A lizard.
A talking lizard.
A small, talking lizard the size of a mini-Dachshund casually swam a few feet from my hoverboard as if it were on vacation and it expected me to hand it a nice fruity drink. And this small talking lizard to my magical senses burned internally with the magical might of a small sun. Its slender crimson tail flicked back and forth to keep pace with me.
Fuck no.
Just one glance at it revealed that this little iguana lookin’ creature could wipe me off the map by sneezing. Its magical signature burned with a mix of incandescent orange and bitterly sharp-sharp-blue that mixed and exploded in the middle before becoming a nuclear whole.
Sheer panic made me pulse the hover enchantment with power, lifting the board with me on it ten feet above the river.
“Rude. You gonna give me a ride or let a little dragon work his ass off trying to keep up with your lazy ass, huh?”
My shock was eventually overridden by the ingrained instinct of years of conservative household upbringing, ‘manners maketh a man’. I always thought my own addition made it better, ‘but humor keeps him sane’. Still couldn’t believe that the lizard lips and tongue moved like a human mouth to produce intelligible speech.
Coughing to cover up my surprise, I gestured at my hoverboard. “Well good sir, you may if you would like, but I may require some information during the course of the ride? And also a mutually beneficial non-aggression pact?” Maybe my forced kindness would wrangle something out of this fucked-in-the-head lizard.
“Agreed.” He grunted, slapping his tail downward to propel himself the ten feet up out of the river and onto the hoverboard. I expanded the width of the board to make room for the passenger as he was in midair.
My new guest chuckled as he lazily sprawled on his back. “Oooohhh, a baby sorcerer, this early in the game huh? Hahahaha, can’t wait to see what kind of carnage you wreak. Always so fun in the beginning, but they never really last.”
This. This right here is why I went the tank route at first. That little casual mutter confirmed my fears. So many horrible things I could intuit from a talking lizard’s offhand remarks. I figured that the odds were stacked against me but I’ve come out ahead-ish so far. The common sense priority of making myself hard to kill is conducive to a decent lifespan. My flesh magic alone could probably make me immortal (or at least give me a long-ish lifespan), but the rest of it (my paranoid preparations) would keep me immortal.
Taking the lizard’s words to heart, I carefully rechecked all of my gear for the most likely outcome ahead; bloodshed. My hands almost went to the defunct shard of Chaos from the second Ripple that I had slipped into my lower leg pocket. It was my trump card, my bit of forced insanity that may let me flip the table if the cards fucking suck.
“So what’s a stranded gecko like yourself doing all the way out here?” I asked with a confident smirk, calculating a little bit of risk with the minor jest. “I'm surprised some of the neighborhood dogs haven’t come nippin atcha?”
He opened one slitted yellow eye to look at me. “Dogs know better than to mess with a dragon,” he rumbled. The word dragon was oddly two octaves lower than the rest of his sentence. “The last humans who attacked me were quite tasty as well.”
I glanced down at my quest as smoke drifted out of his nostrils. “Threats don’t make good guests.” I warned, Gungnir shifting in my hands.
He closed his eyes and stopped breathing smoke. “Apologies. Ask what you will.”
“Ok, fine. How are you a dragon? I thought they were huge with wings and came with a penchant for capturing the sexy princess?” I joked, trying to keep things light.
“Oh don’t worry, the mana on the planet just isn’t dense enough yet, but it will be soon,” he replied with an arrogant laugh, his tail trailing in the water while his claw whipped out, snagging a fish. “And when it does, I’ll be the least of anyone’s worries.”
******
Gate, gate, gotta focus on finding the gate. I don’t even know what it looks like. The little dragon was no help at all after a few more questions, falling asleep in the bright sun even though I pestered him for more answers. I didn’t get a feeling of hostility from him, but damn he was heavy. He made the board gradually sink and I had to keep pumping mana into it to reinforce the levitation.
A whizzing arrow flew by my head. Years of playing baseball combined with hyper over-keyed nerves barely kept me alive as I ducked in the nick of time. Turning sharply on the board, I whipped it towards the nearest goblin hiding behind a tree trying to put another arrow in his bow. Jumping off the board to the river shore I hurled a tremor through the earth as I landed on the sand, knocking down the little fucker and his unseen friends.
More goblins than I could immediately see sprawled on the ground as the earth beneath them betrayed their every movement, giving me time to force my eyes to believe what was in front of them. The little shitstains stank to high heaven leaving me to believe that the green scraps of cloth or armor they were covered in wasn’t just dirt. Flies buzzed around like clouds of raving fans at a rock concert following their every move.
Not a single one of them was over four feet tall and their weapons were fairly primitive. Rough hewn stone tipped spears lashed to tree branches were scattered flint knives and shoddy axes. They must have been uglier cousins of the other goblins I’d already taken care of.
Surprised cries gave away my location for others that may be further away. Springing forward and driving my knife, Gungnir, into the first one’s chest was satisfying but instantly sickening. I almost puked right then and there. Gungnir turned into a mace as I ripped the weapon out and smashed the head of a second goblin five feet away and then fluidly morphed into a spear as I channeled another earth tremor through it to the surrounding area.
Twenty sprinting goblins tumbled to the ground, their pounding footsteps making it easy to sense them through the earth. Even more were out there but those were still a bit further away, their shrill cries alerting the rest of their number.
I stabbed Gungnir into the soft sand with both hands. “Protect me and kill goblins!” I yelled, testing out my staff. Might as well see if it can do shit on its own since I decided to dive into combat without a solid plan.
I called water from the river to my hands forming two maces out of solid ice.Taking care to reinforce my impromptu weapons with a constant flow of mana from my pocket generator, I then used Water Sorcery to force more water to flow around me and shield all of my armor with overlapping scales.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Fueled by unending stamina from the amulet, it was a slaughter.
Ice maces with irregular bluish-white spikes crushed goblin skulls while their feeble blows bounced off my reinforced armor and mana shield, let alone my extra layers of ice armor. Craggy spikes of bedrock ripped through their flimsy bodies just before the nearby trees themselves answered my call to battle. Gnarled roots from elm and maple trees tripped them while showering leaves to impede the goblins' vision. Even the sand betrayed their very footsteps, fouling each stride and making them easy targets.
It almost didn’t feel real, the battle. It was too easy. I was an undeniable storm of hazy slaughter and the aliens were as blades of grass before my inevitable cleansing rage. My Flesh Sorcery aided me in battle, pumping up my bloodlust while dosing out the right amount of adrenaline.
With a heaving chest, I dropped the bloody ice maces, regarding the slaughter. It stank. I pushed the shakes to the back of my mind and got busy. Sinking their mangled bodies to mask the evidence and stench actually took more time than the battle. Using the water I had called to me, I rinsed off the steaming green blood and banished it though I still kept my shield active.
[Can’t let my guard down again.] I brooded. With one last exercise of power, I cleaned up the landscape to as close to its original condition as I could get it. Once that was finished, I could feel the pulses of the Gate. It wasn’t far away. Now that the goblins were dead, its magical signature less muddled.
“Nasty little fuckers. Never taste good, no matter what planet you’re on.” The tiny dragon with no wings sauntered up next to me. “The only thing keeping them alive is the amount of fucking they do. Or is it coitus? Your language is weird, I need to taste a few more humans before the slang sets in.”
“Ok, ok! Shut up, I really don’t wanna picture that!” I snapped, holding back my gorge and my shock at his revelation. It set me on edge but I had bigger concerns since he seemed likely to leave me alone. They really did smell like they bathed in literal shit. I’m pretty sure they covered their weapons in it too. “Got more important things to do than worry about goblins and how they screw. And gross dude. And no more eating humans either.”
“Haha, don’t know about that, humans breed rather quickly. But you leave two goblins alone and you’ll have thirty running around in two months. If those get left alone for another two months you’ll probably have a few hundred. ” He replied, scratching at his chin with his barbed tail. “They’re an infestation, consider your version of locusts but with more disease, more tools, and a taste for human flesh. You’ll see, they utterly ruin the land they inhabit if left to breed.”
“What’s your name anyway?” I asked, realizing I may have given offense to this powerful creature, his casual demeanor putting me at ease and allowing me the mistake of thinking of him like a fellow human.
“Gorgorath. Close enough to what you can pronounce.”
Grinning, I cracked my back as I tried to ingratiate myself with the weirdness. “Well, I’m calling you Rath, with one ‘R’, easy to pronounce and similar to ‘Wrath” with ‘W’.”
He squinted at me, “Fine, you’re lucky I’m in a good mood right now. Just gimme some of that raw mana rolling off of you and we’ll be square. Hard enough being on this planet with barely any free mana floating around. I was forced to become tiny and everything. That’s why you won’t see any truly powerful beings yet.” I paid real close attention to his grumblings.
[Aha! Leverage!] I knew I had some but didn’t realize what it was until now. My generators of mana put me head and shoulders above everything else right now even though there ain’t much out there at the moment. Unlimited stamina and magic power, nice.
From what I could infer, there simply wasn’t enough mana available to sustain most mythological creatures at this current point in time but that would change soon. I did have some sort of timeframe but I really wasn’t sure the scale of it. The upcoming war for Earth possessed the tiniest possibility of being managed if I played my cards right. What I needed most right now was information, and this little lizard had it.
But my attempts at turning the lizard to my cause could wait till the Gate was taken care of. My tracking took us down a gully, past a copse of twisted cherry trees with bark that looked like faces in pain and around a sneaky pitfall. I stopped as the subsonic hum of strange magic got louder. I slowed my pace to a crawl, each step carefully placed with my will softening the earth beneath my feet to eliminate any and all sound. Rath, arrogant dimunitized dragon that he is, ran right into my back foot, completely bowling me over.
“Gah!” I sputtered in mid-air, desperately trying and failing to keep quiet.
“Blessed mana!” Rath exclaimed, climbing over me and zipping into the underbrush, “Oh how I missed thee!” His tail whipped the brushes to shreds in his excitement. “Come to Gorgorath!”
Scrambling to my feet I sprinted after the noisy reptile, stealth thrown to the winds and caution right after it.
“Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” I snarled as I took off in the underbrush, my Nature Sorcery allowing me to thread through the dense plantlife, making a nice path to follow as it subconsciously brushed the tree limbs and the brush aside. I slid to a halt five feet before the woodline; I could see what could only be the Gate from here.
A merging of a natural rock formation and a primal stone megalith marked with rune-based art stood out from the grass covered side of the hill. Clearly, it could have passed for a simple cave entrance but it was covered in strange slash marks that could have passed as an ancient alphabet.
Each imbued slash glowed and shifted every time you focused on a different spot, the eye barely able to focus on it. The entire ensemble was hard to make out, the shifting nature defied being pinned down. Rath’s fat head was nuzzling the cut out frame of the gate, purring all the while. Even his tongue flicked out and licked it, his eyes rolling in the back of his head. I watched as his tail grew just a bit longer.
“Rath!” I stage-whispered just loud enough to not be ignored. “Dude, cut that shit out!”
The darkness that was the entrance to the cave began to shimmer and then grow darker, and then blacker still. The empty mouth yawned so deep that it almost turned purple. The air shook without noise as the mana in the area spiked.
I conjured the trusty flashbang pebbles in my hand, and then pumped them to the brink with mana. Pulling out Gungnir, I began to pour all of my excess mana from my own regeneration and the amulet’s into it. Trusting my gut, I took a bunch of steps back, conjured large bone armor plates to cover the armor I was already wearing and grew a wall of stone in front of me four feet high and forty feet wide, making a small fortification to change the landscape in my favor.
As the gate continued to emit weird energy that felt much denser than the mana I wield, I summoned a wall of ice identical to the stone one right behind it. The dirt I was standing on lowered so that I could take shelter in a foxhole if need be.
[So glad I made the rose vine seeds.] Palming them in my left hand, I began to channel as much energy as I could into them without letting them sprout. I only had time for one last preparation before the gate disgorged its passengers. Just before they stepped out, I reached out with Earth Sorcery and made the ground directly in front of the gate harden into thin, brittle stone with a conditional enchantment to shatter if I willed it, then turned the ground underneath it to extremely silty sand.
Congratulating myself on quick thinking, I held my breath. [I love it when a plan comes together, even if I’m about to piss myself with fear.]
I did not expect the sight that came arrogantly strutting out of that gate.
Humans.
Big ones.
The smallest of the four that marched out first was a slender but well built brunette woman that stood over seven-and-a-half feet tall decked out in dark gray futuristic armor screaming of a marriage between advanced science and magic. The armor had no visible seams and dimly glowed with an acrid power. And when I call her ‘slender’, I mean proportionally. Standing at over seven feet tall put her taller than the giant men who participated in the world Strongman competitions. She looked like she could pick them up and eat them.
Behind her hulked three men going up in size and height till the last one towered over the rest, a thickly muscled behemoth at least nine feet tall. I didn’t want to take a blow from any of them. Being punched by someone your own size hurts but larger people seem to carry around the weight of sledgehammers in their fists when they swing’em around. Wrestling with my friends who were way bigger than me in high school and college showed me just how small being five foot ten could be. Just a few extra inches of height really gives someone an edge in physical combat and here I was facing literal giants.
The woman in front carried a sleek gun and her bodyguards carried various blades with even more sticking out of their armor everywhere; knives, swords, machetes and more.
Burning blue runes adorned every sleek line of their weapons and armor.
One glance made me curse all the heavens.
[Shit.] And I thought I was prepared.
I was expecting something along the lines of classic monsters: goblins, elves, orcs or some other creature straight outta Tolkien or his pen pal’s nightmares, not dangerous humans with a pituitary issue. The woman in the front glanced down at the still purring lizard. She spoke words in a language I didn’t know and Rath replied right back without stopping his almost sexual cuddle with the mana-spewing gate. The men glared at their surroundings as they scanned the woods with disdain.
She turned her burning gray eyes towards the woods looking straight at me. Pointing at me with one hand as her gun swayed near her hip, she barked something I couldn’t make out, the other three laughing at her comment as they added in their own jeers. I really wanted to fight and run at the same time, but I knew when I was outclassed.
“Hey Rath, wanna let me in on the joke?” I yelled from behind my wall, still pouring mana into my tools.
Turning towards me, he said, “They were wondering if you’d put up a good fight. This is their ancestor’s home planet and they want to see if humanity has grown up or devolved in their absence.”
“And?” I asked, tightly gripping my tools of war.
“Eh, maybe.”
That reply seemed to have been what they were waiting for. It was all one motion, their teamwork flawless. The woman in front knelt and sighted down her rifle at my structure while the backline mammoth simultaneously drew his gleaming spear and jumped up and back on top of the gate, cocking his arm back to throw. The two middle guys, almost twins it looked like, drew swords that hummed louder than the gate and began to half-sprint, half-vanish to either side of me. I would have rather taken on a goddamn dragon.