I didn’t freeze. I didn’t have time to freeze. I barely had time to think. “Fucking time travel!” I cursed, wishing for the convenient Consciousness Sorcery which would have allowed me to think faster at a time like this. I’ve gotten too used to having obscene amounts of power. Now I had to make a decision without the luxury of thinking it through.
I spotted Kraken returning from the direction of the ocean. “Kraken, you’re with me.” My familiar nodded as we communicated mentally. The water elemental was off gathering up living creatures to fuel Versonae’s future recovery. Kraken landed on top of the mini Flesh Golem attached to Versonae’s chest. He knew what he had to do, use the golem to keep her alive at all costs. As long as she didn’t full-on die, I could fix her body if that Flesh Golem could get the necessary bio-matter. “Acantha, keep the undead off the freaking wall. That’s your main job. Let the golems do their work. Direct them as needed.”
She nodded and pulled out a Centauri meal cube, downing it with a drink of water from her canteen. I watched her as she touched the mini Flesh Golem for ten seconds and then cupped her hands together, igniting a blue fireball that floated down until it was just a few inches off the ground. “Put the infected flesh on this and it’ll turn it to ash.” Acantha said, shaping the fireball into a wide plate before speeding off, darting to the main pylon to top off her mana. Kraken filled me in before I could ask.
[With food and water in her system, the golem temporarily sped up her healing and stamina generation while removing more aches and pains so she can fight unhindered. Since she has the necessary nutrients in her system right now, the golem didn’t need to use much of anything to help her along.]
I nodded and replied. [That’s smart, I’ll do the same right after Reeanth. Pass along my instructions, need to focus on this.]
Kraken multi-tasked, coordinating with Reeanth who copied Acantha’s magic pick-me-up and then dove off the wall with her mana-maul lighting up the beach that was half covered in darkness. I bent to my task, very carefully sliced off the blackened bits of flesh from Versonae’s abdomen, flicking the dead chunks onto the plate. The smell was awful but I noticed that the flaming plate was so well contained by Acantha’s spell that I couldn’t feel any heat coming off of it. It almost looked fake.
I took a chance, looking up over the wall. I couldn’t see what was going on close to me but further out I could make innumerable dark shapes gliding over the pockmarked landscape. Even more hunched over things shambled, howling their thirst for living flesh to the emerging moon.
“Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuckin’ fuck!” Luckily, due to Kraken’s continuing efforts, the wound hadn’t really gotten any worse and my gruesome surgical work was yielding results. I cut and scraped at skin, flesh, organs, and bone until I could have stuck my head inside of Versonae’s abdomen. “Where the fuck is that water elemental?”
Blue and purple flames lit up the battlefield, lines of explosions ripping the dirt and sand apart leaving nothing but glass and ash in its wake. I watched as Spot charged in from the east, my massive tank of a dragon-infused canine plowing through the growing horde of undead like a runaway tractor destroying a cornfield. He howled his victory and vengeance all in one breath before turning to take on the biggest of the Hungry Ones.
Kraken snapped at me. “Pay attention! You missed some! There’s something wiggling underneath her false rib!”
Chastising myself for losing focus, I pulled out my Grimoire and flipped twenty pages in. I at least had the foresight to create and record a version of the ‘Monocle’ spell built to detect dark energies. This is what I love about a Grimoire. It allows a wizard to prepare spells prior to battle, recording the intricate lines and connecting rune-scripts that make up a working piece of magic. The reason my Grimoire was special, and the reason I really loved this one, is that it was both soul and flesh bound to me.
Normally, well, according to the Centauri, when Grimoires are bound to you, you can record a spell in it and then infuse the page with mana, the spell itself will lift off the page and be ready for use. The problem is, normal Grimoires will require you to recreate and reinfuse the page itself with the spell, as the written spell completely lifts itself off the page. My Grimoire was written in my own blood. If I supplied it with a drop of blood, then pure copies of my spells lifted off the page and the original stayed where it was.
The second reason I loved my Grimoire is that due to being bound to me in both body and soul, I could manipulate the runic structure of a spell on the page after the spell had been written down and dried off. This cost though was a literal pain at the time as some of the material forming the spine of the book came from my own skin and bone. This is a boon directly from my Flesh Sorcery but the part of the price is that pain was required to form the bond. So it actually hurt, I wasn’t able to dull my nerves for that process.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Kraken looked through my eyes, guiding my hand to the right ‘Monocle’ page and narrowed the spectrum of the vision part. I slapped the page with my left hand and the book took its price from me, a drop of blood and some mana, and the altered ‘Monocle’ spell floated up and hovered just over Versonae’s wound.
“This is why Merlin wanted you to learn wizardry,” Kraken whispered, watching me work. “He knew you were going to have issues with your soul being in two places at once and would need a way to work magic.”
I nodded while manipulating the ‘Monocle’ spell to focus in and through Versonae’s stomach. “And I’m really glad you learned more wizardry than I did. We’re gonna need a shit ton more spells in this book right now than we have.” I turned Kraken. “Did you put healing spells in here? Did I ask you that already?”
“End of the book has healing spells, but nothing works better than the golem.” Kraken answered.
The focus dial on the ‘Monocle’ spell turned down into the deeper magical frequencies until I spotted what Kraken pointed out. The head of some double-headed worm with teeth was latched onto an artery, yanking back and forth in anger due to its flow of nutrients being stifled by the Flesh Golem. Working even faster, I sliced off the worm heads where they joined and flicked them onto the flaming plate. Little shrieks of pain quickly vanished as they turned into ash and blew away. I didn’t want to take any chances so I removed the false rib and all of the flesh around it.
“Any stasis spells?” I asked, still looking for anything I might have missed. Blood and gore covered my hands as I worked, the spell flickering as my control over it wavered. “Maybe some light-based purification stuff? I don’t know, there’s gotta be something.”
Kraken shook his head. “Not without alerting the entire invading force that someone of an antithetical element is nearby. We want this fixed and both of you wreaking havoc, not sitting here acting like a beacon.”
“I don’t see anything else!” Shaking the worst of the blood off me, I flipped through my Grimoire. It soaked up the liquid from the blood, turning pages of its own accord until it landed in the Dwarven rune lexicon. “Book! You’re a genius!” Turning to Kraken, I pointed down at an unfamiliar rune. “Did you put all these Dwarven runes in here? Are there some that can help? I see a few I recognize, that one looks like ‘Life’ or something similar enough.”
More runes than I knew what to do with lay in front of me. That in and of itself was weird. Runes are either really simple or extremely complex. It’s generally a page or two of a Grimoire per spell, and more if you’re trying to attach lessons or memories to the spell. So far, I had only worked on the basics, the ‘Monocle’, the ‘Mana-bolt’, and the most common variation of the ‘False-Mirror’ spell: the ‘Mana-Shield’. I had those and some different versions that were perfect for practicing and learning to quickly bring the spells from the book into action.
Kraken reached over and slapped two runes, a hideously complex bunch of circles all mashed together and something that looked like a beating heart within a sun. “I can use these while also managing the Flesh Golem. The first is ‘Togetherness’ or ‘Unity among all’, used for an infinite number of things. The second is ‘Ex-Nihilo’, something from nothing. Or ‘Life from the Void’. It doesn’t translate well but those together should be able to stave off death while we wait for the water elemental to return.”
“Fuck waiting!” I snarled, flipping the pages back to a very sturdy version of an enhanced ‘Mana-Bolt’ spell. “I’m not blind. Reeanth and Acantha need some fucking help. Ping me when the elemental gets back so I can fix Versonae.”
Putting my hand on the open page, the ink made from my own blood lifted off the page as my mana and the required droplet energized the runic sequence. On my left side, a band of pure mana encircled my left hand. I liked this spell because it could fire ‘Mana-Bolts’ based off of my hand position as well and it wouldn’t disperse once a ‘Mana-Bolt’ was fired. The ring of pure mana itself was linked to Gungnir’s stores of mana, allowing my left hand to functionally be a firearm.
I tried to connect my mind to SAW and barely felt our connection. Sluggishly SAW began to comply with my wishes, armoring up the more vulnerable parts of my body while reshaping most of the runic structures to be focused on re-directing or absorbing kinetic energy. I tried to keep my growing despair from escaping and I even felt my edges of my suppressed sex drive start to come back. My connections to my magical weapons and tools were built off the simplistic nature of my Sorceries and right now they weren’t functioning at 100%.
“It’ll be alright,” Kraken said, feeling all of the same things through our link. “Use Gungnir as a mace. Let Svalinn be your shield. Your gauntlets should be more than enough. The rifle will come in handy and-”
I almost smacked myself. “My rifle!”