***Calvin***

Calvin made it three steps away from the strange creature, when a thought occurred to him. He glanced over his shoulder at the curled-up monster pinned to the stone wall like an old man’s prized arc beetle.

I wonder if I can use Harvester on it? I only have five Bent left, though... Calvin put his fingers into his vest pocket and yanked out the tiny vial of viscous black Bent, popping the tall cork off with his thumb.

One out of eight is a better trade-off. Calvin downed the tasteless black liquid, shuddering as it seemed to move on his pallete.

6/11 Bent Remaining.

7/11 Bent Remaining.

8/11 Bent Remaining.

Gods, that’s going to be hard to get used to. More than just the physical repulsion of drinking Bent was the psychological damage of drinking a half of a Glimmer, or gold piece, that he’d been saving for later.

It was enough to feed a family for six months, and he’d knocked it back in seconds. The Gadveran Royal family doled them out sparingly to assets whose Abilities could swing the direction of the battle, like Andra.

And me too, I guess, Calvin thought, kneeling down beside the creature. He definitely wanted those bladed legs, and the armor, and whatever else he could get from it. He touched the cold steel of the monster,

I don’t think that’s going to work. Elliot said, a hint of patronizing smugness in his voice. Those things aren’t even alive, so why would-

Calvin pushed Elliot to the back of his mind and focused on his ability, watching the Bent travel down to the tips of his fingers.

Harvester

7/11 Bent remaining

The pinned metal monster shimmered, and was shortly replaced by a tremendous assortment of slabs of metal, ball bearings, strange, multicolored wires and coils of copper along with strange black pieces of grainless wood covered in golden lines.

Oh, OH! I GUESS THAT’S THE WAY IT WORKS NOW!

There was a stream of cursing and the clatter of furniture being abused in the back of Cal’s mind as he overlooked the creature’s remains. He had no idea what any of it did.

The legs he’d wanted were laid in a convenient pile, with a handle sized length of haft where they connected to the next joint. He hefted one of the leg-tips. A bit heavier than steel, about the size of a short-sword, with a bit of a hook on the end.

Calvin glanced over the assortment of foreign materials.

Elliot.

The cursing and muttering continued.

Elliot!

Frick’en adaptive technology ‘nother thousand years, and it’ll be like we never…What?

I need you to tell me which of these things are useful, Calvin thought. He glanced up at the approaching Siege Towers. And I need you to do it fast, I’ve only got a few minutes before they get here.

If your ability did what I think it did… pick up that microchip there.

What’s a microchip? Cal thought, his eyes scanning the undifferenciated mass.

Ugh, it’s the black thing with the gold bits on it. If your ability managed to take everything apart and from what I can see, wiped its settings, that right there is an undifferentiated A.I. core. It’ll come in handy down the road if we don’t die here.

What else? Calvin thought, scanning the pile as he stuffed the black thing into his pocket.

Grab one of those ball bearings, they’re way better than your little cube. There’s some high efficiency propulsion technology in there, some military grade TechMuscle™, a Warp Engine, some batteries that would keep a flashlight going for years, and some field generating components that you would absolutely need if you ever wanted to build your own lightsaber or personal shield.

So which ones do I take?

None of them! Other than the Jerrytanium ball bearing, you couldn’t use any of this stuff for its intended purpose because you’re a rock-chucking savage without a working screwdriver within 12.3 Lightyears! Elliot oozed with smug superiority.

Where did this one come from then? Cal asked.

Elliot fell into contemplative silence.

That’s a good question. These Ilethans are just as backwards as you. They shouldn’t have been able to tell this thing to do jack shit.

Cal pocketed a couple of the metal spheres.

I don’t plan on using these things for their intended purpose. Are any of them hazardous, explosive, poisonous?

The Engine’s core is highly radioactive, but nobody wins with radioactive. At least nobody with a fleshy meat-body.

What’s radioactive? Cal asked.

Think of it like a poison kills you real slowly that lingers for generations. Not exactly what you’re looking for.

Is there anything useful on this thing?

It’s all useful. Just not to you.

What about these sacks of liquid here? Cal thought, pointing to a clear pouch half the size of his fist full of black stuff. That’s not Bent, right?

Hell no, that’s nannites. If you drank those, they’d treat you like a damaged unit, in essence, try to turn you into a HK-600. That sounds cool, but they’d fail by a landslide, and you wouldn’t survive the process either.

Fine, Cal thought, standing with his razor sharp single-bladed, hooked shortsword in hand. I don’t have any more time to screw around.

The siege towers were already half-way to the wall. They only had a few minutes until they were unfolding their bridges. Maybe five minutes, maybe seven.

Cal kicked a wide-eyed corpse out of the corner of the parapet, and took its spot, getting parallel to the wall and pressing himself in as snugly as he could so he didn’t block any foot traffic.

Playing possum? A better bet would be to-

Shut up a minute.

Eye of the Tiger

Shadow Boxing.

If shadow boxing is a quarter speed, and Eye of the tiger boosts by 50%, then both together means the learning rate is 37.5%. Not too shabby.

The scenery in front of Calvin warped, but not much. He was suddenly standing on the wall yesterday, overlooking yesterday’s troops marching up to the wall.

Call took a deep breath.

Calvinian Summoning.

Rather than drain Bent, the skill simply triggered and sent wasps out into the enemy, just like it had before.

Calvinian Summoning. Calvinian Summoning. Calvinian Summoning. Calvinian Summoning.

Calvinian Summoning. Calvinian Summoning.

Calvinian Summoning.

Calvinian Summoning.

…………….

About two minutes in, when Cal hade simulated casting the spell for roughly the hundred and fiftieth time, it leveled.

Calvinian Summoning has reached level 5!

level 5: 125 pound limit, 25 minutes. 0 slots available.

+1 Will

Nice hustle, kid. Please Choose an Ability or Mutation.

Abilities:

Variety is the spice of Death : 2 extra slots, +1 extra slot every 5th level, rather than 10th

Atom Ant: Sacrifice Mass of summon for increase to physical attributes of summon. 1 to 1 ratio. 1 summon's worth of mass lost empowers 1 summon with double physical attributes. (Max multiplicative power equal to Calvinian Summoning Level)

Bad Penny: Summons absorb Warp from the atmosphere and may use it to split, creating more summons, up to the original limit of summons. This is typically used to maintain a healthy swarm against attrition, or regrow one from a single survivor.

Chimera: The user may rearrange parts from any slotted creature onto any other slotted creature in any combination.(New slot every 10th level)

Mutations:

Heart of the Swarm: Your mass may be added to the effect of Calvinian Summoning. You disintegrate into the summoning, controlling the swarm from inside. If the spell expires, or the mass of living summons drops to your mass, you immediately recombine at the center of mass of the remaining summons.

The Mutation was powerful and interesting, but Calvin didn’t want to pass out for an undetermined amount of time. He needed something that could help him weather the attack just a couple minutes out.

Calvin could, at the edge of his perception, hear the stomping of feet and clattering of arrows bouncing off the stone parapets. They were within bowshot now.

Variety and Chimera were also interesting, and complemented each other, but Calvin didn’t have anything to add to them right now. There were only two things that could help him in the immediate moment: Atom Ant, and Bad Penny.

Atom ant was appealing, in that Cal could make a handful of wasps the size of rodents with lethal poison and bite strength that could shear through steel, but he could only make a few of them, and their normal poison was already plenty debilitating.

Bad penny though…there was plenty of Warp in the air, and if he spread them out evenly across the battlefield, they could be a long-term hindrance, replicating any losses they took.

I wish the damn thing had said how quickly the creatures would replicate themselves. There was every possibility that the rate of regeneration was so slow as to be useless.

I hate it when the guide doesn’t give hard data, but you’re the first person to make the Ability, so the System knows as much as you do.

Fine. I choose Bad Penny. At this point any regeneration was better than none. If the rate of reproduction was good, it would be an incredible asset.

Cal’s senses buzzed for a moment as his Skill changed, then he went right back to what he had been doing.

Calvinian Summoning. Calvinian Summoning. Calvinian Summoning. Calvinian Summoning…

Over and over again, Calvin simulated casting the spell without pause, an endless swarm erupting from his palms in his personal training scenario as the number of casts climbed into the hundreds.

The explosive noise of a bridge slamming down onto the wall tore Calvin’s eyes open.

Damn, I was hoping to make level six.

Calvin lifted his head up and surveyed the situation, looking out for anyone that might try to pick him off.

The Gadveran wall was woefully undermanned, its people spread thin, only able to assemble enough to create a paltry double line of bodies at the end of each of the siege towers’ bridges.

One bridge was down already, unleashing a flood of Ilethan soldiers, who immediately unleashed all their Bent on attacking Abilities, forcing the defenders to exhaust their Bent simply to not be cut down like wheat.

The second wave out of that gate would, without a doubt, tear through the Gadveran line.

Eye of the Tiger.

Calvinian summoning.

6/11 Bent Remaining.

Calvin held up his palm and created a host of wasps, each weighing a quarter of a pound, with several hundred wasps worth of venom in each of their two inch long stingers. Each of the insects was about the size of his fist, making five hundred of the vicious monsters in a fraction of a second.

Spread out. Kill all the blue ones. Cal gave them a mental nudge, but the Wasps hesitated, unsure of the color purple.

Kill all in there. Cal thought, giving the location and impression of the inside of the siege towers.

Cal spread them out very fine over the battlefield, making sure that there was no way someone or something could get all of them at once again.

How the hell did Andra do that, anyway?

Calvinian Summoning has reached level 6!

level 6: 216 pound limit, 36 minutes. 0 slots available.

There we go. Using it in a novel, considered way rather than as fast as I can will always provide more significant advances in skill. Plus it didn’t have the ¼ penalty.

Cal rubbed his palms together and pushed himself to his feet, picking up the blade lying next to him.

Let’s do this.

***Nadia***

“What’s the hold-up?” Princess Nadia of Iletha demanded, her maidservant cowering behind her, face in the dirt as Nadia glared down the commander of the assault. It was an understandable reaction to the arrows buzzing through the air around them. Nadia knew that their bodyguards would remove any arrow that threatened to harm them, but she was still irritated that her cowardly servant sought to use her as a human shield.

I’ll punish her tonight.

The cretin’s eyes wandered down the princess’s form-fitting blue and black armor before snapping back up to her face, apparently unconcerned by the fact that she’d seen him ogling her.

“They’ve got a wizard, and he’s hiding. Dug in like a Belaga wurm. It’s making progress difficult.”

“How are you solving the problem? Your one job as general, is to solve problems! Not shrug and say it can’t be helped!”

“The problem is these,” Grant said, reaching one meaty hand into his pocket and picking out an enormous wasp that had it’s wings plucked from it’s body. The torso squirmed and tried to shove a stinger dripping with venom into the man’s hand. He pinched the stinger down with a practiced hand.

“By all that’s sacred!” Nadia said, shouted, her cowering handmaiden flinching away from the enormous wasp. “What the hell is that?”

“The Spotters aren’t sure. Sometimes they tell me it feels like Genosian magic. There were definitely Genosian spells preformed on that wall, but sometimes they tell me it feels like Gadveran magic.

“What’s the difference?”

Grant glanced over to his subordinate.

“Genosian magic feels like picking meat from your teeth, while Gadveran magic feels like iron in the sinuses.” The lean man said quietly.

“There you have it.”

Nadia’s eyebrows rose for a moment before she dismissed the Spotter. The fools were prone to instability.

“So what do you think it is? Are they hiring the Genosians to work against us? Some kind of secret weapon? New technique?”

“Won’t know for sure until we ask them,” Grant said, shrugging his shoulders.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Nadia demanded. “Every moment you sit around counting your pubes, they are sending for reinforcements. The plan was to take the wall before they know what hit them, so make it happen.

“The wasps are slowing us down.” Grant said, looking up at the towers above them. every now and then a hapless soldier was shoved off the bridge, tumbling to the ground. “A lot.”

“Are you really going to tell the princess of Iletha that you’re being beaten by insects?”

Grant held up his other hand and Nadia’s Handmaiden flinched back in revulsion again. The arm was swollen until it was nearly immobile, his fingers were dark and the skin was tight like disgusting sausages.

“One sting.” He said cheerfully.

“Then don’t get stung, idiot!”

“Every form of armor has a bit of skin showing, and these little buggers are making us waste Men and Bent to get rid of the them, which is exactly what that bastard wants. Somehow he’s keeping a healthy supply of them no matter how many we kill. I suspect he’s got some kind of gimmick.”

“I don’t want excuses!” Nadia shouted, making the Spotter reel back on his heels. “I want solutions!”

“Well, I might have one, but it would require some assistance from your highness.”

“Begging me to do your job for you? Or did you just want the smug satisfaction of giving me commands?”

“Merely a request, your highness,” the towering general said with a shrug. “But the one ultimately responsible for the success of this campaign is not me.”

“I’ll have you know – eek!” Nadia felt the tiniest tremble in the thick Warp around them, and the wasp in Grant’s hand split, with a second peeling out of the first with no discernable loss.

The new wasp oriented itself, then buzzed angrily toward the first thing it saw: Nadia. She reflexively threw her hands up, flinching away from the approaching wasp. Dear gods, not the face!

When Nadia peered through her eyes again, she saw Grant’s fist in front of her, leaking a green ooze between his fingers.

“My apologies,” he said, “for bringing the faint of heart to a battlefield.”

Nadia’s anger burned white hot for a moment before she smothered it. At some point she knew she would have to become involved.

“What was your request?”

“According to the sorcerers, these wasps have very weak Mind attributes, and whatever hold the Wizard has on them is tenuous at best. Unfortunately there are far too many for our sorcerers to control efficiently, even a dozen at a time. If your highness were to lay a weak Royal Order on the entire battlefield, you could likely steal control of the entire swarm at once, and deal an amount of damage that they would be unable to recover from in a matter of seconds. The defender would most likely dismiss them soon after, but the tide would shift. Let these insects work in our favor.”

“I’ll do you one better,” Nadia said, holding up a single hand, carefully isolating the area of her spell to the North Wall. It wouldn’t do to let the destruction spill into the city she was going to rule.

Berserk.

25/31 Bent Remaining.

A red light bloomed along the wall, and the clanging of steel intensified, joined by inhuman screams of bloodlust as the defenders, wasps, and attackers, all turned on each other with a level of violence that beggared belief.

“Mop up the remains with some fresh troops,” Nadia said sweetly, turning back toward the camp, followed closely by her bodyguards, and handmaiden.

Grant watched her leave with a simmering scowl.

Calvin Gadsint

Body:

6

Strength:

6

Kinesthetics:

6

Endurance:

6

Mind:

20

Intuition:

10

Stability:

11

Will:

19

Bent:

2/11

Skills:

Stealth

6

Talking to Girls

7

Acting

7

Read Expressions

6

Sense-Grafting

8

Knife-Work

5

Dupdomancy

12

Hunting

5

Meditation

10

Chained Spirit

2

Calvinian Summoning

6

Fishing

3

Genosian Language

4