Regaining consciousness after that experience was not a pleasant feeling. It was dark in the dome cocoon but it did little to help the nightmare headache. Compounding that pain were the body aches which felt just plain rude. My Flesh Sorcery had been working on my overall state for an indeterminate amount of time but my body was just completely run down.
[Wake up idiot! Wake up!] Forcing my eyes to open, I checked my personal stores of mana, gauging them to be a little over thirty percent full. The batteries were completely empty. Svalinn was tapped out and Gungnir was empty too.
“Did we win?” I grumbled, tapping my dregs of power to wash over me, stimulating my Flesh Sorcery to heal as I put in a pain block so I could function without acting like a whiny bitch.
[Maybe, I don’t know. I’m trapped in here with you right now and the ground is shaking so maybe not dipshit. Get up! You don’t get to rest when you do dumb stuff like that!]
I hadn’t been hurt this bad in a long ass time. My entire body was telling me to just go back to sleep where all the aches and pains wouldn’t trouble me. Blissful unconsciousness was the siren call that I knew I had to resist, but there was one other call that I didn’t ignore, the deep heartbeat of the earth calling to me. Everytime danger came just a bit too close, I followed my instincts and dove into the earth, giving myself time to think in a safe environment that few can touch let alone freely navigate. Quickly making a decision, I abandoned the domed protection that Svalinn conjured and sank into the earth as my magical senses extended in all directions.
[How long have I been out of it?] I asked Kraken as I kept a firm grip on Gungnir in knife form.
[I’ve been yelling at you for at least twenty minutes while managing all the mana feeds to keep you alive. You’re fucking lucky you’re still connected to the solar panels through that handy tool. I can’t contribute to this fight as you’ve drained everything and you’re about thirty percent full up on mana, good fuckin’ luck.]
Keeping my eyes closed, I focused my attention on the constant drumming sounds and piercing roars. Huge mutated lizards were pounding on the dome that was now cracking as I had already cut the power feed to keep them stable. The goth chick was still definitely dead but the other two were nowhere to be found.
[HELLO? WHERE ARE THEY?] My mental roar was deflected by Kraken’s impressive interjection of a quick memory showing Remy singing “Speed” by Montgomery Gentry and a wild desert horse showing up to take them away. A quick key change later and his singing went to “I Hate Everything About You” which summoned a nearby pack of angry mini sand drakkens to keep me busy.
PREY DOES NOT ESCAPE!
[I got it you fucking annoying ass, pathetic excuse for a miserable reptile!] Knowing that my internal growling was useless, I shoved my anger back down deep into that little hole I keep closed and tightly locked for all the wrong reasons. Sinking further down into the earth, I started heading towards the river just as the dome up above shattered. Following the loosened soil from my passage, the sand drakkens dove into the earth like fish and came after me, their scaly hide allowing them to thread their way towards me, undulating like sharks on the prowl. The earth I had loosed up from making my own passageway gave them an easy way to track me as this was their element too.
Every chance I had, I diverted a bit of power from my reserves to the earth behind me as I conjured bits of water and froze them, leaving them spiky to function as caltrops in the earth to slow down the drakkens. It managed to give me enough time to reach the riverbed. Exploding out into the open water, my Water Sorcery gave me the strategic high ground. As the drakkens were following me too quickly, they couldn’t stop themselves from joining me in my home turf. Their momentum hurt them in the end as I pushed them faster.
“Surprise muthafucka!” I yelled, forcing the water to form a whirlpool and drag the pests to the bottom. The pounding in my head hadn’t completely gone away at this point as I was much lower on mana that I had ever been before. Making sure my Flesh Sorcery instincts weren’t messing with me, I pulled one of the sand lizards to the top of the river and stabbed it with Gungnir, hungrily ripping the mana from the beast into myself. What felt like lines of fiery ecstasy rolled through me as the drakken’s lifeforce was ripped from its body. “Whoa mama!” I breathed, barely able to believe the incredible amount of power I was able to snag.
[Now you know why necromancers are so damn prevalent yet reviled in the arcane community,] Kraken cautioned. [They also consume the soul though which contains far more power than just the body but since you’re constantly meeting angels I’d highly recommend you don’t do that shit.]
Each stab and twist of Gungnir ripped the life and power from the drakkens as my Water Sorcery pulled them towards me and held them still. By the time I was done, the water of the river was stained red as my own stores of power were over half full with a substantial amount held in Gungnir.
“What a fucking rush!” I screamed to the sky as I sprinted across the surface of the river, steps being augmented by the water itself pushing me towards the shore. As I jumped on my hoverboard with SAW’s wings outspread to further amplify the amount of solar power I could gain, I turned Gungnir into a knife and stuck it in my belt as I dexterously bent over and snagged my rifle as I passed the area of my dino battle.
[You gonna kill’em?] Kraken’s question didn’t go unnoticed even as I didn’t answer in the moment but I did slow down the hoverboard. There really wasn’t any way the little fuckers could escape, the nearest place was Phoenix which was a solid hundred and sixty miles away. Breathing deep, I focused on gathering power and channeling it to myself and my suit, allowing them to get about thirty minutes into their journey, just long enough to think they’d escaped.
What was I going to do with them? Killing them would definitely make me feel better but is it the most efficient long-term plan? Several memories flipped through my brain reminding me that the two young men were enslaved by Nicole, a thought that made me grip my rifle that much harder.
“Fuck!” I growled. Stifling Svalinn before it could roar its opinion another time, I ordered Kraken to focus on filling up our stores of power while we were still in range of the solar panels. Being carefully silent for once, he brought the four buried ones back to the surface and turned them on, instantly doubling the amount of power feeding to me and Gungir with all my batteries. I got Nicole and Svalinn made sure that she was gone for good, but I had to do something about the other two. And helping them was definitely out of the fucking question. Conjuring a small flat piece of quartz in my hand, I closed my eyes and put together a lengthy message as well as a couple plain snapshots of memories, packaging them up inside my mind and putting it to the side.
“Kraken, put that in the crystal, now.” Without a word, my spirit familiar wrapped up the mental packet and transferred it to the memory crystal, imprinting several runes on it. The moment it was done, I checked that my stores of power were enough to do what I wanted and took off, tightly gripping the memory crystal in my hand. Kraken kindly put a green dot in my vision in the direction that the former enslaved were heading in. The horse they were on simply couldn’t hold a candle to the hoverboard, especially with all of the power freely given by the desert sun.
“And it’s still fucking morning!” I growled again to myself, remembering just another reason why mornings suck. The animal was beautiful as I pulled alongside it, its sandy coat glistening with sweat as muscles perfectly designed for running did their job in the blazing heat. After making sure that they saw me, I pulled ahead of them about fifty yards and pivoted, pulling out Gungnir and blasting a line in the dirt. Their horse reared on its back legs, throwing Fernando off as Remy barely hung on to its mane.
Floating closer to them, Fernando wetting his pants and Remy frantically holding on to the bucking horse brought a smirk to my face. While I was antsy from all the combat induced adrenaline, the whole scene was still funny. No, no, they still set a pack of sand drakkens on me to make their escape, understandable, but still, the intent there was lethal. Raising one hand, I forced the earth to reach up and anchor Fernando’s limbs to the ground, perfectly immobilizing him. Another twist of power forced the horse to calm and stand perfectly still even as Remy kicked his heels. Turning to look at me, he took a deep breath to sing something out which I didn’t give him time to do.
A quick blast of raw mana knocked him on his ass next to Fernando. Hopping off my hoverboard, I slowly walked towards them, letting them sweat, letting the fear build up.
“What do you want?” Fernando screamed at me as I silently stalked forward. “It wasn’t us! We tried to escape, to run, anything! I swear! She made us do it. Please!”
Remy opened his mouth and I pointed spear-form Gungnir at him, its blade bright with power. “No talking from you or you die. I’ve seen what you can do.” Closing his mouth, Remy’s eyes bulged in fear as I held Gungnir pointed at his face, only planting the butt in the dirt when a look of utter defeat framed his features.
Taking the crystal still in my hand, I tossed it in the dirt between them. “No talking, either of you. I’ll keep this simple,” I snarled. “I’m not your enemy. Put that to your head and see the truth. Come anywhere near my area,” I said, waving back behind me, “and I’ll kill you and wipe your fucking city off the face of the earth.”
Both of them nodded like bobbleheads in the fist of a two year old tweaking out on sugar. Hopping back onto my hoverboard, I turned and blasted off back towards my unfinished fortress.
******
The past week of Kraken gathering power and working on the growing ritual as well as the fortress was plenty of time for me to more thoroughly go through the memories I’d taken from Fernando. I got to watch his experiences with magic as if they were my own, from the time he discovered his own power to when he enchanted his bats. The wooden Louisville slugger was a multi-purpose tool while the former aluminum one was purely combat oriented.
The synergy of his dual-wielding combo was pretty cool, perfectly suited for a magical melee. Fernando used the wooden bat to direct, absorb, and redirect spells and the aluminum one was now harder than any steel. Plus, the steel bat had the ability to store up an almost infinite amount of power and release it on command as well as reflect energy. Memories of Fernando literally homerunning giant lizards danced through my brain. There was something about that former sporting equipment that was weird though, there were no runes on it at all. The damn bat, both of them, weren’t normal wood or normal aluminum.
Interrupting my thinking, Kraken explained. [Look, several fortuitous things were already in place when the Ripple happened for Fernando. The wooden bat was made of ash wood, which is already a powerful component for staves and wands let alone necklaces and armor. Wizards tend to cultivate their own private gardens or orchards or they pay through the nose for those that have them. Put ash wood together with Chaos and there’s not telling the powers it holds. And aluminum with Chaos is a whole nother animal. It’s almost mithril in terms of hardness but now it's a tool that's probably as powerful if not more so than Gungnir before an angel put star-iron in it.]
I shook my head in disbelief. “I have to find a way to get some more goddamn Chaos.”
Kraken scolded me, his own feelings coursing down our link. [Don’t be stupid! The fact that you’re alive right now is due to blind luck! Give it another five hundred years before you start trying to play with that stuff. Besides, you’re half a step from a demi-god, what else are you going to ask for? Angelic servants? Succubi harems? Or maybe a nice alien princess to take you away?]
I kept on muttering to myself, ignoring the mocking of my spirit-bound familiar and focusing on things that truly mattered like mulling over all the lost opportunities that I didn’t even think to think of. Laughing after a few self-indulgent moments, I pushed the useless thoughts from my mind, got up and took a quick tour of the progress. My personal home next to the river was pretty damn great so far, just deep enough into the earth to sit at sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit as the small channel of river water helped to keep it livable. I planted my willow tree on top of my home, taking a whole day to encourage the roots to wrap around the hardened rock that was the shell of my living space. Daily meditations next to it were now a favorite new hobby as it helped to center my mind as well as guide the growing tree into exactly the shape I wanted. The young willow had no reservations about growing its roots towards the river as it needed that constant refreshment to survive in this harsh climate.
The fortress itself was coming along nicely as the sun constantly beat down without a cloud in the sky, allowing my super efficient magic solar panels to drink up enough power to work at incredible speeds. The underground batteries were now three layers deep with each layer having twenty-four fridge sized batteries meaning I now had seventy-two oversized power banks. At this point, they weren’t anywhere close to full as all of the power had gone into conjuring and shaping them, but when this place is all done and charged up it will be nigh impenetrable.
The above ground portion of the fortress was about five feet tall so far and still growing but it hadn’t had runes inscribed into it yet. Kraken was using the sunstone’s natural properties to help absorb enough power to also go towards conjuring more sunstone. If not for SAW’s energy conversion runes turning the heat near me into stored mana, the accumulated heat would actually be cooking me alive. It’s like a Texas parking lot in late July but times about ten, that’s what the sunstone was doing for me.
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[Don’t worry,] Kraken said, trying to reassure me as I looked around rethinking my whole plan. [When the structure is done, I’ll put all the right runes on so that it’ll be comfortable for mortals to be in it. The excess heat will be funneled down into the batteries much better with the proper runic channels. About another couple days and the building itself will be done and two weeks after that the batteries should be all filled up too.]
Looking at Gungnir in the center of the conjuration ritual where Kraken was monitoring the work, I smiled. “And then we can plant Yggdrasil part two.”
[You mean part three right? Didn’t you plant one in Florida?]
“Oh, right, yeah, kinda forgot about that one. I don’t think I’m going to tether that to the main tree just yet. I want to get ready for the North before I go see everyone.”
Leaving Kraken where he was, I spent the next two and a half weeks practicing new applications with my sorcery and conjuring more solar panels and various other tools. I didn’t know enough about the Hungry Ones to consider myself well prepared so I took my time making an additional vest with battery inserts for extra redundancy. As I proved in my battle against the zombie dinos, necros, and genie, running out of power in the middle of battle sucks.
Spot arrived about a week back and ate the bodies of the sand drakkens that I’d killed and stored away. The rat bastard found them in the bottom of the river. I had stuffed the containers with the Nephilim chunks in them inside the sand drakkens’ bellies and frozen them to the bottom of the river to keep them fresh. Now Spot was a petrified statue again, curled up next to my growing willow tree looking like a weird boulder.
I figured if anyone could get some use out of the Nephilim it would be him, but due to their very nature, I kept a very close eye on Spot’s metamorphosis. When meditating in the shade of my tree, I spent an hour of my meditation scanning my dog, closely monitoring every single change. My Flesh Sorcery showed me that the color, or flavor of Spot’s magic now had streaks of bluish white in it, as if the fire of his blood burned even hotter now. From lore, nerds have come to figure out that if dragon fire can cut through stone then it must be at least over two thousand degrees Fahrenheit. But blue fire, that stuff can get up to three thousand degrees.
All in all, my time in the desert passed very peacefully, as nothing came even close to the area, probably because they could smell dragon-dog. I even took the time to personally make five very large sunstone golems to function as my sentinels, each one standing thirty feet tall armed with focusing crystals, bladed arms, runed shielding plates, and beach ball sized battery in the chest for extra oomph.
Kraken was more than happy to provide a mental matrix imprinted on a slab of quartz four times the size and shape of a computer harddrive. I wanted to see if I could make autonomous golems without using earth elementals just yet but the hardest part was the actual programming itself. After playing with it for a couple days, I decided that they were just too clunky and summoned one earth elemental to take up residence in one golem so that it could be the ‘captain’ and command the others when necessary.
Satisfied that a certain amount of planned paranoia was capable of serving a functional purpose, I still managed to actually relax. I had a stack of ten more solar panels ready to go as backups and I spent some time practicing finding and drawing power from leylines without Gungnir. Since the amount of sunlight and heat in the Northern hemisphere would be almost non-existent in terms of power output compared to the desert, alternative sources of mana would need to be found. Now the desert seems to be the desert in more than just terms of scarcity life and water, but without the ability to convert sunlight and heat into mana it would also be a deathtrap for anyone looking for some spare power. The closest leyline I could find other than the one running below the river was at least a hundred miles away in every direction.
Using my hoverboard, I went in every cardinal direction and the land was simply bare until I hit what used to be the national parks where thin ley lines of brown and green-brown mana began to flow. Spending a couple days west of my sunstone fortress, I practiced pulling the thick stubborn mana from its natural course up through my boots and into my suit. Each time felt like a damn fight, not as if I were tapping a river of power that wanted to flow but a vessel of life that wanted to stay right where the fuck it was.
Talking it over with Kraken over the next week helped me figure out that this kind of action definitely does require a tool in order for it to work efficiently. Somehow, using a staff or rod allows the mana to act as if it were part of the landscape, using it as a natural outflow for the expression of power. Doing it myself was almost anathema to the process as I was regarded as a thief of power instead of something wanting to grow. Part of figuring it out was when I was meditating and communing with the earth elemental in the sunstone golem, who I named Sunny.
From the images I gathered during our mental conversation, the land is alive, but it’s a different kind of consciousness, one that doesn’t mind naturally flowing through something that was once part of itself. Which is why using Gungnir would be a viable and efficient option as using myself as a conduit for power was akin to a tick sucking blood from a human, unwanted and regarded as a pest. With that in mind, I took the time to grow and carve off two foot long pieces from my willow tree and bond them to SAW on the side of my calves. If ever I need to, I could use SAW to plant the willow sticks into the earth and function as siphons for power, allowing me to neatly sidestep the issue of doing it directly myself.
The last day of fortress construction was boring for me. I had everything ready to go to put the last yet most important part of the whole thing together, the Yggdrasil seed, but I couldn’t do it yet. All I wanted to do was get started on growing the World Tree as the core of my building but the temperature, due to all of the sunstone focusing the heat and light from the desert sun, was well over two hundred degrees in that building. Kraken was furiously using the mana to inscribe all of the runes into the building but the ENTIRE building had to be inscribed, and I mean every freaking inch of it was covered in the proper runes channels so this could be a fortress of stored sunlight. Noticing a couple odd bits near the top, I started to shoot Kraken a question when he sent me a quick mental slideshow of some schematics.
With the environment being the way it is due to the conversion runes providing more than enough constant power, Kraken had decided to put some old school ideas into the fortress. The base of the fortress itself was square, and at this point about three stories tall, so the idea given to me by Kraken was to have eight gun emplacements set up along the walls, one at each corner and one halfway between each corner. He had already gone ahead with the ammo conjuring machine I came up with and meshed it with the design of the Centauri rifle rune channel to produce a concept of magitech cannons.
His slideshow included a timelapse video of a horde of sand drakkens trying to storm the fortress and the high-rise machine guns blowing them away. He made sure to include a swivel bit below the guns so they could turn around and fire inside the fortress in case something somehow got through the World Tree that we didn’t want. Shooting Kraken a quick reply, I watched him quickly add bins so thousands of rounds of conjured ammo could be stored at each gun emplacement.
“Love it when a plan comes together,” I grinned, taking a breath of biting dry air. One of the reasons Virginia sucks is because it’s always so damn humid but the desert, the desert has that dry heat that’s just not as miserable.
[That’ll add another day and a half, maybe two days if you want all the ammo banks full of charged ammo with grenades. Put another two weeks on top of that if you want every layer of siege batteries full before you start with Yggdrasil. Since you’ll be guiding the tree’s growth personally I don’t know how much energy that’s going to take or how long you’ll be shaping it.]
I nodded in agreement. “We’ve come too far to not do it right. I want everything charged and ready to go before I start growing Yggdrasil another root. I may not be able to stop and something may come along that needs some attention so I want Sunstone Castle war ready.”
Giving me the mental equivalent of a nod, Kraken got back to work as I began making more sunstone golem bodies and placing them in the dirt between the two crystal energy gathering rings that connected the solar panels. I had tons of room and plenty of power which allowed me to make an army of two hundred sunstone golems. Since the idea of using the earth elemental as a captain for the initial group was a damn good one, I summoned three more earth elementals, gave them sunstone golem bodies and then proceeded to even out the numbers so that each ‘captain’ had fifty smaller golems to command if needed. Each golem also had a beach ball sized crystal battery and with their sunstone structure they would be able to charge up to full in no time.
The pouding beat of the stormtrooper song of the Empire from Star Wars played in my head as I imagined marching to war with my magnificent golem army, my magic version of the clone armies doing my bidding as I rode before them. Deciding to really put the fear of God in my imaginary foes, I took my time and conjured oversized granite maces for each golem. Once I conjured the first one and inscribed runes on it to make it harder than steel, I kept the mental schematic foremost in my head and walked around conjuring copies at the feet of my new army.
******
Being done was great.
The feeling that I had accomplished something was definitely reinforced by the dopamine dump in my brain, until my favorite hateful familiar chimed in right as I was taking the final tour of the fortress after finally planting Yggdrasil and setting up my very carefully pre-planned runic growth schematics. The fortress was beautiful, complete with eight mounted magitech gatling guns, reinforced anti-undead walls, layers of underground siege batteries, AND a freaking army of giant armored golems commanded by earthen elementals. All I had to do now was take the time to very carefully coax my tree to grow exactly how I want it to and step two of my plan would be complete, EXCEPT, Kraken had to go and ruin my good mood.
[All right, job well done, now there’s some loose ends to tie up before we go much further.]
“What?” I said, my grumpiness bleeding into my voice. “What now, seriously? This is good news! I’m a badass mutha’fuckin sorcerer ready to kick some zombie ass!”
[Well, there’s a bunch of things here you’ve forgotten about in your one-track mind. Let’s start from the beginning, whatever happened to the kid necromancer who’s ass you kicked when the whole apocalypse kicked off? What happened to the rest of the people there?And, did you know that you have a whole white light-based sorcery stone of Chaos back home somewhere? How about the fact that somewhere in your forest there are random ass Chaos stones spread around from when a goddess blew up your home?]
Whipping around in a panic, my jaw hit the floor. “How did you, wha?”
[Your memories! Dumbass! And that’s not all! This shiny memory over here is of a particular ancestor telling you that you’re gonna need Johnny and you left him in Florida?! Or how about the fact that the Hungry Ones are sentient and maybe can be reasoned or negotiated with? You’ve set up a whole goddamn plan with an army to wipe them out and you haven’t even verified the claims given to you in YOUR IGNORANCE!]
My sputtering got worse as Kraken handed me my ass. [And let’s not forget that you’re already dead set on wiping out the Centauri because of what they did to your family when you haven’t considered the fact that they are the main reason humanity isn’t wiped out as a whole. It’s not just undead and demons you have to worry about, it’s the freaking Hive! Or did you forget about them too? And the Djinn you sealed, that was a smart thing to do in the heat of the moment but you weren’t able to grab the coin prison cause you passed out. Now let’s be clear, Djinn are immortal! He won’t forget what you did. You’re gonna need to get some kind of countermeasure for him too.]
I rocked back on my heels, all of the other things, the consequences, the bits of information I didn’t want to face were now all up in my face. With Kraken laying them bare, I could see that my Consciousness Sorcery went along with the wishes of my unconscious, the desire to not face some uncomfortable facts, the desire to accomplish something when everything is going to hell. I had done what any messed up workaholic would, pushed it all down to a place where I could ignore it.
I had more problems than I knew what to do with. They hadn’t gone away.
[And that’s not all buckaroo. What about Tommy, Sally, Billy or Jimmy? You haven’t once thought about them? Why not help them get to that settlement you helped make? Are they even alive? No thanks to you, I put the directions to both that place and the Centauri base in the crystal you gave to Remy and Fernando, sheesh, at least give them a chance to survive.]
My arms felt weak, my head light. “I hadn’t even thought .”
[You’re right! You hadn’t ‘THOUGHT’! How much thinking have you been doing lately? None! You can’t keep working like this without thinking about all the other things going on. You have a kind of power that unfortunately makes some pretty damn big waves.]
He was right. Fuck, Kraken is right. But not completely. I hadn’t fucked everything up. I have done a lot of good with what time I’ve had so far, with what I’ve known so far. Putting a bit of stiffness in my backbone, I turned and glared at my familiar.
“Fine. I get it. There’s plenty I haven’t done and the list of things I need to attend to has only gotten longer, but you cannot deny that I haven’t done a lot of damn good things that I really didn’t have to do.” I counted off my fingers. “Reeanth is alive because of me, the hicks are most likely alive because of me, that settlement is doing damn fine because of me, and my shitty younger brother, well, I do need to go set some things straight there.”
[Look,] Kraken said, his exasperation with me clear in his voice. [I’m your spirit familiar. Keeping you alive is my job, because if you die then it really sucks for me. You’ve done great, really, but marching off with all of this unfinished business just isn’t smart and your sorceries do leave you with some glaring long-term weaknesses. Can’t you tell? They amplify parts of you. Because of your Earth Sorcery, you use earth when fighting, so you tend to bury your enemies and get hyper-focused on gear. Your Water Sorcery makes you really uncomfortable to be away from water and drowning your enemies is another go-to strategy. And that’s another thing, whatcha gonna do with the dwarves and minotaurs you have in storage, huh?]
“Fuck!” I cursed. “There’s not enough of me to go around and do everything.”
Taking a deep breath and focusing inward, I channeled my will into my Mental Sorcery and began reevaluating my actions and my thoughts.
“What have I forgotten?” I said, pushing on and pushing against the self-made resistance in my head. “What have I ignored?”
Everything Kraken had brought up was correct, I did have pressing concerns that I’d put off and with my mind based sorcery obeying my unconscious will those concerns had almost been walled off to the far back of my mind. The outside perspective of Kraken really was a godsend, what kind of hole could I have easily avoided if I had consciously decided to remember my problems instead of blindly pushing through from one objective to the next?
“Ok Kraken, you’re right. Put together a plan for me to review, something I can follow to wrap up all of those concerns. Right now, I still need to get this tree going till it’s mature and doesn’t need my direction but that shouldn’t be too long.”