********

Acantha’s perspective

For all the memories locked away inside of Acantha’s brain, the biological recollection of her ancestors, none of it would have prepared her for the actual experience of possibly dying every other second. Undead behemoths with two heads and arms larger than trees traded blows with giant golems. Blackened horrors screamed from the shadows, their banshee-like sonic attacks strategically weakening the golems by shaking loose the tight crystalline structures of their makeup.

Wretched night-terrors animated the darkness, using it as a living weapon that snarled the feet of the tightly ordered phalanx. The golems were too full of sunlight to directly attack them with darkness but that didn’t mean the sharp tentacles of the night couldn’t tirelessly hurl anything and everything at the golems to distract them in a key moment. Undead soldiers from across a thousand defeated worlds stalked through the night wielding alien swords and axes. But Acantha knew that it didn’t matter.

What mattered was FIRE. All of this was pointless. The Endless Flame of the previous universe within didn’t care. It just wanted out. It wanted to burn this disease from the land, scourge this growing rot and cleanse the air until nothing was left. Ash. Only ash should be left. Only ash is clean. Ash is pure. The disinfected evidence of a fire so powerful that only ash could be seen. Clouds of ash. Soul of ash. Rivers of ash.

Acantha twisted the desires within her, switching flames until she no longer held the Origin Flame within her. That one was too powerful to hold onto for too long. Weaker flames could just as easily get the job done. Acantha was forced to cycle through the different types of fire that lived within her soul or one would get too powerful and overtake the others. The Origin Flame sought to reduce the world to ash so that the Universe could start over. It begged for the heat death that preceded the end of all things.

But the fire from Heaven’s Dragon, Ziorehn, the Cleansing, that fire raged to be let out. It knew its very purpose was just outside the walls of Acantha’s soul. Nothing deserved to be purged more than the undead and all of Heaven knew it. Even Acantha had to be careful to not fly into a rage, holding back the fires within.

Flawleen the First Sun’s Phoenix. She Who Rises Evermore. Sister of Ziorehn. Her fires birth new stars which in turn become harbors, safe nesting areas for new phoenixes. Her flames saw the undead as an unnatural bump in the cycle. How could they rejoin the wheel if they were not purged? How would the Earth be nurtured, the green things of the world would be less without the necessary hinge of death provided the nutrients. Undeath stole from that, it slithered away from the Eternal Wheel, hiding from what ought to be.

Each flamed at its core still yearned for what essentially was the same thing . . . to burn. Acantha cycled through the flames. She had to. Using just a bit of any specific one of the unique flames didn’t affect anything. The balance would still be maintained. But using too much of her Origin Flame would then leave a vacuum which the others would seek to fill. If she had to use a lot of one, then she had to use an equal amount of the others in order for their strengths to equalize. It didn’t just mean she would lose a certain kind of flame, it most likely meant her death.

But Acantha did not possess the requisite skill or power yet to use multiple kinds of unnatural fire at the same time. Such flames were used in bursts and then the others soon after, like balancing eight pressure cookers at the same time and if one opened up but the others were ignored, the relaxed cooker would melt and all of the others would explode. She had to perfectly manage the pressure valves of her powers.

Tonight provided more than enough targets to unleash plenty of pressure. No fire she had was useless. Cleansing Fire for the demented rot spewers, Origin Flame for the masses, Phoenix Fire for the shadow users, Holy Light for anything that got too close, light doses of wytchfire to extinguish any fire that looked to be getting out of control. The night itself could hardly bear the amount of heat and light being output by the Sorceress of Flame. She just had to be careful not to destroy the thousand plus golems keeping them all alive.

She knew it wasn’t an understatement. Five rows deep of two hundred golems protected the giant wall and danced to the tune of the elemental sergeant in a beautiful choreography of silent death. The golems didn’t talk. They didn’t roar in displeasure when one of their number fell. They did not emit any kind of scream when an arm or leg was blasted off. Their fight was silence and brutality all wrapped up in one deadly package.

Now, if her master could just figure out how to get his mojo back and help put a stop to all of this, that would be great.

********

Ben’s perspective

[I don’t want to talk out loud,] I said, communicating with Kraken through our mental link. Just fighting off the pain of my leg was a torturous experience. At least I had just enough of my Flesh Sorcery available to me to prevent me from dying but that’s it. A week ago, this would’ve been something I just shrugged off, not even worth noticing. But now, it’s a crippling experience.

[It’s like this every night,] Kraken said, still monitoring Versonae’s greatly weakened condition. [I’ve already conferred with the sunstone sergeant while you were asleep. The central pylon gathers enough energy from all of the power inputs to keep the golem army going, your team to stay filled up with mana, and a little bit left over. Most of the available mana comes in from hydro-kinetic converters.]

I tried to grin but failed. Being proud of my magic inventions wasn’t enough to battle this level of agony. [So I need to build more of those, right? Is it the ocean current ones or the main river generator that’s bringing in most of the energy?] Being mostly closed off from my Mana Sorcery didn’t let me access my unusually sensitive mana-vision. Normally, I would've just looked out and been able to tell by how ‘bright’ the various channeling pipes were. I could’ve used the ‘Monocle’ spell but that would be stupid and dangerous at this moment.

Keeping my Grimoire available and my two ‘Salvo’ spells at the ready was the only smart course of action. My ability to run away was gone. I could only hobble away at the pace of a crippled child and that’s with using Gungnir to carry the weight that my missing foot could not. Even flying away using SAW was no longer available, our connection thinning out to the point that it barely functioned as a suit of armor.

So here I sat, next to Versonae and Kraken, with my meager spells at the ready and Gungnir leaning up against the Flesh Golem. If worse came to worse, Kraken could manually pilot the firearm function within Gungnir but that’s about it. We’re sitting ducks until that damn water elemental returns.

Almost as difficult as keeping my focus off of my desire to peruse some of the things Kraken put into my Grimoire that might be useful, trying not to think about how shitty my situation was. But only on the micro level. The situation as a general whole isn’t that bad.

I still have roughly a thousand golems fighting in concert with each other protecting a fantastically overbuilt wall buffered by a ginormous power system. My massive pylon soaks up all of the energy being poured into it from a multitude of magical hydroelectric generators AND a few solar/heat mana-converters. We did have a miniature Flesh Golem that can grow as soon as we get enough food into its system. Reeanth and Acantha seem to be enough of a help to prevent the golems from being overtaken by the tide of undead. The situation isn’t all bad.

But the micro, the details DO suck. Versonae is a few minutes away from death if that Flesh Golem weren’t keeping her alive. I’m missing a foot, am weak with blood, my Sorceries are tamped down to basically less than useful, and my gear is on the fritz due to the aforementioned difficulties. If I could just make it until the damn water elemental gets back.

[I don’t think you should’ve gone out there.] Kraken said, warily glancing around but not moving from his spot. [According to the elemental sergeant, wait . . . didn’t you name him by the way?]

I dredged my memories, fighting through the haze to pull the name out. [Uh, Sunny, his name is Sunny, because he’s an earth elemental implanted into a golem made from sunstone.] I smirked for a second before hissing in pain. [I know, stupid name but it’s what I got. Anyways?]

Kraken didn’t even bother to shake his head at me. [Like you said, Sunny let me know that the nightly battles are like this but not usually to this intensity. Each night, they lose about fifty golems but manage to repair them using the pylon to power the reconstitution process. Only two golems have been destroyed beyond repair.]

My trembling fingers scrabbled at the flat rock floor I sat on until I found a little pebble with a few odd bumps. My thumb rubbed back and forth, feeling out my extremely tenuous connection that my Earth Sorcery had with the small rock. I could feel it. I knew it was there. If my power, my sorceries themselves were each a thick rope, then what I had to work with was one thin strand of that rope. Enough to know that a connection exists but not tough enough or thick enough for it to be any good.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

I growled deep in my throat, forcing myself back on task, consciously grabbing my attention by the small hairs and pointing it at what I could do instead of what isn’t possible. I could wait. I could plan. I could dig into the details.

[Kraken,] I said, reviewing the useful info he’d given me so far. [You’re telling me that we are bringing in more energy than we output right now, right?]

Kraken closed his eye for a minute before looking at me again with a small grin. [Yes, yes we are.]

I felt the beginnings of a real plan start to come together. [Okay, good. What happens to the extra mana creation for Acantha and Reeanth? As in, when they are full up on mana, have they been putting their extra in the pylon?]

Kraken saw where I was going with this. [No they have not.] I could feel the numbers and calculations tick through his conniving little brain.

[How much of the pylons total mana storage does it take to fix the broken golems as well as charge them up?]

A few explosions lit up the night and we both paused just in case something ugly and rotting hopped up over the wall. A few minutes went by before we kept planning. [Thirty percent, and barring extenuating circumstances there’s an extra five to seven percent brought in every day. It’s currently at forty percent full right now.] My familiar hummed as the math came together. [At this pace, it will be almost another two weeks before it’s full.]

Without my Consciousness Sorcery, I couldn’t communicate my thoughts with any extra speed nor could I multi-task as efficiently as I used to. [How fast could the pylon hit full if we do this smart? What if we added our own extra mana generation? Think about it, when we hit full, the extra mana goes to our gear and then after that it just gets leaked into the atmosphere. All of our extra mana generation goes to the pylon?]

The open Grimoire began to flip through a bunch of pages until it got to a section in the very front. [The fuck is it doing?] I asked, staring with a hint of trepidation. [It’s been doing this a lot lately.]

Kraken struggled to not roll an eye. [It’s bound to you. It has spells in it that are useful but I’ve also been keeping extensive notes in there for you. The Sun Aelves divulged a few ‘mana-regeneration’ techniques to boost mana production. The basics are good enough for entry-level enchanters or beginner alchemy workers but it’s definitely a fascinating subject. Cultivators premise the idea of using a ‘core’ for their enlightenment and what makes it really cool-]

I waved, trying to keep Kraken on point. If I let him, he’d wax eloquent for hours without actually giving me the answer. He coughed to reset his lecture, tailoring it for me. [‘Mana-regeneration’, good. Useful techniques, in book.]

[You’re such an asshole!] I grumbled, glancing down at the page. An extremely complex blueprint of a human body and the overlaying soul matrix on top of it covered two pages and the sides were filled in with countless paragraphs of tiny notes. [This is not the freaking time to do this!] I snapped, rechecking the area around us. [I can’t just look at that and make it so! It looks like soul surgery and a bunch of meditation mumbo jumbo! We’re in the middle of a fucking night raid from the undead and THIS is what you suggest!]

A wet tap on my shoulder almost made me shit myself and jump off the wall all at the same time. But it was just the water elemental which was several times its normal size and filled with mostly fish, a stingray, a small tuna and more.

The timing couldn’t be better. I looked over to Kraken and said aloud, “Coordinate all of this.” My order was understood. Without my Water Sorcery serving as the medium of communication, I didn’t have what I needed to properly communicate with it. Kraken, since he’s a pseudo-spirit and a young Scion of Order, could do the job well enough. “It will get its own mana brick battery if it can keep bringing us more fish of various sizes so we can beef up the Flesh Golem. And it has to do this for at least the next month when we need it.”

I dragged my broken self over and knelt next to Versonae, sticking my finger into the Flesh Golem. As my finger sank in and the link got established, I looked back at the water elemental and then at Kraken. “Well, what are we waiting for? Hurry up! Let’s go!”

Kraken extended a tentacle to the makeshift living aquarium and completed the deal. Working quickly but carefully, the water elemental fed the Flesh Golem one fish at a time, starting with the smallest and working its way up until the Flesh Golem was the size of a desk. I didn’t waste any time, fastidiously expunging any questionable sections of Versonae’s abdomen while grabbing handfuls of the Flesh Golem and pulling them off. Each handful got slapped into Versonae’s gaping wound, the gray chunks of magical flesh wriggling until they became Versonae, assimilating themselves into new parts of her. It was like slapping Play-doh onto a half-finished product and watching the product create itself. Just the raw materials were missing.

At the very end, the Flesh Golem, now slightly smaller than before, rippled a bit and plastered itself all over Versonae until only her head was showing. For a few minutes, the golem undulated with Versonae mostly inside and with Kraken stuck to the top of it like an unwilling bull rider. Then, it pulled back with a sluuurp until it was off of her and sitting next to me.

I looked down, shrugged, and then shoved my bloodied leg into the golem. I sighed with relief as Kraken performed a medical miracle. Within a minute, my leg was good to go. No longer was my foot missing from my body and even the aches and pains from getting tossed around were taken care of. Under Kraken’s direction, each body part was evaluated and fixed.

Fighting back the flood of relief and the tears that threatened to come with it, I just stared at my foot. There it was, toes and all. Even my callouses were there. I reached down with a hand and grabbed each toe, moving them one by one to force my brain to realize that I could walk again without pain.

I let out a huge sigh of relief. “God, I love magic!” Turning back to Versonae, I told Kraken. “Hey! Get her up and at it! We got things to kill. Oh, and don’t mention anything about the extra treatment.”

[What’s wrong?] Kraken asked, conferring yet again with the Flesh Golem.

[I saw the golem independently adding some more fat to Versonae’s body!] I thought, communicating along our mental link because I didn’t want her to accidentally hear this. I couldn’t believe my eyes. According to the feedback I got from the golem, Versonae was too thin. She wasn’t eating enough to keep up with the calorie requirements of constant combat. [Doesn’t matter, we all need some more fat stores.]

I took my own advice, using the golem to add a few more pounds of fat to my body. Then, as a precaution, I had Kraken separate out a few more independent mini Flesh Golems out so that the team could each have one for emergencies, just enough for them to patch up a big injury and limp back to the main healing station. I stood up, my ‘Mana-shield’ at the ready, and looked out over the battlefield. Neither Acantha were hard pressed. Both were using the well ordered lines of golems strategically, darting in and out to grab brief respites from the battle before coming back out to help sections that were about to get overrun.

I knelt next to Versonae and poked her, using a Flesh Golem to run one last check on her system before waking her up.

[You could at least do it nicely.] I turned to give Kraken a sheepish look.

[You’re welcome to do this if you want,] I said, sitting back and grabbing my Grimoire. [She’s all yours bucko.] I turned my attention to the Grimoire, flipping past the pages with spells that I already knew about. There were more in here than just the ones I’d recorded. Kraken had devoted not a small amount of time into writing down some good stuff. The pages stuffed with lists of Dwarven runes and their explanations almost demanded that I start learning right away but I doggedly kept turning the pages until something else caught my eye.

“The fuck is a ‘Sun-Bomb’?” I whispered, reading the description over and over. My finger traced the words and stopped on the last requirement which I tapped a few times. “Requires the following reagents: living flame, captured sunlight, and a fuckton of mana.” I chuckled, noting the page before moving on to the next one. “And this one is a variation, a ‘Sun-Turret’ or ‘Heaven’s-Lance’ . . . . huh. Okay, save these too but it’s not what I’m looking for. Where did these spells come from?!”

Kraken’s voice in my head was flat. [I’ll give you one guess, you myopic dunce.]

“It always comes back to the sun.” I grumbled, still flipping through the pages. More were blank than filled in but even still there was some good stuff in here that required greater study. “Sun Aelves, sunstones, the sun keeps the undead from taking over the world. Jesus, it’s like the sun is the answer.”

All of the Sun Aelves that I’d met so far ran through my head. “God I’m dumb. Nevermind. Anyways, did they give you any kind of really cool area of effect spells like a ‘Fireball’ spell or something epic like that?”

A soft groan pulled me away. I looked over to see Versonae coming to. She cringed and grabbed at her side.

“Kraken! Is she all right? Did we miss anything?” I flipped the pages of the Grimoire until I got to Kraken’s upgraded ‘Monocle’ spell and activated it. A few twists of the control runes only took a second and I had it scanning Versonae’s abdomen, looking for any hint of missed fleshrot or dark magic. After a moment, she laid back down and relaxed, turning her eyes on me. The cloudiness within them began to clear up as she took in where she was at.

“What are you looking for?” She asked right as I said, “Glad you’re still kickin’!”

We both laughed and I pulled her to a sitting position. “We don’t have a lot of time here to talk and catch up.” She nodded, clearly sensing the mood and not interjecting. “I need you to keep watch over me for ten minutes or so while I figure out a few solutions to help us all out. Kraken,” I pointed over at my familiar and then stuck one of the mini Flesh Golems on Versonae’s shoulder, “He’ll monitor your condition with one of those and make sure you’re good to go.”

Versonae shakily got her feet underneath her, her balance improving as the fact that she was healed finally began to set in. It was understandable, her hesitation. That wound would’ve been fatal in any other circumstance. It takes a strong mind to overcome that kind of trauma even if the physical evidence of it had been wiped away.

It was to her credit that without goddamn word, that slender Lunek began to do a few stretches impossible for a human and then drew her twin scimitars. I noticed that the dual axes I’d made her were missing but I didn’t make a comment. Only a note to make her some more weapons just in case.

The sounds of fighting grew more intense before five explosions, each successive one more powerful than the one before, blanketed the landscape. Once the rush of heat and wind resided, I pulled a copy of the ‘Mana-Shield’ spell and the ‘Salvo’ spell from the Grimoire and walked over to the edge of the wall.

Nothing in front of the line of golems moved. All of the sand was glass. The darkness in front was marred by the flickering lights of the burning corpses. Seeing further out was impossible as the fire destroyed any kind of night vision. Even my own enhanced eyes weren’t up to the task of piercing the night. Acantha climbed a set of stairs that grew out the front of the wall, courtesy of Sunny moonlighting as a kindly butler. Reeanth followed her with a huge smile on her face that she just couldn’t hide.

My retinue looked at each other before quickly walking over to the water elemental. I just raised one eyebrow. My vassal began walking towards me with her arms outstretched, bits of gore and carnage dripping off of her.

“Hug?”

I smirked and pointed Gungnir right at her, the spear blade glowing purple. “You can go hug the ocean for a few minutes to get clean. Then we can talk.”