Future Past Day - 2020 A.D. (0 A.R.) - February - Greenland

“Is this wise, my lord?”

Contrary to the current popular opinion, my grin wasn’t as evil as it appeared to be. My elongated canines poked through my lips every time I smiled but I couldn’t help it.

I felt gooooood.

“Fuck wise.” I said, unable to suppress the snarling undertone. For once, I was looking Reeanth in the eye. Standing toe to toe with her felt real good. Her attitude wavered between respect and uncertain fear. Instead of sleeping for two hours to recover before nightfall as was our initial plan, I used my mini Flesh Golem to overhaul my body as much as possible, adding a foot and a half of height along with an extra fifty pounds of reptilian muscle, denser bone, and magically strengthened tendons. The big scales on my chest, back, arms, and thighs boasted upgraded runes to boost my overall durability while the rest of my scales had miniature runic spells engraved into them. It took everything in me to not let my tongue be a forked thing and add horns to my head just to look even scarier.

I hefted Gungnir in its new war-mace form, giving it a light swing. “You were right. There are other solutions. I just needed to think outside the box even more.”

Kraken chortled. “Even if you had to depopulate this particular bay of the Atlantic.”

I laughed right along with him. “Who knew sushi could be this empowering?” I flexed my arm, muscle bulging at the seams of my armor. SAW had to consume more metal, courtesy of our residential elemental sergeant Sunny, in order to accommodate my super-massive growth spurt.

Reeanth took a timid step back, shaking her head and looking to Acantha and Versonae for help. But there was none to be found. Both of them were looking at me with awe. Reeanth gathered herself and pointed at me. “I remain unmoved, my lord. You haven’t tested your new body, nor have you practiced combat in it.”

Kraken floated between us. “You both are correct but this is the best solution with the time we have available. Splashy-”

I rolled my eyes, muttering underneath my breath. “What a dumb name.”

“Splashy!” Kraken said with more emphasis. “With my guidance, has taken the liberty to gather five times the amount of fish from the ocean to preemptively feed the Flesh Golems. They will be a bigger burden at first but I believe that if they mold themselves to each of your shoulders and spine similar to a pack, then they can enhance and heal you throughout combat. Not just when the fighting is over or during a break.”

“It also means that my Flesh Golem can help me tune this body to the point where my movements are natural.” I said, turning so my team could see that my mindless golem companion was already set on me like a smaller rucksack. Frowning at the dimming light, I stepped further away from the fortress wall and closer to the beach so I could stand in the light of the setting sun. “That’s what you guys missed while sleeping. Not only did I keep watch along with Sunny, but I’ve been stretching and doing light exercises and movement drills while being upgraded so I’m not a complete klutz.”

“What else can you do?” Acantha asked, her eyes shining with unholy fire. The setting sun did nothing to dim the flames racing along her figure. “Please tell me there’s more other than being a hot half-dragon???”

Versonae stepped closer, poking at the few exposed scales near my midsection. “You’ve missed a few spots.” She commented, mildly poking me with her razor sharp claws. One of her blades made a slight hiss as it was unsheathed and I hopped a bit further towards her other side.

I healed the light scratches and swatted at her hand. “Fuckin’ hell, you have some needles on you. Yes, I’m waiting on Sunny to find some more metal to transmute for me. I need just a few more raw materials before I’m fully suited up but it is over 90% there.” And since everyone else felt fine pointing at me, I did the same and put my finger right in her nose. “No testing weapons on me before an all night brawl with the undead.”

My firmness only stopped her for a moment before she darted in again. This time, I pivoted so her blade, which I made, glanced off a much thicker scale on my back. Using my momentum, I leaned to the right and pushed with my right foot to stand up straight as firmly as I could, letting Versonae slip and smash her face into my side while her blade slipped past me.

Blood sprayed from her nose as soft flesh met durable scaly protection. With a twist, low kick to the ankle and then a knee drop, I held her down with Setan Kober at her throat. “Satisfied?” I grunted, watching her eyes uncross before admiration filled them. Just to get my point across, I grabbed her other blade and slashed my thigh with it before dragging the edge down my leg to my ankle. The sharp edge did absolutely nothing to my armor nor did it do anything to my mana-enhanced scales.

I let her up and dusted myself off while she fixed her nose with her own Flesh Golem. “Not as squishy as I used to be.”

Steady, heavy footprints heralded Sunny approaching with chunks of rocky ore that was mostly gray with streaks of green mixed in. Kraken lit up, twirling in the air before zooming over. “That’s the stuff that titanium comes from! Ilmenite ore! Oh yes! Tell me you have more!”

Sunny dropped the ore on the ground and turned to the side where five more sunstone golems approached with massive arms full of the ilmenite ore.

My familiar let out a huge sigh of relief and then landed on Splashy who was chilling at the closest spot on the beach where the waves washed up. “We don’t have time now but in the morning we can use Sunny, Acantha, and myself to extract the titanium from that ore and then we can build more weapons and armor as needed!”

“Better yet,” I said, flipping through the pages of my Grimoire. “We can use Sunny to help build you a beefy ass golem body, Kraken. Let you be our serious heavy hitter to fight alongside Sunny.”

Kraken almost exploded with joy at the thought of being able to physically contribute. But a horrible screech broke our moment just as the last light from the sunset faded.

Acantha said what we were all thinking. “Fuck.”

********

As much as I hated to admit it, I was the ‘reserve’. My job was to sit my greatly enhanced butt next to the pylon and use my fantastic mana-regeneration to fill up the pylon while everyone else supported the golem army protecting said pylon. I felt like the infantry soldier fresh out of boot camp ready to rock and roll but tasked with sitting still until someone died and I had to take their place. Kraken floated above the pylon looking as if he were going to be alighting on its tip at any moment.

“HOW’S IT GOING UP THERE!” I yelled, making sure to keep one hand on the pylon so I could divert my extra mana into its growing stores of power.

“GOOD! YOUR GOLEMS ROCK! WELL, MY GOLEMS ROCK!” Kraken sighed and floated down to hover in front of me. “I really wish your sorceries weren’t on the fritz. I get that they’re keeping you alive in two different time streams but our mental communication being screwed up is pissing me off. Who knew I’d miss excellent coordination so much.”

I laughed quietly before leaning back. No position felt good and I couldn’t even use Earth Sorcery to mold my surroundings for a bit of comfort. “Yeah, I miss your annoying ass too. Do you think it’s gonna work? Our plan, I mean?”

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“Yes.” Kraken nodded firmly before holding up tentacles so he could ‘tick’ off parts of our plan. “Earth hasn’t fully integrated yet with the multiverse so the Hungry Ones can’t bring their big guns to bear. And the golems really are far more powerful than the run of the mill undead horror. Acantha plays a bigger role here too, one of her field clearing spells has hints of celestial fire that not only burns undeath, but it spreads! It’s so hot that anything is fuel but it can even feed off of the energy of the undead. When the swarms get a bit too big, she throws that out there with a few blasts of dragonfire and everyone can get a big long break.”

Grinning my tooth grin, I looked up over the wall. I couldn’t actually see anything except for random bits of glowing coronas from Acantha flinging her fire spells around. Rarely, zombie parts were flung upwards by Reeanth swinging for the hills or Sunny trying to compete with her.

“You know, I just thought of something you’ve been missing.” Kraken noted, humming a bit to himself. “You’ve done a deep dive on your sorceries but haven’t done a good exploration of Gungnir in a while. Maybe check in on your matter-to-mana generators in there and see how they’re doing. Nothing seemed unstable last I looked but the power output is lesser somehow. Merlin probably tampered with it.”

“Good idea.” I muttered, closing my eyes to concentrate. In ideal conditions, I could just harness the near-endless power output of the two generators to fill up the pylon. A gut feeling told me that it wouldn’t be that easy. Just thinking about it made my stomach queasy.

Minutes of steady breathing went by before I relaxed enough to tap into a stray spark of Consciousness Sorcery. Normally, this would have been the work of two seconds for my magic to put me in the exact right state of mind to commune with my soul on a deep level but Merlin had seen fit to strip my advantages away.

Bastard.

At least the asshole wasn’t completely correct. Just mostly correct. My sorceries were locked away, yes, but not completely. They couldn’t be as they were a part of my inner being. I had to have them at this point to sustain living. It’s more accurate to say that 99% of my Sorcerous abilities were locked away. Merlin was also less than correct about my Mana Sorcery being available to me. It was mostly unavailable except for minor flashes of insight that let me walk down the path of understanding at a slighter faster pace than a normal wizard. I couldn’t just inundate an enchantment with my magical senses and understand it at a primal level like I used to. Instead, I had to work with teasing feelings that felt like ephemeral memories hanging around just out of reach.

The storage space within Gungnir finally came into view as my mind synced with the correct frequency. Kraken had really done the place up. The haphazard piles of mana batteries had been reorganized and carefully stacked up to mimic usable furniture. A sectional couch of perfectly placed mana batteries sat in front of the two mana generators sitting on their pedestals and the angelic blades hovered between them.

I tried to examine the Fallen Blades but I might as well have been trying to do surgery on my own eye with a freaking blow torch. Casting my senses near them scalded the inside of my brain. “It’s my fucking weapon!” I cursed, turning away. From what I could tell, the blades of the former Heavenly Hosts were beautiful scimitars but their visage flickered to appear like twin longswords with the iconic crosspiece handle guard.

Turning my gaze down to examine my generators, I was stunned as my senses adjusted to the glow. These were not the same generators that I built that Kraken overhauled a long time ago. When I made them, they were cylindrical pillars covered in runes of gold and silver. Kraken reshaped them into cubes with an inner layer of slate and a core of limestone meant to break down and give a much bigger output if needed. Kraken had gone so far as to shape protective runes out of cold iron and platinum which would greatly increase the durability so that the rising levels of ambient mana (and my own significant stores of power) wouldn’t disrupt the semi-nuclear process.

My generators shimmered until the haze fell away and I saw a creation that only a mad Tesla-like psycho could dream up. Both generators were now floating spheres that were made up of no less than five layers laid on top of one another. The outermost layer of each one was covered in six inch spikes poking out in every direction. I watched in stunned silence as crackles of pure mana lanced out, behaving like slow lightning, before the other generator sucked in the raw output from the other generator. Pulses of alien power bounced back and force, each blast causing the receiving generator to vibrate and spin but as soon as the spins synced up, that generator would blast out to link up with its twin.

“What in the ever living universe am I looking at?” It wasn’t just common sense that told me not to touch the crazy ass inventions, but my flesh crawled to the point where my mind registered on a hidden level that one wrong move would vaporize my consciousness. Keeping caution at the forefront of my mind, I moved back until the mental projection of myself was as far away as I could and the moment I did that, my vision cleared up.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

I didn’t comment. I didn’t whirl around in surprise. Kraken’s presence was calming for once.

“Take your time. Use the ‘Monocle’ spell and learn what you can. Acantha’s having fun turning the beach to glass so we’re in no danger.”

My Grimoire snapped into existence in front of me inside of Gungnir and flipped to a page of its own accord. One of Kraken’s earlier ‘Monocle’ spells stood out. It was his attempt at trying to divine the future through symbology and natural flows of magic but even though it was a complete failure in that regard, the spell stumbled upon a serious advantage. It found the right sigils to decode human emotion so they could be seen. Using my personal variant of the ‘Monocle’ spell and adjusting it using Kraken’s failed version, the spell coalesced slowly in front of me until I could lay my eyes on the flickering swords.

I almost let the spell go in disbelief but held onto its shape due to mental muscle memory. The entire backside of Gungnir’s spatial storage space appeared to be a massive circle, one that anyone on Earth would know well. It was the damn Yin-Yang black and white symbol of Chaos and Order. If you stood back and looked at the perfect angle, the entire picture fell into place. At the very center sat the angel blades and the white hole on the black side and the black hole on the white side were represented by the floating generators. Merlin had gone full Buddhist on me.

“So that’s what it takes to screw with time.” I muttered, shaking my head in wonder. Tweaking the settings a bit on the ‘Monocle’ spell clarified the dense flows of energy that my untrained senses took to be fog. The hyper-dense mana behaving like lightning was oscillating in a cycle that revolved just like the Taoist symbol. I watched as the energy blasts went from right to left arcing up and then down before zapping from left to right by arcing down and then up. The counter-clockwise motion spun, keeping the backlit symbol in motion as well as if they were connected the way gears on a bicycle are locked together.

As violent as the energy was, I could see that it was contained within the incredible suction, the veritable event-horizon of the angelic swords drinking in the overflowing power. Watching the interlocking flows of power only got more interesting the longer I stared at it. Between the crossed blades, a miniature anomaly rotated at inhuman speeds, so much so that it created a suction force. Looking at it was impossible as my eyes kept crossing.

My mind wandered as I muttered aloud. “Does this mean that there’s multiple heavens? Different paradises for sentient life to choose? This isn’t something human hands could have made . . . . ever.”

I laughed harshly. “God, I’m stupid. Merlin isn’t really making this whole time bullshit happen. Sure, he set it up, but the entire mechanism, the engine . . . it’s all right here. The asshole revamped my generators, hooked them up to a big ol’ Chaos and Order rune more dangerous than anything I’ve ever seen, and funneled that into some mystical energy left over from the angelic blades. At this point, my mind was so fuzzled that I couldn’t remember which angel had originally put the blades in there, Gav’riel or Maalik.

Even though it was just a mental projection of myself that stood within Gungnir, I put my hands to my forehead and rubbed my temples. “And that explains why I can’t actually use the full output of the generators. All my power has been hijacked to make the impossible happen.” I futilely kicked at a piece of furniture and the foot of my mental project just whooshed right through it. “Fucking hell, I’m a damn mouse looking at a spaceship and sayin, ‘oh yeah, I know what’s going on’.” Snorting at my own insignificance, I just gazed at the incredible work of mad genius in front of me.

Just as I turned to exit and get back to the real world, a hint of a spark caught my eye. My curiosity wouldn’t let it go so I carefully tuned the controls on the ‘Monocle’ spell as I inched forward. Another flash caught me again letting me know that I wasn’t just seeing things and my careful approach continued. It didn’t become apparent until I removed Kraken’s part of his ‘Monocle’ spell that I was looking at. The innermost core of the rotating matter-to-mana generators, the hyperdense limestone covered with slate, was noticeably shrinking.

I froze in my tracks. My butthole puckered so tight that my pants almost ripped. The generators, which by all accounts and the configurations Kraken had stuck in there, should have lasted for at least a century if they were turned up to full blast. These two reworked pieces of Sorcerous madness had been overtuned to the point where their energy would run out in a matter of weeks!

I didn’t know the math to guesstimate how long I had but Merlin said ‘four weeks’. I had four weeks to get shit done, clean this place up, and be ready to get the fuck outta dodge.

Kraken’s brutal slap hit me upside the head, pulling me out of the meditative trance.

“BUCK UP! WE GOT COMPANY!”