Being creeped out in this way was abnormal for me. I’d normally feel at home in this situation. Again, fuck Merlin and his shenanigans for stripping me of 99% of my sorceries. I’m a mother fucking EARTH SORCERER for Magik’s sake but my usual source of comfort felt like a blanket packed full of lead pressing down on my face.
My tongue felt thick, the walls were closing in, it was all I could do to order my Flesh Golem hanger-on to manipulate my brain chemistry so that breathing was no longer a struggle. Bit by bit, the cortisol levels dropped off and my diaphragm unclenched its stranglehold on my lungs.
Reeanth let a soft click of her tongue. “How disappointing . . . our hosts were at least kind enough to accommodate those of our advanced height.”
Luckily, Acantha wasn’t here to pile on. We had a last minute change to our strategy when Versonae and Spot showed up out of nowhere just before we were about to leave. I didn’t like the look of how exhausted they were, so I fixed them both up with a recently fed Flesh Golem and sent them off with Acantha. Our short conversation revealed to me that Versonae was a bit too bloodthirsty, taking on targets that she should’ve probably left alone, instead she was using Spot as a fire-breathing tank with bulldozer tendencies, a prime distraction for her own brand of sneaky violence.
With Acantha onboard, as Spot’s largest form can easily accommodate two slight women, she would serve as a mobile artillery platform softening up the target before Spot and Acantha could wreak up close havoc. If it weren’t for Merlin hijacking and screwing up my sorceries, I would’ve loved to have been the one to play ‘seek and destroy’ with the undead armies out in the frozen tundra.
Instead, my miserable ass had real responsibilities.
Two hours. I gave the two person (and one dog) distraction team two hours to get in position. That’s more than enough for Spot to be seen and lure out hordes of undead. And worse, two hours would be the ass crack of dawn too, which right now in Greenland with the excessive cloud cover sat right around 10 am.
Two hours also gave us plenty of time to get into position to infiltrate the tunnel network.
At this well-planned time in the morning, 10 am, Reeanth and Johnny directed Sunny to move on out. In a moment of rare brilliance, Johnny suggested that Sunny cover himself and the rest of the golem army in a layer of thick mud to cover up the gleaming sunstone that would have given away our position. Kraken’s massive golem that he was piloting loomed just in front of me, his arms covered in deadly spikes ready for any surprises.
My cultivator friend’s outfit worked surprisingly well in the heavy darkness. His shape was broken up by haphazard piles of furs that served as both his clothing and armor. What was even more creepy was the fact that his silver serpent bo staff didn’t catch the light. As I stared at the mystical weapon, every place a glare should’ve glinted off its shiny form, the snake shifted its color into a mottled dark green, black, and brown. I could’ve sworn the damn thing winked at me.
I followed behind Sunny and Kraken, my water dragon enhanced eyes piercing the gloom far better than any night-vision goggles. Even though my vision wasn’t hampered at all, there wasn’t much to look at as Kraken’s piloted golem almost took up the breadth and height of the tunnel. So I contented myself to practice meditative breathing, forcing my body to live in a state of restful attentiveness while keeping up a brisk pace.
Nothing was as it seemed. My golems were creepily silent, their sasquatch sized feet making zero noise even though I would have expected our procession to sound like the approach of an actual Roman cavalry. All of me screamed to jump at every shuffle that caused a scraping sound. Each shadow held yet another hidden terror ready to spring for our throats.
As Sunny’s earth-shaping finally connected to an actual tunnel, he didn’t actually have to widen it to accommodate our forces. Before stepping out into the lion's den, my team took their time scanning the empty darkness before tentatively moving forward.
Long gouges ran up and down the length of the tunnel as if clumsy giant moles tore out a rough habitat below the freezing wastes of the planet’s shittiest pseudo-continent. It was all I could do to not complain. Without my Water and Flesh Sorceries to stave the bitter cold off, my magical metabolism workaround was chugging along like a fat old horse pulling his equally fat owner up a hill. If it weren’t for my reptilian enhancements and the fact that we were underground, I might have fallen into the never ending sleep of the frozen.
That fact in and of itself was freaking strange. This far down into the earth, the temperature should’ve been normal, a balmy sixty degrees Fahrenheit. But instead, it was even colder than the negative temps of the windswept hell above us that we call the surface. Reeanth let out a deep breath, her huff misting in the air creating a small cloud before dissipating.
I followed suit, feeling the cold trying ever harder to pierce our magical defenses. Turning my metabolism enchantment up a notch, I shoved Centauri meal-cube in my mouth before washing it down with water from Gungnir’s storage.
My team followed my example, giving their own metabolic enhancements more fuel to work with as we continued quiet marching. It took an entire twenty minutes of walking behind my golems before running into our first snag. Clumsily, Sunny’s tunneling didn’t connect to some convenient tunnel leading to the portal deep within the fortress, but into a massive cavern with tunnel entrances strewn across its gargantuan depths.
And it wasn’t an empty cavern.
If we could’ve used radar to map the area, the anonymous bystander would wonder at how this entire beast was constructed. The ceiling of the cavern was held up by bone. Bone structures almost a kilometer in length reached from the floor to the very top where the femur-esque knobs fit into the scooped out bulges of the stone ceiling. The undead constructed support columns by the dozen out of dead things. Between the giant bone support struts ran bridges of leathery dead skin that must’ve been stripped from some prehistoric beast. Tendons and ligaments tied together the bridges in an unholy work of advanced engineering.
What was worse, what sent an almost unending wave of shivers down my spines was the support column at the very center. Where all the other ones were clearly bonded together, the center one was one giant continuous sculpture of a bone. Maybe ‘sculpture’ is the wrong word. From here, it appeared to be one massive bone a kilometer tall and a hundred and fifty meters in diameter. An entire spine wrapped around femur holding up the stony sky.
“This . . . is not good, my lord.” Reeanth’s whisper was quiet enough that it didn’t carry across the wide open space.
Johnny peeked over her shoulder, gripping his serpent staff tightly. “We don’t want this fight, fam.”
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I almost pushed him. I came ‘this’ close to doing it.
For once, Kraken was silent, calmly scanning the situation over and over. A hideous, twisting gloom hung over the hellscape fouling our vision. After a few minutes, Sunny and Kraken moved us back into our tunnel and closed it up.
“You need to think about the consequences of breaking your deal with Merlin.”
I gaped at Kraken. My spirit familiar popped out of his soldier golem and floated in front of my face. Even Reeanth looked stunned.
“This is clearly an impossible task.”
Johnny stepped around Reeanth delicately and stood shoulder to shoulder with me. “And what exactly did you see that changed your mind? Aren’t you some powerful primordial somethin’?”
“Nothing awaits us but coldness and death.”
Several minutes of intense arguing passed me by as my devious mind began to turn. Over and over, my little twisted brain yanked and pulled on a particular sticky plan while my inner coward railed from his cage. Promptly ignoring my base instincts, I turned towards Kraken with an evil grin on my face.
“My friend, I have an idea.”
********
“Madness. You’ve gone completely mad.”
I couldn’t help the way my face looked. Right now, every part of me was in agreement that inspirations of genius road the crazy train, and this sorcerer just so happened to be the fucking captain.
Reeanth merely shook her head, muttering something about ‘forced suicidal missions being a violation of her oath’.
Didn’t matter. Sunny still answered to me. Within twenty minutes, fifty golems quickly traversed not once, but twice that distance AND retrieved the key to it all. I stood in front of the massive pylon lying on its side and I smiled until the sides of my face began to hurt.
“The answer’s right here.” I slapped my hand on its slick, shiny surface twice before lightly tapping it with Gungnir’s knife-blade. “It’s been right in front of me the whole time.”
Kraken squinted at me, motioning for me to go on so that Reeath and Johnny didn’t interrupt. Judy just glared at me.
“And here.” Gulping with genuine fear, I looked Kraken dead in the eye. “My good friend, pray tell, what would happen if I removed one of the given swords in my soul-bound weapon? What would happen if you pulled it from Gungnir and placed it in this pylon? What exactly could happen if we then forged a web of magical links between this pylon and my entire golem army?”
Kraken opened his mouth but I stepped closer to him. “Would we survive? Can it be done? Can it be undone? Can YOU make it work?”
My spirit familiar paled noticeably in the dim light. Our mental link tightened under the strain of Kraken pulling the surface thoughts from my brain. “This is why humans are feared across the Multiverse. You’re all insane. The least of you hold the greatest capacity for madness. Even the children tilt towards chaos and yet you wonder why war runs through your veins.”
I leaned in even closer, my grin teasing the gap between sanity and madness.
“That’s not a ‘no’.”
Explaining my updated plan of attack felt like it took too long so instead I had Kraken make a quick holographic movie about it. I didn’t pay attention to any of it as I sat down fifty feet back down the tunnel and meditated. My team didn’t need me for the first two phases of the new adaptations. We weren’t expecting a Journey to the Center of the Earth situation. We thought there’d be tunnels at best, not a fucking whole new world to conquer.
But that’s my bad. I should’ve known Karma woulda’ chucked a few dinosaur sized wrenches into my plan. And that meant I had to get my head on straight and keep it that way.
Meditating without the Consciousness Sorcery working at full tilt is a complete bitch of an exercise. Proper breathing, visualization exercises, no wonder most monks fail out of their lofty monasteries. I didn’t just need to enter my own mind, I needed to feel the connection between my soul and Gungnir. Five minutes stretched into half an hour which then turned into yet another hour on top of it before I felt myself snap into existence deep with Gungnir’s storage space.
I didn’t even stop to look at Kraken’s artwork or the boxes of supplies, my crystal grenades or crystal rounds for my Dwarven rifle that got blown to smithereens. I did sigh over the dwindling supply of Centauri meal-cubes. Only eight boxes left. I added a trip to Florida to my growing list of shit to do.
Deep within Gungnir’s storage space sat the evidence of Merlin screwing with my soul. Glowing ropes of wispy power converged from where my soul connected to my soul-bound weapon, its very essence, the very excess elemental Chaos produced by my spirit that gave me my Sorceries, drained into the Yin-Yang symbol. All of my energy that I could’ve used to level the undead as they sat unconcerned about us in their UNDERGROUND fortress went into keeping me alive in two separate time streams. My soul-essence formed the boundaries of the Taoist rune. Both matter-to-mana generators, their latest versions twisted and enshrined by Merlin, pumped out incalculable amounts of raw mana feeding the horrific Paradox.
All of this just so I could undo a war crime. One that I would normally call bullshit. Who the fuck cares if I toss a couple dozen mana nukes through a portal into a secondary version of hell? Every planet conquered by the Hungry Ones was simply a just that, another snapshot of what actual fucking HELL would be.
My biggest problem, aside from kicking ass and taking names in the here and now, was my troublesome line of thinking that plagued me at this very second. Why not just wait? Why not just wait out a few months, let the obvious paradox subside, wrench my soul free from Merlin’s chicanery, and then bury this entire continent into the sea?
I could do it. A couple fault lines, one giant crystalline bomb the size of an aircraft carrier built over a couple months, and then VOILA! No more Greenland. Instead, it would be the much more boring baby cousin to Atlantis. No great mysteries to solve. Just a bunch of undead crushed by the immense pressure of the uncaring North Sea.
Or . . . I properly bungle this timey-wimey bullshit journey in such a way that Merlin’s peace rests on a razor’s edge. Gain a little leverage over Mr. Asshole. My evil plan adjusted a few points a little more delicately in another direction . . . some insurance for the days ahead.
Communing within was not the relaxing state it should’ve been. Inner peace ran from me like a cat hauling ass on a farm with an out of control teen driving a tractor. Worse because I could even see my Flesh Sorcery just out of reach. My usual answer for forcing perpetual calm and hormonal solace removed from my grasp by a solid but translucent wall of Wyld Magik. Merlin’s work. It only made me angry, angry enough to focus on the task at hand.
“Use what you got.” I muttered, tallying up my forces along with the tools at hand. “Strategy and positioning, goals and force multipliers. Deception and misdirection. Each one has a part to play.”
Kraken popped in my mind. “You done yet? I don’t understand why I can’t tell the team any of this . . .”
“Keeping everyone off Merlin’s radar as much as possible is as good a reason as any.”
“For once, we agree.” Kraken inspected the magical madness cycling before us. “You know, there’s going to be a backwash here.”
I corrected my spirit-familiar. “More than one, actually. One when I set the portals to infinitely re-route to random coordinates using one of the angelic swords to scramble the magic, and another when the time travel craziness ends and I use the second sword to divert the backlash so I actually survive. I’m basically the guardian of two celestial miracles and I’m going to use those suckers on myself.”