“Tell us what happened!”

“Where did you go?”

“Why didn’t you say anything!?”

I wasn’t looking forward to this part of my life. The flood of questions was expected but still overwhelming. Everytime I tried to open my mouth, the women in front of me fired off yet another question. They didn’t really want answers. They wanted reassurances. They wanted the big bad sorcerer in their lives to lead them out of this shitty situation. I could see it in their faces, the eyes were full of hope and relief supported by exhaustion. It was up to me. The nightly fighting had taken a toll and still it wasn’t over.

Tired to the bone is only the start of what I saw. Everybody was on the bad side of wrecked but at least they weren’t dead. From a distance though, they could pass for corpses about to fall over. Acantha’s skin was sallow, drawn in as if using her flames cost her body something. It wasn’t just mana that was being used to fuel her unnatural flames. Dark rings around her eyes, hands hanging listlessly by her side, and her armor had been shoddily repaired over and over. It barely qualified as protection.

Reeanth wasn’t much better. More wounds criss-crossed her body than any medic would know what to do with but at least she was clean. This mad woman actually jumped in the ocean and scrubbed all the blood and nasty shit off before deciding to mob me with questions which made me more likely to actually answer her first. Her mana-maul was still in pristine condition which surprised me. The damn thing was humming, so chock full of power that it emitted its own aura of ‘smashiness’. That, or my own tiredness was getting to me and I was hallucinating the soft red glow around it.

Versonae at this point really wasn’t all here. Her furred hands with the long claws that usually would be retracted barely hung onto her weapons. A slight breeze would knock them out of her hands. Still, her fur was matted with blood and viscera. I could see more of her skin than anyone would really want to. Even now she couldn’t really get enough air to allow her body to relax to begin the real recovery process.

“Siddown’! Sit down!” I ordered, nicely a first but more firmly as they instinctively knew that this wasn’t a place to relax. I pointed at the line of sunstone golems making their way to the pylon and back to the frontline using the brief respite to charge up the most empty among them. “See? The golems are already rotating to charge and repair. Sunny over there, the sergeant in charge, is fixing the few too broken to fight and cannibalizing those smashed beyond all repair.”

As I tossed each teammate a mini Flesh Golem to get them back into fighting shape, I gave them the brief highlights of Merlin’s fuckery and how that intersected with my life. I tried to keep it brief but I found myself divulging more than I intended. These people trusted me. They deserved to know more than just the bare bones.

Acantha looked the most worried out of them all. “My wytchfire is considered an illegal weapon? How does that work? I’ve been using it plenty and nothing’s popped out of the ether to tell me otherwise.”

I squatted down, interfacing with her new Flesh Golem to help it decide what to fix first. “No . . . that’s not right. It’s how we used your wytchfire. I made a dirty nuke with it.”

She hissed in pain as something within her rearranged itself. “That was your ribs, you had a disconnected one and more than a few cracks in there.” I said, trying my best to multitask. “And I know you don’t know what a dirty nuke is, but before the Veil came crashing down, they were weapons that were greatly feared for their ability to do great damage but outlawed because they would spread death worse than the Black Death and it was extremely difficult to clean up. I used your wytchfire and my magi-tech to do something similar and threw it into the portal of the Hungry Ones. Somehow, that was against some multiversal Geneva Convention that I didn’t know about. Merlin did his wild Chaos magic bullshit and split the timestream to avoid the fallout from that.”

Reeanth nodded sagely. “Thus the severing of time, placing you in two different locations at the same time.”

I looked up sharply. “How the fuck does that make sense to you?! How!?”

She stood up, cracking her back and performing a few stretches. “Easy. It does not. It doesn’t make sense. With someone as close to the divine as Merlin, it won’t always make sense but the motivations behind it do. You said it yourself, he wants something, and he will quite literally bend time to get what he wants. Which leads to the end results that he can only get to by using his descendant, YOU.”

Versonae’s almond eyes narrowed and she attempted to growl before coughing weakly. “And how far can you trust someone who would go to such lengths?”

I turned back to her, pushing her down and making her golem kickstart the rejuvenation process. “You don’t talk much but you sure say a lot.” Acantha was pretty much good to go so I devoted my energy to having Versonae’s Flesh Golem put her in a deep healing sleep, something that I would normally do to myself if my powers weren’t on the fritz.

“She’s no good to us in this condition.” I said. Cracking my knuckles distracted me for a moment but Reeanth snapped her fingers in my face.

“Are you any good to us in this condition?” She asked. Her furtive glances into the shadows let me know that she wasn’t as relaxed as her outward appearance would indicate. Normally, I would’ve looked at her smile and slight manic look to mean that she had a fucking blast smashing undead left and right. But now, the cracks in her armor started to appear. It just took a lot of pressure to bring it out.

I shrugged. My hands tossed my own portable Flesh Golem back and forth like it was a softball made of clay. It just made a nice smack sound when it hit. “Not really but comparatively, yeah, I’m better than y’all. You’ve been fighting for a while and we can’t really rest and heal until dawn gets here in a few hours. I’m full up on mana and mentally recovering from having my foot bitten off by some kind of horrible thing that doesn’t deserve a goddamn name.”

“Horror,” Acantha said softly.

I looked up. “Huh?”

Acantha took a deep breath. “They’re called horrors. Anything that doesn’t seem to fit a category of undead . . . they’re called horrors. They’re not crafted by Liches or brought to life by necromancers . . . they’re spawned from the deepest crevices of the oldest planets within their influence. It’s what happens when purest despair and perfect torture meet in a place rife with conflict, death, and unnatural energies. Hunger and spite given form.”

I put my hand on hers, stilling the tremble that threatened to overtake her. “And that’s why I’m here.” I picked her chin up and looked her in the eye. “It’s why we’re all here. I’ve got a plan.”

Present Day - 2020 A.D. (0 A.R.) - February - New Richmond - 12 Days left

I take it all back. Droplets of ice cold water dripped down my face and neck, cold enough to make your pecker shrink and your entire body shiver uncontrollably. Liquid ice is the WORST thing to get sprayed with in the middle of putting together a new runic sequence.

The children were fucking assholes. Buckwild little turds with zero people actually parenting them. It was the Lost Boys meets Lord of the Flies and their freaking target was ME! It was funny to watch back when I was an observer but after getting invited to different homes to ‘assist’, and by assist, I mean reinvent all of modern technology in the name of practicing my enchanting, I wanted nothing to do with the blasphemous little gremlins. They were comfortable enough around me to interrupt me every five minutes and then steal something before running off like the devil himself was on their tail.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

More and more of them thought it was funny to try and distract me while I was working on my spellcraft in my free time or do their best to disrupt my enchantments WHILE I was doing them! The wands I had given them to help them learn how to manipulate mana and enchanted objects turned out to be the best and worst thing I could’ve done. The little assholes had gotten too good. Over half of the children didn’t even need the wands anymore, and the other half had elementals of either water or wood following them everywhere, just happy to cause mischief without a care in the fucking world.

But I couldn’t just smack’em. I wanted to but it wasn’t my place. Even if the parents and townspeople couldn’t really control them. A myriad of tiny treehouses and earthen homes were created and hidden by the children as if they were little nature sprites playing a game of hide and seek. I only just found out that a network of complicated tunnels with traps and dead ends criss-crossed the entire area, courtesy of the earth elementals and kid with earth wands being completely unsupervised.

Yes. It was mind-bogglingly cool. But still, when your shoes go missing and then your new experimental laser wands, it becomes less cool real quick. I took that to mean that I needed a damn vacation. It was the universe letting me know. The stars aligned and the heavens spoke TO ME, revealing that I needed some damn space. But the message came in the form of Toreen and his friends. And their usual shenanigans.

Kalderan, Umale, and Toreen, the most powerful of the Sun Aelves, also the three who were most likely to be friendly and interface with the humans, leaned against the curved rowan trees in my favorite clearing just south of New Richmond. Their evil grins faded as they vanished back into the dense forest. Not a leaf moved nor did a stick crack at all as they disappeared.

Three slender forms darted out of the tree line from different directions but at slightly varying speeds so they would get to me one at a time in a slightly staggered formation. Just as I turned to deal with the threat coming right at me, two solid blows hit me in the back of my knees and another blasted me in the left shoulder sending me flying off to the side.

My runes and spellwork dissipated into thin air as I hurtled into a boulder and slammed into the ground. All of my soul-bound gear was stored away in Gungnir with Kraken who was back at the settlement learning more wizardry from Cassandra. But those thoughts were unnecessary.

Technically, I had asked for this.

My attackers didn’t stop. Their ruthless speed and careful teamwork took me apart with a skill no human could have matched. I should’ve been able to though. My body wasn’t a normal human body. A normal, weak human male would have been plant food already. I blocked one blow in ten and even then I did my best to take the blows in places that could easily shake the devastating attacks. Luckily, nobody was armed with a blade.

There was no way I could even say what fancy style or cool martial art they used. Damn Sun Aelves. Even without magic they were fucking brutal. They danced in and out of the dappled sunbeams leaking through the forest canopy but they assured me in the past, ‘Oh, we’re not using magic’. I could have easily been confused with a punching bag getting knocked around by fighters with supernatural powers or a goddamn crash dummy that no longer had the will to live.

Damn it though, I was tired of losing.

Flesh Sorcery leaped at my call, infusing my body and my will with power and synchronizing the two parts of my body that needed it most, my will and my reflexes. Two big ‘Mana-Shield’ spells sprang into existence behind me, simple force shields that cut off my most vulnerable avenues of being attacked. And with that, I sprang forward, catching Toreen’s fist with my forehead, taking him by surprise. His hand crumpled when I grabbed it and wrenched him closer, tanking his punches and kicks just so I could land a mana-infused fist straight into his guts.

But the slippery bastard used the momentum I gave him from pulling him in to twist over the fight-ending punch and his left knee clocked me straight in the right temple. Even though I was seeing stars, my Flesh Sorcery kept my body on task, allowing me to keep my grip on his right arm and snag his knee, which I promptly power slammed his back into my knee and then again into the ground.

I ignored his groans, knowing that fixing him would be my job but this was the closest I’d come to victory in a loooong time. So I soccer kicked Toreen, launching him to the edge of the clearing where he hit the ground and rolled until a tree broke his tumble. I pulled my ‘Mana-Shields’ back to me just in time to break off new attacks from Kalderan and Umale. Deadly blades glinted in the sunlight and I knew that some more of the red tape on our usual fights had been removed.

Maybe it was my fault for taking it too far but fucking hell their beatings hurt. I know we set rules up in the beginning to prevent shit from getting personal BUT IT FELT PERSONAL!

I snarled deep in my throat, letting my miniature scales that lay across my body thicken as more and more mana pumped into them. Two scintillating flashes of light blinded me long enough for Umale to bury a blade in my calf but I put that to the side to catch Kalderan’s spear heading straight for my chest. Then, the spear flashed with light and turned into three spears.

“Illusion!” I cursed, conjuring a ‘Mana-Shield’ right in front of me. Just before the glowing blade landed, I pulled the top of my shield back so Kalderan’s momentum could foul his footing. The moment his spear clanged and shot up, I ducked and grabbed his shoulder hauling him closer into a brutal headbutt.

A stab of pain burned through my spleen, once, twice, and yet again as Umale screamed at me in a language I didn’t know. I saw red. Using Kalderan as a flail, I turned and smashed Umale into the ground. Kalderan’s boots smacked into Umale’s hands, screwing up his aim. He didn’t want to hurt his friend but taking me on by himself clearly wasn’t the path to victory. I smiled with blood on my teeth, hurling my improvised weapon into his companion and then dove into the melee, hammering any uncovered flesh with elbows and punches until both were still.

“Easy!”

I turned, snarling as my wounds tried to close through the constant exertion. If I just stood still for a moment, they’d heal but I didn’t give them a chance. A foot snapped up, catching me in the jaw. The brutal foot-based uppercut snapped my head up and a few teeth flew out. A tiny spray of blood went with it.

“EASY!”

I didn’t hear the call for peace. Most of me didn’t want to. I raised my hand, catching that bit of my own blood spraying upwards and caught it, molding it into a spike to slam it down.

“I SAID, EASY!”

A massive blast of force magic tossed the brutal melee apart like we were leaves in the wind. Immediately following that, a tsunami of a dispelling bit of magic blasted from the center completely unraveling all magic in the area.

The fog of rage left my vision and I let the temporary exhaustion of over-boosting my body with mana wash over me. I could see that no one was on their feet except for Scott who stalked into view like the deadly hunter he was. The Glyph-Blade warrior had come a long way from being a scared soldier re-inserted into a savage version of Earth, very different from the home he remembered. I also knew that Scott was unique in his Glyph-Blade tattoo choices, setting one entire pattern of runic tattoos completely dedicated to nullifying any and all kinds of magic.

His face went through a few stages of parental emotions, disbelief followed by curiosity and then disappointment at the state of things. “I thought these were supposed to be friendly spars?” Scott shook his head and then began checking in on my teachers. “Jesus, Ben! You better get your magic ass over here and fix these guys. I’m not telling Stephanie, Martina, and Mai Lin that you’re the one who did this to their husbands.”

I got the message. My Flesh Sorcery quickly began setting my own body to rights as I tended to Kalderan, Umale, and Toreen. I winced as I saw the kind of damage I could produce without overly using my Sorceries. Toreen had it the worst but was actually the easiest to fix. He was the one whose back I broke and then made worse when I kicked him and sent him flying into the woods. The nerves were easy to reattach and the discs in his spine didn’t take much to put back in alignment. After fixing his major issues, I infused his body with a slower over time regeneration bit of magic so any and all bruising and muscle soreness would be taken care of but not fast enough that he wouldn’t profit from our sparring session.

That last bit is something that I learned about my own powers recently. If I heal someone too quickly or don’t pay close attention, I can heal them back to perfect health, undoing the effects of strenuous exercise. That took a particular kind of healing energy, more along the lines of boosting the body’s natural ability to regenerate instead of closing a wound. In effect, shrinking the amount of time it takes the body to recover from lifting weights from two to three days to a few hours.

Umale and Kalderan weren’t happy with me. I apologized a few times as I set broken bones and healed them but I didn’t act like a bitch. These assholes actually used freaking blades on me. I did recognize that they didn’t go for lethal blows but that doesn’t mean they didn’t hurt. But after a few minutes of not being in intense pain anymore, we all got to laughing about it.

Until Scott interrupted again. “I didn’t come out here for no reason!” New Richmond’s second in command dropped a heavy pack on the ground. “One, whatever this insanity is, I want in. And two . . . I heard you needed a few more materials for your Grimoire?”