My initial surprise gave way to a flicker of joy as I barely recognized who magically waltzed into our hidden cavern. That involuntary pause from my surprise didn’t stop the intruder from taking in the gory scene of a trashed stone room covered in copious amounts of blood with two people at the center of it gasping for breath while glaring at each other. Magical healing really allowed for strenuous sparing as well as the incumbent luxury to ignore certain injuries that were not actually debilitating but might have looked that way due to the amount of bleeding, like a slight cut on the head or a long cut on the arm. They bleed a lot and hurt like a bitch, but neither of those will kill you.

With magical healing on the table, we could push ourselves to the literal edge of exhaustion, abuse, and even death if we were crazy enough.

My old friend’s initial expression of joy went through half of the stages of grief: disbelief, denial, and then it ignited into anger before flowing into a deadly resolution, acceptance of a bloodthirsty rage.

“Hey-” I started just as a glowing silver fist introduced itself to my face. My body felt like it was picked up by a runaway bulldozer with an attitude problem. All of me flipped ass over teakettle, a followup kick in my side broke five ribs before depositing me thirty yards away.

“Hey-” I started again, weakly spitting drops of blood out between broken teeth. The world flipped on its head yet again. Out of the corner of my eye even though I was currently upside down spinning in midair, I could see Reeanth angrily pounding away at a translucent green bubble just big enough to contain her and Acantha.

That was new. Even with my vision going blurry, I knew that wasn’t right. I couldn’t do that. Reeanth couldn’t do that. Acantha certainly couldn’t, and Kraken . . . where the fuck was Kraken?

My vision vibrated as my armored helm skipped across the floor. This wasn’t the Johnny I knew. He’d been replaced with a muscular beast of a Mongolian warrior standing six inches taller and carrying around forty extra pounds of muscle on his frame. Skinny ass Johnny just didn’t have the frame to support all that. Worse, the happy go lucky look so characteristic of Johnny that endeared him to me at first was gone.

Out of those gentle brown eyes looked a killer.

And his blistering gaze was fixed on me.

“Fuuuuuuuuck!” I grumbled, surreptitiously prodding the mini Flesh Golem hanging off my hip to get its ass in gear. My jaw was broken in five places and more of me was too but the pain was just too loud for me to concentrate. I couldn’t even categorize the number of injuries and I hadn’t even been allowed to join the fight yet. So many broken bits of me ground against each other in a symphony of agony. After two seconds of watching Johnny stalk closer, a confident lion taking the measure of a wounded hyena, the Flesh Golem finally managed to dull my pain senses enough for me to take a ragged breath.

All of the energy I could have spent cursing Johnny out for misreading the painfully skewed situation, I tactically diverted into the few brain cells that were actually functioning in that moment. With the pain no longer clouding my mind, I yanked on my considerable stores of mana locked away within Gungnir, shaping the simple yet cubically inclined Dwarven block rune for ‘Mana-Bolt’, throwing a full third of my mana stores into the working. At the very last moment, I shaped the intent of the spell so that the initial bullet instead acted like a battering ram as opposed to the kinetic missile that this spell could potentially be.

Dwarven block rune spells aren’t like our spells. Power. That’s what the Dwarves work with. Raw, unadulterated, pound for pound power. If it didn’t work the first time, get a bigger hammer and if that bitch doesn’t work, then get an even bigger hammer. And if that attempt doesn’t fucking work, get bigger muscles, two hammers, and go to fucking town until the obstacle crumbles to dust in the face of your might.

The Dwarven Codex, the Dweme Folio, included more about their culture than it did about their magic. Unfortunately, it meant that I didn’t get a long list of block runes and spells to work with, but what I did get was all of the basic knowledge for their fundamental spells. And everything was based on three variables: volume, density, and intent. With those variables, the Dwarves believed that all things could be subjugated. Or destroyed. Or ground to dust.

I found it hard to disagree.

But alas, I didn’t need to do that right now. I just needed the fourth element that the Dwarves never did talk about. Expediency. I needed to shape a fucking spell right here and now! My insta-spell could’ve been a kinetic missile or a tank buster or even an orbital strike. It was a mercy that I didn’t put my all into it. It was kindness that I didn’t blast my friend into a fragile puddle of jellyfied flesh gobbets.

And that mercy bit me in the ass.

I dropped another full third of my remaining mana into my mini Flesh Golem, forcing the damn thing to work miracles putting me back to rights. Gungnir appeared in my hands, a long shaft of magically reinforced Yggdrasil wood missing its usual speartip. Again, I didn’t want to kill Johnny and purposefully handicapping myself would help do that.

And Johnny took that personally.

His appearance again caught me off guard. He wasn’t wearing any of the items that I had made for him. His kinetic energy capturing plate armor, the kinetic dispersal gauntlets and boots that would greatly enhance his mobility and striking power. It was all gone. Instead, my beefy Asian friend was only halfway covered in thick carpets of what appeared to be fur from some wild animal. And worse, the skin and fur clothes still felt like they held onto a semblance of life, as if Johnny were wearing the skin of a creature that still lived, wouldn’t let go even though ninety percent of its body was missing. That poor creature that he was wearing, it was lending him its strength too.

A low growl emanated from his throat and I swore that I saw Johnny’s upper and lower canine poke out of his lips. His fur clothes grew thicker and sharper and I swore I saw two floating eyes from a primordial bear glaring down at me from just above and behind Johnny’s head. His forearms noticeably grew as he tightened his grip on his own silver serpent staff in time with his eyes squinting.

And that was all the warning I needed. To be honest, it was really the only warning I was given. Johnny vanished from right in front of me and only my recently upgraded instincts saved my life. I ducked like my life depended on it while instantly conjuring a ‘Mana-Shield’ devoted to only diverting kinetic energy. Even then I wasn’t fast enough to completely dodge the strike.

It happened at multiple points at once. Not only did the haft of the spear strike at my shoulder but the fucking head of the spear, the visage of the snake, it struck at my face. In doing so, both of those strikes bounced off of my shield but my own downward momentum carried me directly into Johnny’s followup knee. Tucking my head even further in, I caught his knee on my forehead instead of my nose.

Luckily, the Flesh Golem had sufficiently deadened my nerves so that the blow didn’t phase me at all. I rode the force of the kick back to give myself the room, hoping Johnny wouldn’t follow up but that sort of wishful thinking almost got me killed. The man was a hurricane of blows, a veritable storm of raging death. Each punch or chop of his hand carried a kind of energy that snuck past my ‘Mana-Shield’ spells and that damnable snake-spear of his kept striking at any perceived weakness. Even worse, the viper tore at any mana construct, drinking in any power not perfectly contained within an item. If the fight kept up at this pace, then I was done for.

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The fact that his strikes contained an energy that bypassed my defenses at least in part, meant that my Flesh Golem was constantly ticking away. Each kick at least broke a bone, every punch pulverizing muscle like he was a tenderizer and my body was the poor piece of tough steak refusing to be dinner.

A tiny voice in the back of my mind kept screaming to just talk to Johnny, just speak to the inhuman desperately trying to separate my head from my shoulders and maybe he’d back off.

The other tiny voices in my head vehemently disagreed. This man was lost to a suicidal rage. Bloodshot eyes. Drool slipping down his lips as he silently screamed with each swing and thrust of the spear.

Fuck him. Fuck this unthinking loser. I didn’t work this fucking hard to have my own friend kick my ass in front of my other friends. What kind of a bitch did he think I was? More importantly, what kind of a bitch did I envision myself to be?

Nobody’s bitch, that’s who.

Easier said than done. With a calculated toss, I hurled my Grimoire up in the air over towards the strange green bubble trapping Reeanth and Acantha. That book contained half of my last third of mana. An independent ‘Salvo’ spell spun up, launching a veritable firehouse of compressed ‘Mana-Bolts’ at Johnny forcing him back under the onslaught. My last chunk of mana, I fed that directly into my Flesh Golem along with a few instructions. Quickly detaching the gray blob, I waited until the Grimoire directed ‘Salvo’ spell reached its peak intensity and then launched myself directly at Johnny.

I ‘accidentally’ dropped three planttrops to the side in the wake of my passage, cursing at myself for being clumsy as a distraction so I could hurl three cryoshards at Johnny’s feet. Several ‘Salvo’ bullets supercharged the cryoshards which in turn exploded upwards. Only one of the random ice spears caught Johnny and even then it was just a shallow cut along his leg.

I timed it perfectly.

Johnny dodged or blocked the ‘Salvo’ bullets, avoided most of the cryoshards area of effect explosions, and even snatched Gungnir from my hand as I approached. But the fucker didn’t expect the Flesh Golem to extend from my left arm like an octopus on steroids grasping for his face with a plethora of arms. And all of those Johnny still managed to deflect.

But he did miss the extra Flesh Golem blob that I flicked at the open wound in his leg. The tennis ball sized blob stuck to the open wound like an angry ball of snot. Within moments, Johnny’s rage and energy fled from him. I pressed my advantage. Gungnir vanished and reappeared in my hands. Black streaks ran up Johnny’s leg from my Flesh Golem and even his side began to wither.

Quickly punching Johnny twice in the jaw, he only teetered for a moment before I knocked him out with Gungnir. One final swing to the head rendered Johnny unconscious. I tapped the mini Flesh Golem on Johnny’s leg, changing its instructions to healing AND keeping him completely unconscious. Taking a few minutes to breathe, I gathered up the sliced remnants of the rest of the Flesh Golem and let them coalesce into a unified whole.

“Miserable fucker.” I laughed softly, shaking my head. “Am I that unrecognizable?” I put my hand on Johnny’s leg, communing with the Flesh Golem patch. “Let’s see here, fix the rot, pull back on hormones, deaden the nerves so he can sleep, up the serotonin levels temporarily so he’ll be more likely to listen to me . . . . oh what the fuck?”

Tons of feedback looped in through the connection I had with the mini Flesh Golem. Johnny’s body was all kinds of fucked up. Not only did just about every bone in his body speak of barely healed breaks and microfractures, but all of his muscles were in various states of collapse. It’s like he’s been fighting for his life for months with zero sleep and minimal food while carrying an extra two hundred pounds on his back.

Everything was messed up. His body spokes volumes to the abuse he’d recently experienced, and I know that this wasn’t from his fight with me. There’s a certain kind of wear and tear your body experiences from too much adrenaline and cortisol. The cartilage between his major joints was all but gone, the pain receptors in his brain were all but fried, and worse, his heartbeat was hovering at thirty beats per minute.

Ignoring the plight of my teammates still trapped in their bubble, I united the Flesh Golem patch with the rest of its original self. “Put the oxygen mask on yourself first,” I mumbled, remembering the painfully slow admonitions of flight attendants in their stupid safety movies.

But it was good advice and it applied to this situation right now. I stuck my hand in the Flesh Golem and put it to work fixing me back up. I grimaced as too many ribs found their original spots and stitched themselves back together. My stifled concussion fully healed and all of my bruising went away. The moment I felt my body sigh in relief from my ills magically being washed away, I turned my attention back to Johnny.

First things first, I made sure to put in a nerve block at the base of his skull preventing his brain from being able to communicate with his body. The reasons for doing so were twofold. One, and this was my main concern, I didn’t want Johnny hulking out in my face while I’m completely distracting fixing his fucked up body. Second, fixing extensive damages to this degree would undoubtedly cause a metric crapton of pain, and I didn’t want to wake him up just yet.

Starting at his heart, my magic combined with the Flesh Golem’s incredible regenerative capabilities wove a cascade of healing effects. The golem visibly shrunk as its tissue became the fuel and substance of Johnny’s physical revival. Every tear in his muscles healed in the truest sense and then I focused on the bones. “SPLASHY!” I screamed, still focusing on my work. “MAS’ FISH!”

Wet burbling slaps heralded Splashy landing right beside. “And where the fuck were you for that fight?” I snapped, yanking a two foot chunk of tuna out of Splashy’s gullet. “Coulda’ used your help you freaking useful ass blob.”

My water elemental’s reply sounded like a long wet fart.

“You asshole,” I grumbled, infusing the chunk of meat into the Flesh Golem so it could turn the base fats and proteins into usable material. “I didn’t misspeak, I said ‘useful’, not ‘useless’. You are useful, just not during that brutal life and death scenario. However, you are the best fisherman I’ve ever met.”

The bubbly reply was decidedly more happy. I ignored the vengeful trickle of ice cold water sliding down the back of my neck. Little bastard didn’t know that my water dragon DNA enhancements made me immune to the cold.

Before I even finished mentally recovering from the fight and nowhere near done fixing Johnny, my patient’s eyes snapped wide open.

Before he could speak, I smirked right at him. “I know, I get it, a face only a mother could love, right?”

Johnny’s eyes bugged out like a dying fish as his gums uselessly flapped.

“Shit!” I cursed, flipping a few nerve connections back on and manipulating a few more. “Sorry man! Unconscious breathing is a different part of the brain compared to conscious breathing, and don’t get me started on where the speech centers of the brain start. Turns out, your soul is the origin point but the body doesn’t know that because the soul inhabits the brain but technically separate because spirit does not . . . anyways, you don’t care about that stuff.”

I patted his fur covered shoulder. “Doesn’t matter. Anyways, it’s me, Ben. No, I wasn’t killing the love of your life.” Johnny’s glare at my fishing attempt told me everything I needed to know. “She’s teaching me how to fight and you know how bloody that can get with magical healing keeping us going past when reason would tell us to stop.”

Digging around for a different nerve cluster, I reconnected Johnny’s ability to fully control his breathing and a third of the nerves controlling his larynx. I didn’t want him spitting some crazy ass cultivator spell at me before he got all caught up to the situation.

His body shuddered as he tried to reassert control. With nary a thought, I re-disconnected his body from the neck down with the Flesh Golem. “Dude, it’s me you idiot. We met in the middle of bumfuck nowhere!” I sighed straight through his glare. “Yes, we met when you were clutching some essence infused banana while running from a pack of monkeys and a giant gorilla. I built you a gravity compressor workout machine AND a small healing tether that works by stabbing it into the ground to absorb ambient mana.”

Johnny’s eyes searched my face for a moment before squinting even harder in disbelief. “DUDE! I look different due to magic!” I pointed at his body, shrugging my shoulders in shock. “Come on! You put on a foot of height and forty pounds of straight muscle and you’re getting on to me for doing the same!?” I stood up and looked around. “Answer me honestly, is it the scales throwing you off or the fact that I kicked your ass?”

Rolling my eyes in frustration, I grabbed Gungnir and stomped over to Reeanth and Acantha. One lazy slash and a weird unzippering sound later, the green shield dissipated into nothingness.

Acantha’s pale face looked whiter than normal. “That’s a friend?”

I nodded.

“I would hate to see your enemies.”