the violent internal changed rocked Jamal, his body trying to seize and vomit but the golem wouldn’t allow his body to react.
Using my own magic, I quickly knocked him unconscious and assisted with the change, making sure that all of the subsidiary veins and arteries were strengthened to handle the increased power of a dragon’s heart. Subtle changes were needed as well, the shaving off of the instinctive heightened aggression and dominance that comes with the draconic territory, the lessening of the hoarding desire as well as the overwhelming lust part too.
As soon as it was over, the flesh golem spit Jamal out, returning to its normal orb state, albeit just a bit smaller. Waking Jamal up, I smacked just to drive my point home. “What, in, the, FUCK!? At least ASK before you do something that drastic and STUPID! The flesh golem is LITERAL! Doing just that would have killed you in the five minutes after the change if I hadn’t fixed you!”
He came to all hazy, his eyes unfocused as he spoke, “Did it work?” Handing him his own flask, I pulled Jamal to his feet, doing my best to return his mind and body to a calm state.
“Yes,” I answered, shaking my head. “But damn dude, that kind of change needs to be planned out first. Ask me next-”
“ME NEXT!” I didn’t have time to react as Mark ripped his clothes off and walked into the golem, squatting a bit so that he fit inside except for his head which stayed just above it. God it looked weird, like a two-tiered fleshly snowman. Putting my hand on his hand to get a picture of what was going on, I looked Mark in the eye.
“Whatcha mean, next?” I growled, noting the changes. Honestly, I was surprised because the changes weren’t overly radical. With a dopey grin, Mark stepped out of the golem after two minutes, the golem much smaller for the change as Mark was much bigger, much. He had gained about two inches in height and about fifty pounds of muscle. The man gave the Greek statues of Hercules a freaking complex right now.
“If a dragon heart is too crazy for a change, then I’ll settle for being able to kick Schwarzenegger’s ass!” Flexing to show off his naked body, Mark twisted and did every exaggerated pose a body builder would, each muscle popping out.
“Gross dude,” Scott said, turning away. “You’re a steroid experiment gone wrong! Bet your dick shrank off too.”
“No steroids here baby,” Mark grinned. “Just hundo P perfect magic muscle here! Bet I could bench a freaking tree right now.”
“Betcha can’t scratch your head.” We all had a good laugh as Mark instantly tried and failed.
Deciding that we had had enough drunken fun with the golem for one night, I overrode its programming and shut it down until I could get someone to be in charge of it, preferably some magic user with a background in healing or transformation. The next morning came too soon for some, but for me it wasn’t an issue. Hangovers don’t exist for flesh sorcerers. Waking up early to do a quick reconnaissance flight around the camp, I stumbled upon a group of women quietly arguing amongst themselves around the flesh golem.
“You don’t need this! You’re already perfect!”
“Shut up Lovera! Not all of us popped out in perfect condition like you did! Shit, I know for a fact that my nose is too damn long, fucking genetics and fucking parents!” Cassandra angrily whispered. “My big nosed dad had to find himself a hooked nose wife and then looky’!” Pointing at her own nose, Cassandra slapped the flesh golem. “And then the guys had to play with it and break it!
Yup, I was peekin’. This was just too good not to watch. Fifteen women in all arguing with each other how perfect the rest of them were while simultaneously shooting greedy looks at the golem as the women magic users kept examining it trying to get it to work. Several teenage girls were there as well arguing with what looked to be their mothers. The usual arguments of wanting bigger boobs to go with a nice ass were deflected by the matronly ‘perfect-as-you-are’ speech while the other moms without kids were discussing getting rid of stretch marks and toning up certain parts.
“Ladies, please!” I interrupted after not being able to hold in my laughter anymore. “I turned it off for the night so the guys wouldn’t do anything more stupid than they already did. Real quick, who’s in charge of the camp? I need to figure out who’s planning everything.”
Lovera looked at me, a bit of relief flashing across her face. “We have a ragtag council and one emergency leader,’ she answered. “Mark is in charge of the soldiers which I guess now are mainly the Glyph Blades? Cassandra is in charge of the magic users which are made almost entirely of women, is that normal?” Plowing ahead without letting me answer, she ticked off her fingers while finishing. “Stacy is in charge of logistics relating to living spaces and children while Jamal splits his time with helping out logistics and perimeter security.”
Looking around, I asked the more obvious question. “So who’s in charge of healing? Is there a doctor round’ here?”
The group got quiet.
Damnit. I stepped in it. “That person’s dead huh?” The look everyone had on their faces was one of resignation, fear, and pain. “I didn’t mean to hit a sore spot, but is there a replacement or someone who could learn? This golem can do more harm than good if used incorrectly, just like a surgeon.” Leaning forward, I put my hand on it lightly and reactivated it. “And remember ladies, it needs to be fed when it shrinks. It can alter, enhance, upgrade, heal, and replace any kind of flesh.” Looking at the older ladies of which there were a few who were around the forty mark, I spoke forcefully to make sure I got my point across. “Yes, it can also restore a sizable resemblance of youth, but if you don’t know what you’re doing and make huge changes, those changes may end up killing you. Jamal almost died last night, he would have if I weren’t there.”
A veritable storm of questions instantly were thrown in my direction. Raising my hand to quiet them, I continued, “He’s fine, in fact he’s better than he’s ever been. He replaced his heart with a dragon’s heart without considering that the rest of his body had to be adapted to accommodate something that powerful. Think about it, his new dragon heart would have torn his old human body apart at the molecular level. Now, getting a boob lift or removing some excess fat you don’t want or even healing an old messed up ankle is no problem, but trying to make yourself a teenager again is a lot. Do this in small steps, in bits and pieces so you can easily reverse it if you need to.”
Touching the flesh golem, I found the DNA of Mark, Jamal, Stacy, and Cassandra already inside. With a bit of help from Kraken, I made them the ‘admins’ of the golem so that it couldn’t be used without one of them present. The only exceptions to that rule were standard regenerative healing and Glyph Blade tattoo alterations; all of this was mainly making sure that no one fed a human to the flesh golem in the dead of night.
Just to make my point, I took one of the older ladies who introduced herself as Heather and walked her through the process of flesh alterations. Heather took to it like a duck to water, making small changes at a time. I monitored everything with my own magic as she first removed some skin discoloration, and then a wrinkle or two, and then injected some youth and health into her skin section by section. With a bit of encouragement to experiment, Heather began doing the alterations that most women do when they see swimsuit model magazines, quick skin tightening in the chest area with toning in the midsection as legs. Going a bit further with a bit of advice from me, she added some muscle and repaired tendons at the microscopic level while letting the magic of the flesh golem restore her eyesight to perfect vision.
Ten minutes later, Heather pulled her hand back looking a good fifteen years younger. “I feel, fantastic!” She screamed, jumping around and hugging her friends who were salivating at the chance to feel the rush of youth again. I left Heather to it as she worked with the older women, Lovera pulling me off to the side.
“Does it really make you younger? Did you just give all of us eternal life?” Her eyes were burning as her fingernails dug into my arm.
“Not really,” I answered, raising one eyebrow and glancing at her hand. “Why, you mad that everyone has a chance to be as pretty as you or that you can’t believe that there isn’t a tangible price?”
Her questioning face turned red as her jaw dropped. Laughing at her because I couldn’t help myself, I pulled back just a bit. “Relax, the easy answer is the price feeding the damn golem and putting up with women that will soon be too beautiful to handle. The guys won’t be complaining but if I know anything about female politics, well . . .”
A disapproving frown showed that maybe I hit a bit too close to the mark. Modern society before the apocalypse had a sort of hierarchy between women that got more and more fragmented as society became bigger and bigger. The issues were only exacerbated by the radicalizing presence of social media. It used to be that in a small farming village, the biggest and wealthiest dude married the hottest and wealthiest girl and had a bunch of kids, while the second biggest and wealthiest dude got the next hottest and wealthiest girl and so on and so forth. With social media, womens’ options opened up to hundreds of miles away from their zip codes and men had to compete with men hundreds of miles away from their own homes for the girl next door, so women could have whoever and men’s competition just got many times more intense.
Now, we’re back to old school politics, where there will probably be one man generally in charge of the men and one woman in charge of the women and the strongest and most powerful person leading the whole thing. Without digital media to connect people from hundreds of miles away, and travel being perilous in the world now that magic holds sway, their options are limited once again to their group. This made being a hermit have its upsides, cause I’m outside the political structure.
But all of these people probably aren’t thinking about it this way, the women are probably making alliances and subtly shifting their ways of thinking to figure out their own hierarchy while the men are off doing their own thing not knowing or caring about the political machinations taking place. This is why I made sure to have at least two men and two women as admins, so that there would not be a monopoly on the biggest game-changer in the settlement.
As I left, one girl I hadn’t seen yet who was in her early teens walked up to me and pulled me a bit closer so she could whisper in my ear. Closing my eyes so as to not laugh at the ridiculousness of the request, I whispered, “No, you can’t be a ‘cat-girl’, not yet anyway. You have to find a cat and feed it to the golem.” I walked back to the overcrowded golem and erected a stone wall behind it, inscribing the directions of how to use the golem, the administrators of the golem, and then all of the available functions and DNA types available for use. Satisfied with a job well done, I thought for a second and put a big caution message at the type for those attempting more radical changes.
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Jamal bounded over when I finally extricated myself from the growing horde of women. “Yo! My dude, what’s happenin’, what’s goin’ on, that your group of women now?”
“Hey man,” I said, my voice wavering a bit with caution. “You feelin’ ok?”
“Never better! I feel like a million bucks fucked steak and shrimp buffet with a small bucket of cocaine DAMN I FEEL GOOD!”
Reaching forward quickly, I poked Jamal in the chest with my finger inserting my Flesh Sorcery and instantly calming him down. Twisting his clashing hormones down a bit, I then tweaked his adrenal glands that were wide open to close. His body was experiencing its own form of shock thanks to the dragon heart.
“Ok, that was weird,” he said, looking at me. “What’d you do?”
“Turned your shit from eleven back down to three, man. I guess I’m gonna have to stay here for a couple days. Your uh, changes, or alterations need a bit of maintenance to make sure you’ll be ok,” I answered, frowning at the feedback from his ongoing evolution. “The human body wasn’t meant to house a dragon’s heart and we’ll see exactly what needs to be done to keep you alive.” Continuing with my examination, I fixed the micro-tears in his muscles and tendons and a couple hairline fractures in several bones. Tweaking his natural physiology again, I allowed his heart to ramp up his healing processes so that these issues would be taken care of.
“If all goes well,” I said, explaining a bit more for him. “Then the dragon heart will break down your body and repair it bit by bit so you’ll actually be more durable and dragon-like by the time you’re done. Make sure to eat a lot or visit the golem for extra healing.”
“Thanks man!” Taking off at a sprint, Jamal vanished into the woods.
And this is how the next week went. I spent it tweaking body enhancements and watching as the children and some adult magic users did some incredible work building the settlement with my wands. The solar panels really helped speed things along as it just recharged the people who ran out of mana and allowed some of the people not using the wands to practice their magic all day. The Glyph Blades tried out a bunch of rune combinations and started making their own compendium of useful runic channels.
I assisted the endeavor by compiling everything Reeanth knew about the Glyph Blades as well as any knowledge of Centauri rune channels and combat techniques in a compacted memory file with Consciousness Sorcery. That updated file, I stuck in the flesh golem along with a lot of the knowledge I had discovered so far. It was downright genius of me to use the golem as a freaking computer as it removed how necessary I was to the day to day operations of the camp. I didn’t have to heal because of the golem, I didn’t have to build because of the wands, I didn’t have to make them gear of any kind because they already had my knowledge.
I worked myself out of a job.
Feeling pretty damn good about myself, I took one last tour around. A plethora of aesthetically pleasing single story houses had been built, some out of stone and some grown out of trees. A large pier jutted out into the river complete with several canoes and two barges grown out of trees. Communal showers had been hooked up away from the settlement kitchen and the wizards of the group had done a damn good job enchanting all kinds of various tools, especially with my memories to go off of. Heating enchantments on stone disks to function as a stove, stone knives with self-sharpening enhancements, directional lightstones and sunstones spotted each house and the dirt paths of the settlement.
I found out that there were two things the wizards of this town had trouble doing, which was conjuration and summoning of elementals. As the final piece of goodwill, I helped four teenagers bond with elementals, one boy and one girl each got a water elemental and another boy and girl got an earth elemental. I made sure to educate them on the elemental growing in stature and in power the longer they were bonded but that didn’t matter to the elemental as much as they measured millennia the way we measure days.
*****
My plans to leave got wrecked at the last minute. What made me stay another freaking week longer than my already extended plan was not only the magic users coming to me for advice, but several men had started bonding with nearby dryads. That entire event almost turned into a fiasco as even the taken men were eyeing the unique seductiveness of the women of the forest. I couldn’t really blame the men though as a lot of them spent time in the woods either hunting or scouting the area. The wizards though had a lot of questions.
Sitting in the new meeting area, a beautifully constructed amphitheater, I stood in the bottom fielding questions as a good thirty people sat around. They didn’t really want to learn from the memories I had put into the flesh golem, they wanted to hear it straight from me even though there were certain issues I had carefully avoided such as Kraken’s existence, the fact that I was a sorcerer not a wizard, and anything related to my wife in stasis inside of Yggdrasil’s newest splinter.
“Yes, Cassandra, let’s start with you,” I said, pointing her out. Figuring I’d start with their leader, I almost started laughing while looking out across the crowd. The sheer amount of model-level beauty was staggering. Not one woman or man had neglected to put the flesh golem to good use over the past week but to their credit, I only had to intervene about three times. One woman made her skin so shiny that it sloughed off because she kept growing it way too fast and one of the Glyph Blades didn’t think before putting a rune similar to a bomb on his wrist. The last incident was a young woman who went full on into the transformation schtick. It took forever for me to unravel the dragon heart and spine that didn’t want to work with the minotaur skin immunity or the dwarven bone structure that kept trying to leech all of the magic out of her flesh.
“Thank you. I have several questions, one or two about you specifically and one in regards to the wider implications of the changes you’re responsible for.”
Cutting her off real quick, I answered sharply, “First, I’m not responsible for the ‘wider implications’.” My fingers made quotation marks at ‘wider implications’. “I gave all of you tools and how you plan on using those tools is up to you. I’ve got my own problems that I’ve put off for too long so next question.”
Frowning at me, she continued. “So you plan on leaving us so soon?”
“Yup,” I answered, moving on to the next girl even as Cassandra looked at me in shock. “You in the back, dark red hair, yes, you.”
The young lady stood up, her eyes partly turned down. “When you leave, are you taking anyone with you?”
“Nope. Where I live is too dangerous.” I answered, shaking my head. “According to what I know so far, the ambient mana levels are so high that all of you will die if you stay with me in my area. You’re not magically altered in such a way that it would be feasible, and just to head off the next question, no, I will not be altering anyone in that way. Too much work and it’s not worth it.”
What they didn’t know is that my sheer amount of sorceries combined with all of my gear and living through the Ripples changed me fundamentally. High levels of mana mean nothing to me but I wasn’t about to let them know that.
A young man stood up, raising his hand. I pointed at him. “We’re not in school, man, just ask your question.”
He gulped, looking around briefly before meeting my gaze. “Can you uh, maybe uh, help us out in the normal weapons department before you go? Some of us are still unarmed and a decent chunk of us don’t have magic at all or that weird tattoo magic.”
I hadn’t thought about that. There’s a good chance that I could give people magic, but that would lessen my own abilities and I’m not about that. I’m sure it might grow back if I gave them a seed of it, but I am completely out of the Chaos crystals necessary to do the heavy lifting. It was only possible to give Spot a seed of Flesh Sorcery due to a Chaos crystal. I quickly shot down my own idea of crafting magical weapons that siphoned life from enemies to power enchantments and while making crystal batteries for everyone was definitely feasible, it would make this settlement a target if it ever got discovered.
[Yo, need some help here,] I sent to Kraken. [People who can’t do magic at all. Can I bond them with an elemental or can I use the flesh elemental to give them magic via magic organs like the way Jamal got a bit of fire magic from the dragon heart?]
[This is new territory. Just about everyone has magic of some kind, even if it’s beyond weak. Mana is integral to life as we know it, except this forsworn planet when it was behind the Veil apparently. Shit, try it out.]
Coming back from my nigh-instantaneous conversation, I looked back at the young man. “I’d recommend using the flesh golem for personal body enhancements. Once it has ingested the right ingredients, magic may not be out of your reach. For now, use that to give yourself more strength and speed, harden your body, give yourself heightened regeneration or modified body parts. I have given this new town everything it needs to survive, if you’re creative enough.”
Two stick thin people stood up, a man and a woman who looked to be twins. “We read your memories left in the golem,” the woman said, looking at twin and then back at me, her hands trembling on her wizard’s staff. “Is it true, about the undead at the poles and the demons in Europe?”
“Yes, and what do we do about it?” Her brother chimed in, his hands shaking as well. He clutched two wands as if they were his lifeline. “How do we prepare against such horrors?”
“Better questions, thank you,” I said. “First, the pile of sunstones I’ve planted for you in the center of town will grow over time. Those can channel mana that I believe will hurt or destroy the undead. This is what I’ve been told as I haven’t had a chance to test it yet. The demons, I’m not worried about them as much as from what I’ve been told the Vatican stands on more than equal footing. If I were you, any of you, I’d say your best option is magic research and bonding with elementals. You can talk to the rascals I helped the other day. Earth elementals can help build pretty much anything and are nigh indestructible in a fight. Water elementals are powerful if you can keep them focused. Both of those together would make this place a fortress.”
Just as I finished, three incredible smoking hot blond babes stood up glaring at me. “And just what do you plan on doing about these, these, DRYADS!? They take the men and keep them out to who knows how late?”
The middle one joined in as the first one took a breath. “Dryads are wrecking our community! We need the men to defend this town! Food needs to be brought in, land needs to be cleared, and where are they?”
“Banging the forest sluts!”
Yup, there was the third one. God this is annoying.
“And this is my problem, how?” I chuckled. I crossed my arms and leaned back, my spine cracking audibly. “How is it my fault y’all can’t keep your men? I bet the dryads are nice and sweet. In fact, they also can help y’all out with the new greenhouses if you ask nice enough.”
“It’s not right! It’s not natural? What if they get pregnant? What kind of monsters will we have running around?” These women had worked themselves up into a righteous fury. I can only imagine they were the ‘Karen’ stereotype, trying to talk to the damn manager when the apocalypse hit. Now, thanks to me, they looked like supermodels but that didn’t change their personalities.
“Let me give you the truth ladies, in fact, let me give everyone the truth here. Here’s the skinny, Life as you know it is over. America doesn’t exist. Government does not exist. You are here and you are free, if you can keep it that way. There is no police to run to, there are no rules to live by unless you so choose, and no HOA to make your neighbor behave. I am not your king, I live far away and do not want to be bothered by pitiful neighbors but my conscience wouldn’t let me leave young women and children out in the cold, so to speak. Your men can bang whoever they want, AS CAN YOU. So, get over yourself and live your life. Prepare for the worst and hope for the best.” My rant wasn’t over but I had to take a deep breath. I watched their faces fall while others perked up.
“Magic is real. Real fucking magic, is real. Power is now an individual characteristic. Equality of capability is now a myth. Notice I didn’t say ‘worth’ because that’s not what I’m talking about. Some of you will be able to fly, maybe move some mountains on a whim and others will do some freaking amazing things, but no one is equal anymore. And in that specific sense, everyone is equal. Everyone with magic now has the equivalent of a loaded gun in their back pocket. Now, you can use this to make your own version of utopia, or you can use it to rule with an iron fist. I don’t care. What you do need to look out for is each other. In case you didn’t know or haven’t figured it out, magical threats are also real. Dragons that fly and eat and burn everything are real.”
I ticked off my fingers as I continued. “Dwarves, demons, minotaurs, monsters, giant gorillas, spirits, vampires, undead . . . Fuck man! The list just goes on! It’s all real.”
You could have heard a pin drop in that amphitheater. Nobody expected this, and they sure as shit didn’t see me getting angry and happy all at the same time. My voice got softer as I continued, “This could be the best or the worst thing to ever happen to any of you, but it’s completely up to you. Oh, and to answer your accusations, ladies.”
Glaring at the three women now trembling before me, I called Gungnir to my hand in spear form, the swirling blade glistening with red light. Slamming the butt down, I looked at them each in turn.
“You now have to work to keep your man or the dryads will happily take them away. There’s no divorce court here to drag a man through. I’d advise you to be nice and above all, useful. And that goes for all of you, there’s around two hundred of y’all, which means there is more than enough work to go around. I’ve done plenty to get y’all started but the rest is up to you. I recommend teamwork as a general rule and letting peoples’ talents dictate where they work. Don’t put your best enchanter to work as a fisherman, duh.”
With that, I summoned my hoverboard and took off towards the side of town. Three solar panels had been set up near the greenhouses and the young teens with the smaller kids were working with the two that had bonded earth elementals. I had given Jenny and Simon, the two with the earth elementals, a secret assignment a couple days ago and I wanted to know how it was coming along.
Those two were building houses and erecting stone walls with their elementals doing most of the heavy lifting as the children were taking turns with the earth wands putting in the detail work like doorways, windows, and stairs. The children took turns with the wands when they ran out of mana, scurrying back to the solar panel for more in a rush to do more magic. Their assignment was to eventually make this entire town secure and I let Scott know so that he could secretly organize the entire thing.
Moving on after watching them for a bit, I got to the other set of wands being wielded by mostly teen girls and a few young men in the greenhouses. They had the other most important job of planting and tending crops, which they had three solar panels to assist them as none of them were used to this level of constant power output. The two water elementals bonded to Kyra and Jackson were watering the plants as several others with the plant wands were coaxing them to grow. Two earth wands users were out making the rows nice and perfect as the outside crops were to supplement the greenhouse ones.
“There you are!” Turning around, I saw Jamal jogging up to me with Scott. “You can’t be leaving just yet! There’s so much to drink still and you know Scott can’t hold his liquor!”
“Ha, sorry man,” I said, just a bit of sadness creeping in. “I got too much work to do on my own right now. Also, I have too much power to stay here for long, people will want to start putting me in charge and that’s something I hate. Also, I hate having a boss so that’s a no go there.”
Scott punched me in the shoulder, just soft enough that he didn’t hurt his hand on my armor. “Dick,” he said, a smirk creasing his face. “Ya come, show us all up, make all the women swoon and then dip. That’s cruel. I like it.” Grinning at me, he pulled his new rifle off his back, the spare one I had made for myself. “Sure you don’t want this back?” He asked, offering it up to me. “It's pretty sweet.”
“Already got one,” I said, punching him back. “Besides, this baby is the real weapon.” Hoisting Gungnir up, I changed it from a spear into a knife and then shifted it to a mace, finally lengthening it so that it looked just like a wizard’s staff. “Shoots better than any gun. Anyways, got somethin’ to show ya.”
Leading Jamal and Scott to a small hut near the pier, I opened the door and walked down the earthen stairs. This was the only building in the settlement made by me, the arms room. The pier had two solar panels on top of its roof that were attached to wires that I had buried and connected to a contraption deep in the arms room.
“What the hell is it?” Scott said, looking over the stone contraption with four crystal spikes sticking out of the top. Four slides stuck out the bottom leading to four wooden buckets.
“Behold! Your ammo maker!” I said grandly as if it were a brand new car. “This bad boy right here will conjure, rune, and charge your ammo all in one go. When y’all finally learn how to make your own guns, you’ll be happy about this machine as it makes .45 pistol ammo, two kinds of rifle ammo such as the .223 and the 7.62. The last bit is for making grenades. The solar panels from the pier feed into this so all you have to do is turn it on. It’s slow but it’ll work all day when you’re gone.”
“Stop, please, my dick can only get so hard!” Jamal crooned as he hugged the machine. “Oh sweet baby Jesus this is the best gift! Unlimited ammo for a dragon cannoneer!”
“What could go wrong,” Scott joked, pulling Jamal off. Seeing an odd package off to the side, Scott poked it with his foot. “What’s this?”
“That, my friend, is a sample box. I’ve included as many kinds of metal as I can conjure in there. Your two family friendly earth elementals in town can either find or slowly conjure whatever metal you need. Which means, y’all are set.”