“What do you mean that’s not how it works? I fucking made it and it’s been working great ever since. Shit man, I even blew up a goddamn vampire and gigantic witch’s pet with that bad boy!”

My professional complaints fell on deaf ears, or ear holes. Kraken didn’t care that Gungnir is an epic work of deadly art that’s served me well for months now. The stupid spirit squid just took my mental schematics of all of my gear and shredded them. In short, my rune work was pathetic and apparently I only got by because the materials I used in construction of my stuff had incredible synergy.

[Shoddy! Shitty! Shite! Shovel this to Sheol!]

“Your alliteration is asinine you abominable anus!” I yelled back. Kraken had actually kicked me out of the shared mindspace, grumbling the whole time about how he could do it so much better. Our relationship had improved over the past couple weeks but we still fought like siblings. I left Gungnir in a slot in one of the solar panel mana converters to charge up some batteries in there while I experimented with my collection of sunstones. Thankfully, sunstones are a naturally occuring kind of mineral that my earth sorcery was more than happy to conjure for me. I just couldn’t do it earlier because I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for until the dryads brought me some samples.

“So if they sit in the sun they charge, duh, but at night they just blow through their energy,” I muttered to myself as I held my samples at my outside temp lab. “So, either gonna need runes to get them to hold on to their charge throughout the night or put them in a specially shaped crystal battery to govern the energy dispersal.”

My main weapon Gungnir had been already altered by the Angel Maalik to have some kind of ‘star-iron’ metal that was inimical to the undead, but it wasn’t something that I could recreate. I had an idea about manipulating the sunstones in such a way that they could be weapons I put on Everest and Meliad so they’d never have to worry about the undead ever, but I had to come up with more viable solutions in case I needed to arm other people. I knew that while I’m alone here for right now, humanity isn’t completely gone off of this planet.

In one of my experiments, I did find that the sunstone material was much better at gathering sunlight than my own freaking solar panels, so I spent a day reworking all of them to have sunstone coverings to up their efficiency. The power intake spiked beyond what I had even dreamed to the point I had to put in a governing rune function to prevent explosive accidents. Underneath each solar panel setup, I buried a giant crystal battery bank to handle the overflow just in case I wanted to do some power intensive enchanting or crafting. The power bank had a crystal spike that came up through the surface of the earth and connected to the solar panel providing an avenue for the energy to drain safely.

With the energy-experiments mostly completed, I had also taken the time to make about eight more Yggdrasil seeds so I could see about making a personalized travel system for me. They all were taken from the same area of Yggdrasil, and I was hoping that there would be enough compatibility between the seeds so that I could put the travel trees and be able to basically teleport freely around the North American continent. I had the actual World Tree to start from, which was powerful enough to keep anything from using it to get to my main base, but the others I planned on putting elsewhere.

The first one would be somewhere in Death Valley or the deserts out west if they’re still there, one to be my forward base in northern Canada, and one at the impromptu base near my brother in Florida. The others would be get out of jail free cards if necessary. I tested one seed just to see and it did work. All I had to do was plant the seed, shove enough energy in it so that it could handle travel to the main tree, and step through. Forcing the plant to grow that fast also causes it to completely burnout so I don’t have to fear anyone following me by the same method. I ran back to the original travel point and there was a burnt out pile of ash where the travel tree was. Or, if I had time, I could plant it and grow it like normal to be a travel/teleportation tree. But, it was good to know that I had options.

One of the things that I had been too afraid to do but had actually started doing now was communing with the World Tree. Yggdrasil is that which holds the universe together, so the legends say, but the fucking thing also currently has my wife. I made it a practice at least once a week to merge my mind and magic with the tree hoping to find some conscious trace of my wife up in there. What I found instead was the local network of arboreal life that my section of Yggdrasil was attached to. From the magical senses perspective, it was like looking at an aerial map but that only had different shades of green. In fact it almost looked like rivers of green and brown flowing around that I kind of assumed to be ley lines for the surrounding area.Now, it was real clear to me that the damn World Tree doesn’t look at things the way we humans do, so traveling around was a bit of a pain. Plenty of plant life extended up and down the eastern seaboard and a decent distance out west but it stopped in the east probably due to the Atlantic Ocean out there. And as far as I could tell, there were big dead spots in the west that the World Tree really didn’t touch. My educated self planned on starting there to see where the deserts are.

I loved the fact that my plans were coming together. I wasn’t finished with any of them really but the simple fact that progress was being made on multiple fronts was exhilarating. With Kraken’s help and my solar panel and sunstone experiments nearly complete along with the travel-tree concept working as planned, taking on the Arctic to rid it of the Hungry Ones seemed more and more likely.

One of the things that fascinated me the most was studying the two swords that Maalik stored inside of Gungnir when he left. While they both burned slightly different colors, one pure white and the other with a shade of light blue mixed in with the white, it was hard to get close to them. The issue wasn’t really the fact that my body couldn’t get close, it’s that my mind seemed to constantly shift away as if the swords were covered in oil and my focus kept slipping off. Kraken had said something about being ‘too mortal’ to understand the Adamic or Enochian runes and ‘some things are not meant for mortals and others really aren’t meant for mortals’. When I summoned the sword outside on the ground and bent to physically pick it up and examine it, Kraken had screamed some kind of sound wave to knock me away and then explained afterward that it would have either blown my hand off or burned it off instantly.

So I spent time magically meditating on the swords and the little angel feather display. It was magic all right, but not any kind that I could handle or replicate. There was something inherently alien and painful about it. The swords possessed a quality of fire that was more powerful than sorcery, but definitely not something my magic was capable of handling. If Maalik had wanted to do anything to me, I would not have been able to stop him. I tossed rocks and water and raw mana at the swords and they just shrugged it off like water off a duck’s back. Enchantments lasted a bit longer but I don’t think half seconds count. For fun, I enchanted a stick to be harder than steel and threw it at one of the swords. The damn steel stick just fell into two pieces.

[Quit playing with Heaven’s blades. Did you ever stop to think maybe you have a duty like Merlin? Didn’t he carry around Excalibur for a while looking for the rightful owner of the sword? Sheesh mortal, not everything is about your or even belongs to you.]

[Fuck off squid,] I growled inside my head. [Either tell me how the damn things work or put some of those ever-shifting runes on those armor schematics.]

[What do you think I’ve been doing for over two weeks? Higher Runes don’t just get slapped on? They have to be properly aligned, and be set in the right material, and they also have to be attuned so that they don’t burn your less than perfect self to dust!]

Sometimes, magic fucking sucks. I replied with a bit of irritation, [Then make another schematic not using those particular runes as well. I’m going to need an upgraded suit of armor now-ish and then we’ll actually work on the way more detailed powered-up one later.]

[Grumble, grumble, snark, snark.] Or at least that’s all I heard coming down the shared mental link.

[Hey! It’s time for our session anyways. Come on dude.] My excitement rolled through our link. Kraken wasn’t the best at answering all of my questions about the universe at large as he’s still just a young Scion, but his powers of deduction and knowledge in regards as to how magic works were invaluable for me.

[I still don’t get the distinction between mages and sorcerers, and what do you mean I have to train my mana capacity? I have generators and batteries and power banks and solar panel converters, come on dude?]

Kraken just stared at me. His bewilderment was clear but it carried the tinge of an adult watching an idiot child ask a really dumb question. [We have been over this!] he sent, frustration making our connection a bit tenuous, [Sorcerers use the element and Mages COMMAND the element. They are the element. You throw water at a water mage and he takes it away from you while laughing and drowning everything around you. But, the mage can only use the one element he has, so you throw a rock at him and he better get the fuck outta the way. It’s why mages tend to settle down and never leave their area of influence. Water mages live near the ocean or in river-boats, nature mages never leave the forest, and fire and air mages fuck like rabbits and are inseparable.]

[Ok, that does make sense,] I thought, mulling it over. [But what kind of training do I have to do that wizards do? Aren’t they pathetic in terms of holding power, which is why the crystal batteries are sort of a huge deal?]

[Yes, wizards don’t have the same capacity you do, but because of that they train themselves to hold more and more over time. Also, yes, wizards are not as powerful as sorcerers but if you ever run into an old ass wizard you better run like the Hells themselves are coming for ya.]

[Yeah, I hear ya, but I’m not seeing how that’s possible. I command water and earth, what’s a wizard going to do with it that I can’t?]

[Think with me for a second,] he chuckled, his mind pulling me his own. A live-action cartoon movie started playing. [Ok, the blue dude over there is the water sorcerer, and the old man is the wizard. Watch the wizard shoot a couple sharp icicles and see, the sorcerer just laughs at it.] And sure enough, the young man arrogantly waved his hand at the incoming missiles which went from ice to water vapor. [But look, wizards tend to use implements a lot more than sorcerers or mages and it gives them an incredible amount of variety to use.]

The old man chuckled, icicles pouring out of his wand like a machine gun and the young man barely paying attention at this point as the projectiles turned into vapor to the point that fog was starting to hamper visibility. The old man grinned for a quick second as his other hand held a different wand that quickly blasted a spiky ball of solid rock that plowed right through the fog into the sorcerer. The impromptu movie cut off.

[I get it, wizards use tools as their preset spells and pump mana through it to up the number of spells in play, but they have a bunch of wands ready for variety. That wand belt was pretty cool. Do they normally carry around that many?] I asked, replaying it in my mind.

[Yes, they really do, and they stress their mana capacity every day too. Eventually, they get to the point where they hold almost as much power as you do with your batteries on their own but that takes decades of dedicated work. They’re big fans of living near ley lines or having familiars or elementals to supplement their mana expenditure.] Kraken’s answers were enlightening, kinda scared me a bit too. I felt like I was missing out on the grade school education that everyone else got.

[So how’s it work, how do they gradually increase what they can hold?] My question prompted a two hour discussion on basic mana manipulation training techniques and breathing exercises that were frankly exhausting. Kraken ended up throwing his curriculum away after finding out exactly how much power I carried around in my batteries.

[You’re already doing the craziest workout I’ve ever heard of? Just being near that much power 24/7 is forcing you to expand your mana capacity, and that’s not including your blend of diverse sorceries and proximity to the World Tree!] At the end there, his voice through our link was getting a bit raspy. [Did you know that most humans are simply not durable or resistant to the level of mana being put out by Yggdrasil? Shit, most creatures can’t handle that. It’s like dragons nesting in a volcano not just because they want to but because they’re really the only ones who can!]

[So, I don’t need to do all that hippy shit?]

[Meditation and breathing exercises are not ‘hippy shit’! Communing with the foundation of the multi-verse is NOT hippy shit!]

I laughed him off as I opened up my magical senses to feel the surrounding area. Nothing but forest and raw power as far as the magical eye could see. “Feels like hippy shit to me,” I grumbled with a small smile.

[Look, haven’t you noticed that even your canine companion doesn’t even stay around here for long? He comes by for some fetch, belly rubs, and then runs off?]

[Yeah . . . but that’s what dogs do man. He’s got private parts to lick and deer to chase.]

[This area is hard to live in for things that are not plants you freak. You should not be alive. Besides, you’re probably gonna die as soon as the other realms start traveling here. You’re pretty squishy and can’t even fight with a blade.]

That for some reason actually got under my skin a bit. He was dismissing me as non-threatening, like a child with a loaded gun but with no actual strength to cock it. Reaching into all of my batteries, I pulled as much power as I could handle and surprised myself to find myself not even full from the batteries on my chest. Linking to the power banks, I pulled even more, draining one out of three, until my head was pounding and my heart straining.

My gear activated, every rune lighting up across my body even as Svalinn expanded to the bladed shield form and Gungnir crackled with power. My presence, magnified by the weight of all the power cascading off of me, was starting to make my limbs shake before I let it all go back to storage. Gasping for breath, I managed to mentally send as I couldn’t voice the words, [See? You’re telling me that’s vulnerable?]

[You know anti-magic weaponry is a real threat right? All of that does not matter one iota to one of the many groups that hunt magic users.]

[You’re kidding!]

Kraken shot a snippet of a memory at me, hordes of silver plated warriors in the sun cutting down magic users left and right, their armor shrugging off spells while their weapons knocked aside or nullified their spellforms. The last few seconds showed several wizards fighting back, their staffs now maces or swords.

[You’re fucking kidding me right?] I scoffed, [We’ll just do this the American way, shoot them. Gungnir has Centauri rifles and I’ve even modified bullets to blow up. Magic may not work but physics is hard to ignore dude.]

[This is why teams are important,] Kraken stressed, shaking his one big eyeball. [We’ve talked about this. That’s why the Centauri still fight like your ancient Romans did. Formations of many kinds of weaponry ensure success far better than being a lone wolf. Even mages work in teams with enslaved creatures to cover their blind spots. Wizards learn how to fight with physical weaponry, and the Hive races use the swarm tactics. You can’t protect against everything perfectly. There are even accounts of the Hungry Ones’ overlord arming their hordes with anti-magic weaponry complete with gauntlets to shield them from their own weapons!]

[So, bullets don’t work? Is that what you’re trying to say man? Cause I’m definitely short on manpower over here. There’s some hillbillies that I might want to check in on, but we won’t be making SWAT teams out of them.]

[Your normal human definition of ‘bullets’ won’t work, and you being all alone really won’t work either. You’re squishy, like me, but I’m the spiritual form of squishy which means that I’m way less squishy than you. Most things tend to be either too durable for bullets or they’re a bit advanced and have some basic shielding against high-velocity projectiles. It’s really why wizards don’t use guns. The craziest ones use big longbows with crazy enchanted arrows, and most use swords while the rest use beefed up staffs.]

[So I need an army, or, fuck, a fucking team. Fuck! FUCK!] My stomping off ended the conversation but it didn’t end the fact that maybe the little shit was right. [Wait, fuck you!] I mentally yelled back as I turned right around stomped back up to Kraken. [Can’t I just hide out, go rogue, not really show off and be unnoticeable? If Spot the dragon dog can do it then so can I right?]

[Maybe in about three hundred years of practice if you’re lucky,] Kraken scoffed, poking me with one barely corporeal pseudopod. [You’ve shown me your magics, and if you were smart, you would have stolen some weapon skills from the Centauri you killed. Up close combat is your greatest danger, followed by your own idiocy.]