I had a plan for a reason. Always have a plan. I had a nice plan for a damn good reason, just in case this wonky scenario didn’t go the best way possible, just in case Chance decided to stop fucking around with my life. The woman’s alien rifle silently spat a thin lance of magically charged plasma that blew right through both walls. Only my frantic dive to the side barely saved my ass, but I did manage to activate the trap in the thin stone underneath her. I still didn’t have time to see the results of my hasty play though as the giant hurled his spear through the remnants of my walls as if they didn’t matter.
What continued to frustrate me was how little my hasty yet well thought out plan worked out, literally. These freakishly tall meatheads just overpowered my plan and shit on it laughing the entire time. My shield deflected the shards of my wall that had exploded from the sheer force of the spear throw. Twins one and two were on my ass as I used the momentum of the sheer kinetic force from the giant’s spear to hop back to my feet.
Using Earth Sorcery to soften the ground beneath the flickering twins to slow them down, I conjured little walls of uneven stone in front of their feet, trying to trip them up. All the while, I quickly spread the thorn seeds on the ground.
Thinking as fast as I could, I released the growth-limiter cap I had on the the thorn seeds with a blast of will and dumped more energy into them just as I knelt to present a smaller target, trusting in my beefed up shield gauntlet to block their strikes so I could give the vines a second to sprout. Twin two’s kick bounced off my shield but Twin one’s blade went right through the barely glowing energy field into my right arm. My anguished scream made him smile.
His brother’s howl of pain wiped that grin right off.
Twin two was on the ground, nasty sharp rosevines entangling him, slowly drinking his blood and constricting every limb like a demonic snake with vengeance on its mind. Each pain-driven flex of movement only encouraged the thirsty vines to dig deeper. Twin one yanked his sword out of my arm in order to prune the vine caging his brother.
As he did, I thrust Gungnir forward with my left hand, channeling my will and a chunk of energy through it. The spear hurled a concussive blast of lightning-charged air that caught him in the hip, rocketing him forty-feet away. Several hungry thorn-vines tumbled after him using my blast as propulsion.
My flesh magic was already stitching my wound back together and the pocket generator was supplying the energy to wipe away fatigue and shock. Just in time, I slapped on a pain block right as the leader’s second plasma shot nailed me right in the gut, kicking me down to the ground like it was a horse, my shield barely holding. Thank the Ripple for my battery vest. That shot took two whole battery’s worth of energy and I had six left after that and Gungnir’s blast.
[I can’t take many of those!] I thought, panicking because I have no clue about alien weaponry. There’s no indicator for how many rounds like that she can pump out. I could hear Rath laughing and chatting with the woman from where I lay on the ground. A shadow covered the sun for a bare moment, oh fuck.
Instinct and Earth Sorcery shoved me to the side using the dirt below me and then pulled me down into the ground. I dove further and further until I was forty feet down. Lucky for me I acted on my instincts. The big guy had jumped off the gate and tried to land on me with another spear. I actually felt the impact through the earth.
Equal parts fear and wrath swept through me like a cold wind. [Fuck this!] I snarled in my head. [Time to cheat.] Gathering my energy, I summoned hands of stone that reached up, grabbing the big man and his weapon and hauling him down into the dank soil. I kept on pulling, the earth around me more than willing to bend to my will as it dragged him seventy-feet down encasing him in a ten-by-ten stone box.
I wore a dark smile as I gave him just enough room to breathe but not enough to struggle. [That should take him a while.] Feeling around with my senses, I found the twins writhing with pain twenty yards up and ten behind me as the thorny vines mercilessly restricted their movements. Shrugging my shoulders, I pulled them down into the earth, encasing them in solid stone cages about ten-feet away from the big guy’s cage.
That took me down to a little less than half of the remaining energy from my battery vest. I had four full batteries left at this point with my pocket generator keeping me healthy, my personal energy stores full, and the overflow going to the empty batteries.
I took ten minutes underground to slowly summon a thin, wide disk of platinum, then bonded it onto a disk of stone with a handle. From my experiments at the house, platinum seemed to be a null metal. I could conjure it as it was a naturally occurring metal in the earth, but it seemed to be immune to magical energy, to mana itself, especially after I finished conjuring and shaping it. The more I shaped it, the less it allowed me to shape it until it resisted all magical efforts to manipulate it.
I couldn’t shape it if I stopped working with it. I couldn’t put energy into it or an enchantment of any kind. It made for a perfect anti-mage shield. I couldn’t even do anything else with it.
Grinning with anticipation, I hefted Gungnir in my left hand and my makeshift shield in my right. [Party time bitch.]
I reasonably concluded that the woman was in charge based on her attitude, her actions, and her equipment. She was the first out of the gate, the only one holding a gun and everyone seemed to defer to her when she spoke. The best course of action would be to hand her a solid defeat without humiliation, and if that didn’t work, just bury them in the heart of the earth and an oversized stone coffin just to make them feel special. Either way works for me.
Carefully monitoring the topsoil with Earth Sorcery, I could feel her location. Her boots shifted and her weight with it. [Fifteen feet to the left of the gate on solid earth . . . she’s crouched and aiming all around.] I thought, steeling myself. [The damn lizard feels like he’s still curled up asleep on the other side of the gate. Asshole is probably snoring like my overweight uncle.]
Feeling her shift one more time, I exploded out of the earth directly underneath her, my new shield facing up like a battering ram.
Her catlike reflexes used the momentum to leap up and away from me, but midair is exactly where I wanted her. You can’t dodge up there unless you can fly. Flipping in mid-air, she skillfully unloaded a plasma bolt at me which splashed off my platinum shield, barely heating it up.
I grinned triumphantly. [Take that! Loser!]
Seriously, I can't wait to get home to experiment more with platinum.
Just before her feet touched the earth in a landing that was going to be very graceful and skilled, I turned the earth beneath her into a seven-foot deep pit of thick wet mud, more than enough to disorient and hamper her movements. The mudpit welcomed her with open arms, her head just barely above the surface.
I pointed Gungnir at her and channeled my Water Sorcery through it, blasting her with a ramping up firehose of freezing pain. I kept up the flow for fifteen seconds, stopped, turned the mud to stone and froze the water everywhere around her except her face. If looks could kill man. She started shrieking at me. It didn’t really help seeing as I didn’t speak that language.
“Rath!” I yelled, not turning away from the trapped woman, “A little help here please?” I checked on the three trapped men. From the vibrations, they weren’t fighting too hard so I guessed that their stone coffins still had about five minutes worth of air in there. Betting on the fact that I couldn’t calculate the required air needed to not suffocate a giant, I methodically banished little tunnels of earth starting from the surface all the way down to their coffins to create a little air tunnel and then put a small air hole in each stone prison.
“RATH!”
“Whazzat?!” He yelped, startled awake. “Trying to nap here!”
I fought the overwhelming desire to glare at the diminutive lizard. “Seriously, I need a translator, I got them all trussed up but no way to communicate except for you.”
He trundled over to me, licked his lips, and then chomped down hard on my calf, his fangs sinking in a good two inches and then quickly released.
“What the fuck was that for?” I screamed, pointing Gungnir at him, pumping it full of energy as the wound quickly healed. I didn’t trust myself to hit him even at this range as I was jumping on one leg. I didn’t release the energy just yet even though I wanted to, soooooo bad.
Rath had already turned around and calmly started walking back towards the gate, not even caring, “Just wait, I gave you the language. Calm down infant.”
Turning my mana sight towards my leg, I watched as a small white packet of condensed mana shot up my vein, spiking through my nerves to my tailbone and then rocketing up my spinal cord to my brain, spearing it and then branching out and dissolving. The lizard ignored my frantic screams but the woman started laughing as I clutched my head and staggered sideways into a tree.
“I hope it hurts you inbred excuse for a human.”
I turned to her, still clutching my skull and using my flesh magic to block the pain. Breathing through my nose, I waited until the agony I was actively blocking stopped making my eyes water.
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[It actually worked!] I thought. I heard the noises she made, obviously not English, but it sounded like it in my head. I focused on her arrogant face and enunciated very slowly, just in case.
“Fuck you asshole.”
Her jaw dropped. That right there made me feel good, so good in fact, that I stood up and stuck Gungnir two inches from her aristocratic nose as it vividly pulsed, wreathed with lines of fire and crackling electricity. Grinning like a triumphant cat with a bird in its paws, I couldn’t help but relish the moment as I asked, “Anything else you want to tell me?”
A surprisingly large glob of saliva was loogied on Gungnir from my captive which instantly evaporated. “ You sure that’s how you want to play it?” I snarled. “Cause your inbred gangbang is a hundred feet under us right now and I could cut off their air supply or just crush them from here.”
A chuckle escaped her lips, “You don’t believe an already dead ape like yourself could ever defeat warriors of the Centauri empire do you?” I double checked the stone cages where big man and the twins were. Yup, still there. I turned and sealed the entrance of the gateway with conjured stone. Taking a moment, I shaped a rune of Earthbound strength into it. My crudely fashioned rune took the shape of a clenched fist of stone with a keyhole on it. That should give me a few minutes if reinforcements start to arrive.
My eyes hardened as I turned back to my captive. The tip of Gungnir, pointed at her nose, grew longer and slimmer, a crystalline needle with a small ball of flickering light at the end.
“Playtime’s over. You can either answer my questions willingly, or I could use Flesh Sorcery to make you feel pain that no creature has ever felt before - all without actually hurting you,” I threatened. “And if I’m feeling especially evil, I can make it so that every second of absolute agony feels like a thousand years. Take your pick.”
Mental exhaustion pounded at my brain, but I couldn’t let her see that. Have to maintain my image, the only leverage I have.
“A sorcerer?” Her face scrunched up. “Impossible, they died out several millennia ago during the Great Rending. Their sensitivity to magic made them burn out from the inside when Chaos fell.”
“It’s true.” Rath finally chimed in. “Been watching him for a few days.” He rolled over to get more comfortable and closer to the gate. “Definitely a sorcerer, purest mana I’ve ever felt too.”
She looked shaken, like her understanding of the world had been flipped on its head. She looked quizzically at me and then back at Rath, gulping with hesitation. “If you let me and my companions free, then I will swear on the broken throne of Atlantis that we will do you and yours no harm.”
I waved Gungnir in her face as it spat sparks around her. “Not good enough,” I snapped. “I need information too. If there are no sorcerers, then how are y’all doing magic, I can feel it running through your veins and weapons. Also, how do I permanently shut down a gate, and how long do I have before alien armies start walking Earth, and why the fuck are y’all so tall? Some kind of beefed up space cows where you’re from? Oh, and the three stooges are going to make the same oath you did as well.”
Her curt nod and repeating of the oath allowed me to relax a hair. Every second that I stalled allowed my pocket generator to wash away combat fatigue, adrenaline exhaustion and fill up my batteries. Six were full at this point as I had amped up the output of the pocket generator.
I banished the ice covering her and made the earth push her up out of it. “Put your weapons on the ground, all of them, and very slowly.” I ordered, ready to sink her back into the dirt. I kept my focus as I saw the mud sucked down into the ground revealing a skintight suit of armor. What really needed answering was where in the world did all of that futuristic weaponry come from. A knife, energy pikes, rippling swords, collapsible spears, guns, grenades, some spiky ball with an empty core, a few glowing chains. I encased it all in a stone box and sank it ten-feet down.
I pulled up her companions one at a time and she explained the deal to them, each swearing the oath while removing all of their weapons, which was a ridiculous amount, each getting their own stone case ten-feet down. The four freakishly large humans watched me as if I was a tiger about to spring at them. This really didn’t help their egos - getting bitch slapped by me, a short sorcerer.
I sat down on the ground thirty feet away leaning back against a tree with Gungnir in mace form draped across my lap, tapping the handle like an old school villain. Feeling cocky for once, I conjured stone chairs and gestured for them to sit down.
“Please, sit, relax. We’ve got time.” I ordered in a carefree yet slightly mocking manner. “Just wanna know what’s up.”
The big man actually growled at me, his pupils suddenly condensing down into glowing slits. The woman made a cutting motion with her hand at him and he stopped then sat down in the chair in a huff.
Turning to me, she introduced herself. “My name is Captain Reeanth.” Pointing at the sitting giant without turning, she continued, “and that is my second in command, Jorgan.”
“And these are Gerome and Gerone.” The twins slowly sat down, never taking their eyes off of me. This was getting creepy. “As to your questions, we are not sorcerers, we are combat wizards here on an preliminary scouting mission.”
“What’s the difference? You say wizard like it means something different than sorcerer.” I interrupted, eager to gain some intelligently put together information from someone who probably knew what they were doing. Clearly, their futuristic gear delineated that they had experience with magic. All of those weapons glowed to my mana sight and more than a few of them gave me the impression that they harbored tightly bound dark hungers.
“Sorcery is the gifted but rare understanding of an element to the soul by events of Chaos, allowing one to command, conjure, banish, and commune with the element.” Reeanth explained, gritting her teeth as she spoke. “Every halfwit child from the Centauri empire knows this. Wizards have to build their own understanding to work with any element and use reagents to actualize the result. They build power over the course of a lifetime due to education, research and understanding which is very different from most other forms of magical power. For instance, Mages are limited to only utilize one element, but they are essentially demigods when they are near their element. Combat wizards integrate magic into their bodies to be unstoppable weapons of war. And warlocks,” she shrugged, “well, we hunt down warlocks. They are universally treated as vile criminals. Scum.”
Okay, not touching that subject if at all possible. “And the rest of my questions?” I inquired.
“Gates can’t be permanently sealed,” Gerome answered.
“But they can be locked.” Gerone finished.
Yup, still creepy.
“And more will come when the ambient mana for Earth becomes naturally dense, which will take about one of your planet’s revolutions around Sol,” Reeanth picked back up. “The only reason we are able to be here is due to the stored energy in our armor, if not for that, we wouldn’t be able to survive. The honorable Gorgorath’s size is due to this fact, but he will return to his former magnificence in time. That’s probably why he is staying near you, you are putting off an unseemly amount of mana - pure mana.”
I glanced at Rath who went back to laying on his back. Disregarding him as a problem for now, I turned to look at the freaking giant as he stewed on the small stone chair. He didn’t take his eyes off of me, not even to take a look at Gungnir.
Damn I felt puny. After I looked him dead in his eyes, he snorted and leaned back. I didn’t notice at first, but the big bastard was at least a few inches closer than just a minute ago. Letting out a deep breath with his eyes closed and his hands laced behind his head, he fell asleep. I backed up a foot while keeping my eyes on all of them. Rath shuttled a bit closer as well while still asleep himself.
Creeps.
“Yeah, yeah, not talking about my mana here, we’re talking about you,” I said, waving Gungnir for emphasis. “Answer the rest of them.”
Urgently, Reeanth nodded as she spoke. “We are not tall. You are short. When mana left your planet, everything that needed it escaped or died. But the remaining human colonies didn’t die, they adapted. Maybe the word I’m looking for is ‘withered’. Our initial scans of this planet show that your genetic code is greatly fragmented due to lack of mana, which indicates your lack of proper height and muscle.”
This bitch really just called me short. The other three started snickering, not even trying to hide it. My glare cut that shit right off.
“Ok, where is the rest of humanity? I made a drunken wish, took a couple stabs from Chaos crystals and most of everyone happened to be gone when I woke up. Took me days to figure out that fact.” I lied, not wanting to reveal anything about my visitor.
Grimacing with distaste, Reeanth spat on the ground. “The Conglomerate picked up most of them. They will be integrated properly into their society after repairing their genetics. The Centauri Empire also grabbed two landmasses worth of humans. Our war needs soldiers and your people needed fixing. The last fifth of the population was picked up by the Others and the Elders. Your lack of exposure to mana, when reintegrated with it, seems to come with an incredible ability to adapt and improvise. Oddly enough, your genius’ IQs jumped by thirty percent after just three weeks of exposure.”
I caught that.
“Three weeks, what do you mean three weeks? It’s been only a couple of days!” Each word got louder until I was standing with Gungnir in my hand, fully extended into a glowing spear radiating power in waves that buffeted everything around us.
“You said you took a stab from Chaos, how is that possible?” Jorgan’s deep base rumbled, “Nobody survives that. Chaos completely decorporealizes matter on contact!”
“If it’s true . . .” Gerome started.
“Then it explains the Sorcery.” Gerone finished.
[No fucking wonder.] I thought as I put it together. I had missed out, literally. Most of Earth was picked over by fucking aliens while my soul was injected with Chaos. That’s why cats were eating my body, and that’s why it hurt so goddamn much coming back, because my body was almost fucking dead while my soul was being remade at the sub-molecular level!
My mind bounced back and forth from speaker to speaker as they argued with each other about Sorcery.
“SHUT THE FUCK UP!” I screamed, an vibrant pulse of light from Gungnir punctuating my words. Their faces went white, the arms of the stone chair crumbled slightly under Jorgan’s hands. “How long has it been since the first Ripple, and how many more Ripples are there going to be, and what exactly are they?” My voice was frantic as I tightened my grip on Gungnir.
Reeanth put her hands up, placating, and calmly said, “The first Ripple as you call it, arrived on this plane twenty-three days ago. Four have come and gone since then and there are three left, though each successive one is barely weaker than the last. They will each raise the ambient level of mana and continue to break the remnants of the dimensional seal on this realm. Ripples killed the sorcerers last time as they suffered an extreme mana burn on their souls from the occurrence, and the wizards and mages mainly went insane from the raw Chaos. Warlocks grew incredibly powerful and witches became unstoppable as their practices were strengthened from the introduction of primordial elements.”
“We need to go.” Gerome interrupted.
“Time grows short.” Gerone finished.
“They’re right,” Jorgan rumbled, standing up abruptly. He turned to me and growled, “Undo your seal for a moment and let us leave. Our mana grows thin. We will not trouble this area again.”
“Please, let us leave, and I will give you something that will help when I return.” Reeanth pleaded, the tips of hair beginning to turn gray.
“Fine, but I am keeping one of each kind of weapon from y’all for myself,” I answered.
“That is acceptable,” she agreed as her complexion began to lose its healthy glow, the same happening to the other three. Each of their complexions grew wan, vitality slowly leaving their eyes and skin.
I banished the stone seal in front of the gate, and brought their weapons to the surface, keeping one of each kind in the earth so they couldn’t snatch it. They gathered up the rest and stumbled to the gate, the three men vanishing instantly.
Reeanth turned around and whispered. “Good luck sorcerer, the corrupted races require less mana than us to sustain themselves, and they are far less kind than we. We did not know the full state of the world from our actions.”
With those parting words, she turned and vanished through the gate. Staring blankly at the twisting void, I only came to when Rath smacked my calf. Coughing to cover up my embarrassment, I conjured the stone seal again, this time, twice as thick and covered in iron. Thinking it over, I shaped out a sealing enchantment and rune on it and keyed the whole door to my blood. I socketed a bunch of new thorny vine seeds and flashbangs into the stone door, each one of them overfilled with mana and rigged to blow. It was all experimental but Rath nodded as I finished.
“Smart move,” Rath rasped, making me jump. I completely forgot about him for a minute there. “That’ll stop most mana-heavy beings. The door that is, not your weak bombs. Remember, in magic, intent and force of will matters just as much as available mana.”
[Breathe in, breathe out. Don’t annihilate the lizard that is actually a tiny-but-ancient dragon.] I struggled, keeping my shock to myself. It’s hard to take Mushu seriously.
I hauled the spoils of war to the surface: a magitech gun, advanced spear, sword, ax, and spiky ball thing. Hopefully, I could reverse engineer these to get a serious boost to my combat abilities. Not that I needed it; My run-in with the snooty Elder humans showed that I could at least hold my own.
[But maybe I could fix my genetic deficiencies with my flesh magic?] I wondered, already picturing myself as a better looking He-man. Just another thing to add to my ever-growing list of shit to do.
I gathered the weapons up and carried them to the hoverboard. Rath followed me without offering to help. Without a word, he hopped on one end of it and fell asleep. My world had been shaken enough, I was done with today. I single-mindedly coasted home up the river, gently placed the lizard on the porch in the sun, the weapons in the basement, checked on Elizabeth and numbly ate dinner.