I didn’t get the chance to use it. It was such a good idea. Be safe. Stay at the top of the wall. Let the golems do the brutal legwork. From up here, it looked like they barely needed the bit of support from Reeanth and Acantha. I mean, they were doing a good job. Kraken had instilled solid infantry tactics, holding a line, swinging the ax right after shoving forward their gigantic tower shields carved out of bedrock.

It was my very own Justice League movie. Jack Snyder couldn’t have made a better scene. The growing horde of unsymmetrical undead monsters getting torn apart in the dying light by a determined phalanx of gigantic combat golems crafted from sunstone bathed in the desert sun. If one part of the infantry line threatened to cave in from the swarm, the golems used their shoulder mounted coordination crystals to fire powerful beams of condensed sunlight mixed with pure mana to mow down their attackers .The tide began to turn however as the saturation of undead reached its peak.

It seemed to happen all at once. The shadows weren’t anyone’s friend. Every hint of darkness that you weren’t looking potentially held a deadly threat. Undead magic users popped out of the darkness, using the numbers of the lesser zombies to disguise their entrance. Every strip of shadow was used like it was their very own. Unholy creations stepped out of the black to smash the forwardmost golems into chunks and then slipped back into the nether. I sighted down my rifle, rotating the barrel to explosive crystal round, calmly fired six rounds that cleaned out three writhing knots and something yanked me over the wall flinging me twenty yards in front of my golems’ line.

My reflexes weren’t so dead that I didn’t prepare. I watched in mid-air as something large and with too many teeth ate my rifle but got blown sky high as the power control mechanism ruptured, the stored mana disintegrating everything within five meters. I didn’t have time to laugh though. I cleared the area I was going to land in with my enhanced ‘Mana-Bolt’ spell wrapped around my left wrist. As long as I channeled mana into it, it would fire high-powered rounds of force, pure energy but giving results similar to a United States Army kinetic missile. This particular version I thought of as my ‘Salvo’ spell. I loved it because it turned the ‘Mana-Bolt’ spell into an automatic firearm, slower than a normal machine gun but a blast every 1.5 seconds is still a lot of deal to hand out.

“Fucking bast-!” I said, unable to finish my usual litany of epithets as claws tore against SAW’s outer coat, launching me forward and into the ground. I landed awkwardly on top of Gungnir, the mace form not damaging me but still driving the air from my chest. Slithery fingers picked me up by my leg and dangled me in front of rotting horrors sprinting at me faster than gazelles. The acid began to slowly burn through SAW’s coating on my leg.

[BEN!] Kraken screamed, wanting to help but unable to without leaving Versonae to die. [Fight back!]

I partially managed to shake off the aftershocks of being flung around, blasting the offending tentacle until it dropped me. Letting the instincts of my enhanced body pull me down into the flood of rage that had always lived beneath the surface of my joking demeanor, I fought with greater strength and ferocity than I ever had before.

SAW extended a three foot blade from my left arm giving me a brutal scythe to work with. Gungnir’s black mace head exploded and reconstituted itself, becoming a large sphere of mixed energies several times larger than the original mace head. Within the globe, a storm of power swirled like a hurricane promising True Death to all in its way. I smiled, flinging myself forward parallel to the great wall.

I saw how this could have been much easier, far simpler if I had my sorceries at my beck and call. I could’ve sunk the entire army beneath the sands with my powers or simply had the ocean grind them to dust using the sand as a blender. The dying forest behind them could’ve been a living blender, tearing apart the untold amounts of rotting flesh and using it for fertilizer. But I found it hard to complain. Never before had I been forced to rely upon my body in such a way. Never before did I have to fucking ‘man up’ and muscle my way out of here.

But I did. SAW’s arm blade sliced through heads with too many mouths, severed limbs that moved as if they had no bones. Gungnir massive energy ball crackled with false lightning, the pure mana amplifying my swings to god-like levels. Each swing couldn’t fail with the sheer number of enemies around me, explosions ran out with every twist of my arm as countless zombies offered themselves up to me in their haste to taste living flesh.

My ‘Salvo’ spell put the .m249 machine gun to shame, the piercing rounds lasering through rows of shrieking targets four deep before petering out. Instinctively, I reached for my Water Sorcery in order to use the nephilim water arms to assist in keeping the swarm at bay. But my soul ran up against that thin film, that invisible wall keeping my powers separated from me. Even my soul-tree railed against the wall keeping us apart.

“Shit!” I snarled, the rebound hitting me worse than before. My legs almost went out from underneath me and my ‘Salvo’ spell flickered out. SAW’s blade shrank from three feet down to only a foot in length. It was at that moment that my combat high failed me.

An agonizing crunch and grind snapped something underneath me, hurling me to the ground and I felt pain like I’d never felt before. I kept rolling, screaming bloody murder and tried to stand up. My leg failed me. I tried to take a step forward and rolled as my splintered ankle and missing foot proved to be unreliable in the muck. I didn’t want to look down but I had to. Everything from two inches above my ankle and below was simply gone. Splintered bone and ruined flesh wept blood that looked black in the twilight. My blood steamed as it hit the almost frozen sand around me.

My open wound invigorated the masses of bloodthirsty enemies. Most diverted their attention from assaulting the golems to my exposed weakness. Even more decided that they wouldn’t mind eating the sand that had been touched by my blood. Their screams of ecstasy and imminent victory chilled me to the bone.

I couldn’t function. White hot pain lanced through my side, ripping at my nerves like I could actually feel the monster behind me still chewing on my foot. The butt of Gungir caught the ground and only a nearby explosion saved me, blasting away the undead who drew nearer sensing my blood. Svalinn’s passive mana shield and SAW’s kinetic dispersal runes kept me from being turned into a bloody smear, well, that and my super enhanced body. I was in an ocean of creatures hungry for me and until just a minute ago I was the alpha shark. Now, I was a stranded dolphin with an open wound.

A heavy hand hauled me up by my collar and tossed me diagonally towards the wall closer to Acantha’s position. I landed on my back and rolled a few times before bumping into her legs. She grimaced, looking at where my leg spurted a few weak pumps of blood. My Flesh Sorcery wasn’t at my usual beck and call but my body did still have a very weak regeneration.

“Fuck no! Fuck no! FUCK NO!” I screamed as Acantha leaned over, stretching out her hand towards my wound. “NOOOOOOOO!”

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

Her face said she was sorry but still she didn’t back up. “I’m sorry! It’s for your own good!”

I screamed over and over, trying to back up further even though the wall prevented me from moving anymore. My screams did me no good. Even though my slowly closing wound was being assisted by SAW clamping down on my thigh like a tourniquet. “We don’t have time! And I can’t risk you dying!”

She turned to unleash a tsunami of red fire so dense that it looked like a wave of blood, picking up the closest undead and pushing them away as it burned them to ash. For a moment, the core of that wave of fire flickered with a pair of black eyes seeming to invigorate all nearby flames.

I lurched to the side but it didn’t stop the Fire Witch from doing what she knew was right. She turned back to me after granting our immediate area a brief reprieve from the fight. I still tried to back away. The pain made me weak. I didn’t have my power to tamp down on the connection between the nerves in my spine and my leg. I didn’t even know any wizardry healing spells. And so, I felt every bit of Acantha’s living fire cook my wound. Velvet flames seared my shattered and bleeding ankle closed, the unbridled agony of burning flesh smacking me unconscious.

Rough rocking woke me back up less than a minute later, the giant solid arms of a golem cradling me like a baby as it bashed its way to get closer to where Kraken waited with Versonae. Reeanth fought next to the golem, trying to stem the tide that threatened to crash over everything. Weakly, I pulled myself up more to see, thankful that I could still feel Gungnir in my hand.

With a whisper of pain-fueled will, my magnificent weapon launched a dozen over-charged crystal grenades into the horde, the explosions creating holes that only took a moment to fill back in.

Reeanth snarled as her mana-maul smashed through the zombies, launching blasts of mana that further destroyed anything in their path . Behemoths fell to her swings and Spot happily tore through any that seemed too prepared to jump into Reeanth’s blindside.

“You aren’t ready for the front-line!” She screamed, somehow growing larger the longer she fought. Her entire body glowed with mana, infusing her with a strength and durability that rivaled my golems. The alien Centauri woman showed me her wrath and staunch loyalty with her sheer, unmitigated violence. Large booted feet stomped heads like overripe fruits and dark wraiths were plucked out of the air and tossed towards Spot who bathed them with rivers of flame.

Acantha always took advantage of Spot’s flaming breath, screaming with joy as she manipulated and empowered it to form fire elementals that desired to bring the entire battlefield to naught but ash. I fired crystal rounds and launched grenades from Gungnir with impunity but it didn’t seem to help at all. I might as well have been throwing pebbles in the ocean for all the good I was doing.

Putting one hand on the golem and forcing my mind into it, I yelled, “Throw me that way!” I pointed with Gungnir towards Kraken and subsequently was flung like a small sack of flour up and over the crenellations. My leg again made itself the center of my existence as it banged against the solid stone more than once, the wound opening up once more.

[Good! You’re here!] Kraken exclaimed. He turned his one eye down at the shorter leg. [That’s not good!]

I roared back at him. “NO SHIT! ASSHOLE! FUUUUCK!” I pulled some spare clothes from Gungnir, emptying the storage space until I got to a shitty belt I’d made a while ago. Using that, I wrapped it around my thigh in the crook above the knee and tied a knot. Using Gungnir itself in its mace form, I shoved the wooden shaft underneath the knot and began to rotate, cranking harder and screaming with every quarter turn until I was sure zero blood was moving below that point.

[I hope the water elemental returns soon!] Kraken whispered, pushing the floating Grimoire closer to me. [Get some spells ready just in case.]

Stupid familiar. I hated his suggestion. Because duh, of course I need spells to do anything. I have tons of stored mana in Gungnir and my own personal stores of mana were considerable, but my Sorceries were GONE. Tamped down. My connection to the powers that set me head and shoulders above any other magic user were throttled to less than two percent of their normal capacity. I had just enough to make sure that my soul wasn’t actually gone, and just enough to feel the connections forged between my soul and my soul-bound items. I was four-fifths of the way to being useless and I KNEW IT.

I leaned back, the sweat making the filth covering me even worse. A massive hand of bleached bone reached up and gripped the top of the wall. Fear and adrenaline spurred me to lurch forward and grab my floating Grimoire. My left and right hand frantically flipped pages and slapped the ‘Salvo’ spell, pulling the requisite price from me. I drained myself of mana, blasting the fingers over and over until they were dust. With an unearthly scream of rage, the bone giant fell back. I saw Reeanth for a split second jump up high enough to be visible before she crashed down like an avenging comet, finishing what I started.

Staying where I was wasn’t easy. Vulnerable, eight feet from the lip of the wall, weak from blood loss, bereft of Sorceries, and my tools weren’t at their best. Svalinn snarled, our tenuous link even getting a reaction out of my stoic shield. Its growling held a deeper meaning, it wanted to be out there fighting the good fight but couldn’t. Svalinn’s powers were intrinsically linked to my own. The Sorceries locked away within my soul had to be present in all their glory in order for my gauntlet/shield to be used to its fullest potential. The mana I provided absent my usual powers just wasn’t enough.

But I did have tons of mana. Literal tons of enchanted bricks chock full pure mana stored away in piles of mana batteries within Gungnir. And my Sorceries weren’t required to access those. Meaning I could use my ‘Salvo’ spell as needed to keep me safe up here and power the damn Flesh Golem whenever it got its due.

I just had to hold on.

*******

Reeanth’s perspective

The Centauri warrior flew across the sands, not trusting the footing available and instead using extremely controlled, tightly focused blasts of mana from her boots to propel herself. Her feet never technically touched the ground, only using the vast depths of magical power stored within her mana-maul and power-storage necklace instead of the faulty surface of the beach. The foe in front of her and on all sides instinctively used the darkness and all the foul magics that are gifted to such as those who embrace Undeath.

But this type of fight was simplicity itself. Pure combat. Nothing more. Nothing less. Difficult yes, but straightforward. So much so that Reeanth couldn’t help the smile on her face. She crowed victoriously as she worked her maul with all the power that her enhanced Centauri body could produce. “What a wonderful release!” She screamed, swinging for the hills, crushing skulls and shattering bony plates of armor that did absolutely nothing to stop the devastating power of her swings. “What a glorious outlet for any true Centauri warrior! Finally! A true and honest foe with no hidden desires, no devious machinations, zero extraneous motives, just pure bloodlust being expressed through unfettered battle. There is nothing better!”

Reeanth’s leaps only gave her more power, making her favorite move supremely effective. Each leap allowed her to leave and re-enter combat, a giant, hammer wielding grasshopper yelling herself hoarse as the maul sent omni-directional shockwaves out when it hit the ground.

“I even got to save my liege!” Reeanth hurled herself into another behemoth, her first swing removing the oversized dual purpose arm that functioned as a battering ram and a shield. Her second swing came down from above like an avenging angel riding a meteor, splitting the earth and destroying five more zombies behind it. “Oh the joy! And a chance to cut loose . . . to lose one’s self in the midst of unchecked battle? Earth had never held such promise to me before!” She looked around, her blood rising to the occasion. “I might stay here a while!”