Future Past Day - 2020 A.D. (0 A.R.) - February - Greenland - One week in
Daybreak sucked. The nights of the past week had dragged on beyond all belief but the day I’d been looking forward to was finally here.
Was it everything I wanted? Sunshine, rainbows, refreshing ocean breeze to hamper the smell of the beach full of rotting dismantled corpses? Pretty much was more than enough to sour my mood and motivate my ass to GTFO.
At least Kraken was on top of everything. Organization was his strong suit and he’d been planning for days since the boredom of repetition was getting on all of our nerves. Today was the day. Today was the day we were moving from the half-crap beach base to setting up camp two miles ahead where my beginnings of a base with the alder thicket Yggdrasil lay.
Sunny, Reeanth, and Acantha had already taken an hour to scout ahead and blow up any and all tunnels that they could find. My team stood guard while Sunny sank any trace of tunnels that he could find but he went above and beyond the call of duty to sink columns of thick stone down in there so digging out would be a pain. Other spots he transmuted the softened dirt into massive plugs of granite that would dissuade all but the most stubborn of diggers.
While I grumpily concentrated on mana-regeneration meditation techniques, my team kept busy scouting and preparing for the trip ahead. Our situation wasn’t perfect but honestly it was better than anyone would believe. At this point, our golem attrition rate wasn’t too bad as Sunny could regenerate most if not all broken golems and Kraken just copy-pasted the basic programming from a working golem into the newly repaired one. We were working with nine hundred and thirteen golems total, down from the original five thousand that initially assaulted the fortress to the secondary thousand of when I rejoined the force after the time-travel shenanigans. So in the last week, we lost eighty-seven.
But I had a plan to beef our numbers back up. We just had to get to the alder thicket to get that good juice. Yggdrasil’s very existence bleeds off incredible amounts of power, power we could use to recharge everything. Fill up Gungnir’s stores of power, fill up the pylon, top us all off, use that excess power along with pieces of broken golems to make a bunch more to fill up our numbers.
“Tell me again how this is going to work?” Acantha said, wiping the dirt and sweat off her face. The witches had zero issues with nudity but she kept her clothes on to appease my sense of good manners and proper boundaries. To compensate, she was using a large stone tub crafted by Sunny and filled with pure water by Splashy and just heating it up herself. Splashy, our well-paid water elemental, had the good sense to keep changing out the water as Acantha boiled herself over and over, to include her armor, to get clean.
Stepping out of the tub, my minion-apprentice shook out her mane and dried herself off using Fire Sorcery as easy as breathing. I was jealous.
“You and the team have already done the hard part,” I said, leaning against Gungnir. The butt of my spear sank into the sand of the beach. “You guys have destroyed the tunnels, made sure Sunny plugged everything up tight, and gathered up enough broken golems pieces together for us to generate a few hundred new golems when we get to the next FOB.”
She huffed at my use of an acronym so I rolled my eyes and drew in the saw. “FOB, forward operating base. We are at one right now, the beachhead fortress.” I drew a crappy sand castle with a long wall in front of it and then put a vertical squiggly line to denote the nearby river. “We travel parallel to the river underground using Sunny to create a big, stable tunnel and all the other golems will either push or pull the giant ass pylon.”
I swept the sand clean with my foot before drawing another crappy scene. “Here, two to three miles north, we stop a few hundred feet underneath the living alder thicket with the root of Yggdrasil within it and use that excess power to rebuild the golems and resupply everyone’s mana stores.”
Versonae took her turn in the tub but being a Lunek, she didn’t give a solitary fuck about propriety. Acantha was kind enough to heat the water up over and over for her as Splashy filled and emptied it to get rid of the nasty water filled with grime and dried gore. Her voice was a bit hoarse from a week of fighting throughout the nights so she didn’t talk much. I was surprised when she growled at me with some heat.
“And we’re supposed to sit in a dark tunnel for yet another week or two just to travel and surprise a fortress?” She glared at me before she spat in the sand. “Foolish human. Why not race around and surprise from the east? You said there are mountains curving around anyways?”
I looked her dead in the eye before nodding solemnly. “That’s a good point. I’m glad you brought that up. There are a few points here from a strategy perspective that we’ll need to address.” I began making tally marks in the sand as I spoke to illustrate my points.
“One, if we disappear from the beach after collapsing the tunnels, whatever army they send after us will be traveling over land and we want to avoid more fighting until we’re ready. Second, Sunny can pull ambient mana from underneath the ground so that plus us riding along with the pylon while donating excess mana will help minimize the overall mana loss as we travel. Third, the pylon plus the ‘Sunstone’ golems will give us plenty of light. Fourth, those on the team with living bodies, I plan on having us rest the entire time as much as possible. Sunny will reshape the pylon so it will have skids, places to lay down or sit, so not only will we travel in style but we will also be more comfortable than not.”
Reeanth took her turn getting clean but she honored my sense of propriety, bathing with her clothes on but she did wash her armor separately after her own bath. Part of me was fascinated, not by the half-dressed completely soaked female form, but by the fact that part of me still hadn’t gotten over just how goddamn big the Centauri were. I beefed my body up to be seven feet tall and filled out with as much lean muscle mass as my Flesh Golem could slap on without undercutting my balance and STILL Reeanth had six inches and thirty pounds on me.
They just grew’em bigger.
Assholes. The whole lot of them.
“I’ve already given this crazy plan my stamp of approval,” Reeanth grunted, wringing out her hair. “We get in, tunnel to remain hidden, attack at dawn from the east, and blow the damn castle to kingdom come.” She glanced at me. “Did I say that right?”
I nodded. “Yes mam. That’s the plan. Minus the whole ‘blowing them up’ part. We need to attack, yes, but I can’t risk destroying the portal at the top. Still need that thing in one piece, just need it shut down. And shut down for good.”
It was Acantha’s turn to spit in the sand. “You do understand that what you just said makes this entire effort that much harder.”
“Tell it to Merlin,” I said with a sigh. Some nervous part of me wanted a tic, like biting my nails or irrationally tapping my foot to some rhythm only known to me. “Motherfucker tied in my generators and my sorceries to this timey-wimey bullshit so I could undo a Geneva Convention fiasco while stemming the flow of undead AND ALSO securing the Earth against one of the greatest long term threats. I’m just along to pull the fuckin’ trigger and get back to my smoothie jungle.”
Acantha kicked sand on me before hopping back with a smirk on her face. “We didn’t come this far for you to mope and act like a woman.”
I whirled around on her, trying to hide my grin. “Hey! The only one around here who gets to be sexist is me. Knock that shit off and be a good little and heat me up some bathwater. Hop to it, minion!”
Rolling her eyes, Acantha dipped one finger in the tub just long enough for it to come to a seething boil. I smiled before stripping to my skivvies and washing most of the gunk off in the freezing cold ocean. SAW’s native magic allowed it to always be clean but the rest of the metal plates and dragon scales still held on to more than their fair share of gore and nastiness. I took the time to scrub with seawater and sand before I motioned Splashy over to give me a solid pair of rinses.
“Ahhh! That’s the stuff.” Sinking low into the big tub felt like being pampered by a five star hotel. My greatly enhanced dragonoid skin soaked up the warmth and I luxuriated in the cleansing steam. My initial moments of pure bliss were interrupted by a deep bark that turned into a higher pitched howl.
I turned to see Spot charge towards me in his most massive form before leaping into the air only to turn into his smallest form and powerbomb dive right on top of me. The tub exploded outward and I just lay in the mess sputtering for air as Spot let out a series of joyful barks before charging away into the ocean.
After a few minutes of recovery, my flesh golem had to fix a few deep bruises, I hopped out of the small crater and had Sunny make me a new tub. Stubbornly, I directed Splashy to refill the new tub and then Acantha kindly reheated the water even while she rolled her eyes. “You know he’s coming back to do it again.”
I shrugged before dipping back into the water. This time, as Spot approached with the enthusiasm of a three year old hopped up on a whole pack of pixie sticks, I simply held up one hand and conjured a large ‘Mana-Shield’ that was angled gently towards the side. Spot landed on my shield, desperately scrabbling at the translucent mana trying not to fall off. With a mournful howl, his furry red butt landed in the dirt and he stared at me with those big puppy eyes.
“Stuff it, you mutt,” I grumbled, letting the heat of the water sluice away my woes. “I got a big job for you and it requires that I get a little peace of mind.”
My loyal canine friend turned around and faced the ocean, slamming his butt in the ground but even he couldn’t stop from wagging his tail. I let him sulk as I rinsed off and proceeded to wash my armor again before dawning it. Splashy was kind enough to wick the remaining water away so I didn’t have to deal with the discomfort.
Reeanth twirled her mana-maul before gazing at the last of the sunrise. “It’s time, isn’t it?”
I sheathed Gungnir at my belt, lightly tapping my favorite weapon in its knife form. “It is indeed. Load up and form up. We’re making like dwarves and tunneling through.”
Tossing a handful of Centauri meal-cubes and a few slabs of stored meat next to Spot, I walked up next to him and scratched behind his ears. With gusto, he tore into the food and then demolished the bowl made of conjured ice and filled with purified water courtesy of Splashy.
Motioning for Versonae to get closer, I explained to her part of my plan while she stood next to me and Spot. “You are going to have a very important yet very different role while we make our way to the North.” I kept scratching Spot’s ears even as he growled through his almost rabid devouring of the meat. “You are going to work with Spot, either by running next to him or riding on his back while he’s huge, and work on numbers management.”
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Versonae’s eyes narrowed. “You mean ‘hit and run’.”
I nodded. “I mean tactical skirmishing. I need you to winnow down the numbers of any group of undead that you see. Only take on what you can reliably destroy and get the hell out of there. Spot needs someone to watch his blind spot and you need a trusty tank.”
Reeanth joined in after inspecting a few items that Acantha was a bit secretive about. I didn’t ask as Reeanth casually commanded attention just by her sheer presence. “This is a brilliant addition to the plan, my lord. Distract and dismantle as a feint while we proceed to the priority target. Genius yet classic.”
After confirming with Spot that he got the rudimentary basics of the plan and that he was fine with Versonae’s partnership, I let them be as I examined the beach in detail. It is a shame leaving it behind but the beach fortress and walls had served their purpose.
The actual implementation of my part of the plan was easier when you have hundreds of golems at your beck and call. Two hundred hefty chunks of living stone complete with powerful arms and thick legs standing almost nine feet tall flipped around the pylon so the upper tip pointed north. Sunny took thirty minutes to reshape the bottom so it had large smooth skids, formed large brackets in the front, back and side for handholds, and then smoothed off any rough edges to reduce the overall friction. As soon as that was done, the golems situated themselves at the front, sides, and back to push the pylon forward and Sunny got to tunneling.
I let Kraken ride shotgun on his own personal golem that was several times bigger than all the rest of them. My spirit familiar kept a steady pace behind Sunny, coordinating the golems so that they wouldn’t walk too fast and trample our only possible mode of arcane covert travel. My team walked with me in the back and after five minutes, Acantha set a few small enchanted bombs in the side of the tunnel with an evil grin.
“Where did you get those?” I asked, making sure to stay well ahead of our resident pyro. I checked my mental model of the ‘Mana-Shield’, making sure that it was pre-charged, prepped, and ready to go. Bombs have a way of putting their makers directly into the ground and I wanted no part of that. At least I didn’t have to keep careful watch on my feet as I walked. Sunny’s nature of being an Earth Elemental made tunnel creation fairly easy which meant the quality and size of the tunnel were better than anything a human team of engineers could create. I could walk along without fear of loose stones or piles of dirt. And the walls of the tunnel were so thick and magically reinforced that there were zero worries of a cave-in unless outside forces acted upon it.
Hence, Acantha and her bombs.
“I’ve been taking lessons from Reeanth.” I didn’t like the sound of that. Not that women can’t learn from each other or some crazy sexist shit, but the red-haired pyro witch said it like she’d been hiding it. As if it were something nefarious, something an apprentice would hide from the master. No, more like a mischievous twin four year old plotting with the good one to hide away and wreck a perfectly good white wall with a sharpie.
Acantha sniffed as if she were some learned scholar. “Centauri rune-script is fairly simple to learn and even easier to apply. It is much easier than WierWords or Wytch-Tongue. Besides, with your elementals fetching any raw material I need, and Reeanth supervising preset rune-scripts and using her Light Sorcery to scan for vulnerabilities, I’ve been able to make all kinds of explosives.”
I just stared at her but on the inside I was furiously poking Kraken to use his unique capabilities to pilfer any and all Centauri rune-script knowledge from Reeanth that I didn’t have.
My spirit-familiar assented without words but after a moment, he did momentarily retreat from our connection to consult his own notes. [Well, I figured something out after hours of examining your shitty runes and all the info downloaded into your Grimoire.]
I waited for the inevitable criticism.
[Your runes are completely bunk. Garbage. They’re not really runes. They’re pseudo-runes, fake-scripts that only worked because it was close to you AND was essentially a mental conduit for your Sorceries. It’s why you have to use wizardry right now and also why your tools are a lesser version of themselves.]
I glared at nothing as I walked. [Then explain my generators! They work, mostly. And besides, Merlin hijacked them for his own purposes so they have to be worth something.]
I could feel the eye roll. The disdain came through our link loud and clear. [Oh come on, that was basically an updated equation you stole from your world’s second greatest genius and slapped onto a chunk of rock. Any high school student with two concussions could’ve done that. It only even worked because of your Mana Sorcery.]
Part of me wanted to rant out loud but this conversation was purely mental. And I’d look crazy talking to Kraken if nobody else could see him at the moment. So I grit my teeth and furiously thought at my abrasive companion.
[So what’s your actual point?] I mentally snarled back. [Where are you going with this?]
[It’s not that hard. One of the earliest directives you gave me months ago was to do my best to streamline your work, make all of your work more efficient.] I ignored the implied deep breath. [What would make this entire journey more efficient is if you could use your Earth and Mana Sorceries to make these golems and the pylon a little lighter.]
I snapped my fingers. [Like when I made my hoverboard!]
Kraken applauded through our mental link. [Exactly! Anti-gravity runes tied to your Mana and Earth sorceries! But . . . you can’t do that now with your powers locked down to the nth degree. And if we knew Centauri rune-scripts well enough, we could get around it that way.]
[And how do you propose we do that?] I asked. [We only have what we’ve been given and all of that is related to basic and intermediate theory along with the standard Centauri spells that their base soldiers get. I mean, we have more but it hasn’t been decrypted yet.]
I felt Kraken’s smugness bleed through our link. [Just leave it to me.]
Passing the day away walking and reviewing the contents of my Grimoire was a good mental exercise. The sunstone golems gave off plenty of ambient light and the sideways pylon scooting ahead on skids was hard to make out a few hundred feet ahead of us as it was just a ball of bright light even from this far away.
I went through the basic spells, empowering the rune-script with mana but never actually letting them fire off. The Dwarven runes were my favorite as they were simpler but the undeniable fact was that they were hungry. Every Dwarven rune, because it was a full concept condensed into one complex rune instead of being built up with a hundred tiny runes, devoured mana at an incredible pace. Just comparing the energy required to create a Dwarven block rune ‘Mana-Bolt’ versus the Centauri rune-script ‘Mana-Bolt’, the Dwarven one was the tank buster compared to the .45 bullet of the Centauri.
It wasn’t even close. Close to fifty times the amount of mana was required for the Dwarven one compared to the Centauri one. But in all fairness, the Centauri ‘Mana-Bolt’ could easily accommodate a scaling input container sequence that would allow anyone to power up the ‘Mana-Bolt’ to whatever explosive or penetrating power they so desired. One was a precision instrument and the other was a blunt hammer the size of a house, a veritable wrecking ball of sheer destructive power.
“Asmorai helix prints . . .” I muttered under my breath. “What in the living fuck are you? They don’t even look like a viable language.” My irritated glaring at the pages rustling in front of me almost made me lose track of where I was walking. Acantha easily yet lightly pulled on my shoulder to prevent me from power walking directly into the back of the nearest sunstone golem tromping in line with his comrades.
“I’ll put a leash on you if you do that again!” Acantha teased. She matched her pace to my own. “Whatcha workin’ on?”
I hefted my Grimoire closer to her and dispelled the built-in privacy screen so she could see what I was looking at. “What the fuck is ‘Asmorai’? It was in one of the books from a Mad Alchemist and referenced in one of the Centauri de-scripter blocks but there’s no explanation as to who or what it is?”
My resident witch stared at the page as if she were trying to force it to give up the hidden information before a lightbulb went off in her head. “Wait a minute here, this looks similar to the Hellion hieroglyphs, specifically the Insectile caste.” She pointed out one of the swirly prints, tracing it with her finger. “It’s reminiscent of how bees dance in circuitous routes to communicate, or how ants wave their antennae and walk in circle patterns to map routes to food.”
She glanced up at me with a shrug. “Good luck translating that. Directions, angle, and the thickness of the print’s curve all matter. Very few individuals can translate, let alone read with ease this kind of language. You’re more likely to summon a demon than decipher a viable spell.”
Huffing at the irritating idea that I may have just wasted a precious hour on a pointless exercise, I had my Grimoire move any and all Asmorai helix print data to the very very back of the book but I made sure not to delete it in case I ran across something able to translate the information.
Acantha’s delicate hands flipped back to the pages dedicated to the Dwarven block runes and pointed at a few with no descriptions. “I can, however, help you out here. The Dwarven language, Dweme, is the third language I mastered during my initial apprenticeship.”
Kraken took that opportunity to snag the Grimoire and Acantha at the same time, yanking them to the back of the procession so he could pick her brain. I laughed, knowing just how tempting new knowledge was to a Scion of Order, especially a young one like my familiar.
Their conversation was interrupted by the entire procession grinding to a halt. Kraken perked up for a moment and then froze. I could feel him communicating mentally which meant he was talking to Sunny way up at the front.
My familiar pivoted in midair, shaking his tentacles. “We’re here!” He sang.
I snatched my Grimoire back and gestured towards the pylon. “You know the drill. Reshape the pylon so it's even better for underground travel. Break down a bunch of golems and have Sunny regenerate them into more to build up the army. Then, siphon off the excess energy from Yggdrasil’s roots to fill the army and the team.”
Kraken scoffed at me. “Of course I know the plan! I came up with it.”
Acantha clapped her hand on my shoulder, smiling at Kraken. “We know you’re the real brains around here. My mentor is just doing everything he can to avoid studying.” She turned to smirk at me. “Right?”
“Fuck all of you.” I grumbled, sitting down and leaning against the curved wall of the tunnel. I pulled a flask of water and a few strips of dried desert lizard meat from Gungnir before. “Fourteen freaking books and most of them have to be decoded to be of any use but what in the world should I be focusing on?”
Versonae sat a few feet away from me, happily tucking into her own meal. I watched her canine features come out as she tore into the hunks of meat with relish but it almost put me off the way she then delicately drank water as if she were a high-end royal lady at a debutante ball. The dichotomy just didn’t make sense in my head. Clearing her throat, my companion’s wolfish bodyguard pointed at my Grimoire.
“What do you have to go through?” Versonae’s voice was soft and low, as if she knew that my hearing was almost as good as her own.
I smacked my Grimoire. “This bad boy contains a bunch of new books, fourteen I believe.” I looked down at the very first page where Kraken had made sure to put the list of additions in a simplified glossary. “One Centauri primer on gray magic, one intermediate instructional manual on Centauri rune-scripts, and entire Dwarven codex, three Aelven treatises on the nature of magic, plus three Wizard spell books that the Mad Alchemist never managed to decode. To top it off, we got two Codexes from before the fall of Atlantis, a portal tome accompanied by a spell book of interdimensional travel theory and a map book full of coordinates.”
The pages felt like an odd mix of velvet and steel, soft but incredibly durable. I thought about trying to rip just one of the pages but that was just the juvenile part of me trying to distract me from getting shit done.
“You know, I’m just going to pick up where I left off.” I said with a nod.
Versonae tilted her head before adjusting her sitting position.
“I mean, most of this stuff is for Kraken to sort through and determine what’s useful, but I have to continue my wizardry training.” I glared at the book in front of me. It cost me a lot. This very book was a long time coming and I know that I should be grateful but at the moment, I just want to relax. “Smoothie jungle later, hit the books now.”