“Don’t fuck it up, don’t fuck it up, don’t fuck it up.” I knew I wasn’t going to but dear god I felt like it was within the realm of possibility. On the way back home I took an opportune moment dive-bombed a lone sand lizard sunning himself on an outcropping of rock and froze him completely to the ground, killing him quickly. This horse-sized gecko would provide more than enough flesh for fuel for my golem. Getting back to my flesh golem at Sunstone Castle, I inserted the water dragon skin and the entire sand lizard into the bulbous mass and waited for it to completely break them down before I cracked my knuckles and chuckled, channeling the mad genius from Pinky and the Brain and the Black Eyed Peas. “Let’s get it started!”

[Are you sure you want to start with this?] Kraken asked as soon as I shoved my greedy fingers into the flesh golem to start playing around with the DNA sequences. [I don’t get the obsession with, as you call it, upgrading your body. Simply due to the undeniable fact that your sorceries and enchanted items more than make up for the fact that you’re a squishy mortal. Why? Why do you want this? There are dangers to the process.]

[Look, if you know something I don’t then spit it out,] I replied with my eyes closed, mainly concentrating on the golem. [I have my own original DNA set aside in case I fuck this up too badly, I have a flesh golem which can function as a test dummy before I do anything to myself, and I have flesh sorcery as the end-all be-all to fix my own mistakes. So whatcha got?]

[My advice as your spirit familiar is to first upgrade your armor similar to how you made fire dragon armor for your witch vassal. Combine the water dragon with the sand lizard, grow a set of that, maybe feed a bit of it Svalinn and also see if it’ll combine with SAW. Your body at this point should be your last concern. You’re so much further ahead in regards to your weapons and armor that your body is almost not worth it. According to your memories, you call this ‘min-maxing’?]

I chuckled as I explained his misunderstanding about pre-apocalyptic gaming. [Ok, you’re half right on the min-maxing, but that only works in video games. The concept there is to only focus on your strongest stats to make you specialized. Life isn’t as forgiving as a video game. Humans generally don’t get second chances when we die. My abilities are fantastic at keeping me alive, helping me escape, being a veritable magical tank. It would help if I brought a truckload of innate durability to the table, like that of a dragon perhaps. You can’t really one-shot a dragon, can you?]

[Not unless a deity or Greater Demon gets involved.]

I groaned. [You get the point. The only thing falling behind at this point is my body, my soft, squishy, mortal human body.] Kraken fell silent as I pulled out a handful of the flesh golem, directing it to only contain a solid packet of my original DNA, just in case. Setting it off to the side and sealing it in a runed stone box, I turned back to my test subject. Within a minute, the original almost house sized flesh golem spit out a human sized version of itself which I picked up and sat on one of the stone benches. Putting my hand on it, the grey flesh rippled until an inert clone of me was laying there. Pulling another human sized blob from the original golem, I rolled it over till it was next to me, ready to provide extra raw material if need be.

“Breathe in . . . breathe out.” What sucks is that I had honestly thought that I’d never get this far. I did not expect to live this long past the end of the modern world, I mean, I had mild prepping tendencies back before the Ripples but who would have fucking that it would be magic that ended the world? According to the projections of the scientists, we were overdue for a solar flare, which was my personal favorite of all the apocalypses, and the rest of the prepper community that I followed on social media were generally split between an economic collapse or a natural disaster. A significant portion also had their money on a supervirus and the rich preppers prepared for everything by buying fully sealed and stocked renovated nuclear silos.

Shaking my musings away, I got started on my project that’s been a long time coming. First, I covered the upper-left side of the clone’s chest in blue water dragon scales and the upper right side in sand lizard scales, then I left the lower right portion as normal human skin and the lower-left I altered to be minotaur skin. To keep things organized, between each section of differing alien skins, I made sure that they were separated by human flesh so it kind of looked like a four piece puzzle.

Putting one hand on the dragon scale part and the other on the lizard part, I pushed them together as my flesh sorcery alongside the golem started to combine the different scales where they met, forming a dark brown line of scales between the two. “So the reptilian scales join together with absolutely no problem,” I muttered, concentrating on how seamless the differing elemental scales just meshed. “Makes sense, earth plus water equals mud, hehe. Ok, part two.” Leaving the successful join where it was, I moved down to the lower portions of human and minotaur skin. Repeating the process, the human skin almost seemed to want to bond with the minotaur skin, as if it were a blank template just waiting for some direction.

[It makes sense. You humans are virile, uncommonly so. You can basically mate with anything and have a half-decent hybrid. Prolific, is that word I’m looking for?]

I ignored Kraken’s side jab at humanity. So the two two halves bonded no problem and the two bottom halves did as well, which meant that so far so good. The problems started happening when I tried to bond the minotaur skin to the water dragon scales above it, they both kept sliding away from each other like two magnets of the same polarity.

[Almost correct,] Kraken interjected. [The minotaur skin functions similar to your understanding of duck feathers. They have just the right amount of ‘oil’, so to speak, to shed the water which in this case is magic. Water dragon scales are chock full of magic, so they’ll pour over anything but the minotaur skin is essentially magic-proof.]

[All right, makes sense. But for science, we’ll approach this logically. Minotaur skin and dragon scale don’t mesh instantly, which is fine. So, let’s see how minotaur and sand lizard skin works?] I returned the lower half of the clone’s torso back to plain human skin and then turned the portion underneath the sand lizard part into minotaur and attempted joining them together. The same repulsion effect was still there, although noticeably less in power.

[Minotaur skin on its own seems to be a no-go, but,] I thought, twanging on my mental link to Kraken. [If you’re right about humanity being the blank template that’s compatible with anything, then maybe there’s a workaround here.] Pushing at the flesh golem, I combined the lower half of the torso into the amalgamation of minotaur/human skin and kept the top as water dragon, ‘mud’ scale, and sand lizard scale. [We have two working combos so far with one being the logical base. I’m going to do this step by step to find the best one, which means finding the worst one first, usually.]

The experimentation took a while as I tried combining the different sets of DNA into a cohesive whole. The minotaur/human did actually end up joining what I called the ‘mud dragon’ scales, but it wasn’t a simple combination. What ended up getting it to work was when I used the human/minotaur flesh as a base and attached the mud scales to the inner part of it, forming a solid attempt at scale armor.

[I still don’t think it’s right,] I grumbled to Kraken, poking and prodding at the golem. [This is more along the lines of what I’d do if I wanted to make some cool armor, not as a replacement for my skin.]

[Why don’t you just make the scales smaller? More like a slippery snake instead of a thickly armored lizard?]

Perfect. The KISS method fixes my problems yet again. Keep-it-simple-stupid. Morphing the scales into miniature versions of themselves about half an inch long and wide from the original size of six square inches, it took far less coaxing to get the base skin and the mud scale to bond. My flesh sorcery poked at me as I noticed that while the join was successful, the project was literally starting to die. Where the small scales met the skin, the red blood cells underneath started dying.

[MANA! IT NEEDS JUICE!]

Trusting my partner, I channeled raw power through my flesh sorcery, keeping the scale alive as the innate magical bonds strengthened, finally completing the perfect join. Cursing under my breath again, I dragged the clone body over to the pedestal holding Gungnir. “So I actually have to pull a frankenstein huh?” Forming a link between Gungnir, myself, and the batteries below the castle as well as the power-gathering ritual, I funneled the energy into the golem as I screamed, “FOR SCIENCE!”

The clone body spasmed as waves of raw power washed over it, the skin morphing into the minotaur/human base as thousands of tiny brown ‘mud’ scales sprouted up like opening seeds and then lay down, each draining tons of power to fill up the magical bonds holding it together. Barely holding on to the wave of power, Kraken helped direct the flows so make the changes as seamless as possible, leaving the right parts of the clone body scaleless like the face, palms, armpits, groin and more. The point here was to be enhanced, not to completely remove all traces of humanity from the body.

Five minutes of intense concentration with mountains of power yielded a result that was scientifically beautiful. I couldn’t help but admire my own damn ingenuity as I hoisted the clone up onto a stone table, examining the placement of the scales, noting the smoothness as well as its durability. Bowing to another whim, I released another wave of power, turning the scales from dark brown to my natural light tan so that it wouldn’t appear to anyone casually looking that the clone was covered in armor-like skin.

[This is a fine experiment,] Kraken congratulated. [Are you going to work on the insides next or were you thinking of putting runic tattoos on the scales?]

[Actually, I was going to work on the insides and didn’t even think about that last one. How bout you work on a nice rune schematic for the scales and I’ll get started on the inner workings?]

[Fine by me.] Kraken agreed, mostly withdrawing from our connection.

While the minotaur skin was awesome to work as part of the base for the epidermis, the rest of the minotaur DNA didn’t really hold anything else that I’d want as part of my future body. Water dragon and sand lizard innards were simply better in just about every way. The lungs were altered to be partially water dragon so that breathing under water wouldn’t require magic. The sand lizard and water dragon eyes respectively contained the ability to get a thermal reading of the surrounding area, basically they could ‘see’ heat. The water dragon's ear canals were perfect for sonar and the blood marrow of both was far more robust in terms of natural healing and red blood cell production. The golem clone’s skeletal structure easily accepted a combination of water dragon and sand lizard bone tissue as well as the combo of muscle, tendon, and ligament tissue. The next three hours were spent painstakingly going over the body, making slight adjustments after the initial inputs of variant DNA.

[Are you sure you don’t want to put a tail on it? How about natural wings, oooh, ooh! How about retractable fangs or internal poison sacs? Maybe incorporate poison sacs into sweat glands? If we’re going this far we might as well make you full on bizarre!]

[Great word choice,] I mused, loving how much Kraken was getting into this. [But the goal is to meld the best of humanity with reptilian durability while still maintaining the overall form and function of a human body. SAWs got wings, and Reeanth is right, tails are unnecessary handles. I’m not averse to hidden weapons though. I’m on board with the poison sweat glands and maybe some retractable bone blades, just not really sure where to put the blades, hmmm.]

With another wave of power, some of the clone’s sweat glands morphed into miniature poison sacs. The issue was that I had no variety in the poison department, only the sand lizard in my DNA collection had poison and it wasn’t very good, simply a mild paralytic to keep prey from struggling too much to help the lizard pack drag it down through force of numbers. [Ok, revisit the poison gland thing later. Blades! Where should they go? Svalinn has the forearm blade part covered, so where?]

Kraken conceded the point. [Actually, yeah, you’re right. Blades aren’t really necessary for you. Gungnir plus Svalinn covers your bases. Without good poison, there’s no point in making venom glands to spit the stuff. What about a retractable frog tongue?]

[Human, Kraken! Human! Trying to stay mostly human here. Planning a future body here that children won’t point at and scream. Avoid ‘monstery’, ok?]

[Fine,] he grumbled. [Be boring. My part is way less fun. The rune schematics are done. I went with the basic defense rune formation. Since the skin is mostly minotaur, it sort of does most of the magic bleedoff effect which is great in fights against wizards, witches, and sorcerers, but the scales will have a different purpose. Mainly, they will be the last line of physical defense. I have a kinetic-energy diverting rune within the standard defense rune, and I figured out a tricky part. After going through your memories, you read a lot of stories about assassins and how they used a thin sharp blade to puncture vulnerable spots. So, I figured out a way to link all of the scales together to ripple when impacted to turn the point of the blade so that it would divert the puncturing power. Basically, the assassin would have to land a perfectly placed attack with a crapton of power to get through the scaly parts.]

[Holy shit!] I thought, almost gasping. [I’ll be un-one-shotable?! NICE!]

[I guess? Not sure that’s proper English . . . moving on. There are also leyline conductor runes on the bottoms of the feet so that if you’re ever without your boots you can top off on power just by standing in the right spot, and the best part is, all of the standard rune tattoos that you have on you right now work just fine on the minotaur skin underneath the scales!]

Right then and there I almost started the process to make that body my body. [WAIT! Don’t get ahead of yourself. We have to look at the downsides here too.] Kraken warned.

[What now?] I snapped. [Come on, this is perfect!]

[Maybe, or maybe it’s got a serious downside. Like maybe this might hinder how you use your magic. I don’t think you noticed but minotaur skin doesn’t really like magic all that much, and covering most of your body in it may hinder how much power you can pull in or push out at any given time. The upside,] Kraken continued before I could object. [The upside is that the dragon scales love magic and may actually be enough to balance it out or enhance your control by a little bit. I’m not sure if they’ll channel the nature sorcery you have that well but your earth and water control may experience a dramatic spike in overall control.]

[And if that’s all true, then I might have to rely even more on my tools instead of myself, FUCK!] Taking a few minutes off to the side, I relished the feeling of the castle’s mana washing over me as I refilled my personal stores of power from the incoming flow of the solar panels. There’s always another way and every path to self-improvement doesn’t need to have downsides. Maybe the answer wasn’t in completely redoing all of the work, but simply adjusting it a little bit. The minotaur combination with the human skin was right around eighty percent minotaur with twenty percent human, which allowed for great elasticity and incoming magic projectile defense. The one that an enemy wizard would never see coming is if they threw magic at me and it slid off, but even more surprising is if that very same offensive magic was absorbed, right?

If I could alter the ratio of human to minotaur, it stands to reason that I could hit upon the right proportions where the minotaur part could blunt the incoming mana just enough for my sorcerous human skin to absorb the power instead of it getting deflected by the final product. If I’m right, my future skin could function like that cool modern concrete that is just porous enough to let the water drain right through it but tough enough to withstand cars driving on it. Reading my thoughts, Kraken interjected. [Ok, my projections are that we start with an even fifty-fifty split on the human to minotaur and then go five percent either direction depending on how much you can damage it from a blast of raw mana. If we do it right, then that means your ability to outwardly project mana won’t be hindered at all!]

I liked it. In fact, I liked it so much that I went about three years ahead of the project. Walking over to the giant body of the main flesh golem, I rolled it over to Gungnir and tossed the upgraded clone body into it and waited a minute while it got absorbed. From there, I channeled stupid amounts of power into the flesh golem so it could make a bunch of clone bodies, each with their own different human to minotaur skin ratio. I had the fifty-fifty, sixty-forty both ways, and then the seventy-thirty both ways as well. Each body, after it had drained enough power to complete the power-intensive cell joining process, I put up a conjured stone wall and shaped the stone to form restraints so that I had clone body targets.

[This looks so messed up,] I remarked, looking at my courtyard with five targets. The fifty-fifty was in the middle and the sixty-forty and seventy-thirty of the mostly minotaur were on the left and the mirror opposites were on the right. “Again,” I called out loud as I pulled Gungnir and leveled it at the clones and blasted each body with a wave of dense, raw mana. “FOR SCIENCE!”

Working my shots from the left to the right and then back again, each clone body took a total of three raw mana blasts before I was satisfied. The stone walls holding the bodies were completely blown away and the bodies themselves were in a bit of a state. [Wasn’t that a bit much?] Kraken yelled inside my brain. [You didn’t need to blow the courtyard away!]

[Look,] I pointed out gleefully as I sprinted over to the devastated courtyard. [It worked! Plan for the worst and experiment with disaster! BEHOLD!] Holding up the most intact clone body, I swung it around happily. [Forty percent minotaur is the sweet spot! And the best part is, not only do I know the best ratio for mana absorption, but the ratio is super easy to change! Which means if I’m ever getting my ass kicked magically by some godlike wizard, all I gotta do is up the ratio to eighty and I’ll be invincible!]

Running back over to the main body of the central flesh golem, I pushed the best clone into it and waited for it to be absorbed and saved as a preferred body schematic. Taking another test minutes, I cleaned up the blown away parts of the four failed clones by chucking them into the main golem. Stripping off all of my clothes including Svalinn and SAW, I rolled the central golem just a bit closer to Gungnir.

“Fuckin’ tight!” I celebrated even as I began to sink into a meditative state, my eyes closed as I focused on my state of mind and sorceries. [Kraken, your job is to make sure that the power supply is constant and available. Do some projections real quick, do we have enough power to see this through? I got the feeling that I’ll need more than the clones due to my sorceries.]

[There’s months worth of stored power in your batteries, let alone what you personally hold and what’s in your freakish staff,] he assured me. [Just take it slow and let me work on the runes and you’ll be a brand new you in less than two hours.]