I liked it. In fact, I liked it so much that I went about three years ahead of the project. I didn’t have any government red tape to cut through. There were zero activist groups protesting my less than humane experiments. I could just do whatever the fuck I wanted. Walking over to the giant body of the main flesh golem, I rolled it over to Gungnir and tossed the upgraded clone body into it and waited a minute while it got absorbed.
Kraken popped out of Gungnir. [What are you doing?]
“Science!” I yelled happily. “Mad science!”
Cackling like a madman, I channeled stupid amounts of power into the flesh golem so it could make a bunch of smaller clone bodies, each with their own different human to minotaur skin ratio. The main flesh golem shivered as round torso-sized chunks of itself plopped onto the ground.
I smiled as I arranged them how I liked them. I had the fifty-fifty ratio body in the middle with the sixty-forty bodies both ways on either side, and then the seventy-thirty both ways further down on the left and right as well. Each body, after it had drained enough power to complete the power-intensive cell joining process, was held up by a stone column with arms that I shaped out of the surrounding rock. Making sure my ‘targets’ wouldn’t slip away, I shaped the stone arms so that they circled around the targets forming restraints so that they wouldn’t budge. Following proper military safety protocol, I also shaped a large dirt and stone berm behind the targets.
“This looks so messed up.” I remarked, looking at my courtyard with five targets. The fifty-fifty was in the middle and the sixty-forty and seventy-thirty of the mostly minotaur were on the left and the mirror opposites were on the right. Figuring I’d make them more realistic as targets, I shaped the flesh golem blobs to be the shape of a man’s torso with a false head. Kraken impatiently tapped on our mental link.
“Again,” I called out loud as I pulled Gungnir and leveled it at the clones and blasted each body with a wave of dense, raw mana. “FOR SCIENCE!”
Pure, condensed mana lanced out of Gungnir like cannonballs. The center target didn’t budge as I immediately threw two more blasts out following the first. Working my shots from the left to the right and then back again, each clone body took a total of three raw mana blasts before I was satisfied. The stone columns holding the bodies were completely blown away and the bodies themselves were in a bit of a state.
[Wasn’t that a bit much?] Kraken yelled, thrashing at the mental link connecting our minds. [You didn’t need to blow the courtyard away!]
“Don’t be such a bitch. Look!” I pointed out gleefully as I sprinted over to the devastated courtyard. “It worked! Plan for the worst and experiment with disaster! BEHOLD!”
Holding up the most intact clone body, I swung it around happily. [Forty percent minotaur is the sweet spot!” It was pretty obvious. The outermost targets were absolutely destroyed and the center one had splattered into chunks. The sixty percent minotaur one was slowly caving in on itself but the forty percent version was only lightly smoking. I pointed Gungnir at the clone body target, making sure to lightly stab the undamaged parts. Most of the target torso was undamaged, only light scorch marks were visible. It still retained some semblance of flexibility. The other ones I could see either had disintegrated chunks taken out of them or they were split wide open.
I danced a little jig, reveling in the power of mad science of magic. “And the best part is, not only do I know the best starting point ratio for mana absorption, but the ratio is super easy to change! Which means if I’m ever getting my ass kicked magically by some godlike wizard, all I gotta do is up the ratio to eighty or past it and I’ll be invincible!]
Running back over to the main body of the central flesh golem, I pushed the best clone into it and waited for it to be absorbed and saved as a preferred body schematic. Taking another test minutes, I cleaned up the blown away parts of the four failed clones by chucking them into the main golem. It absorbed the dead flesh no problem. Stripping off all of my clothes including Svalinn and SAW, I rolled the central golem just a bit closer to Gungnir. My weapon glowed ominously in the pedestal governing the power intake for all of Sunstone Castle.
Rubbing my hands together like a mad scientist on the verge of a breakthrough, I double checked my body to make sure I was ready for this leap. “Fuckin’ tight!” I celebrated even as I began to sink into a meditative state, my eyes closed as I focused on my state of mind and sorceries. [Kraken, your job is to make sure that the power supply is constant and available. Do some projections real quick, do we have enough power to see this through? I got the feeling that I’ll need more than the clones due to my sorceries.]
[Are you sure?] Kraken asked, surveying the damage while running a bunch of calculations. [This is a rather large step.]
[Hop to it] I ordered, sinking deeper into my mindscape where I had complete control in the very heart of my seat of power.
Sighing but acquiescing, Kraken checked the connection between Gungnir and the control plinth of Sunstone Castle. [There’s months worth of stored power in your batteries, let alone what you personally hold and what’s in your freakish staff,] he assured me. [Just take it slow and let me work on the runes and you’ll be a brand new you in less than two hours.]
Brand new me took a lot more than two hours.
Kraken’s initial estimates kept changing as I was a lot slower at full body transformations than I had expected. There were unforeseen obstacles with the process which pushed the timeline; Kraken and I worked for nine times longer than we expected. First, the power requirements for drastically altering my own body skyrocketed as my own Flesh Sorcery was a bit too at home in the original me. My magic liked me how I was.
Small changes, healing, minor upgrades were easily within my purview but it seems that the total body makeover should have happened over time. This resulted in the second big obstacle, my soul. My damn soul was the real problem, the fact that my soul-tree was a bit too much like how I envisioned it caused me some serious problems like the fact that putting down some metaphysical ‘roots’ actually meant ROOTS! My soul-tree, my combined enlivened sorceries liked my body, the original fleshly weak one. My Earth Sorcery was invested in my body, the Water Sorcery in my blood, the flesh in the, well, duh, flesh, and the personified soul-tree was invested in staying.
The hardest part was convincing it, yes I know that I’m arguing with myself, but apparently if you treat your magic like a part of you that’s just a little bit separate, it actually becomes a little separate. What did the trick was convincing it that the newer model would be more durable and a lot more likely to actually live longer than the homo sapien concept. Dusk had come and gone by the time my body was in fighting shape. I ended up falling asleep outside next to Gungnir as Kraken poured mountains of stored mana into my body, using our internal connection to soothe the angry waves of the process. The problem is that simply changing your body does not instantly result in perfect changes.
Consider the idea of making yourself taller. It’s not just lengthening the bones so that you are actually taller, there are a million other little details that go into making that change effective. The muscles have to stretch out so that they properly connect to the right areas. Then, you can’t forget the ligaments and tendons as well need similar treatment so that there’s some structure to that bone. The balance centers of your brain have to be recalibrated so that your body knows what to do with being taller so you don’t walk into every door frame you come to. Your eyes have to be used to the new scale of vision in order to properly judge how long your new stride is or how fast you can make it from here to there. It even throws your center of gravity off which is intrinsically tied to the new weight requirements of having a bigger body. Details, it always comes down to the details, and sorcery doesn’t get rid of the process, it just puts the goal within reach.
And let’s not even get started on the impacts to my magic itself. My brain has to get used to a new form of channeling power unconsciously. Human skin, for all its flaws, is incredibly adept at taking in and pushing out power. I could use it as easily as a frog spits out his tongue to nab a fly. Effortless application of will. Now, I have to actually focus on channeling through the million tiny scales on my body and perfectly avoid the minotaur skin that wants to shed the mana instead. Not that it matters where I physically conjure or control my magic from, it’s where my mind perceives that I control my magic from.
Kraken gave my unconscious mind the rundown as I was sleeping, the entire time of which he was still easing the indignant factors of widespread changes. I spent my unconscious time remaking and remodeling my mind-castle and my own vision of myself. I had to, I needed my brain, my self-visualization to be on board with this. It’s the extreme case of that rare brand of psychosis where people believe that the leg on their body isn’t their leg, and they do everything they can to cut it off and we stick them in the psych ward. But instead of a leg, it’s my entire body. My mind had to be brought to heel, perfectly joined to the idea that thanks to my sorcery, my flesh is completely under my control regardless of what it looks or feels like. Malleable, malleable by self and self alone.
The final piece fell into place when I appeared in my mind in front of my soul-tree and branded its trunk with a vision of myself, a complex series of runes encapsulating the idea that ‘I can change’ within the greater realization that ‘I am me’ and that will not change. ‘Power’, ‘will’, ‘strength’ were the three outer runes undergirding the runic envisionings of myself that I carved into my very soul, gently forcing the being of myself to my own will.
The soul-tree closed its eyes, its face smiling even though there was no mouth. I watched as the ‘earth’ that was its base turned translucent. Underneath it, its roots curled around two forms, the first which was my original body complete with a hundred percent homo sapien DNA and the other, my new form. As the ‘earth’ turned opaque again, I did manage to make out that there were two other such spaces in its roots, both blank.
[Two more forms huh?] I mused. A light shaking of my soul-tree’s head denoted affirmation. [But I can still alter the two there without taking up the other spaces, right?] A single nod. [Good.]
The desert’s morning light smacked me back to consciousness as Kraken desperate yells crashed against our link. [YOU’RE DRAINING THE ENTIRE CASTLE!] The cognizant understanding of what he said broke me out of the daze as my Flesh Sorcery instantly kicked in, jazzing me awake as if I was on the tail end of guzzling ten shots of espresso.
“What?!” I screamed, jumping to my feet, letting go of Gungnir in the process.
[There, oh my Order, what the Seven Realms of Infernation was that?] Kraken freaked. [You just set us back months! Tuck your aura in before some damn dragon pops outta the sky or a demon rips open Hell just for you!]
My bewildered expression didn’t help. Reaching through our link, Kraken manipulated my personal aura until it was just skin deep. Working for another ten minutes, I carefully watched him work, reeling in the sheer amount of mana that I’d accumulated so that it didn’t leak out.
[There, stupid, ignorant human. Do you not know how dragons work yet? Proto-crystallized mana gives off an incredible amount of power and you’ve got months worth of a desert’s accumulated heat and solar energy as converted mana inside of you!]
As my familiar raged at my apparent inborn stupidity, I did manage to pick out the relevant parts of the newly implanted instincts. Lesser dragons are weird but at least the instinct package was simple to parse through.
I closed my eyes and spoke out loud as if I was repeating something that I’d memorized from a book. “Dragons nest near ley lines to help them maintain their ridiculously massive amounts of power. Leylines are good for nesting near and for hiding personal auric or mana signatures.”
Kraken sent the mental equivalent of a slap to the head down our mental link.
I kept going. “The kind of power I have is like a beacon unless I tamp it down via aura control. Having a bit of dragon in me means that I’ll generate more power than usual but it’ll have a different flavor than it used to.”
Opening my eyes, I jumped a few times and then shook my limbs, noting the changes. “Huh, so, this feels a bit strange. The main reason that my body soaked up all the power was to set the changes within my body as pretty much permanent, the only thing that could alter it at this point would be me, and even then I’d require another couple months to accumulate the required power.”
My metaphorical ears were ringing as Kraken began to launch into another lecturing tirade, so I did what any eyes-glazed-over person would do, ignore the too tightly wound familiar and get some light practice in. For the next two days, I made my own obstacle course out of conjured stone in the nearby Colorado River and ran complete circuits that included lifting humongous rocks, leaping fifty feet, climbing in tandem with my Earth and Water Sorcery. Turns out, if you can shape the rock to have handholds or conjure ice to the side of a smooth column, you can climb anything. The endurance test was mentally exhausting because I just got bored before my body tired even after five hours of running from ravenous sand lizards.
The magic part turned out to be even easier than I thought it would be as dragon scales were several times more mana absorbent than human skin, and the minotaur part was negligible in interfering with my practice. I had no problems conjuring water, stone, metal, or ice. The application of wielding mana wasn’t disturbed too much by the scales; thankfully, the runic schema linking all of the flesh-hosted enchantment provided a cohesive outlet so I didn’t have to manually control the input/out for each individual scale. They worked as a team.
One fact that turned out to be frustrating to test was that I couldn’t reliably test my healing abilities out on myself. I failed in being able to lightly wound myself to test my Flesh Sorcery. Of course, it turns out that the dragon scale parts are incredibly hard to cut open, so I settled for the bottoms of my feet which were mostly scale free. Gungnir, in knife form, did easily penetrate the skin but the flesh snapped back like a rubber band. I didn’t want to try shooting myself or anything more drastic, that would be stupid.
“Can’t believe I’m gonna do this.” I grumbled. Gathering myself and my stuff up, I took another leisurely flight out into the desert. Since testing on myself wasn’t a very fruitful idea, I spotted a sleeping sand lizard when I got a few miles away from Sunstone Castle. Landing on its back and smacking it with a mana-infused fist knocked it out.
I looked the sand lizard over. “Poor bastard, hopefully this won’t take too long.” The beast was a magnificent specimen. Twenty feet long, deep tan scales with mottled brown stripes running along the back and sides. Making sure to deaden the nerves so it wouldn’t feel a thing, I began making incisions and then repairing them, making sure that my Flesh Sorcery wasn’t all out of order. Healing cuts, check. Regenerating lost organs, check. Fixing broken bones and regenerating missing ones, check. For the hell of it, I cut all of its limbs off and then let it almost bleed out so I could see if fixing it was within my abilities still. I know that technically this is cruel, but the nerve block made it humane. Ish.
Putting the lizard back together and setting the bewildered creature free, I made my way back to Sunstone Castle and got started on the Ritual Expansion project, creating another couple sets of solar panels and making the gathering ritual larger in order to cover more ground so as to bring in more power. The next month was spent on incredibly boring, extremely repetitive work: adding another two outer circles of conjured gold and silver to the ritual, keeping it properly aligned and adding the new solar panels so that I wouldn’t run into a situation again where stores of power would ever be in question. I couldn’t believe that I actually did run into a situation where I blew through months of accumulated power, and it was all related to a personal change.
With this oversight in mind, I had Kraken also start the process of doubling the layers of buried conjured batteries and heightening and thickening the castle walls so that they would exponentially cover more ground, greatly deepening the available mana reserves.
[Or you could just tap into a freaking ley line. Sheesh,] Kraken complained, reviewing the holographic map of the area in front of him. [All of this hoopla and you don’t even think to just build a damn castle OVER a leyline, you gotta do it the hard way!]
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[There are no freaking ley lines out here!] I snapped, pointing at the very map he was looking at. [They’re all too damn far away!]
[There’s one under the river, dumbass! If you can convert heat and light from the desert into raw mana, you can divert some power from the ley line under the river and then convert it to pure mana for the castle. You don’t even need much, just divert a bit and you’ll have a constant feed of more mana than you’ll ever need.]
If only my bastard of a familiar had said that at the outset of this journey. Muttering dark and dangerous things under my breath, I traipsed over to the river and dove in making my way to the bottom. [Son of a fucking goat lover!] I cursed in my head. Kraken was right. It wasn’t a particularly deep or powerful ley line, but there was a small one that swiftly flows underneath the bed of the river.
Alternating between cursing and singing the praises of my spirit familiar, two to three hours went by as I conjured and shaped a pipeline of braided gold and silver encased in shaped granite all the way from my castle to the bottom of the river bed. Inscribing the proper runes took longer than the actual construction process. It was tricky to make an auto-detection power governor so that the pipeline would cut off the flow of power or lessen the intake if the castle was full up on mana. I can’t go completely draining a ley line if I don’t have to.
“I wonder what Andy’s up to?” I whispered as night fell and the heat of the day broke while sitting in my stone chair overlooking the desert. The sky began to light up with stars as there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I thought about my brother and my keen nugget of jealousy in regards to the fact that he was at freaking magic college right now. What I would have given to go to a grown-up version of Hogwarts, but instead I gotta worry about the miserable amount of undead on my planet.
Slapping away the voice of Peter Parker’s uncle in my head, the one warning me that ‘with great power comes great responsibility’, I grumbled some more as my thoughts turned towards Acantha. I gave her a task but I didn’t really give her a timeline. To me, that meant I’d at least go check on her after a month, of which there was least a week and a half left, but now boredom was my main enemy.
I thought about popping over to New Richmond and checking on them to see how they’re doing but that would mean leaving Gungnir as Kraken needs the tool as a focus to continue making the golem army. My rifle and Svalinn are more than enough for pretty much any normal enemy but every book had a clear cut lesson inside of it: if weird shit is going down, do not be caught without your best fucking weapon. Harry Potter without a wand, screwed. Harry Dresden without magic, fucked. The badass from the Patriot without a gun, his children die. The list goes on, and if that means I have to be bored until my plans are ready, then I’m just going to have to be bored.
Three weeks later . . . .
My golem army is complete!
Over a thousand sunstone golems complete with elemental sergeants, armed with warhammers and battleaxes stood proudly in the sun. Standing at the top of the north wall, I preened as I surveyed the acres of gleaming stone soldiers in their organized teams. It was almost enough to make me cackle like a mad scientist in the throes of discovery.
[We can leave now!] Kraken celebrated, flying around in the open air. [I’m so done being your 3-D printer! They can charge up on their own, and I’ve installed a dummy processor so that if you need to, you can simply reach out and it’ll conjure replacements for your army, weapons included.]
Spinning around so fast that he almost disappeared from sight, Kraken flew in front of my face and bounced around like a psychotic pinball. [I wanna see what Phoenix looks like!]
Agreeing with my familiar who’d been driving me up the wall with his complaining that had been steadily growing worse as the weeks wore on, I donned SAW and Svalinn, not even checking to see if I had all of my batteries charged as I’d check about a hundred million times in the past few weeks. My rifle was ready to go, I’d practiced flying and hoverboarding, my magic was rockin’ and rollin’. I had been so bored that I practiced staff forms that Reeanth tried to teach me a while back. Sheathing knife-form Gungnir to my waist, I took one last look around and hopped on my hoverboard, turning its nose south-east.
Getting up to speed in the desert flats, I used a sloping hill as an angled takeoff point for me to transition to flying, SAW’s wings effortlessly unfurling and catching the rising heat of the desert updrafts. Hitting two hundred miles an hour let me get to what was left of Phoenix in just under an hour. I flew very high over the city back and forth a couple times just to get the lay of the land.
No wonder Acantha hadn’t returned.
The city was a desiccated hulk of its pre-Ripple self. Most of the suburban houses were demolished wrecks, the streets were filled with craters and half of those were filled with raging green fires. Trash, scrap metal, blown apart infrastructure, it just got worse the more I looked at it. And that’s with trying not to take in the details of rotting and bloated bodies that decorated the landscape in the most horrific ways. Holding in my gorge, I counted at least three open portals spewing out all kinds of monstrosities, two of which had large groups of humans and maybe humans confronting the stream of invaders. The third portal was vomiting shrieking creatures that tried to flank the other two groups until an explosion of green and purple flame annihilated the many-eyed shriekers.
[There’s your vassal,] Kraken commented, keeping a running tally of the devolving situation. I could hear him shaking his head. [She’s breathing hard and her aura’s dim. Probably can’t keep that up much longer.]
[So what you’re saying is,] I laughed as I hovered over the battlefield. [Is that it’s time to test this shit?]
Acantha’s face was priceless as I dove and landed in front of her. Her shell-shocked look morphed to surprised relief even with her entire dragonscale outfit being covered in blood and gore. The fire in her hands that roared in sheer surprise died back down to a flicker as she recognized me. “What are you doing here?” she exclaimed, seeming to not believe her own eyes.
“I thought you’d be done by now!” I yelled back, hosing her off with conjured water. “Damn, you smell like shit. The fuck happened?”
Turning back to the battle raging around us, Acantha clapped her hands together and started chanting. A wickedly bright green flame sparked to life in her palms which she blew outwards. Like a dragon’s breath, the fire leaped out seemingly of its own accord, consuming all of the horrors in its path. Even as the shrieking things died, they and the ground kept burning. The crackling pops of the burning fat accompanied the stench of rancid scorched flesh.
[Wytchfire,] Kraken clarified, sounding impressed. [Mixed with dragonfire if I’m not mistaken.]
“Someone or something keeps opening up portals to different realms and we can’t keep up!” Acantha explained as color drained out of her face. “The people here aren’t soldiers. They wouldn’t have lasted this long without the Luneks.”
Before I could ask what in the world ‘Luneks’ were, a wave of silver furred things crashed into the mobs of shriekers like a wave of living moonlight. The surprised mob of shriekers looked like each one was the baby of a radioactive giant praying mantis and a lionfish’s bastard crossed with a porcupine. The Luneks though appeared to be the hulked out version of werecreatures, giant wolves and bears and cats that raced around on their back legs like humans while wielding two handed swords of silver light that cut through anything in their way.
The long-legged Luneks raced around myself and Acantha the way a river flows around rock in the middle of the current. Their movements held an incomparable grace that was hypnotizing in nature. Figuring that I might as well make the high ground since there wasn’t any to take, I used Earth Sorcery to raise Acantha and myself thirty feet into the air.
“Don’t! No! We’re sitting ducks now!” she screamed as she started to dive off the column. Snatching her by the back of the armor, I hauled her out of the path of vomited spines that trailed sickly green acid. Svalinn roared from his place on my arms, conjuring floating shields of stone and generating a forcefield around us, blocking the incoming projectiles. Drawing Gungnir who shifted from a knife to a crystal adorned mace, I pointed it at portal number one.
Kraken, obliging my unspoken wish, unleashed a barrage of ten overcharged crystal grenades that blew that part of the horde to bits. Before I pulled back, he launched another ten through the portal just to return a little bit of love. Repeating this two more times gave the fighters a breather as the Luneks cleaned up the rest of the stragglers as Acantha provided fire from above.
I lowered the column as I quietly hummed to myself. “Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone, it’s not warm when she’s away . . .” Facing Acantha who looked at me with a mix of fear and respect, I stamped staff-form Gungnir into the ground. “What’s next? Either introduce me to your friends or let me flatten the city, your call. Everything smells awful.”
Just as I finished speaking, a concerted roar rang out from the Luneks as the biggest one, a veritable giant, jumped and landed ten feet away, smashing his battleaxe into the earth.
“Who dares to steal the honor this day from Severak the Hungry?” The massive bear of a man, bearman? I mean the Lunek, glared at me with heated red eyes as two barely smaller catlike Luneks joined his side. The smaller ones were slender, whipcord thin and taut as an over-tightened bowstring. Slowly turning and looking the menacing predator in the eye triggered the Alpha instincts of Acantha’s furry friends. Severak bent down to my height and roared. I bared my teeth as Gungnir glowed white hot.
“Tell your friends,” I said to Acantha, gritting my teeth. “To back off. This city should have been cleaned up already. Didn’t I tell you to team up with Remy and Fernando? The three of you had more than enough power to fix this.”
Reeanth’s jaw dropped just before she sharply inhaled. “That was before someone started opening portals to let the Hive through!” she clarified, her hands on her hips. “That’s what these things are, the Hive. The spitters and devourers swarm while the sackers suicide acid bomb any kind of magic user. And then we have the insectified venom-wyrms that just wait for us to bunch up and they pop out of the ground like a worm from hell. Magic just slides right off of them so we had to make a deal with the Luneks.”
“I’m TALKING to you!” Severak roared again, this time his roar generating actual physical force that would have knocked us both down if not for Svalinn’s mana shield.
“Do that one more time fuzzy and I’ll make a coat outta you,” I threatened, whipping around. Raising my left hand, I cracked all of the earth within a hundred yards sending his group sprawling. “I don’t take orders from anyone. I’m here for my vassal.” My left hand landed on Acantha’s shoulder.
“No honor!” One of Severak’s companions, the cat person, spat. “Never any honor from the tleusant.”
Acantha’s eyes went wide. I looked to her for clarification and she shook her head. “It’s an insult, it translates to ‘cursed’, but it also means cowards. They view magic as weakness made real because magic users can’t fight ‘honorably’, as in using a weapon.”
I laughed out loud and let out a deep breath. “I’m not here for honor, cat. Honor is for the dead. It serves no purpose for the living. Just tell me where the evil fuckers are that need killing.”
All of the Luneks in the immediate vicinity spat at the ground as one. “Life without honor is no life at all, tleusant.” Snapping his giant fingers, Severak jutted his chin as his subordinates, growling something I couldn’t make out at them. Our standoff continued for a few minutes as his two cat lieutenants ran off and came back with someone in tow. Tossing the mess at my feet, Severak laughed. “To each their own, right, tleusant? Take your coward, he’ll show you the infestation.”
“Fernando!” Acantha gasped, leaping down helping him to his feet.
“And this one too!” Another filthy human hit the ground in front of me.
“Remy!”
My blood started to boil. “What, did you do to them?” I snarled, my teeth almost cracking from the force of me gritting them so hard.
“Their crimes are many, tleusant. First, they fight with cowardice itself, and second,” Severak paused, a growl from deep within his throat turned into an angry yowl. “This filth tried to seduce one of our number! As if she were a slave fit for breeding!”
Intentionally reining in the flood of rage that threatened to crack the seal of my patience, I took yet another deep breath. [Do I have to wipe them all out?] I asked Kraken via our mental link. [What the fuck am I dealing with here?]
[Luneks are a race that holds honor as their avenue to their afterlife. Great battles are their religion, fighting with tooth, nail, and claw is the only way they know. Magic fits in with neither tooth, nail, or claw. The only way to win their respect is by an honorable duel.]
[Yeah, no. I don’t have time for that, and neither does this fucking city.]
Resigning myself to a course of action, I called on the earth and sank every Lunek within sight up to their neck and solidified the stone. “Tried and true,” I commented to myself as I crouched in front of Severak. “I’ll be real blunt here. I can kill you. I can easily kill you and your entire tribe. But I don’t really want to. Is that something you can understand? Either nod or shake your head no because if you insult me one more time I will simply end you.”
Severak barely gave a nod. “Good, thank you. Now, you are going to give me your most trustworthy soldier, packmate or whatever, and that person is going to lead me around the city to whatever needs blowing up. From there, I will personally take care of this fucking mess of a city and give you back your soldier. Again, nod for yes or shake for no.”
Another quick nod. “Good. Thank you. One last question, did you hurt those two over there? The ones you threw at my feet?” I asked, my voice as icy as the Grim Reaper’s scythe. Severak’s eyes widened but he didn’t move other than that. “Did . . . you . . . hurt . . . them?” I asked slowly, making sure to elongate the syllables.
“They were cowards!” he roared, straining at the stone encasing him. “They retreated from honorable combat! Pain and humiliation to those that run from battle!”
“It’s called strategy, you retarded ass!” Acantha screamed from where she knelt, doing her best to clean up Fernando’s and Remy’s faces. “Not every charge has to end in death! They’re human! They don’t have natural fur armor like you!”
Why does it always come down to responsibility?
Humanity has a strange idea that responsibility, the acceptance of that lifelong burden, is what makes you an adult. And shouldering said burden in turn grants the autonomy of maturity so that you can do more and accept even more responsibility later. It’s the way a man strives for a better job when his wife gets pregnant so he can provide, willingly taking on that responsibility to better meet the demands of the future. And then either works for a promotion or hunts for a better job for more money when the kids come along. An old boss of mine once told me, ‘the only reward for a job well done is more work’. Of course, that dude was the epitome of doing the perfect amount so that he stayed right where he was, fat and happy in his comfortable management position. Not that I was jealous of him, but his style allowed him to coast through on his laurels in a way that might have peaked my little green monster.
Which means, in my book, the whole thing’s a racket. Responsibility IS a racket. It is the societal expectation to do more so that other people can do less, at least that’s what it seems like. Helping out New Richmond automatically made a bunch of people there assume that I was in charge, that I was going to stick around and solve all of their problems, willingly putting on blinders to the fact that I had just literally already solved most of their problems by properly equipping them with magical gear well beyond the means that they had available at that point in time.
And here I was again, about to spit in the eye of some cosmic trick that wanted me to take on the mantle of what was left of Phoenix. Fuck you, is all I have to say. This ain’t my city, these aren’t my people, and I don’t owe any of them jack shit. This decision that sits in front of me, this current set of choices is a forked road. For the moment, assisting Acantha is a good strategy because she’s trying to save humans AND close portals of alien invaders. And it’s fair to say that I don’t want to have a pustule of demons, zombies, necromancers, bugs and any other kind of nastiness anywhere near me when it is finally time to head up north.
But Acantha, the bitch of a witch that she is at the moment, is desperately making big, watery eyes at me, begging me without words to solve the problem that she couldn’t solve. Inner-me groaned at the thought. Yes, my kind of power is on the heavy side, allowing me to forcibly adjust the weight class scale so I can wreck all kinds of shenanigans at a time of my choosing, but that doesn’t mean I want to be the savior of this place. The real issue was the mistake I made in my initial judgment call. I figured that this would be a good place for a powerful witch to stretch her wings and raze the bitch to the ground, giving her combat experience and taking care of a long-term problem in one convenient swoop.
But no, if you want something done right you have to do it yourself. Lifting up Gungnir, I let loose with my own personal brand of American Hellfire. Kraken bombed the shit out of anything that moved, especially if it resembled an insect or arachnid. Crystal rounds cracked as they split open chitinous bodies and overcharged crystal grenades vaporized hordes of demonic ants. Pulses of mana flipped the unstable landscape to smash wide swathes of enemies and all I could do was smile as I single handedly turned the tide.