Brand new me took a lot more than two hours. It took Kraken and I nine times longer than we expected, the power requirements for drastically altering my own body skyrocketed as my own flesh sorcery was a bit too at home in the original me. Small changes, healing, minor upgrades were easily within my purview but it seems that the total body makeover should have happened over time. My soul was the real problem, the fact that my soul-tree was a bit too much like how I envisioned it caused me some serious problems like the fact that putting down some metaphysical ‘roots’ actually meant ROOTS! My soul-tree, my combined enlivened sorceries liked my body, the original and weak one. My earth sorcery was invested in my body, the water in my blood, the flesh in the, well, duh, flesh, and the personified soul-tree was invested in staying.

The hardest part was convincing it, yes I know that I’m arguing with myself, but apparently if you treat your magic like a part of you that’s just a little bit separate, it actually becomes a little separate. What did the trick was convincing it that the newer model would be more durable and a lot more likely to actually live longer than the homo sapien concept. Dusk had come and gone by the time my body was in fighting shape. I ended up falling asleep outside next to Gungnir as Kraken poured mountains of stored mana into my body, using our internal connection to soothe the angry waves of the process. The problem is that simply changing your body does not instantly result in perfect changes.

Consider the concept of making yourself taller. It’s not just lengthening the bones so that you are actually taller, there are a million other little details that go into making that change effective. The muscles have to stretch out as well with the ligaments and tendons so that there’s some structure to that bone. The balance centers of your brain have to be recalibrated so that your body knows what to do with being taller so you don’t walk into every door frame you come to. Your eyes have to be used to the new scale of vision in order to properly judge how long your new stride is or how fast you can make it from here to there. Details, it always comes down to the details, and sorcery doesn’t get rid of the process, it just makes it within reach.

And let’s not even get started on the impacts to my magic itself. My brain has to get used to a new form of channeling power unconsciously. Human skin, for all its flaws, is incredibly adept at taking in and pushing out power. I could use it as easily as a frog spits out his tongue to nab a fly. Now, I have to actually focus on channeling through the million tiny scales on my body and perfectly avoid the minotaur skin that wants to shed the mana instead. Not that it matters where I physically conjure or control my magic from, it’s where my mind perceives that I control my magic from.

Kraken gave my unconscious mind the rundown as I was sleeping, the entire time of which he was still easing the indignant factors of widespread changes. I spent my unconscious time remaking and remodeling my mind castle and my own vision of myself. I had to, I needed my brain, my self-visualization to be on board with this. It’s the extreme case of that rare brand of psychosis where people believe that the leg on their body isn’t their leg, and they do everything they can to cut it off and we stick them in the psych ward. But instead of a leg, it’s my entire body. My mind had to be brought to heel, perfectly joined to the idea that thanks to my sorcery, my flesh is completely under my control regardless of what it looks or feels like. Malleable, malleable by self and self alone.

The final piece fell into place when I appeared in my mind in front of my soul-tree and branded its trunk with a vision of myself, a complex series of runes encapsulating the idea that ‘I can change’ within the greater realization that ‘I am me’ and that will not change. ‘Power’, ‘will’, ‘strength’ were the three outer runes undergirding the runic envisionings of myself that I carved into my very soul, gently forcing the being of myself to my own will.

The soul-tree closed its eyes, its face smiling even though there was no mouth. I watched as the ‘earth’ that was its base turned translucent. Underneath it, its roots curled around two forms, the first which was my original body complete with a hundred percent homo sapien DNA and the other, my new form. As the ‘earth’ turned opaque again, I did manage to make out that there were two other such spaces in its roots, both blank. [Two more forms huh?] I mused. A light shaking of my soul-tree’s head denoted affirmation. [But I can still alter the two there without taking up the other spaces, right?] A single nod. [Good.]

The desert’s morning light smacked me back to consciousness as Kraken desperate yells crashed against our link. [YOU’RE DRAINING THE ENTIRE CASTLE!] The cognizant understanding of what he said broke me out of the daze as my flesh sorcery instantly kicked in, making me feel like I was on the tail end of guzzling ten shots of espresso.

“What?!” I screamed, jumping to my feet, letting go of Gungnir in the process.

[There, oh my Order, what the Seven Realms of Infernation was that?] Kraken freaked. [You just set us back months! Tuck your aura in before some damn dragon pops outta the sky or a demon rips open Hell just for you!]

My bewildered expression didn’t help. Reaching through our link, Kraken manipulated my personal aura until it was just skin deep. Working for another ten minutes, I carefully watched him work, reeling in the sheer amount of mana that I’d accumulated so that it didn’t leak out. [There, stupid, ignorant human. Do you not know how dragons work yet? Crystallized mana gives off an incredible amount of power and you’ve got months worth of a desert’s accumulated heat and solar energy as converted mana inside of you!]

As my familiar raged at my apparent inborn stupidity, I did manage to pick out the relevant parts. Dragons nest near ley lines to help them maintain their stupid amounts of power. The kind of power I have is like a beacon unless I tamp it down via aura control. Having a bit of dragon in me means that I’ll generate more power than usual but it’ll have a different flavor than it used to. And the main reason that my body soaked up all the power was to set the changes within my body as pretty much permanent, the only thing that could alter it at this point would be me, and even then I’d require another couple months to accumulate the required power.

My metaphorical ears were ringing after that lecture, so I did what any eyes-glazed-over person would do. Ignore the too tightly wound familiar and get some light practice in. For the next two days, I made my own obstacle course out of conjured stone in the nearby Colorado River and ran complete circuits that included lifting humongous rock, leaping fifty feet, climbing in tandem with my earth and water sorcery. Turns out, if you can shape the rock to have handholds or conjure ice to the side of a smooth column, you can climb anything. The endurance test was mentally exhausting because I just got bored before my body tired even after five hours of running from ravenous sand lizards.

The magic part turned out to be even easier than I thought it would be as dragon scales were several times more mana absorbent than human skin, and the minotaur part was negligible in interfering with my practice. I had no problems conjuring water, stone, metal, or ice. What turned out to be frustrating to do was lightly wounding myself to test my flesh sorcery. Turns out the dragon scale parts are incredibly hard to cut open, so I settled for the bottoms of my feet which were mostly scale free. Gungnir, in knife form, did easily penetrate the skin but the flesh snapped back like a rubber band. “Fuck,” I grumbled.

Since testing on myself wasn’t a very fruitful idea, I captured an outlying sand lizard about two miles away from Sunstone Castle and knocked it out. Making sure to deaden the nerves so it wouldn’t feel a thing, I began making incisions and then repairing them, making sure that my flesh sorcery wasn’t all out of order. Healing cuts, check. Regenerating lost organs, check. Fixing broken bones and regenerating missing ones, check. For the hell of it, I cut all of its limbs off and then let it almost bleed out so I could see if fixing it was within my abilities still. I know that technically this is cruel, but the nerve block made it humane.

Putting the lizard back together, I made my way back to Sunstone Castle and got started on my new project, creating another couple sets of solar panels and making the gathering ritual larger into order to cover more ground so as to bring in more power. The next month was spent adding another two outer circles of conjured gold and silver to the ritual, keeping it properly aligned and adding the new solar panels so that I wouldn’t run into a situation again where stores of power would be in question. I couldn’t believe that I actually did run into a situation where I blew through months of accumulated power, and it was all related to a personal change. With this in mind, I had Kraken also start the process of doubling the layers of buried conjured batteries and heightening and thickening the castle walls so that they would exponentially cover more ground, deepening the available mana reserves.

[Or you could just tap into a freaking ley line. Sheesh,] Kraken complained. [All of this hoopla and you don’t even think to just build a damn castle OVER a leyline, you gotta do it the hard way!]

[There are no freaking ley lines out here!] I snapped. [They’re all too damn far away!]

[There’s one under the river, dumbass! If you can convert heat and light from the desert into raw mana, you can divert some power from the ley line under the river and then convert it to pure mana for the castle. You don’t even need much, just divert a bit and you’ll have a constant feed of more mana than you’ll ever need.]

If only my bastard of a familiar had said that at the outset of this journey. Muttering dark and dangerous things under my breath, I traipsed over to the river and dove in making my way to the bottom. Son of a fucking goat lover! Kraken was right. It wasn’t a particularly deep or powerful one, but there was a small ley line that swiftly flowed under the river. The next two hours were spent conjuring a pipeline of braided gold and silver encased in concrete all the way from my castle to the bottom of the river bed. What took the longest was inscribing the proper runes to make a auto-detect power governor so that it would cut off if the flow of power lessened or if the castle was full up on mana. I can’t go completely draining a ley line if I don’t have to.

“I wonder what Andy’s up to?” I questioned later as night fell and the heat of the day broke. Sitting in my stone chair overlooking the desert, I thought about my brother and my keening nugget of jealousy in regards to the fact that he was at freaking magic college right now. What I would have given to go to a grown-up version of Hogwarts, but instead I gotta worry about the fucking undead on my planet. Slapping away the voice of Peter Parker’s uncle in my head, the one warning me that ‘with great power comes great responsibility’, I grumbled some more as my thoughts turned towards Acantha. I gave her a task but I didn’t really give her a timeline. To me, that meant I’d at least go check on her after a month, of which there was least a week and a half left, but now boredom was my main enemy.

I thought about popping over to New Richmond and checking on them to see how they’re doing but that would mean leaving Gungnir as Kraken needs the tool as a focus to continue making the golem army. My rifle and Svalinn are more than enough for pretty much any normal enemy but every book had a clear cut lesson inside of it: if weird shit is going down, do not be caught without your best fucking weapon. Harry Potter without a wand, screwed. Harry Dresden without magic, fucked. The badass from the Patriot without a gun, his children die. The list goes on, and if that means I have to be bored until my plans are ready, then I’m just going to have to be bored.

Two weeks later.

My golem army is complete! Over a thousand sunstone golems, complete with elemental sergeants, and armed with warhammers and battleaxes stood proudly in the sun. Standing at the top of the north wall, I preened as I surveyed the acres of gleaming stone soldiers. It was almost enough to make me cackle like a mad scientist in the throes of discovery. [We can leave now!] Kraken celebrated. [I’m so done being your 3-D printer! They can charge up on their own, and I’ve installed a dummy processor so that if you need to, you can simply reach out and it’ll conjure replacements for your army, weapons included. I wanna see what Phoenix looks like!]

Agreeing with my familiar who’d been driving me up the wall with his complaining, I donned SAW and Svalinn, not even checking to see if I had all of my batteries charged as I’d check about a hundred million times in the past few weeks. My rifle was ready to go, I’d practiced flying and hoverboarding, my magic was rockin’ and rollin’ and I had been so bored that I practiced staff forms that Reeanth tried to teach me a while back. Sheathing knife-form Gungnir to my waist, I took one last look around and hopped on my board heading south-east.

Getting up to speed in the desert flats, I used a hill as an angled takeoff point for me to transition to flying, SAW’s wings effortlessly unfurling and catching the hot desert updrafts. Hitting two hundred miles an hour let me get to what was left of Phoenix in under an hour. I flew over the city very high back and forth a couple times just to get the lay of the land. No wonder Acantha hadn’t returned. I counted at least three portals spewing all kinds of things out, two of which had large groups of humans and maybe humans confronting the stream of invaders. The third portal was vomiting shrieking creatures that tried to flank the other two groups until an explosion of green and purple flame annihilated the shriekers.

[There’s your vassal,] Kraken commented. [She’s breathing hard and her aura’s dim. Probably can’t keep that up much longer.]

[So what you’re saying is,] I laughed as I hovered over the battlefield. [Is that it’s time to test this shit?]

Acantha’s face was priceless, her shocked look as her entire dragonscale outfit was covered in blood and gore. The fire in her hands that roared in sheer surprise died back down to a flicker as she recognized me. “What are you doing here?” she exclaimed, seeming to not believe her own eyes.

“I thought you’d be done by now!” I yelled back, hosing her off with conjured water. “Damn, you smell like shit. The fuck happened?”

Turning back to the battle raging around us, Acantha clapped her hands together and started chanting. A wickedly bright green flame sparked to life in her palms which she blew outwards. Like a dragon’s breath, the fire leaped out, consuming all of the horrors in its path. Even as the shrieking things died, they and the ground kept burning.

[Wytchfire,] Kraken clarified. [Mixed with dragonfire if I’m not mistaken.]

“Someone or something keeps opening up portals to different realms and we can’t keep up!” Acantha explained as color drained out of her face. “The people here aren’t soldiers. They wouldn’t have lasted this long without the Luneks.”

Before I could ask what in the world ‘Luneks’ were, a wave of silver furred things crashed into the mobs of shriekers. The shriekers looked like a radioactive giant praying mantis had a baby with a lionfish’s bastard with a porcupine. The Luneks though appeared to be the hulked out version of werecreatures, giant wolves and bears and cats that raced around on their back legs like humans while wielding two handed swords of silver light that cut through anything in their way.

The Luneks raced around myself and Acantha the way a river flows around rock in the middle of the current. Their movements had a sort of incomparable grace that was hypnotizing in nature. Figuring that I might as well make the high ground since there wasn’t any to take, I used earth sorcery to raise Acantha and myself thirty feet into the air.

“Don’t! No! We’re sitting ducks now!” she screamed as she started to dive off the column. Snatching her by the back of the armor, I hauled her out of the path of vomited spines that trailed sickly green acid. Svalinn roared from his place on my arms, generating a forcefield around us, blocking the incoming projectiles. Drawing Gungnir who shifted from a knife to a crystal adorned mace, I pointed it at portal number one. Kraken, obliging my wish, unleashed a barrage of ten overcharged crystal grenades that blew that part of the horde to bits. Before I pulled back, he launched another ten through the portal just to give a bit of love back. Repeating this two more times gave the fighters a breather as the Luneks cleaned up the rest of the stragglers as Acantha provided fire from above.

I lowered the column as I quietly hummed to myself. “Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone, it’s not warm when she’s away . . .” Facing Acantha who looked at me with a mix of fear and respect, I stamped staff-form Gungnir into the ground. “What’s next? Either introduce me to your friends or let me flatten the city, your call.”

At my last phrase, a concerted roar rang out from the Luneks as a giant one jumped and landed ten feet away, smashing his battleaxe into the earth. “Who dares to steal the honor this day from Severak the Hungry?” The massive bear of a man, bearman? I mean the Lunek, glared at me with heated red eyes as two barely smaller catlike Luneks joined his side. As I slowly turned and looked the predator in the eye, Severak bent down to my height and roared. I bared my teeth as Gungnir glowed white hot.

“Tell your friends,” I said to Acantha, gritting my teeth. “To back off. This city should have been cleaned up already. Didn’t I tell you to team up with Remy and Fernando? The three of you had more than enough power to fix this.”

“That was before someone started opening portals to let the Hive through!” she clarified, her hands on her hips. “That’s what these things are, the Hive. The spitters and devourers swarm while the sackers suicide acid bomb any kind of magic user. And then we have the insectified wyrms that just wait for us to bunch up and they pop out of the ground like a worm from hell. Magic just slides right off of them so we had to make a deal with the Luneks.”

“I’m TALKING to you!” Severak roared again, this time his roar generating actual physical force that would have knocked us both down if not for Svalinn.

“Do that one more time fuzzy and I’ll make a coat outta you,” I threatened, whipping around. Raising my left hand, I cracked all of the earth within a hundred yards sending them sprawling. “I don’t take orders from anyone. I’m here for my vassal.”

“No honor!” One of Severak’s companions, the cat person, spat. “Never any honor from the tleusant.”

Acantha’s eyes went wide. I looked to her for clarification and she shook her head. “It’s an insult, it translates to ‘cursed’, but it also means cowards. They view magic as weakness made real because magic users can’t fight ‘honorably’, as in using a weapon.”

I laughed out loud and let out a deep breath. “I’m not here for honor, cat. Honor is for the dead. It serves no purpose for the living. Just tell me where the evil fuckers are that need killing.”

All of the Luneks spat at the ground. “Life without honor is no life at all, tleusant.” Snapping his giant fingers, Severak jutted his chin as his subordinates, growling something I couldn’t make out at them. Our standoff continued for a few minutes as his two cat lieutenants ran off and came back with someone in two. Tossing the mess at my feet, Severak laughed. “To each their own, right, tleusant? Take your coward, he’ll show you the infestation.”

“Fernando!” Acantha gasped, leaping down helping him to his feet.

“And this one too!” Another filthy human hit the ground in front of me.

“Remy!”

My blood started to boil. “What, did you do to them?” I snarled, my teeth almost cracking from the force of me gritting them so hard.

“Their crimes are many, tleusant. First, they fight with cowardice itself, and second,” Severak paused, a growl from deep within his throat turned into an angry yowl. “This filth tried to seduce one of our number! As if she were a slave fit for breeding!”

[Do I have to wipe them all out?] I asked Kraken. [What the fuck am I dealing with here?]

[Luneks are a race that holds honor as their avenue to their afterlife. Great battles are their religion, fighting with tooth, nail, and claw is the only way they know. Magic fits in with neither tooth, nail, or claw. The only way to win their respect is by an honorable duel.]

[Yeah, no. I don’t have time for that, and neither does this fucking city.]

Resigning myself to a course of action, I called on the earth and sank every Lunek within sight up to their neck and solidified the stone. “Tried and true,” I said to myself as I crouched in front of Severak. “I’ll be real blunt here. I can kill you. I can easily kill you and your entire tribe. But I don’t want to. Is that something you can understand? Either nod or shake your head no because if you insult me one more time I will simply end you.”

Severak barely gave a nod. “Good, thank you. Now, you are going to give me your most trustworthy soldier, packmate or whatever, and that person is going to lead me around the city to whatever needs blowing up. From there, I will personally take care of this fucking mess of a city and give you back your soldier. Again, nod for yes or shake for no.”

Another quick nod. “Good. Thank you. One last question, did you hurt those two over there? The ones you threw at my feet?” I asked, my voice as icy as the Grim Reaper’s scythe. Severak’s eyes widened but he didn’t move other than that. “Did . . . you . . . hurt . . . them?” I asked slowly, making sure to elongate the syllables.

“They were cowards!” he roared, straining at the stone encasing him. “They retreated from honorable combat! Pain and humiliation to those that run from battle!”

“It’s called strategy, you retarded ass!” Acantha screamed from where she knelt, doing her best to clean up Fernando’s and Remy’s faces. “Not every charge has to end in death! They’re human! They don’t have natural fur armor like you!”