I take it back. Having a giant eagle-crow is not great. In fact, it fucking sucks. Hmmmm, because maybe it isn’t just a giant eagle-crow. Maybe, just freaking maybe, it is a giant eagle-crow with a bit of rooster mixed in there. And not the frill or beak or wings or weird legs of a rooster, but just the part of the damn chicken that decides to wake up at the butt-crack of dawn and wake up the entire state by cock-a-doodling.
[Why, oh dear Ripple why?]
Looking out the window showed the barest hint of the sun beginning to rise, and all I wanted to do was rip its head off and feed it to whatever animal likes big fucking birds on a stick. Oh wait, it’s my bird, as in, I can actually control this bird. Grabbing the mental link this early in the morning was only made harder by the fact that the piercing wakeup call would put exploding mortars to shame.
Finally, I found the tether and yanked, cutting off the next cock-a-doodle halfway. [NO MORE!] I sent down the link, burning it into its brain, [ONLY IF YOU SEE ENEMIES].
I am not a morning person. Using Flesh Sorcery in place of coffee to speed up the waking up process was a poor emotional substitute as it spurred me to the bathroom. With the morning necessities completed, I went to the fridge and looked through it and the freezer. Almost empty. This was probably the best time to take advantage of almost no people being here.
I geared up and went outside, whistling for Norn. His feathery butt was more than happy to be up at this hour. “Hey! Asshole!” I called with a snort. “Is it a five-fingered discount if there ain’t no one at a register?”
Norn cawed at me. “Fine, keep your secrets.” I muttered, cracking my neck. I mentally ordered him to follow me as I grabbed my hoverboard and hopped on, flying about a mile as the crow flies to the nearby Giant food store. The trip took me up the big hill behind the university, past the two soccer fields and then across the abandoned local highway. I had Norn circle it twice to make sure that there were no obvious things here that wanted to eat me.
Not a soul was in sight as I passed the bank, the Taco Bell, and destroyed Dollar General. Going around to the back of the Giant food store, I unfurled my senses to check for life in the nearby woods. Nothing.
Casually pointing Gungnir at a wall, I let off a bit of steam and blew it wide open. Power is awesome. Floating inside the abandoned grocery store was not the usual happy-go-lucky experience that modern day shopping usually affords. For starters, the lights were all off and it stank, spoiled milk and rotten seafood were the first hints that even corporate America couldn’t take a hit from the Ripple. Norn also decided that the smell was too unpleasant, as he shit on the ground right next to the hole I had just made.
“Awww screw you!” I yelled at him, wheeling the hoverboard around for fresh air. “Everything smells like ass and you have to add your own to it?”
I coasted down the backside of the building myself, taking the time to blow man-sized holes every twenty-feet. I was after the preserved food, such as cans of soup, tuna, vegetables, and seasoning. As I finished my circuit of creating doorways and ventilation, Norn began squawking at me, rapidly increasing in volume till I made him shut up. Preferring to be safe rather than sorry, I strengthened the hoverboard enchantment to allow me to rise up fifty-feet.
“So where is it? Hmm, you stupid bird?” Looking at the giant eagle-crow’s face as he flew around me showed me that his beak was always pointing at the center of the store, but I didn’t see anything yet. “Anybody in there?” I shouted as I charged up Gungnir, my voice unintentionally amplified by the powered up crystal tip.
One of the walls that I hadn’t ventilated exploded outwards, an ugly looking feline shaking its head, growling and spitting out bits of brick as it stumbled through the rubble. Thin, slimy gray tendrils sprouting from its shoulders were wiping at its patchy hide while a few more tentacles along the spine were stabilizing it against the walls. I could see missing patches of skin where its bones were clearly displayed.
[Holy fuck that’s a cat, one of the dead cats that was eating my face and disappeared just a couple days ago! Or weeks ago . . . shit.]
An overgrown zombie cat with prehensile appendages in the grocery store that I wanted to loot. Shit. Is nothing easy in this new world? Norn sent me a feeling of extreme danger as I internally griped. No, not dealing with this. I’m safe on my floating hoverboard fifty-feet in the air. The Weiss grocery store was just a half-mile away, I could go there, loot the soup and canned meat and veggies and hightail it outta there.
As I pivoted the board around, a chunk of brick came flying by my head. I rose another ten-feet and shouted at the dead animal. “Hey now! We don’t have a problem. I’m up here and you’re down there.”
The scrappy lookin’ fella with too many teeth was not happy about missing, which was evidenced by the fact of three more tentacles grabbing more ammo and hurling it up at me which just bounced off my shield.
“Dude, I swear, one more brick and I’ll show you how to throw a goddamn rock!”
The shitty kitty obliged with a chunk of concrete the size of a human chest, which just exploded on my energy shield from the sheer force. Its milky zombie-eyes squinted in unfulfilled anger as it yowled and futilely hurled more rubble at me.
A solid bar of blazing yellow light cannoned into the zombie cat from the side slamming it right back into the store.
A shrill feminine voice rang out. “Foul Beast! The great goddess Astria sends her wishes!”
“That’s right! Take that, fiend!” The second battle cry from a barely more masculine version of the shrill voice being followed by another bar of light blasting into the hole where the zombie was first sent. “And it’s Astrea, get it right, we’ve been over this!”
I pivoted in mid-air. Three humans on the smaller side wearing mis-matched armor composed out of cobbled together sports gear were running flat out, sprinting in my direction. Two of them were dual-wielding aluminum bats with more sports weaponry strapped to their backs, and the shortest one of them was holding a hockey stick with crystals and stone pendants dangling from the curved hooked part by lengths of twine.
A pitiful attempt at a roar came from inside the food store, sounding more like a very angry whine. The secondary appendages came out of the shadows of the hole, gripping the edges and slowly pulling it out. Out of the four main legs, only two were working, but the tentacles were shrinking and the rotten flesh of the legs was slowly filling in.
“Not on my watch you nasty cat!” The smaller one wearing a hockey mask yelled, her voice giving her away. “The Amazing Advocates of Astraea have come to put you down!” She posed with her hockey stick pointed at the regenerating zombie cat, the gently swinging pendants glowing a soft white.
I groaned just soft enough that they wouldn’t hear. [Lame paladins. Lame adolescent paladins. That’s all I needed.] They couldn’t even get their pronunciation of their goddess straight, but here they are. And I suppose they weren’t just going to let me leave in peace. This whole time I was continuously pumping mana into the levitation enchantment and angling it away from this area making for a swift and silent retreat.
“And where do you think you’re going punk?” A blast of light flew near me. “We clean up your mess and you just want to run away? The traffickers of darkness shall be cleansed by our Lady, the Pure One!” A rather pompous announcement from the tallest teen.
Cleansed huh? It would be funny if the little bastards weren’t using the iconic and terrifying words from the Spanish Inquisition. My teeth began to grind as my grip tightened on Gungnir. Taking a deep breath, I marshaled my mana.
[OHHHH NOOORRRNNN!] I called out to my giant feathery-bringer-of-death-from-above through our mental link, while simultaneously sending an image of its target along with the call.
Shock and awe baby.
It’s my favorite answer, right next to bomb and bounce. Most of the humans on Earth were gone, and I didn’t want to add to our under-population problem as they could serve as a nice bumper to the monsters of this new world. This led me to the decision of not wiping the three arrogant paladins off the face of the earth. I wasn’t that callous yet. But part of me couldn’t leave them to that thing, I mean, it ate my face the other day and I DESERVED REVENGE! So, as I didn’t want to show my hand at what I could do myself, I struck a nice compromise.
I controlled myself. I obviously did not let out an evil laugh as a black comet plunged from above, slammed into the cat, breaking every bone in its slinky feline body. The airstream from Norn’s dive and braking maneuver plowed into the little paladins and knocked them over. Norn screamed like an eagle, a king of the sky declaring all the pitiful creatures bound to the earth as his prey. Then he bit down, severing the cat’s head, vigorously shook it like a ragdoll and then took off with his lunch.
[Gross. And uh, that was easier than I thought.] I snickered. Cats eat birds but big birds seem to eat cats. Gotta remember that for later.
I looked at the dazed paladins and shouted. “Don’t worry kids, the bird is mine!” I laughed, hoping to scare them off. “Oh, and there should be another cat like that around here, so take care!”
The main reason I didn’t attack the kids or put them in their place is because I’m clearly not bent on being an asshole. And personally, another good reason not to mess with them is because I don’t know their goddess. Magic is real so it stands to reason that Goddesses are too. I mean, I’d already met Hermes so . . . yeah.
If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
If I recall correctly, Astria is a Slavic goddess that has something to do with purity, or was it virginity? Something along those lines. Anyways, I still had food to get, and my main hauler of foodstuffs was outta sight with his Chinese-takeout. Peeling away from them felt good. My day was looking up. Took out a zombie cat without lifting a finger, put the fear of magic into some kids with zero harm, and I still had another grocery store to loot! Dangerous cat my ass. Woohoo!
The next closest store that had what I wanted a few miles away luckily was abandoned. Literally. The lights were out and I just decided to blow holes in the roof with Gungnir until the whole thing collapsed. Overkill is the safest way to stay safe. Lowering my board to the rubble, I began banishing it bit by bit until I came to the canned food section, and then I started banishing the wood, metal, and stone to reveal the entire aisle. Bingo. Crafting a long barge of stone forty-feet long off to the side, I steadily grew it out to be fifteen-feet wide and about six-inches thick.
Slapping it with a hover enchantment took me fifteen minutes and then gathering all the canned stuff I could shove into the barge took me two hours. Cans are heavy work and there was plenty for the taking. I pushed the hover barge parked off to the side with the enchantments off and stacked way high with canned goods that hadn’t broken open.
All the canned meats and soups and vegetables would keep me going for a long ass time, but getting it home would be a problem. My main concern was the fact that the barge was taking a significant amount of power to keep off the ground, as in one of my ten batteries was going dark every five minutes kinda output, which is insane.
And that was just the levitation, not even the thrust required to move the damn thing. I spent another fifteen minutes adding on a gravity negation enchantment, which was costly in and of itself, but it drained my energy at the rate of one battery every fifteen minutes, which is a 300% efficiency increase. I finished this right as the sun started beating directly down on me.
As I started on trying to get this show on the road, Norn’s signature squawking alerted me that I was not alone.
“Shit, when the hell did you get back?” I cursed, shading my eyes in the bright sun. I didn’t even know that the bird had returned. Standing up straight made a couple vertebrae in my back pop, I hadn’t even realized that I’d been hunched over enchanting for so long.
“Thought you could get away from us huh?” Pipsqueak Paladins One and Two with their glowing aluminum bats were about thirty feet away.
Groaning with exasperation, I stretched while turning around slowly. “I wasn’t hiding. I can fly. Come on now, I only went a few miles away and been busy for a couple hours.” I mocked. “How out of shape are ya? Kids your age should be little balls of endlessly annoying energy.” I flexed my muscles in a strongman pose just to annoy them.
Their expressions had zero joy in them, stuck somewhere between mind-controlled or zealot. Rolling my eyes, I stood up straight and looked at my weapon. I had stuck Gungnir into the ground a while ago when I started loading up my barge, its crystals quietly gathering ambient mana and heat like a solar panel the whole time I had been working.
“Man, I love this staff.” I muttered. “Time for another show.” Pulling it from the ground with both hands, I looked around me, desperately hoping for a ley line. I did not want to tangle with these nuisances at this time, wait, where’s the third one? “Hey, where’s your little sister?” I yelled at the first two.
“Right here you fat, old man!”
I double checked that my shields were up and at full power, then turned around again. The little bitch was standing on top of my bird! He was perched on top of an abandoned Humvee ten-feet away, looking sheepish with that small pest on his back.
“Dude?! Shake her off, what the-? How did-” I sputtered, sending him the same images of what I wanted the bird to do. I quickly grew large stone handles with supporting iron struts on the barge next to me and turned off the levitation environment then cranked up the gravity negation enchantment to the max and sent him another image, and re-sent it again even stronger.
“Ok feathery fuckface, when I do the thing I sent you,” I growled loudly, glaring at my traitorous bird and ignoring the children. “You do the other thing I sent you, got it???” Gungnir pulsed with red light, sparks dripping from it, in perfect sync with my rising anger. Norn answered with a tiny nod.
The little lady called out. “You will do no such thing! By the power of Astraea, I CLEANSE thee!” Smacking Norn on the head with her hockey paladin staff, the glow from her pendants washed over him. I felt my mental link starting to fail.
[OH FUCK NO] I snarled internally, channeling a blue pulse of my Water Sorcery through Gungnir and pointed it at the miniature soldier. A firehose blast of water trucked her right off my bird, who just before the water blast landed quickly ducked to give me a clear shot. Silently, Norn caught the girl right before she hit the ground with her armor. Powerful cannon blasts of strangely dense energy hit my shields from behind, the kinetic energy dispersing but some of the heat still leaked through.
“Hold her still and take her stick away!” I yelled at Norn, turning to the older threats. “And you guys suck, attacking from behind. Not noble, but smart. Props for good tactics.”
I didn’t scare them enough last time, although in my defense, a giant eagle-crow wrecking ball woulda scared the crap outta me, especially one that carries away and eats cougar sized zombie cats. Plus, I can’t kill kids, that’s just low and not socially acceptable, not that we currently have a society to frown upon us in these tragic times.
On the other hand, the kids did go after my bird which I can admit is pretty damn smart, but they have no idea what I myself can do. After I freed Norn from his paladin purloiner, I fed pure mana down our mental link to make sure that all of the cracks were filled in. Cawing at me as I finished, Norn hopped up to the barge rails, and actually managed to pick it up and fly away (with help from my anti-gravity enchantment). Now I just have to see if he drops it off at the house like I told him.
I shook my head as I chastised my inner monologue. [Dude, why can’t I stop these half-second daydreams that happen at the worst of times?]
While I was watching Norn to see if my enchantment on the barge would hold up as he took off with all of my food, a bulldozer made up of two teens and their faith-enhanced bats (modern maces) blew me out of my reverie. My shield barely cushioned the blows, but not enough as I was now one with a trashed Humvee. This is why I strengthened my body, to take unexpected hits like this. The metal door crumpled around my forming a me-shaped indent.
As my regeneration went to work to shake off the concussive damage, I could hear the screams of the kids over my pounding headache - something about attacking their little sister and how they were going to purify or sacrifice me when they were done beating me senseless.
[No, no, no - no more!]
The two older ones were hammering at my shield with their deity-buffed bats, screaming all kinds of religious stuff that honestly just made the headache worse, the stacking concussive forces bleeding through my shield. The younger one had picked herself up at this point and was chanting something while doing a weird little dance. Flares of white hot energy circled her form like floating ribbons of angry light.
Gathering my power, I banished every bit of metal that the Humvee was made of, gracelessly dropping me to the ground, then forcefully called on two full reserves of mana. I stood up as waves of power rolled off of me, forcing the paladins back and unintentionally blasting away the glass and plastic leftovers of the car.
Angry at myself for letting the kids get the drop on me, I called on the earth to completely reshape the terrain to give me the advantage. My Earth Sorcery grasped all of the dirt and stone around me, raising me up on a ten foot pillar while causing the ground all around me and beneath the kids to sink down twenty feet until I was standing on a lone makeshift island surrounded by an empty moat. I called Gungnir back to me and stuck it between my feet. Its metal base cap dug into the stone.
“Fill it up!” I said, channeling Water Sorcery to my trusty spear. As Gungnir began to rapidly conjure water and fill the moat, I smoothed out the walls of the moat so my prisoners couldn’t get a grip and then began blasting the two munchkins with gouts of water to keep them occupied and off their feet. The third one had collected herself and was doing her chanting routine again, which I happily stopped with sporadic firehose blasts of water. I really didn’t know what to do.
Still not even sure why they’re attacking me in the first place.
I waited until the water in the moat was finally deep enough that it was forcing the two bigger kids to swim. They had dropped their bats and taken off their armor, doggy paddling to stay afloat. I made sure that there was enough clearance that they couldn’t haul themselves out. The situation being what it is, I was finally able to see the details previously hidden by their armor. The tallest one was a boy roughly fifteen years in age with wispy hair on his chin, and the shorter of the two was a girl, right around thirteen or fourteen. I conjured two small ice floes near them, just big enough to keep them afloat but not get out.
“Now, you two stay there, and I’m gonna talk to the small one to sort this out.” I said, shaking my finger to make them feel small. I bet they had huge egos being picked to be a holy warrior and all, but somebody had to bring the real world crashing down. I could be the adult.
Uhg, that made me feel old. I conjured a bridge of stone from the side of the moat to the top of the pillar and walked calmly to where the third kid was shivering but still kept a solid ten feet between us. She was clutching her hockey stick, her hockey mask on the ground next to her.
“What’s your name?” I asked, sticking my spear into the ground and squatting in front of her. “My name is Ben, and I promise not to hurt you.”
“You lie!” She screamed, shakily scooting away from me. Tears made dirty tracks down her slightly sunken cheeks. “You sent that thing after us! We saw you talking to it, taking our food!”
Definitely a lot more venom there than I was expecting. I put my hands out. “Wait, I mean it, I mean no harm, I’ll even let your other holy rollers go if you promise to not attack me.”
She kept scooting back, her feet making tracks in the dirt. “I don’t believe you, we’ve been fighting dead things for days! Goddess Astraea says that magic is what is keeping the dead from their rest, and that’s why they’re hungry! They need more magic, and we saw you using it!”
Her voice getting more heated and high pitched as she made butt-scoots away from me like I was the devil himself. “Magic isn’t clean, it makes yucky dead things that eat and make bright things black!” Throughout her mini-monologue, her stick’s glowing increased in intensity till she was encased in a shimmering globe of soft white power, almost solid in consistency.
“Ya know what? I don’t have time for this.” I complained, thinking about the food I needed to take care of. “I am a Sorcerer of Earth and Water and Nature,” I explained, conjuring a ball of dirt in my hand and dropping it, then doing the same with water. “I’m almost a freaking druid!”
It didn’t really look like I was getting through to her. The raw fear in her eyes told me that much. How am I supposed to reason with young hormonal holy rollers with an actual goddess behind them? The only two real answers that popped in my head summed the first stirrings of a migraine.
“AAAAhhhgghghhhg!” I growled. “You’re all coming with me!”
A trumped up babysitter. I could not believe that this is the point to where my epic journey thus far had taken me. Punk One, my new name for the smallest of the trio, was a mess. I ended up having to turn Gungnir into a sword and forcibly hack through her shield and use Flesh Sorcery to put her to sleep. Then I put her hands behind her back and conjured stone manacles around her wrists so there’d be no chance of fighting back.
“Hey!” I yelled at Punks Two and Three, still paddling around in the moat, “I’m taking y’all to my house and your Patroness and I are going to have a discussion. Now, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. Your choice.” The ice floes had chilled the moat, their teeth were chattering so hard that I couldn’t tell if those were nods of ‘yes’ or not. Eh, close enough. I banished and shaped stone until there was a rough ramp for them to climb out.
“Yes, the little punk is asleep and unharmed.” I said as they climbed out, shaking and shivering. I nudged the sleeping girl laying in the dirt with my foot. “She is not harmed in any way.” Punk Two, the girl, shot her worst teen glare at me. I looked at Punk Three, the slightly older boy, “Behave, or I’ll knock y’all out too, I promise. It’s been a long day already.” Punk Three smartly decided to keep his head down.
I conjured a stone cart with no wheels, slapped a quick and dirty anti-gravity enchantment on it and put the sleeping kid on it.
“What did you do to her?” Punk Three whispered. “What are you going to do to us?”
“Are you going to make zombies out of us?” Punk Two followed up, their angry looks offset by their entertaining shivering.
“You’re not in a place to ask questions right now, but no, I don’t make zombies. I work with water, earth, and nature.” I reminded them. “And she’s asleep because she was hysterical. Besides, that was my bird that killed the zombie, remember?”
“But magic is dirty and unclean!” Punk Two snapped.
“Magic isn’t dirty!” I retorted. “It’s a tool like a hammer or a screwdriver. I could hammer a nail or smash a skull, same tool, but very different uses.”
The boy just looked at me, curiosity and confusion warring on his face. “Don’t listen to him!” Punk Two said, her hands clenched into little fists still shaking with the cold. “We’re just more zombie parts for him!”
“Okay, more craziness - joy.” I muttered, reaching out with one hand and tapping her skull. She bonelessly slumped to the ground, put to sleep by my Flesh Sorcery. I put her on the cart and shackled her hands with stone as well.
“Alrighty,” I said, pointing Gungnir at the last awake member of this pain in my ass trio. “You’re gonna to push the cart with your friends where I tell you, got it?” He couldn't nod fast enough. I conjured stone weights around his ankles, sealing his feet to the ground. “That’s just to make sure you can’t go anywhere for a minute.”
Walking to the moat, I could see their gear spread out at the bottom. I called on the water to spit out the stuff and it obliged, delivering the bats and glowing sports gear armor and setting the stuff at my feet. The armor was a mix of hockey and football padding. I picked up a shoulder plate, running my hand over it while trying to feel it out with my magical senses. A slick white film of glossy energy just barely covered it, rebuffing my sensory foray.
“Fuck it, I’ll deal with it later.” I sighed, gathering it all up and dumping it on the cart and covering it with ice. Banishing the stone cuffs on Punk Three’s feet, I ordered. “Follow me.”