Numbness. Lack of physical feeling. Not even a weird tingling or that weird ringing in my ears. That’s what I was struggling with . . . except . . . in my brain.

I couldn’t process thought. All I was doing was staring at the wall. My dinner of cold beanie weenies forgotten in front of me.

My notepad half filled with lazy scrawl of short term and long term plans sitting next to my plate had no additional entries even though I knew that I had a bunch more to add. The desire to move, let alone think, had completely left me. I felt safe in these walls, why would I ever leave them? I had freaking Sorcery for crying out loud, epic magic of a scale that no human has possessed in millenia, and no desire to use it. There's a literal dragon snoozing on my front porch and I didn’t even want to talk to him.

Pathetic. Everyone I knew, gone. Taken from here. And there was nothing I could do about it. Soldiers in a war. And what’s worse, they were going to be fixed ‘genetically’. Miserable alien cunts thought they were doing us a favor by drafting humanity in a war they never even knew about. This all stemmed from where I knew we all sat on the cosmic totem pole - the very fucking bottom.

Literally lower than the bottom feeders though, right down there in the muck where bugs eat the bits of flesh that flake off a corpse and blow away in the deep oceanic current. Insignificant is the word I’m looking for. Small just doesn’t cut it. Miniscule sounds too smart for us humans, as if we aren’t worthy of it, cause we’re beneath that even still.

A jolt ran through me, my Flesh Sorcery reacting to the unhealthiness of my thoughts, correcting the imbalance of chemicals, halting the imminent cascade to depression.

“Lemme in! Lemme in, lemme in, lemme in!”

Rath’s panicked scream cut through my internal struggle as he bounced up and smacked off the window outside my house. It was almost dark out. His claws barely left a mark as he jumped to another window and smacked into it screaming some more. “For the love of all that is mana, LEMME IN!”

Right behind him was a giant bird, pitch black with flaming blue eyes and wicked talons the size of my leg, its own screams shaking the house. This bird was big enough to fly off with a minivan. I prodded my Flesh Sorcery to finish rebalancing my brain, then stumbled to the front door and opened it just enough for Rath to slither his way in. I quickly shut the door just as the gleaming talons of the bird bounced off the reinforced wards. For ten minutes the annoying giant-crow battered at my house. For most of that, I found it hard to force myself to care.

A spark lit deep in my gut.

[That’s it!] I snarled, rounding to glare out the window. [Absolutely insane that some freaking bird wants to test me today.] The cawing and incessant slamming against my house was enough to make me angry; angry enough to do something about it.

Anger alone wasn’t what encouraged me to act, it was waves of constantly being shocked that simply produced a kind of existential numbness that resulted in me feeling small. Yup, a giant-crow was attacking my house. A giant-crow was just trying to snack on a miniaturized dragon that loves me for my pure mana. Shit. It was this kind of shit that was making ‘going with the flow’ another part of my day.

Why not? Why wouldn’t a giant crow attack my house? Why wouldn't it happen after fighting interdimensional magical humans that towered over me? Because it was just that kind of day. The old Irish curse came to mind. May you live in interesting times.

Understatement.

Snatching Gungnir from where it leaned against the wall, I calmly walked outside, my shield cranked to max power. [Dumbass chicken picked the wrong house!] I growled internally. As the giant crow spied new prey, I channeled mana into just the embedded rune of wind on Gungnir, waiting for the right moment. The bird didn’t dive down on top of me as an eagle might, like I expected. Instead, he swooped down about thirty-feet in front of me and braked, furiously flapping his humongous wings.

The resultant gale of wind almost blasted me over, but I smirked as it was diverted by Gungnir gathering up the very winds of the attack into a very small, condensed ball of air. With a flick of will, Gungnir released it and sent it spiraling above the crow before it exploded.

The ball of hyper-condensed air pressure expanded without a controlling influence, smacking the bird down into the ground as if the hand of God spiked it like a volleyball. Turning the spear into a mace, I sprinted forward and clubbed the dazed bird in the head, completely knocking it out. Riding the red wave of my rage-fueled imagination, I opened the meat of my palm with a thought and placed it on the bird’s head right where I walloped it.

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My Flesh Sorcery communicated my iron will through my blood with its own dripping down the feathery skull and drilled one thought through every neuron in its brain.

[MINE].

The bird convulsed as my tireless energy washed through it like ocean waves.

[MINE]. I sent, over and over.

Each sorcerous pulse seared my command deeper and deeper into its skull, ingraining the idea that its very brain and body belonged to me. My commands would be enforced by its own blood. Using both hands, I lifted its cavernous beak and examined the bird with my senses. No wonder Rath ran away. This freak of nature could certainly hunt small dragons. I ran my hands over the feathers adorning its skull, continuing with my mental branding as my own blood dripped into the cut on its forehead.

Focusing my will, I held a clear picture of my upgraded home in my mind.

[This is your home now.] I commanded, hammering the idea that the World Tree was its new nest. Twisting its own instincts, I wove within it the need to guard all the lands around it as well.

Healing the bird took far less time than dominating it but because this was the first time I had done something like this I wanted to test out the limits of this kind of power. I woke the bird up with a few pokes of magic after making sure there was structurally nothing wrong with it. All semblance of broken bones from the battle that hadn’t fully healed were mended and missing feathers were quickly regrown. The massive crow popped up like nothing had happened and chirped at me.

Seeing as it didn’t make an aggressive move when I stepped back, I pointed at it with Gungnir. “You. You are my noble steed.” I declared, grinning with dark pride. “And your name shall be Norn, for your fate is tied to mine.” The nordic theme of my naming penchant stemmed from my love of history even if it sounded a bit cheesy.

The name ‘Norn’ sounded pompous and I was definitely being a bit melodramatic, but I loved the name. Being a nerd all my life grants me certain liberties in my own head, especially since there’s barely anyone around to object. I looked into Norn's plate-sized eye as it turned to stare at me.

“Don’t fuck with me.” I commanded, stepping forward and putting my hands on his beak. “Now, I want you to make a nice nest in this tree behind you, and patrol the skies, alerting me if goblins or humans or any kind of monster comes near. Got it, bird-brain?”

A sense of warm affection and understanding gently flowed from Norn to me, to my mind. Awesome. A telepathic eagle-crow the size of a bus. Look out Blue Angels, there’s a new man in town.

I stepped back again, Norn doing the same. Then with one flap of his wings he took off. I watched him for a minute, feeling out the new mental connection I had. His thoughts were primitive, almost infantile in nature, obsessed with ‘food, prey, nest, watch, master/mother, tree, home, safe, food’, and it went round and round. This particular mind muscle is not something I started with, or had ever considered even dreaming that it existed.

Telepathy or mind powers are not my forte, but the bird bonding experience forcibly awakened a tiny kernel of my brain that would have any scientist drooling over it. The doorway opened a gateway for new things. Again, I did not have time to fully explore the limits and capabilities of this but the immediate benefits were undeniable. Having a feathery biplane with swords for talons in the sky keeping watch for me does mean that I get to try out one of my crazier experiments.

Follow me here. Human bodies are frail and weak, but apparently, we can be better, and supposedly we were much more robust before the Rending. Whatever the fuck that event actually was, but I digress. If I could somehow fix my genetics, I could get there too. The problem is, I don’t know shit about genetics, or the hows and whys and differences between me and the other-than-this-earth humans. And since my Flesh Sorcery branched off of my own understanding of the human body (which might be more than the average dude but nowhere near close to what a doctor would know), I couldn’t just wave my hand and fix it.

So part of the idea would have to wait till those arrogant assholes returned with some real knowledge, but the other part of my idea remained possible. I figured that I could probably upgrade the base level of my body as it does somehow contain the fragmented potential of giants. The only thing I could think of that would bring that out would be a combination of ridiculous stress and Flesh Sorcery. My guess is that the key to bringing this about would be a tiny fragment of Sorcery that came with the the intersect of the physics part of Mana Sorcery but mainly had its roots in Earth-based Sorcery, gravity.

I hustled to the basement, ignoring the sleeping lizard sprawled on my dining room table snoring like a chainsaw. Sitting on a conjured stone bench in my basement in front of the generators, I conjured small squares of stone one piece at a time, carefully laying down runes on each one and then laid them out like disassembled medieval plate armor in front of me. A chest plate of armor and its companion back plate were laid out next to each other but beneath a stone helmet with holes for straps in it.

To the sides lay pieces for the forearm gauntlets and pauldrons for shoulders. The gauntlets and pauldrons took some work to fit the pieces to my arms. I finished off leg coverings and curved stone plate coverings for my boots. The light was fading through the basement windows so I wanted to get this done before tomorrow morning so that a day of my own personal hell could begin.

What made this idea brilliant is that each piece of this project was actually a part of a greater whole. I took the time to touch the connecting pieces together as I enchanted them and forced the mana to sink into the structure. Each piece of the stone armor had multiple enchantments on it with several conditional factors. First, the enchantment would increase its own personal gravity/weight when I activated it. Second, the weight would evenly distribute across my body so that no muscle would be missed and that nothing would be unbalanced. Third, all of the enchantments were linked so that when I turned it on and off, it would apply to each piece.

I reworked my main portable generator so that it would be focused on powering the entire suit as it had more than enough output for it. That left a hole in my power generation which then led to me making a second pocket generator which would be a bit more complex.

This new prototype had two different healing enchantments on it. The directive of the first enchantment focused on cardiovascular healing, specifically wiping away fatigue by banishing lactic acid and carbon dioxide and upping the efficiency of my lungs to pull in oxygen so that I would not get tired. Basically, creating an instant marathon runner enchantment.

The directive of the second healing enchantment focused on rebuilding my body from the cellular level on up. It would slowly make my bones denser and heal them constantly from rigorous stress as well as fixing muscle microtears so that they grew in strength, not forgetting about both fast and slow twitch muscles. I made sure to not forget about the ligaments and tendons in the enchantment. Those would also repair themselves but not with scar tissue. Lost blood would be replaced and even old, worn out cells would be cannibalized for the building blocks to make way for new tissue. With everything laid out perfectly for tomorrow, I decided to do the last experiment for the night.

With my Flesh Sorcery, I wanted to see if I could reverse my age.