Acantha’s mental shriek wasn’t just fear. A series of pictures slammed through our temporary mental link almost tearing it to shreds. Brief flashes of an angry undead horde didn’t really give me details other than they were coming! I took a moment to scan the failing link, using it to divine that the threat was still a couple miles out. The terror of the group didn’t hit me until they got closer.
Ordering the golem sergeant to double time back to the beach, I took a few seconds to more closely examine the mental screenshots from Acantha. They had gone out to about forty miles and walked up a large hill, not seeing signs of anything until they hit the top. Down in the valley in front of them was a gruesome sight, milling hordes of undead as roiling fog coursed in and out of the bodies, dissipating and appearing at random. Several black bonfires dotted the valley leading the way to the other end where the horde grew even thicker and more bizarre.
Some of the bodies were clearly once human but those were the minority. I don’t even have words to describe the horrors of what used to be living things. Some were several human corpses put together but not one of them looked like each other, a few with three heads and five arms, others put together to look like bastardized horses. Getting out of the realm of human physiology were the freaky ones, winged monsters with six foot tongues that oozed oily slime blazing with gray fire that continued to burn where the spit landed on the dying earth. Undead giants fifteen yards tall wielded bone clubs decked with prehistoric teeth way too large to be anything from this planet. The creepiest of all were what could only have been spellcasters, those had multiple limbs welded to their torsos, up to six arms. What caught my interest were their long, spidery fingers clutching tools. I saw books that dripped blood and glowing red wands tipped with black diamond teeth and staves with organ tassels tied to the top. Each one of those freaks had at least two heads, one constantly muttering while the other simply shrieked like it was a full time job.
Somehow, either Versonae or Acantha accidentally kicked over a rock in their haste to back up which caught the attention of the outer horde. At least three hundred of the fuckers started shambling after the disturbance and another two hundred were running comparable to a tireless human jogger.
“Fuck!” I snarled, pulling myself away from the jumbled images. I looked through the memory screenshots again before cursing under my breath and sprinting in their direction. Boosting myself with Flesh Sorcery, I caught up to Spot faster than I thought I would. Reeanth and Acantha were right on his tail. Funny enough, Versonae was easily keeping up with Spot. Communicating with Spot directly via our link, I asked him very politely to get the attention of the horde and lead them away, up to the East and then directly North. I just needed him to give us at least three but hopefully four-ish days of preparation before heading back. We were nowhere near ready.
With a chuff and a quick headbutt, Spot agreed and took off barking and howling back the way he came. His bounds were deliberate, kicking up a lot of dirt, both covering up the majority of our tracks and clearly making his own new ones. Using Earth Sorcery, I smoothly covered up the rest of our tracks as we sped back to the beach. Our superhuman bodies covered the just over two miles worth of landscape in record time, Reeanth and Acantha sprinting down the shore of the river next to the conjured stone wall as I skated across the top of the river using Water Sorcery, making sure to cover up the tracks as we fled as quietly as possible. Versonae stayed at the top of hill facing the forest, keeping watch for the rest of us.
“What? There’s nothing here?” Acantha scream-whispered as we hit the beach. “And a giant fucking diamond doesn’t count! What are those weird pillars? Are they bombs?”
I glared at her as I turned around, part of my mind relaying orders to the elementals through Kraken as they split off and got busy. “Not my fault someone tipped them off! What part of scout or be fucking quiet did you three not understand?! Spot can buy us a couple days but fucking FUCK I need at least a goddamn week! Did we not understand the concept of a SLOW scouting mission? It was SUPPOSED to take awhile!”
Our problem here is that while my team did fuck up my plans, Acantha still had a point. This was nowhere near good enough to withstand an assault yet. The sandy beach had taken on a creepy form of new life as the silica of the sand molded before our eyes into a kickass giant’s version of a sand castle but it was still just sand. The five pillars slowly grew upwards as the wall in front of them grew just fast enough to keep the pillars from being seen from the vantage point of the land in front of us.
I took a few deep breaths, smacking my palm with Gungnir. Its mace form appealed to me in the moment. I felt like walloping my idiot vassal to knock some freaking sense into her. “If we’re lucky, they’ll think it was just a random beast that knocked the rock over and merrily chase Spot all across Greenland. If we’re not, then say hello to Black Summer.” Rubbing my forehead as I communed with Kraken who was busily managing the sergeants, Versonae and Reeanth grimly looked at each other.
“My lord, is there anything that can be done?” Reeanth’s pained expression showed me that she knew how far up shit creek we were.
“Well, we’re down our best fighter and tank.” Both of them looked at me. Shrugging but not shy about it, I laughed. “Spot! Duh! Versonae doesn’t tank and you both haven’t fought a dragon. Now, y’all have been scouting for half a day and a small part of the night, which means you’re useless to me right now!”
Kraken interceded, speaking mentally to the entire group. [I recommend that Mr. Panic put the rest of you in a condensed sleep state.]
“Who speaks directly to my mind?” Versonae spat, drawing her blades and looking around. “My mind is my own!”
Reeanth shushed her as Acantha explained. “That glowing spear has Ben’s spirit familiar in there. It does most of the real work.”
She grinned as I glared at her.
[Although you are correct,] Kraken hopped back in, not caring about my glare. [We do need to stay on the dangerous task at hand. As I was saying, you’ll each be able to have the restful benefits of a full night’s sleep in just a few hours. Ben can use Flesh Sorcery to do this, and he can also easily bring you to full alert if need be. With you three taken care of, he can refresh himself with Flesh Sorcery and keep working with the elementals to fortify the area.]
The three women looked at me, Acantha disbelieving as Reeanth nodded in agreement while Versonae thought it over, sheathing her blades.
“Who will keep a lookout?” Versonae asked pointedly as she joined us. “And where will we rest?”
Gesturing at the ground next to me, I raised up three pod-like structures out of sand. “Me, Kraken, and a small golem army will be on guard while you three get some accelerated shut-eye. I’m also going to see if I can get a couple sand elementals around here to play guard in exchange for mana.”
“Playing to the combined strength of the land and your affinity. Smart.” Reeanth praised as she climbed into the first pod. “Knock me out. When we wake, we shall start guerilla warfare to grant you a week’s worth of time, my lord.”
The other two climbed in their respective pods and shut their eyes, Acantha gripping her two glowing wands as she looked away. After putting my team in a sorcery-enhanced sleep, Kraken linked back up with the elementals to keep the construction on task as I guided the rest of the mini-army to be at advantageous points around the beach. Having them stand out here on the wide open sand didn’t seem to be that bright. The first three groups of ten I had were marched out to about a mile where they covered themselves up with dirt and mud, hiding behind dense thickets. The other two groups of ten were sent out to the east and west ends of the beach just to make sure that we didn’t get flanked. With Kraken’s embedded programming, they easily accepted the simple orders I gave them, mainly, ‘Attack anything that does not align with these specific energy signatures, namely, my group’.
With that complete, the hard part began. My basic plans were fucked, and my next two backup plans were in a bind, which basically left me with the bloody idea of ‘island hopping’, again. I’m stuck on the beach making a fortification when what I really want to do is be making a base about two miles ahead of me in that perfect spot which happened to be very defensible and almost divinely created to be where the portal should be planted.
Twisting the entire scenario around in my head and forcing it to bend in ways that probably edge the boundaries of good sense, I grabbed my common sense by the horns and said ‘fuck it’. It also doesn’t help that one of my mental background processes from forever ago that I forgot about, the one that comes up with backup plan after backup plan, spoke up about a tendency that I had ‘buried’ (hahahaha) awhile ago. I could simply start building underground.
[The word you’re looking for is ‘asinine’. It perfectly describes your plan, going off alone, away from your army so you can build an underground base on a shitty river island so you can then turn said underground base into a fortified island with entrenched walls. Am I, how do you say it, smelling what you’re stepping in? Picking up what you’re putting down?]
Kraken being my spirit familiar with the innate ability to read the twisting lines of my thoughts is both comforting and irritating. Mainly, because he’s usually right, but sometimes, his perspective just lacks balls.
My reply was a bit more biting than I intended. [Spot’s risking his life around this icy shithole of an island, the team is unconscious, you’ve got the elementals moving forward with this part of the plan. Exactly what am I going to encounter underground that I can’t handle?]
I could tell that he was gathering his thoughts the same way an experienced sailor feels a growing storm just past the horizon, the simple drop in temperature, that crease of pressure flowing over your skin as the air gets thicker. Snickering to myself as I shielded my thoughts from Kraken, I walked over to the large battery pylon, using Earth Sorcery to make each step on the beach cover twice as much ground.
“Sorry dude,” I said, not meaning it one bit. Poking the pylon with Gungnir, I pushed Kraken out and into his new temporary home.
[What is the meaning-]
[Calm your tits, I mean your tentacles.] I soothed, sinking my whole body into the sand and swimming towards the river. [You can wake the girls up without me and you know it. Just keep things running for a bit and I’ll do my own thing just a bit further up. I’m bettin’ there’s a leyline up there somewhere that can swing this a bit more in our favor. Gimme four hours before you start blowing smoke.]
Moving underground through the silty mud of the river upstream was not the miserable experience I expected it to be. It’s one thing to know that you don’t really feel the cold from water hovering just above the temperature of freezing your manhood off, but it’s another to move through it like you’re made for it. The mud and water welcomed me like the lost sheep finally returning to the fold, happily enveloped by feelings of welcome and home.
Letting my thoughts flow through me as my magic carried me to my destination, the river and its banks were more than happy to oblige my curiosity with vague images of what I wanted: a small leyline on the western side of the island, the soil composition of the island itself, a little network of rabbit burrows comfortably chillin’ just below the surface.
It’s always pitch dark, and I mean blacker than a demon’s butthole, below the surface of the earth. Light simply doesn’t penetrate down this far and with my gear all covered up and in stealth mode, I didn’t even give off my usual glow. Gungnir stayed in my hand in knife form, its stored power under wraps even though I knew it would all be ready to go with a casual flicker of will. My Earth Sorcery carried me gently northward in the safety of the bedrock beneath the river. The few miles of travel was its own unique experience, similar to one of those sensory deprivation tanks. In a sensory deprivation tank, you can hear but you can’t smell anything or see any light or even feel much at all.
For me down here in the bowels of the earth, the only sense worth having down here was that of magic, and I had that in spades. I could feel the area around me sifting through my magic that extended out like questing hands. Everything from the tiniest grains of sand to the myriad ocean of pebbles, dirt, and organic matter that made up our concept of ‘the ground’ parted for me as I finally reached the spot I’d been aiming for.
From where I sat forty feet underground, I kept about a good twenty feet away from the leyline itself. Calling it a vein of planet Earth is really only describing one facet of the incredible magical pipeline of power that hummed deep and true in front of me. To my magical senses, it glowed a mixture of icy blue and forest green, but the dominant flow of the leyline was solid brown denoting the main concentration of power.
All in all, it was perfect for what I wanted to do. Taking a second to make sure my hands were steady, I pulled the Yggdrasil root/seed creation out of Gungnir and held it in my left hand, putting Gungnir away as I held my palm up. Reaching out with my Nature Sorcery, I located a grove of alder trees above me, their tendency to grow together in dense thickets being exactly what I was looking for. With a twitch of power, I pulled a handful of their seeds down through the soil where I pushed them into the Yggdrasil egg.
My other Yggdrasil creations had the same purpose as the one I was about to make, but in order for this sneaky portal plan to work with the secret island base, I needed a very different approach. Using Sunstone Castle as an example, one big baobab tree served as a perfect central hug, a large pillar of nature capable of holding the mystical presence of the World Tree. My desert base was a beacon, a bastion of magical power and unadulterated presence. But here, I needed it to not stick out, at least not just yet, which if I used a web of alder trees it would diffuse the signature of Yggdrasil while also being able to handle the immense load of power. The idea of not using a central rod to focus and contain the power and instead spreading the load out through a network isn’t one that I’ve worked with before. I’ve used oak, willow, and baobab, which all three are innately large and in charge trees, but those would stick out here. The climate and soil composition up here isn’t suited to trees of that nature, although I’m sure I could fix that for any tree I wanted.
*********
Andy’s POV (Somewhere in the Cosmos at the Poly-Arcane Institute)
“And why are the rules of scrying so important?”
The wet slap of my professor’s leg pseudopod against the steel floor sounded like an octopus in an open air asian market. His or its bubbly voice still sounded like mashed bubbles even though the translation spell managed to communicate the exact meaning of his ‘words’. I’d tweaked it enough so that alien accents didn’t blend through but it was still a work in progress. The alien professor stood three feet tall when teaching but tended to change his height by further extending his ten eight-foot long tentacles. The rat bastard often used the change in stature to ‘intimidate’ even though it didn’t work as well as he thought it would.
And for me, I found the alien hottie two rows away far more interesting. What a view even though she was a few rows up in the stadium-like classroom. The Spiratni woman sported a killer body, long red hair, and three slitted eyes with a wicked smile that absolutely washed away any kind of rational male thought. My overpowered hermit brother might focus less on the material, softer side of life, but I sure as hell didn’t. The first thing you learned in the forced training at Centauri boot camp is to enjoy every last moment cause’ you don’t know when it’ll be your last. At least here I didn’t have to worry about surprise bug ambushes every waking moment.
“Bootlicker!” A leg tentacle slammed into the desk in front of me, my professor’s assortment of green eyes glaring at me. Each little slitted bead of an eye was filled with a teeny seed of hatred mixed with fear. “Answer the question for the class or back to humping like a tk’lanta.”
Supposedly, that was a diss on the Centauri warrior culture, the fact that we’re meatheads who wield magic like a battleaxe instead of like a delicate instrument most magic users claimed that it was. That might have been actually insulting if it knew that I wasn’t always Centauri. Formerly a hundred percent Earthen stoner, but hell, having a poor excuse for a squid insult me is still something to laugh at, quietly.
“Scrying rules are important because of exactly how the shamanic aspects of mysticism meet the logical rules of wizardry,” I said, giving my personal view of what the text book said. “The marriage of intent and dream creates a schism where the soul and mind are vulnerable, but in such a way that it is not immediately apparent.”
His eyes narrowed. “Explain.”
I snorted but still played along. This professor had it out for me. Unluckily for him, I loved magic. I just loved alien women more. Definitely not mutually exclusive.
“Basically, scrying is so basic that people don’t think of how it actually works, and since it uses the mystic aspects of dream magic which is inherently based in the soul, it means the soul is vulnerable. But, because it’s so easy to do generally, people don’t think about the risk. The chances of your scrying getting hijacked is actually much higher than even demonic summoning rituals due to the lack of precision. Summoning rituals for instance are cast with Names, protection circles, and a team to back you up, but scrying can be done with a small mirror by a powerless child. Which is why the guidelines of the First Circles emphasize extra safety precautions for those prone to astral projecting in their sleep. And it’s also how the Conglomerate makes a killing on the famous ‘Dream-Safe-Sleep bed.”
Professor N’ganke bubbled unhappily. “Correct. Foreign elements are considered less of a threat based on the scryer’s state since they’re looking for something of which they’re not entirely familiar. However, too much protection, as we well know, filters out the Spiritual Will of the Universe. Magic speaks if you but listen. You may not know the surroundings of what you’re scrying, the mood of the person you’re scrying, or even the correct dimension that you didn’t know you wanted. Scrying is the essence of casting your will into the Cosmos and hoping for a reflection of a particular facet. It is also why group astral projection is recommended until one builds the necessary spiritual strength.”
The Shamanic classes and lectures fit me the best here at the Institute. My inclination towards mind-altering substances gave me a serious leg up against those who went into the teaching with a ‘purity’ mindset, wanting to accomplish everything by pure will and hard work. My resident A.I. implant took the labor out of the rote memorization work which made the wizardry classes almost too easy, but, sometimes, talent figures into it too.
As the professor bubbled on, describing the next set of exercises for us practice, I reached into my satchel that sat near my feet. My latest project was barely larger than the width of my palm. Three little red leaves that looked similar to oak glowed with a soft cherry color. Taking one, I placed it under my tongue and closed my eyes, putting the other two away and grabbing the scrying mirror with both hands.
“Gaze into the mists of mana and let your will form the shape. Connect with the vibration of life, feel the solar winds take your mind to what you envision.”
The first instinctive image my will pushed me towards was a bit more detail on little miss sexy over there, but her anti-scrying wards gave me the equivalent of a magical black eye. Shaking my head to ease the sting, I figured I’d try on a safer target, clueless older brother. I hadn’t seen Ben in a while. For me, it’s been about a year or so here but for him it’s probably been a couple months. Earth is getting back to a normal timescale but who knows how long it’ll take to equalize and settle down. I tried to find more info on Earth and its historical troubles but my clearance wasn’t high enough. Damn aliens.
Opening my eyes, I looked down as my spiritual energy flowed from my soul in fits and starts, twisting through my channels and runes further down into the mirror. Forcing myself to focus on the most recent memories of my brother instead of the shapely distraction to my right, I tied in the image and feelings along with the natural bond between the wands he made for me out of Gungnir. The tenuous sympathetic link pulled my mind to Earth. Swirling crimson flows of power mixed with the deep black of space filled the mirror for a moment before resolving into a tiny image of my brother. He had to be somewhere dark, the only thing I could make out really was the barely glowing green bulbous orb in his hands and his face screwed up in concentration. If I didn’t know better, I’da believed he was poppin’ a squat.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Carefully maintaining my link, I spoke up. “Can you send messages while scrying?” Looking up from my hands, I squinted at Professor N’ganke. “Or does the other person have to be actively and knowingly participating?”
The hot chick turned around, her flirtatious look gone and replaced with a condescending one. “How do you not know this? Dream scrying has unprecedented range and depth but communication is unreliable.”
“Remeran wizardry solved this issue with entangled particles combined with silver runed mirrors! Blood magic is another avenue that has a greater success rate but the audience is understandably limited.” A nerdy looking blue gnome, basically a hairless dwarf with penchants for magitech, squeaked bravely from the back row. “Its cost in thaums is so low that even the ungifted can use them. Something shaman-based magics can’t even boast about.”
“What did I say about mentioning wizardry in my class?” The explosion of bubbles slammed into the gnome. Professor N’ganke slithered up the wave of slimy water until he was grasping his student by the neck. “Opening your mind is the only way to learn the mysteries of shamanry! Never again!” With a flick, the gnome was flung through the silvery portal that served as a door.
“Anyone else want to disparage the wonders of mysticism?” Every green eyeball had turned blood red as they swiveled in different directions to take in the entire class aa one, except I had three eyeballs pointed at me.
“Hey now, don’t look at me, was wanting to know if I could send a message this way or not.”
“Have you tried?”
I looked back down at the mirror, unconsciously zooming out. “Uh, no . . .” Before I blinked, the dark image had zoomed out to the point that I might as well have been a satellite, surveying the entire Northern Hemisphere, probably. I mean, Alaska was still there but Greenland had gotten a huge upgrade, and the USA had a few more mountain ranges than I remember. Cool. Focusing, I zoomed back in to where my brother was, where a much bigger Greenland was? Yeah, some ugly fucks were running around the landmass but a small chunk was heading his way. My fear hit me even before I recognized what he was up against.
“Run douche! Run!” I didn’t even think, just threw my words and my mana at the mirror, breaking the connection just as my brother’s eyes opened. Sweat ran down my hands as the surface of the mirror shattered into a million pieces, blood slowly dripping out between the cracks.
“And blood means what, class?” The angry Professor was replaced once again with his normally bubbly self. Pitying looks came from all directions except the front of the class. “Yes, imminent doom.”
Greenland - Ben
Cold fear that wasn’t my own ran down the back of my spine. Concentration almost completely shot, and that’s definitely not good in the midst of handling the mystical equivalent of nuclear power lines. Zombies, wights, ghouls, and many other smelly rotten abominations were coming my way. How I knew that, I don’t really know, but I knew that fact was true from the depths of my soul, almost as if I could see them. I had been completely focused on handling the flows of power and I couldn’t really stop, the process had begun. Why did it feel like someone I knew was screaming at me?
[Think, think, think . . . ] I grimaced, glaring at the seed in front of me. [Stupid, stupid, stupid, so close to being smart that I might actually be stupid! I was close enough to the leyline that it should have hid this working!]
Then it hit me, a way out of my fucking mess. Taking one hand off of the Yggdrasil seed while keeping the other there and also tamping down on the power flow while turning the energy monitoring process into an auto-Mind Sorcery background process, I conjured a handful of alder tree seeds and forced the Yggdrasil orb to absorb them. Gently imbuing the amalgamation with life giving mana, the seeds became one with the orb as if all of it were made of soft playdough. Pulling my hand back off, I grabbed a bunch of bloodthorn seeds from my pocket and then two cryocards from the other pocket.
[Vaya con Dios!] I screamed mentally, forcing the ingredients into the orb as I pushed it closer to the leyline.
Weaving my Nature Sorcery through the disparate cocktail, I focused on the interplay of energies as they fought with each, the tangly nature of the alder trees fighting the dominating design of the thorny vines that hungered for my flesh or any tang of iron. The compressed frozen energy of the cryo-cards creeped into the Yggdrasil orb only to be blasted away by the ever increasing volume of raw power of the leyline.
[You, will, SUBMIT!]
My senses, entangled with the web of plant life above me, alerted me to the incoming horde of undead, their hungry, mindless stampede having no care for stealth, not that it would help. Leaping deer and flitting birds finally made their appearance for the first time as they fled in front of the horde, keeping just out of reach, not knowing that they weren’t the intended prey. My hands vibrated as the Yggdrasil orb almost shook itself to pieces, my sorceries forcing my intent into the orb using Gungnir as a guide. My very first implement, the weapon that let me bat above my weight class, was a product of different energies and substances that found a balance and flowed. This orb would do the same.
My will wouldn’t accept anything less.
Undead hands and shovel-like feet tore downward through the earth like a giant starving mole on crack, each rotted limb flinging dirt aside and even smaller horde members without a care. Feeling actual fear for the first time, I shoved the orb closer to the intangible leyline line, opening up the temporary channel of power to full blast instead of the initial trickle. Searing pain blazed through me, just under the amount of pain I could handle with Flesh Sorcery’s help, and about a million times more than what I could handle if I didn’t have Gungnir to handle the magical load.
The earth around me exploded outwards as Yggdrasil erupted, excess energies flowing upwards in the form of alder trees bearing thorns the size of rapiers stabbed into the incoming horde, temporarily grabbing their attention as I focused all of my will on manipulating the tree as it grew. More thorns savagely ripped through the dirt. Crackling vines tore through, waving as if they were electrocuted.
For these few moments, I would have an unprecedented level of control in this time of birth, hopefully. The cryocard energy altered the nature of the tree to allow it to withstand subarctic levels of cold while the bloodthorn seeds nature fully integrated into the bark structure of the branches. Each alder seed formed into a separate but tangentially attached trunk, spiraling outwards as its wooden fingers grasped and tore the incoming horde, a raging whirlwind shredder borne of magic’s most primal arts. Three massive roots speared downwards, two of which wrapped around the leyline and the other kept going downwards as if to form a massively deep taproot anchor. The alder bark turned crimson, forming into the shape of bladed leaves that popped outwards as soon as the tree's flesh was done growing in that spot.
Over four hundred Hungry Ones were torn apart, ground up, sliced into bits, and dragged down into the dirt as my latest insane creation experienced its slow, first stretch into fresh air. It wasn’t alive in the sentient meaning of the word, it was still basically a tree, a zombie-crunching magical tree. New alder trunks sprang up, never further than ten feet from each other, their spindly branches bisecting and impaling more zombies, each little branch growing more grasping thorns to hold its prey in place. I stayed safe, or as safe as I could, way down even deeper in the dirt using Nature Sorcery to ‘encourage’ more growth, more viciousness from the newborn.
Old, rotted blood stained the earth, the poison of its uncontained dark magic not even posing the barest threat to the fundamental power of the fledgling World Tree. As the leyline powered the tree from below, the mystical connection of the tree to its main trunk, Yggdrasil itself, fed it from a dimension removed from our own.
Five three-headed spellcasters, a bit more controlled than the rest, flung black fire and ghostly silver bolts of malevolent energy at the tree, scarring blackened wounds into the trunks. They recognized that this malevolent arboreal wonder was in their way. The scabs bled as they slowly decayed further into the wood. With each blast of necromantic power, the two roots wrapped around the leyline pulsed, pulling more and more power upwards. Each scarred knot bearing the necromantic taint exploded outwards, the bladed bark propelled by the instant expansion of sap freezing as the alder acted like my cryocards would. From the exposed heartwood, more branches lanced out as if they were wolves that caught a scent.
“SCREEEAAAHHHH! ALSFA’GRAN DECHANZ!” The translation amulet attached to my armor didn’t catch enough of the words to give a good ‘word for word’ translation, but it caught a part of that. One of the sibilant words meant ‘prey’ and another one meant ‘down’.
Shit. At least I’m in my element.
Fighting underground isn’t really that exciting, for me, it’s simply an exercise in focus and channeling power. Distance is king and power is essential. My Earth Sorcery makes me nigh invincible down here and as long as nothing has Earth Sorcery or years of practice in living/moving underground, I know for a fact that they’ll never win. It’s not like I’m in a cave where there’s room to move around, I’m literally surrounded on all sides by dirt and stone. I myself have half an inch of space between my armor and the dirt which my Earth Sorcery maintains, but other than that, it’s like easy swimming for me.
Laughing at the situation even as I ignored the healthy amount of fear trying to wrangle my hindbrain, I acted. Transmuting sections of dirt around me into circular stone blades and other sections into stone spears, I expanded this outward from myself in a full spherical fashion. Keeping one hand on Gungnir as its crystal spear blade was embedded in Yggdrasil’s latest sapling, keeping up the will required for its violent, zombie-eating tantrum, the rest of me focused on the sickening invaders.
That’s what they are. That’s all they are. Invaders. Scum. Pests. Good for nothing except future fertilizer and nothing more. Disgusting.
[Why do we run, scatter before pests? Are we not stronger? Are we not better?]
[Shut it!] I growled back, pushing Svalinn down.
Optimum testing conditions met. Flesh Sorcery enhanced body projected to meet this threat level. Artifacts projected to provide more than enough defense/offense for necromantic threat. Recommend testing new runic protocol: Dreadnaught Druid.
Great, SAW’s kickin’ in too. Whoop de fuckin doo. And, just to add in, there’s that sorcery/magic enforced anger again due to being near my elemental opposite. The unreasonable, or maybe reasonable in this case, schismatic anger flared up deep inside me, forcing me to consider other options. My instincts screamed at me to run, kite away while using the earth and river to drag the horde far below the surface, and my other, newer instincts screamed for blood.
My upgraded body howled for a fight finally worth having. Svalinn’s deadly anger resonated with the reptilian rage ensconced in my altered DNA. The course of events prior to the anticipated fight itself had dragged myself a hundred feet deep below the earth but the visceral thrill of combat called to me. Quickly checking my magical senses, less than two hundred freaks were left. My tree had taken out over six hundred zombies on its own, most of which were being dragged down to serve as fertilizer.
[Why is now a ‘great time’, huh? They’re real life zombies! Experiment my ass!]
Speeding up my perceptions for a moment to consider what to do, I looked over the conceptualized plan of ‘Dreadnaught Druid’. The projected image was a hologram of myself but a bit on the scary side. My standard black armor was covered in extra plates of black obsidian so that none of the silver runes shone through, and the image of me had me wielding Poseidon’s Trident, or Neptune’s Shame, in one hand while swinging Gungnir in mace form in the other. Svalinn’s bladed shields were partially extended out of both gauntlets, ready to extend further if any blades or more defense was necessary.
Honestly, it looked badass, so badass I just had to try it.
“Fine,” I grunted, rocketing out of the earth as my gear shifted and molded around me. The obsidian add-ons barely weighed anything with my upgraded body’s strength and my trident streaked out of its tattoo on my arm, liquid blue light materializing in my hand as I landed heavily in the dirt. Gungnir’s crystal blade shrank into a thick, pulsing orb that crackled with raw mana and the spear shaft shortened and thickened. My leap out of the bowels of the earth put me at the edge of the river surrounding the island, the entrance flashy enough to draw the attention of the insane zombies along with their freaky spellcasters.
Faster than starving cheetahs, every single one of them howled and flung themselves at me, a wave of sickening flesh and rotting stench that I countered with a wave of my own. Pointing Neptune’s Shame forward, I pulled with my Water Sorcery from the ready source of liquid behind me, adding sheer volume where the trident concentrated lines of compressed water that cut through their lines like lasers. More waves of river water smashed into the zombies that weren’t cut down, pushing the reinforcements back and grinding them into the dirt.
[Rip! Tear! Destroy!]
The next moment, I found myself in the midst of the horde, smashing heads open with Gungnir and stabbing anything that moved with the trident. Each trident stab was punctuated with a blast of rotating water blades to clear the area and each swing of Gungnir was accompanied by kinetic blasts that acted like controlled mini-grenades. Gore, bits of organs, desiccated flesh, and bone fragments covered me before I had the chance to breathe. Stomping down with my foot, simply to play to my nerdy fantasies, I caused a wave of stone spikes to radiate outwards from me, giving me more breathing room before I lifted a car-sized globe of water above me. The pulsing orb of water floated like an ancient deity above us all, ready to unleash its wrath. Letting go of it, it rained down, cleaning me off. Grabbing the runoff and man-made rain in mid-air, I froze it into icicles facing outward. They hovered around me, turning my position into a floating porcupine which the Hungry Ones gladly attacked.
Detecting six separate accumulations of sub-protonic energy. WARNING! WARNING!
Crap, the spellcasters. For a handful of moments, I’d gotten lost in the mindless joy of swinging power. My body, my human body, never felt this good, this invigorated, this full of endless vitality! And for just a minute, that lack of conscious, in-the-moment thinking, could have been my downfall.
Diving back down into the earth, I took stock as I fled fifty feet down. My weapons were devastating, leaving me awestruck. Gungnir and Neptune’s Shame enhanced my abilities to the point where I myself was a magic human wrecking ball. Less than thirty of the zombies remained from my outrageous tactics, including the shriekers holding their wiggling balls of black mana. Fighting spellcasters is nothing new, although the simple fact that they’re dead means there’s probably an element to them that I’m unfamiliar with, but to be fair, the point of fighting those that use magic is simple, cheat. If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t competin’.
The earth around me began to shake as I struggled with a moment of internal arrogance. That was easy, frankly, too easy. Each swing of my enchanted weapons caused several zombies to fucking explode, each pulse of magic tore them to shreds, what in the world did I have to fear from them? That’s it? Really? This is what I’ve been afraid of, been working so hard to fight against? Is it true that I’m essentially the sorcerous Goliath stomping the undead David into the dirt as his little sling missed? Am I the real parable come to life?
Threads of twitching blackness reached out from the shriekers as I shook my head.
Focusing on them, I prepared a handful of crystal grenades that I pulled from Gungnir’s storage space, over-filling them with mana. Exploded bits of hungry ones touched by the lingering threads of darkness started to hover, slowly floating up and over to where the shriekers continued to howl and shake their implements. I really didn’t want to see what they had in store, and every nerd knows, never give a magic user time to kick off their show.
Grabbing all the earth around me within a hundred yards, I shook it, creating my own personal addition to the Richter scale, a nine point break your fucking legs earthquake. Unceremoniously flung off their feet and into each other, tatteried windpipes sounded cries that reached an even higher pitch as four grenades landed between them. Just before they went off, I inverted the dirt they were laying on, flipping them like a pancake, forcing the explosion to concentrate its heat and kinetic energy in a small space under the earth instead of dispersing it. Not knowing what magical defenses they had, if any, I pushed the makeshift coffin deeper as I grabbed a few more grenades.
KABOOM!
The dirt fountained upwards through the softer sediment from the passing stone coffin and the screams cut off. Not taking any chances, I pushed the grenades towards the filled in pocket below.
KABOOM!
Sealing the remnants of the only real threat away, I pulled myself back up to the surface and raised Gungnir in the air to finish the last of the undead. Crystal rounds fired out in an uneven rhythm, dropping the remaining zombies.
Looking around with both my physical eyes and double checking what I saw with magical senses, an absolute wasteland of filth surrounded me. My earthquakes, tsunamis, water jets and crystalline bullets had completely torn up the area. Even the Yggdrasil thicket was looking ragged.
“Shit.” Sprinting over, I worked my way tree by tree, using my own blood as a healing reagent for the trees, my Nature Sorcery closed the gashes in the bark, soothing the irritated knots containing embedded necromantic flesh. A soft crack caught my attention, pulling me away from my work.
Behind me, a greasy horizontal cut hung in midair, an empty blackness that wept green fog at the tips. Clawed hands reached through as blood curdling screams once again rang out.
“Oh hell no! No creepy ass portals on my island!” And I do get that there’s no one around to hear me except for myself, but fighting in pure silence just seems wrong. All my real combat experience comes from movies and the last year of my life, so, when in Rome.
Pointing Gungnir forward, my trusty mace unloaded charged crystal bullets as I conjured SAW’s Nephilim water arms as backup. In my left hand, I held a special crystal grenade the size of a soccer ball and topped it off. This particular explosive was a result of Acantha and I putting our heads together, and yes, each one had its own name. Always have a bigger bomb on hand, just in case.
This one was Big Bertha, the other ones were Madam MOAB and O-bomber, hehehe. Eerie crimson runes sparked flashes of bright green ethereal fire that covered the outside of Big Bertha, mainly Acantha’s work, allowing mana to be converted into wytchfire. I only had time to make about three of these with her in Sunstone Castle before the shenanigans kicked off but if there’s one thing I’m good at it's blowing shit up. And with her help, we are really good at blowing shit up. The overcharge feature pretty much allows a grenade of this size to be a miniature backpack nuke. After arming it, the estimated radius of instant devastation would be enough to take out six square city blocks.
As soon as the bullets cleared away enough space from inside the rift, I launched a few standard crystal grenades through for good measure, should be enough to clear the area for my Big Bertha here. Running to the side of the portal so I wouldn’t be directly in front of it, always mind blast zones, I waited for two solid breaths. The initial grenades went off but the portal didn’t close. Turning Gungnir into its knife form, I sheathed it and pulled out a little enchanted light stone. It could function pretty close to a standard flashlight but it could also act just like a lantern, although an order of magnitude more powerful than that.
“I shouldn’t, I know I shouldn’t, but I really want to.”
Muttering to myself usually gets me an answer because Kraken’s there to give a yay or nay but right now, he’s two miles away playing babysitter and golem-minder. And what I really wanted to do was get a glimpse of what’s on the other side of the portal. I didn’t do it back in Arizona when Phoenix was shit city, and right now, most everything in the immediate vicinity of the other side of the smelly ass portal should be teeny tiny bits and pieces.
Just a glimpse, I can handle a glimpse.
Alley-ooping the light stone into the wavering portal, I pulled Gungnir back out to full ready and ran around, not quite sticking my head in the portal while holding my breath. The little piece of enchanted marble clattered on what sounded like stone. For all I knew it was stone. The ground within six feet of the light stone was solid black and just beyond the dome of light was solid ink. I couldn’t make out any scuff marks, signs of explosions going off, nothing. Nothing was visible, not a damn thing. What was on the other side of that portal? Not taking any chances, I backed up and tossed in Big Bertha, my mana flicking the internal enchantment trigger.
Five seconds till wytchfire induced hell broke loose.
Now from my meager understanding of how portals work, if something explodes on one side but doesn’t shut it down, then part of that explosion will come back through the opening. Which means that in this case, only one direction is in actual danger, whichever way the portal is facing. My ass gathered every bit of power at my disposal and fed it into SAW and Svalinn as I sprinted behind the portal and kept going until I hit the river where I dove under. Sitting at the bottom about thirty feet down, a tongue of flame the length of a skyscraper shot out, kissing the sky and abruptly cutting out. After floating to the surface and sticking just my hand out to make sure the air wasn’t nuclear hot, I hopped out onto the island, taking stock of my surroundings again.
“Okay, so, that’s not what I expected.” I said, staring at the place the portal used to be. I glanced in the direction the explosion should have gone and then looked up at the charred branches of trees that hung over the portal. “Weird. Guess portals don’t work like how I think they should. At least I’m still kickin’.”
It was clear that the evil-gash-looking portal was gone. The greasy feeling that hung in the air was gone and it no longer felt like there was a cloud of decay coming for my very soul. I shuddered as I remembered the adrenaline mixed with butthole puckering fear.
Signing, I re-examined the area. The wytchfire tongue didn’t kiss much of anything on this side of the portal, and every bit of zombie was dead, or dead again? Maybe double dead, that works. Mental exhaustion washed through me as my Earth Sorcery went to work, tilling the soil to erase the evidence of the fight and bury the remnants of the Horde. Internally, I felt happy as I washed away my tiredness with Flesh Sorcery but I’m sure the stank from that many risen dead would never leave my nose. The next hour was spent finishing the cleanup, fixing the damage to the alder-Yggdrasil-thicket and then hauling my butt back to the beach.
Upon arrival, I found that considerable ground had been covered in regards to the fortification of the beach. The elemental built walls were freaking huge and that pylon was just peeking over the tops of the walls. Not really wanting to answer questions that I knew Kraken already had coming, I packaged up a copy of my memories from the past couple hours and shot it to him while I cleaned myself off and hopped into a bed molded out of sand. A quick touch of Flesh Sorcery put me into a condensed sleep and I was out.
Three hours of shuteye brought me back to full wakefulness, bright eyed and bushy tailed, can’t really tell since I haven’t had coffee in who knows how long. I substitute the morning rush of caffeine with Flesh Sorcery but it’s not the same, definitely not the same. Although, I’m pretty sure that I didn’t fall asleep in what looks to be the Amazon rainforest. And I definitely didn’t go to sleep naked.