Morning brings out the worst in people if you belong to the vast majority of sunrise haters. The few, the proud, the morning people, now that’s a despicable crew. And, thanks to Flesh Sorcery, I have unfortunately joined their ranks. It takes just a second to will my Flesh Sorcery to begin and rapidly process the entire mental exercise it takes to strangle the intense desire to stay in bed. To be clear, it was also greatly assisted by my prisoner’s screams, the piercing wail of unbelievable torture.
“MY LORD! LET ME OUT! PLEASE! I HAVE TO PEEEEE!”
“Fine, fine, I get it, sheesh. One second,” I grumbled, only registering select pieces of that statement as I got dressed and called Gungnir to my hand, its form changing from orb to spear in midair. In an attempt to keep some semblance of control of the situation, I quickly removed her pain nerve block as I walked around the corner and imperiously tapped the spear tip to her shackles then banished them even as I opened the door to the outside. Wasting no time, Reeanth sprinted out the front door.
“Hate to watch her go, but love to watch her leave!” Gungnir sang softly.
“Leaves work as toilet paper!” I yelled after her as I walked to the opening, oddly enjoying the very human reaction. For just that moment, I forgot that she had tried to kill me just a week or two ago. Her lithe form disappeared into the undergrowth. “And hopefully she doesn’t come back.” I muttered as I reconjured the stone vault door and turned away.
“Pleeeaaseee, don’t leave me! I always say how I don’t need you . . “
“I realize that there is a song for literally every situation a being can encounter,” I started, “but if you do not shut . . .”
“Baby come back!”
“Ok, that’s it. That’s fine. Plenty of things I can do with you.” I growled, stomping over to the crystal vat, using my will to change Gungnir back into a ball. I shoved the orb into its docking station. “You will sit there and decode all the information and organize it into cohesive subjects. Do not leave until it’s done.”
“Head like a hole, black as your soul, I’d rather die! Than give you control!”
“One more out of date lyric and you’re done. I will stick you inside the freaking World Tree and put you on guard duty until Elizabeth gets out, which by our last estimate, was four thousand years.”
All I heard was an audible gulp down our mental link, then blessed silence. It truly was a wondrous new day. The Centauri woman was gone, Gungnir was silent, and I had a whole bunch of new magical lego pieces to play with, but my main problems were that I needed the info locked away in that crystal vat before I played with them intelligently.
Living through the last Ripple and then eventually surviving the invasion of the Hungry Ones were the two tasks weighing on my mind as they fought with my desire to experiment. It made me not want to craft anything due to the chances that Chaos might undo what I just did.
Refocusing on what mattered for the time being, I grabbed a can of soup and sat down in my comfy chair, pondering my options. Mindless eating helped grease the squeaky wheels in my brain. So far, the Ripples have changed the landscape of Earth, allowed other things and creatures to travel here and back, given me opportunities for supernatural power, and mutated the plants and animals. Also, it undid the various forms of domination Gungnir and I had put on the animals as well as allowing forgotten deities to make a comeback.
One of the weird things that I had noticed as the Ripples flooded our plane, is that the Ripples were getting weaker as the levels of magic were rising. Chaos seemed to have the greatest effect on the things that were untouched by magic, such as Earth before the Ripples, or me. I was a prime example of this. Shoot, rocks were an example of this.
Crystals seemed to have some kind of ability to inherently change their characteristics after coming into contact with the raw power of a dying deity. How many other worlds were experiencing this, or was it just us? Animals got mashed together with other animals that were nearby and my own trees have a thirst for blood.
I stared at the collection of changed crystals off to the side that I hadn’t put away but kept out for sensory exercises. The stone of fire couldn’t give me Sorcery, but it could be used as a perfect weapon against the undead. The other one, the quartz, Gungnir mentioned something about it having Sorcery related to light. I did have an idea for that, but not in the way I initially thought. It will wait till later. Damn, everything hinges on information which unfortunately is what I lack.
Well, I could experiment with things that probably won’t change when the Ripple hits - namely, myself. The entire concept of power that I was previously using, creating my own personal dominated army of mutated beasts, won’t work until the Ripples stop entirely. The summoner or necromancer builds just don’t work for me yet. Personal power inherent to myself is what I need to work on.
Some things I found were rather interesting, for instance, one of the bits that I did pick up accidentally from Reeanth’s mind flow is that it is standard practice in the Centauri Empire to undergo a kind of genetic cleansing. Part of that cleansing is a basic restructuring of the body’s internal system from bones to nerves. This is one of the reasons that their bodies tend to be so much taller than ours. Reeanth, as an example, is short for their kind.
The Centauri need a larger frame to house a sturdier product. The average height for the females of the Centauri Empire is around eight feet tall weighing in around three hundred and fifty pounds, and the men are proportionally bigger, but not by too much. Using strands of biologically compatible crystal, they fundamentally changed the basic standard of human durability. They also seem to have shortened the genetic gap of strength and speed between men and women as well. Their bodies also had far more conscious control of fat retention and muscle growth which is a seriously enviable set of traits.
One of the ways that their combat-centered empire adapted to meet the need of matching supernatural creatures in terms of power is two-fold, enhancing the body internally, and enhancing it externally. The external side focuses on the many years their wizard scientists took to perfect combat suits that are covered in runes, enhancing everything from cardiovascular health to overlapping fields of miniature mana shields that allow them to soak up damage. Basic grunts get a pain-blocker with clotting potions as well as the common life-support system. As one goes up the ranks in their military, the suits get fancier as well, all the way up to mana storage containers and embedded spell-runes that fire various kinds of elemental damage.
Boom, boom, boom.
“My lord Sorcerer! Please let me in!”
“And now she’s back, from outer space!”
Great. Gungnir alone is bad enough. Reeanth, polite Reeanth? She actually came back. Now that’s just cruel. How the hell am I supposed to handle this? At least when she’s being a dick I can be one right back, but this? Fuck man.
“Go away!” I yelled at the stone door while setting down the empty can. I glared at the two-foot thick, solid stone portal, imagining her outside, fearfully looking around for Kong who just might be hoping for round two. “A badass Centauri captain with thousands of years of magical learning behind her education doesn’t need little ol’ me.”
“I swore a binding oath of loyalty to my lord! I’m also less than two centuries old!” She stated firmly. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
Groaning audibly, I stood and walked to the door and shaped the tiny peephole to be a bit bigger. “This is gettin real old lady. You have nothing I want now. Also, I fixed you up back to normal and don’t want to deal with you. And no, it doesn’t mean anything to me. How could it? I don’t know how magical oaths work, or if they’re even a thing?”
Her face made her opinion clear. Apparently, they’re definitely a thing. “A magical oath sworn by a soul capable of magic binds that person’s life to the oath.” She said, her gray eyes losing their sense of arrogance for the second time. “I am sworn to you and your cause until released by your will. You should be honored that one such as I am championing your pursuits.”
“Right, I figured that, but that doesn’t mean I trust it. I mean, I don’t trust you. At all.” I said flippantly. “Besides, my main goal is to survive the next four thousand years. I got wedding plans on hold thanks to some magical apocalypse fuckery, but that ain’t stopping me. You, my dear, are a hindrance to that. Besides, how did you get back here anyways? I plugged up the gate y’all used! And where are your goons?”
I feel that the uncaring tones and disrespectful manner of Earthly communication aren’t really having the same effect on her that they would with any other human. Usually, a person’s eyes would have narrowed from the realization that I was clearly talking down to her, belittling her in the pursuit of testing her patience, to purposefully get a rise out of her. Nothing. She answered respectfully as if I were a corporate CEO making a minion clarify something on their shitty powerpoint presentation.
“The Sorcerers of old were mighty nobles in our empire. Power is treasured and respected while weakness is ruthlessly weeded out. If you were back in our cluster, then many would be seeking your hand in marriage for the hopes that your children would have a seed of Sorcery. Here, you could be king! But with us, you could be Emperor!”
“No, seriously.” I deadpanned. “How do I know for sure that you are not fucking with me? Trying to take advantage of my lack of magical education. You know that I’ve had magic for just over a month, while your civilization and every other one out there has had it since time immemorial. I have too much to do and figure out before I start taking on even more risks, because I’ve already taken too many of those. I’m surrounded by a forest of beasts that I once enslaved. They managed to escape by the way. Also, goblin-esque creatures that hunt down giant alligators and have attacked me already roam the area, and some freaky things at night come knocking even though I can’t even see them. And it just gets worse and weirder every time the death throes of some unnamed dead god of Chaos hit my planet.”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Wow. Felt good to get that off my chest.
It felt so good in fact, that I almost shut the door hole in her face. It occurred to me that with my abilities, I could just leave and hollow out a mountain somewhere nearby and do whatever the hell I wanted. I could burrow down and create an underground fortress, or make that mountain indestructible from the inside!
Oh the possibilities. I could experiment for a few hundred years while using Flesh Sorcery to keep me young and energetic and go full-on-mad-scientist. I could wait out the Ripples and the various arms races that each continent was holding. And all of this would be a helluva lot easier if I had someone capable and not completely ignorant watching my back. The lack of choices is certainly painful, but it could be worse, way worse.
“How do I prove to myself that this oath, this vow of loyalty is real?” I asked her through the hole. “What proof do you have?”
She hesitated for a second. “Blood,” Reeanth said. “Lies hurt, but disobedience bleeds.”
“Explain.”
“If you order me to tell the truth and I lie, I will feel pain until I comply. If you order me to do something and I defy you, I will bleed.”
“How badly? Like, can I test this in a non-life threatening way?”
“It depends on the severity of the offense. The more it angers or disappoints you, the worse for me it will become. This is why our cadets follow their leaders so faithfully, one, because they swore to do so. And two, because the leaders make an oath to be a good leader and to make intelligent decisions that keep the soldiers’ well-being in mind. Both parties are held by magic in a pact of obedience, loyalty, trust, and decency. But the bond-oath is constructed in such a way as to benefit both parties.”
My left eye-brow rose a fraction. “Sounds like there’s plenty of room here for maneuvering around that.”
“We follow the spirit of the oath as well!” She snapped. “We are not the Fae!” Her sudden vehemence took me off guard.
“I didn’t mean to insult, but what are the Fae? The Elves or Aelves, however you say it, they are in the Amazon rainforest. That the same thing, Fae and Aelves?”
“My lord, we have a lot to talk about. Your education is very poor.”
“Of course it’s poor! How many times do I have to explain this to every fucking idiot that drops by for a visit?”
Flexing my will, I activated the weapon-rune components of Svalinn, blue energy making the blades lengthen down my forearm, and then banished the stone door, taking a few steps back. “Come on in, Reeanth. Let’s test this oath.”
She ducked her head down as she gingerly walked in, eyeing Svalinn as it crackled with stored power. “That’s new.”
“Yup, and don’t give me an excuse to test it, too.”
She stopped just outside the doorway.
Looking her up and down and noting the ragged state of her uniform, I noticed her tense stance. She actually viewed me as a threat right now. Guess I’m coming up in the world.
I straightened my back as I adopted a snobby tone. “I order you, Reeanth, to fetch me a can of soup.”
Holding my gaze, she didn’t move. Well, her body didn’t, but her face barely scrunched until a line of blood began to flow down her forehead originating from her hairline. This was kinda cool, but freaky. Like when you watch a horror movie about a haunted house and you see blood dripping down the walls but there’s no signs of violence and you just want to make sure that your eyes are not lying to you.
“Reeanth, drop and give me twenty.” I barked.
A small cut opened up on her exposed upper right arm, a small trickle of red creating a stream down her arm. I let a little bit of my temper leak out.
“KNEEL!”
She held still for a moment, then folded like a cheap plastic chair. “Oh shit! Oh shit, shit, shit, shit!” I cursed, making Svalinn withdraw the blades as I jumped to her side. “I rescind all my orders!” I freaked as I pushed my Flesh Sorcery into her wounds, sealing them up and examining her insides. “Way too far!” I muttered as my Sorcery showed me the battlefield that was her body. The damage was extensive, and I would not have believed it if I hadn’t seen it for myself.
Her own body, her red blood cells and nerves had literally attacked her on the cellular level, ripping molecular tears in her muscles and overloading her synapses with alternating hormones. At this moment, her body had stopped fighting me, but the damage was incredible. I had to reconnect the muscle fibers and seal up the micro-tears in the arteries and regrow half of her nervous system.
Thank the Ripple that my Flesh Sorcery contained the instincts to do this almost autonomously. The fact that Sorcery is guided by will is what makes what I do look so easy, even though I can watch the million steps to actually get something done. Without my personal generator working correctly, I used Reeanth’s own energy and the ambient mana in the area around me to power this regrowth.
“Uhg, generators. Another problem to fix. Another awesome plan wrecked by the freaking Ripple.” I muttered as I dragged the unconscious woman to the cot I had set up in the corner. Several grunts and a constant stream of cursing later, I had her heavy ass lying on the cot, her feet hanging off as it was meant for a person of normal height.
“Gungnir, did you find anything about mana storage or batteries or generators of any kind yet?” I yelled over my shoulder to the docked orb.
“Not really. Mature dragons don’t particularly care about mana generation as they make plenty of their own, and their bodies store the excess that they generate.” Gungnir answered. “Which is why big dragons tend to be the most powerful. It’s a snowball rolling down a hill kind of scenario. They also tend to nest or store their hoard on a ley line of their preference for faster growth. Only the little guys desire over-saturated environments.”
“So, everything always comes back to size, huh?”
“Yup. Ask your woman when she wakes up. That’s why they’re all so big. Their bigger bodies are designed to hold far more mana. I bet they had a Flesh Sorcerer long ago who came up with the template for the enhanced humans. It also might be the root cause of what got rid of Sorcerers in their society in the first place.”
Ignorance. Cucked by my own ignorance. What I wouldn’t give to have a greater IQ. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a smart guy, but that’s compared to humanity prior to magic returning. How do I measure up to an alien wizard with centuries of learning and experimentation?
“Ok, so the body can hold mana, right. But what else can?” I questioned. The basics most of all were what I needed to know. “Is there anything in that brain vat about exercising your soul so it can hold more magic or be more powerful? What about increasing how much mana my body naturally generates? There’s gotta be something.”
“Dude, there’s like six thousand years of memories in this big brain, and this little brain on the side of the big brain has actual ENCRYPTION in parts of it. This is gonna take a while.”
A while. Fuck a while. I wanted to explore. One Ripple left. No personal generators. A horde of living animals that were former slaves circling my forest. Boredom. My new greatest enemy. It may be the death of me. Fuck boredom. I sat my butt on the floor next to Reeanth’s cot. Normally, my hermit instincts serve me well, the natural drive of the introvert to chill and wait out the situation is perfect for this situation. But even I need a group, a place to be social, once in a while. The human condition requires a pack, companionship. It seems to be a built in weakness, one that I am not immune to.
I scanned Reeanth, noting that her body was back to normal. Guess oaths are a thing. I’m going to have to be very careful with my words from now on.
“Hey!” I shouted, “Time to get up!” Using my Flesh Sorcery, I forced her pain-induced unconsciousness to recede. “We’re going to test this oath for real. I have experiments and things to do outside, and you’re going to watch my back. Protect me with that over-sized body of yours and I’ll make sure that you’re always in one piece.”
Not sure she caught all of that. Her wiping the crud out of her eyes did not inspire my belief that she heard me. “Reeanth!”
“Yes my lord. I heard you.” She said, sitting up, stretching like a cat after a long nap. Her gray eyes seemed to convey no emotion whatsoever. “In order to accomplish my duty properly, I will need to repair my suit and find a suitable weapon.”
My sarcasm trotted out like a proud knight peacocking around in brand-spankin' new armor. “Right. Because I can repair high-tech alien magical armor. If that were the case, I would have already made some. I’d be walking around in some Iron Man suit wrecking zombies if I had that kind of power. But no, my dumbass didn’t choose fire or energy or light, I picked earth and water.”
“You can conjure metal right?” She clarified, her voice holding a hint of amusement.
“Yes. All day. But I don’t see how that helps. I already examined your armor. It’s freaking platinum mixed with iridium. Both of those are super rare and my Sorcery takes a long time to conjure stuff that rare. Besides, after I’ve conjured it, it’s almost impossible for me to affect platinum.”
“I don’t need those for now. Regular steel works,” she said smugly. “If you would be so kind, my lord, I shall show you.”
Conjuring a bar of iron in my hand, I held it up. “Steel doesn’t occur naturally. We got iron though.” In my other hand, I conjured a small diamond. “Diamonds are easier to conjure since they are made from carbon, which is the most abundant element.” I banished them both and then conjured a small block of titanium. “What about this? Titanium is usually better than iron or steel, right?”
“That, that actually works.” She said, eyeing me with new respect. “How does conjuring work? Our mage-techs can’t do that. In order to build, we have to gather the materials and place them in an assembly circle and then load a schematic into the guidance diamond. Then it tells us the missing elements from the process before we begin, and then using the supplied mana from the building storage batteries, the circle manufactures whatever the schematic wants once the required materials are present.”
“Dude, that sounds like freaking alchemy.” I said, my inner nerd getting excited.
“No, alchemy is the science of transmutation. Wizardry is the science of building. We use alchemy for body augmentation and potions.”
Totally cannot wait until we break into her cloned brain. I’m gonna learn so damn much.
She took the block of titanium from my hand. “And we use nanobots for this.” She reached down and pulled a small block of translucent material the size of an ice cube from a hidden compartment at her ankle. Her boots were really the only armor she wore that survived generally intact. Then she squished the little cube to her chest and held the block of conjured titanium to the new wet spot. I watched, fascinated, as the block of titanium shrank and the tears of her armor slowly filled in.
“Quick my lord, I need more. I don’t have many repair cubes left!”
I quickly conjured several more blocks of titanium and handed them to her, which she quickly pressed to the different parts of her suit that were being repaired. The blocks sank in, dissolving before my eyes as her ragged and torn Centauri battle-suit fixed itself. My eyes were huge, then they quickly narrowed as I looked at Reeanth in full battle-rattle.
“So, can you make more nanobots if you had the raw material? Cause I want one of those suits,” I said enviously, images of me in an epic futuristic combat suit running through my head. Arcane Iron Man. That would be badass.
“I can . . .” She said, “But they would all be keyed to my DNA. It’s to prevent the enemy from copying our abilities. These suits allow even untrained wizards to use their full power. The only training required is the mental part, where they learn to activate the runes which works the magic for them. Nanobots do have a serious flaw. They burnout after activation, only giving thirty minutes of consistent operation. Nanobots burn out fairly quickly in mana-dense areas so they don’t last long.”
Her words rocked me to my core. “Hold up. You’re telling me that pretty much most of your soldiers don’t actually know how to use magic?! Their suits do it all for them? THEN WHAT’S THE FUCKING POINT OF HAVING MAGIC!” My voice got louder as my body caught up to my surprise. “You have this incredible ability, this amazing power, and you let something else use it? What the fucking hell is wrong with all of you?!”
“We are at war, Sorcerer.” Reeanth coldly snapped. “I don’t expect you to understand, but we, the Great Centauri Empire, don’t have time for the traditional apprenticeship or schooling of two decades to teach each generation how to feel the magic, and then guide the magic, and then integrate it into yourself, and then how to create the tiny building blocks of magic with conditions so that it does exactly what we want it to without burning us out from the inside. The wretched Hive does not give us time to train. All the Hive does is eat and enslave. Wizardry takes a long time to properly use and train. We haven’t had combat Sorcerers in so long that their ranks were taken out of our manuals. These suits saved our civilization millenia ago, and they keep us alive today.”
Great. More enemies. Woohoo.
The Hive. Every nerd, every geek, every science fiction lover understands the concept of invading space bugs that want to eat our brains. Normal people don’t because they don’t care, because space-bugs didn’t exist two months ago. At least, not to us. What made it worse was that a huge chunk of humanity, normal humanity, was conscripted into the Centauri military to fight these freaking bugs.
Reeanth looked down at me from her full seven and a half foot height. “And it’s also why we look for new sources of Humanity.”
It hurt putting the pieces together.