Their laughter wasn’t funny for me. It was honestly the best lie I could come up with at the time, and somewhat plausible too. “Spot, change!” I’m normally not very good at lying, but having consciousness sorcery really helped out my ad-libbing skills right now. Normally, my bad memory would screw me over in the department of keeping track of what lies I told and to whom, but preprogrammed emergency verbal responses on command certainly help, especially considering how little brain power it actually takes to come up with a plausible lie.

Reinforcing my command mentally with exactly what I wanted him to do, my dog grew to his normal size and bounded around as if that’s what he wanted to do all along. Three jumps and buttload of barking served to freak out the soldiers who fell behind their shields from the earth shaking, which I helped just a teeny bit. “Good boy! Now shake!” His giant tail began to wag back and forth, bowling over the captain and his corporals.

“Damn it dog, not ‘shake’ the tail, shake hands!” I laughed out loud, holding one hand up. My favorite dog did exactly what I wanted him too. “We can play with Kong when we get back, I know you want to,” I cooed, unable to hide my own laughter.

Spot carefully lifted one paw right in front of my face and I high-fived it. “Good boy, now get small again. Can’t be freakin’ out the new locals now can we?”

In a flash of fire, my dog was normal size again, sitting calmly at my feet. Pointing up in the sky, I caught Captain Casparai’s eye. “And that one up there is mine too. Don't’ shoot him or we might have a problem. I’m not really a threat, but that’s Spot’s snuggle buddy.”

So maybe I wasn't what a dungeons and dragons nerd would classify as a usual ‘beast tamer’, but I sure could fake it, especially considering Spot’s enthusiasm to prove me right. A loud crack of thunder from the gate cut me off from having to explain further. Snakes of white lightning arced from one giant set of runes to another as the inner space of the gate where air used to be started to liquify and swirl like a whirlpool that some deity decided to flip on its side.

“What the fucking hell is that?” Even though I asked the question, I’m pretty sure that I didn’t need an answer just yet. Finding my brother and taking this whole thing down while not making new enemies all fell to the wayside as the sharp scent of ozone became more prominent and things began crawling out of the gate. Wasting no time, Spot grew to his largest size, easily over two stories talls with angry flames dancing across his fur.

“It’s a damn gate you backwards normie,” Corporal Smith said, turning her weapons towards whatever it was coming out of the gate. “And that isn’t supposed to be happening! Captain, those don’t look like reinforcements to me!”

“Decant the sleepers, we’re gonna need em!”

At the Captain’s orders, Corporal Johnson speed off towards their camp, the rest of the soldiers hauling ass after her. As the other Corporal ran off after her battle buddy, Captain Casparai rounded on me and slapped me on the chest with a small medal that stuck in my armor.

“Welcome aboard pipsqueak. You’re hereby deputized into the Marauders, the vaunted 2nd Legion of the Reclamation fleet. Wear the shield proudly.”

That odd disk wasn’t just a medal. The instant it hit my armor, a set of tiny metal spikes began doing their best to burrow through my chest plate to get to my skin, and even smaller tendrils of magic were poking at my armor too. Clapping my hand over it, I focused my earth and mana sorcery into it, ripping up the enchantments and crumpling the disk without letting the Captain see as he had already turned back towards all the hubbub.

What could only be described as Godzilla’s ugly ass cousin from West Virginia stepped, or stomped, or crushed its way through the gate. The large black longhouse looking structures were now floating up and away from the chaos while opening up from the long sides, sets of five fully armored soldiers hopping out. Forming up into shield walls, they met up with the other groups of awakened ‘sleepers’ and began retreating, or tactically moving in a rearward direction.

Grabbing a hold of Spot’s knee, I hoisted myself up to his back to get a better look at Fugly emerging from the gate. Parts of it were solid black, shiny like a beetle’s carapace, while other parts looked like raw flesh that was slowly weeping some kind of ooze. I didn’t have time to talk. As quickly as this situation was devolving, I had to find my brother. Mentally communicating my plan to Spot, my trusty canine took off and ran down the Captain before he could get very far. As gently as he could, Spot snatched him up and tossed him up and over so that he landed, painfully, right in front of me.

“Wha-oof!?”

Not giving him time to react, I grabbed him by his shoulders and flung us backwards, quickly using my earth sorcery to turn the dirt we landed on into a much softer kind that swallowed us up. With a concentrated spike of mental sorcery, I drove my mind into his, bypassing his somewhat formidable but badly set up mental defenses. Thirty feet below the earth’s surface, I held the Centauri soldier perfectly still with my will alone as I plundered his mind for what I wanted. Reeanth’s mind was full of ciphers and encryptions, but this guy was relatively new. He didn’t have the hundreds of years of training and programming that she did to keep me out. His mind wasn’t even well organized, not that I should be complaining or even have any room to talk. Mine was a kid’s playroom until I got my consciousness sorcery.

There! A tightly bound packet of information wrapped in a cube of runes was buried in his mind. Tiny threads of information connected it to the rest of his mind, but I still couldn’t read what was in there. Eh, I didn’t need to do that anyway, as long as he could. Keeping him still by manipulating his nervous system, I reached into my own mind and summoned an image, a family photo that used to sit on my desk at work. Constructing a 3-D version of that photo, I set it straight into his brain.

[WHERE IS HE!]

The authority carried by my mental shout coupled with the fact that my magic was literally forcing his body to be unnaturally still almost killed him. The simple shock of the realization that there was absolutely nothing I couldn’t and wouldn’t do to get what I wanted sparked something in Casparai, fear.

[I don’t know!]

[THINK! Ask your database Captain! I can see it in your mind, and if you don’t, I’ll purposely trigger its safeguards. You’ll be a fuckin vegetable.]

His resolve hardened just long enough to mentally spit in my eye. [Fuck you normie! Without me, you get nothing!]

Seeing as I was inside of his head, he couldn’t hear the laughter reverberating through my soul. Opening up just a tiny bit of power into his forebrain, I showed him just a glimpse of what I envisioned for him. He saw his body wasting away under my flesh sorcery while I used water sorcery to drown him and revive him over and over. He saw his body seize as I caused his nerves to fry and then seize again as I healed them. Images of hungry plants and angry pointy insects crawling in and out his orifices entertwined with endless solitary confinement miles below the Earth’s surface. As the vision ended, I pulled his mind just a bit closer to mine to let him feel the unwavering resolve that had kept me alive so far, and just a bit of the anger that kept it hot.

[None of that was a lie, and every bit of it can come true. All I need you to do is tell me where the fuck my little brother is, even if he isn’t little anymore, and I’ll be on my merry fuckin’ way.]

As Casparai pissed himself, I watched his fragile mind take a long look at the image of my family. [That one! I recognize that one!]

The frame zoomed in on my father. [He was a prime candidate for the life extension process! My family bought the rights to him years ago! We were told that he spent years in your military and was an excellent pilot, perfect for the Portal Corps.]

[Bought, him!?] The grip of magic that held Casparai down tightened as my temper threatened to break loose. [Fuck it!] I snarled. Reaching another fist full of power into his mind, I grabbed the small silvery cube of Centauri magitech and ripped the threads from their anchors. As Casparai died from his own nervous system revolting, I used his nervous system to read the last couple data packets coming from the cube. Tag Marauder, Designation Alpha Shield Tango, all of that was denoted by the Marauder Tag on the Centauri battle suit on the shoulder. My brother’s Marauder tag was a shield with the Greek symbol Alpha, but the Tango meant which sleeper hover pod he was in.

Letting my earth sorcery pull me up to the surface, I broke into the sunlight to a scene that wasn’t the hell I was expecting. Big Fugly was curled up off in the distance and all of the Centauri were stiffly walking around or working. The gate was silent and gave off the feeling of dense cold, as if it had given its last breath to birth its passengers. And Spot, Spot was sitting in his tiny form on a lady’s lap, twisting and turning under her caresses to give her the best angle for a belly rub.

Her dark eyes were only matched by her raven hair, scarlett streams of raw magic gently flowing off of her in waves, as if a dragon were given human form. Her gaze fixated on me and the sheer presence of her being crashed into me.

“Still conscious I see? Maybe the survivors have some backbone after all.” Her left hand kept petting Spot while her right arched up as if to grab the stem of a wine glass that wasn’t there. From her slightly pointed finger, a cannon of untainted force blasted me away.

My view of the sky was simply gorgeous from where I lay, hurting. Flesh sorcery working overtime to repair the bruised tissue was almost as taxing as my consciousness sorcery forcefully shunting aside the screaming tide of pain signals coming from all over. And yet, there was a little teeny voice in the back just screaming, get the fuck up, almost as if from very far away. Engaging, Surprise Survival Protocol: Mole Mode. In my spare time, I had programmed responses for my mind to engage in if shock ever kept my conscious self from action. My earth sorcery opened up the dirt beneath me like a mouth and quickly buried me two hundred feet below the surface while my flesh sorcery kept right on chugging.

My senses were on full alert, sparing no effort to make sure that the alien woman couldn’t touch me like that again. My mind sorcery kept replaying that moment in every spectrum we could perceive. That blast of energy almost bypassed every kind of defensive magic I had. If Svalinn didn’t do its job of draining and diverting overloads of incoming power, that sneak attack would have utterly smashed me. The scene replayed again, and again, and a dozen more times. Ten minutes of straight healing and scared meditation later, I finally saw deviousness. There were tiny connections of red power that were coming from her fingers to Spot as she was petting him. The power that almost killed me wasn’t hers, it was my freaking dogs! That bitch, that witch, stole my dog’s overwhelming strength and used it against me.

Two can play at that fucking game. Double checking to make sure that I was in one solid piece, I pulled Gungnir from off my belt as it turned into a wicked looking spear. Down here in the Earth, I could feel the ambient mana settling down, a calming pressure that to others would feel oppressive, but to me felt like home. Gathering a mass of power, I started to feel the dirt and rock underneath the woman and as I began to sink my mana into it in order to make a giant sinkhole, a few words floated to my ear.

[Oh no darling, don’t do that. My little love tap was simply the price for what you stole, besides, witches do love to play with sorcerers.]

Her tone wasn’t actually audible, but the intent of a psychotic dominatrix somehow rang through, as if all of my efforts were futile and always will be. The feeling of being transparent scared me, but like hell was I going to take this lying down. This Earth is mine, and down deep in it, I was definitely king. Feeling out with Gungnir, I swam down through the dirt and rock until the pressure of the Earth was compacting raw mana into barely stable condensed gems of power. Stabbing one of them with Gungnir, I focused my will and pulled.

First, the giant gate sank, cracking the warehouse building upon which it sat, then all of the sleeper soldier carriers sank as well, which I ended up placing next to each other. Stabbing another stone of power, I pulled every soldier down so that only their heads were showing and turned that dirt into solid stone. And for the best, most satisfying part of all, I sank the bitch. As the tumbling rock and dirt tore her and my dog apart, I pulled Spot to me, creating a large enough air bubble for us to be comfortable. The witch, she had her own special prison, a nice solid coffin of granite with two tiny air holes. Pulling that to me, I used earth sorcery to carve runes of power extraction, confusion, sleepiness, mental weakness, and then nausea to top it off. I didn’t have enough power at my disposal to solidly cover the entire thing in platinum, but she wouldn’t be able to work magic in there if she couldn’t concentrate in the first place.

Taking Spot and I up to the surface, we came face to face to Fugly, standing over his buried charges. The soldiers looked pale, those that weren’t wearing helmets, and all of them were screaming for mercy or help. Casually tossing up a stone of power that I swiped on my upward journey, I looked the ugly monster in the eye.

“You know I’m the Alpha here!” I shouted at it, mentally sending the same emotional tones as my words. “You can either fuck off or die.” At my last words, Spot took it upon himself to grow as big as he could, gouts of flames erupting randomly from his body. The tip of Gungnir began to pulse with white light, a low but loud and ominous hum coming from it. As the beast continued to stare at me, I had enough. Slapping the power stone to Gungnir, I braced the butt in the dirt and used earth sorcery to reinforce my stance.

Strands of molten earthen power creased up the grain of the wood as Gungnir sapped all of the power from the nearby earth, the three bladed crystal tip flashed with light, channeling the condensed power at Fugly. The jet of power didn’t blast Fugly, it evaporated a hole so big I could shove a car through it. Not even waiting for the rest of the body to fall, Spot tackled it and began eating as if I had starved him.

“Damn it dog! No! Bad Spot!” I yelled, sprinting at the tangled up mess. Jumping up, I stabbed Gungnir into the corpse, doing my best to drain as much leftover power from the body before Spot ate it all. My flesh sorcery was channeling the stored bio-power from the body into me through the medium of my weapon, but the crazy part was the crystal tip was also storing the blood and the wood was drinking it. Without prompting, Svalinn extended blades of bone that stabbed into the beast as well, drinking up blood and power from the body. As Spot messily continued his eating, slopping bits of flesh and blood and sinew everywhere, including on me, my flesh sorcery cried out with joy as bits of energy flowed in to me from the simple contact. Just what was I becoming?