Ultimate Adhesive: (Neophyte Difficulty)

Ingredients: troll Ichor, Hymn of the god of homesteading, Lunt bone in ¼ squidge cubes, cheese cloth, wax, airtight containter.

Stir the lunt bone and troll ichor together while reciting the hymn, when the mixture begins to glow, quickly pour through the cheesecloth into the airtight container lined with soft wax, then seal.

WARNING: Do not get any mixture on your skin, wearing long blacksmith’s gloves is advised.

Obviously magical, but more of a commodity than a spell, this particular recipe was quite popular among the wildlands of Carpica, whose inhabitants would use it to fuse together wood and stone to create especially strong buildings and quickly repair vital equipment, decreasing the need for the Carpican settlers to return to civilization.

Applying the substance between any two objects will cause them to grow together, making the distinction of where one begins and the other ends meaningless. Again, do not let this touch your skin.

Perry re-read the recipe a couple times.

Lunt bone was an energizer. It just activated the ichor and made it think it was still alive.

The hymn provided direction, and the troll ichor provided the ‘fusing’ effect they were talking about.

It doesn’t mention what troll ichor is, though.

Perry went through a book on essences until he found what he was looking for.

A diagram showed nodes where troll ichor could be extracted all along their spinal column and most of the major branching nerves, ready to deploy into their body at a moment’s notice.

Makes sense that removing it would kill them.

The thing that interests me is that they found a way to accomplish something similar to the Ultimate Adhesive spell…but for technology, fusing their nervous systems to tinker-tech…and actually having it work.

The hymn to the god of homesteading was the key that was swapped out. Lunt bone was unnecessary while the troll was alive, so the key difference that changed the way the spell worked was…the symbol of Gna’kis.

Perry had some suspicions about what this Gna’kis demon was. He wasn’t in any of Perry’s books of demonology, so whoever had brokered the deal knew more about demons than Perry did. A lot more.

And someone did broker the deal.

Perry had nothing but respect for Karth’s The Great’s intelligence, but the troll leader couldn’t have done the extensive research it would take to accomplish contacting an unheard-of demon and subcontracting it to provide a powerful extention to troll’s natural abilities seemingly designed specifically to counter tinkers…if he was in a permanent roid rage.

Cui Bono?

Certainly not Perry and company. Perry had no idea who benefitted from intelligent trolls capable of stealing human weapons and using them for themselves.

The true enemy hadn’t even shown themselves yet.

His hand clenched into a fist as his guts burned with frustration and anxiety. Solaris had told him he wanted the city to be standing when they go there, and he’d already sacrificed a quarter of it to slow down an invading force he was poorly equipped to handle.

“Hey,” Natalie said, her hand gliding overtop of his, seemingly drawing a bit of the tension out of him through skin contact. Who knew? Maybe she was. Nat was pretty cagey about what exactly the Elysian attendant had taught her.

“We’re gonna figure something out.” She whispered, pressing her cheek against his.

“Yeah,” Perry leaned back in his chair, allowing Nat to step around and settle in his lap. “I’ve already figured out a bunch of stuff, but all that tells me is that there’s more out there I don’t know, and that big question mark is trying to kill us.”

“Us, specifically?” She asked.

“Maybe?” Perry said with a shrug. “Maybe it’s just trying to kill humans in general. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was gramma trying to give me experience with leadership and warfare with a disposable population.”

“And what makes you think it isn’t her?” Nat asked.

“It’s a weird combination of elegant and forward thinking.” Perry said with a shrug. “It’s difficult to explain, but gramma doesn’t think much of technology, so giving trolls the ability to interface with it wouldn’t really cross her mind as particularly powerful. And if it were gramma, she’d probably have some kind of artifact at their base camp that empowers them.”

“Something she could take away from them when their job was over.” Nat said.

“Exactly.” Perry said, snapping his fingers. “She wouldn’t just give them knowledge that they could use to better themselves. These trolls are orders of magnitude more dangerous than the old ones of Manita, and they spread the knowledge of Gna’kis among themselves like wildfire. You’d have to kill every single one of them to stamp out the information. And that’s really hard. Because they’re trolls.”

“Smart trolls,” Nat said.

“Indeed.”

“So what are we gonna do about it?” Nat asked.

“How’s upgrading Boomer to resist magic going?” Perry asked.

“I’ve got this,” Nat said, leaning forward and connecting to her computer’s screen with a few quick keystrokes. It was a design that looked a bit like a soda can filled with a wire Brillo pad.

“This should act as a flush valve that catches magical influence for about a sixteenth of a second before it affects Boomer. Plenty of time for him to eject it and come up with a counter.”

Nat glanced up at him. “I’m just not…one hundred percent sure it’ll work. I’d like to test it against something that won’t kill me if we fail.”

Hmm.

“Here’s what I’ve got,” Perry said, reaching around her and tabbing back to his most recent designs.

“That’s…surprisingly low-tech. And brutal.” Nat said, staring at Perry’s designs to enhance his troop’s ability to deal with trolls.

“Low tech means they can’t hijack it. Plus, since it’s simple, the production line has already spit out a couple hundred.”” Perry said with a shrug. “It’s meant as a stop-gap to allow my people to deal with the troll more effectively while I figure out a more permanent solution to the troll problem.”

Nat peered up at him and raised a brow.

“Permanent, or devastating?” She asked.

“Tomato, tomahto.” Perry shrugged, eyeballing the giant springloaded fishhook.

The whale-sized pike of lake Michigan will eat well tomorrow.

Perry briefly considered if the trolls would exist in endless suffering, constantly being melted by acid, only to regenerate over and over again, until they finally ran out of life force and died…

Then he decided he didn’t care.

They attacked him.

They ate his wards.

***The next morning***

“Good morning captains, We don’t really have a lot of time, so I’ll cut to the chase,” Perry said, motioning to the table in front of them.

“Yesterday sucked pretty hard, from what I saw it took no less than a dozen men to delay a single troll, and as far as I could tell, none of you actually killed one.”

The captains shuffled nervously as Perry scanned them critically.

“That’s my responsibility. I should’ve armed you with the correct tools to fight these bastards. To that effect, I’ve made you some upgrades for your troll-killing toolkit.”

Perry motioned to the items laid out on the table.

He pointed to what looked like football shoulder pads with large thrusters jutting out of the sides.

“These will enhance your lift by an order of magnitude, allowing you to lift several tons of cargo. It is designed to be bolted into your armor’s chassis. It’s meant to be used with this:

Perry motioned to a cannon-shaped thing.

“This will launch out a steel cable netting covered in barbed hooks,” Perry said, pulling out one of the cables from under the desk and showing it to his audience. Each of the hooks was about a foot long, bigger than a standard meat hook, shiny, razor sharp, and covered in barbs.

“Snag a troll with it, the extra lift from your new thruster will allow you to pull him up in the air and carry him over to Lake Michigan.

“Once you’re far enough away from the shore, you hit this button,” Perry said, hitting the ‘release’ button on the cable cannon.

The barbs retracted into the hooks and the hooks themselves flattened out.

“And Lake Michigan will take care of the rest.”

An enthusiastic murmur spread through the assembled soldiers.

“Next, we’ve got these.” Perry said, motioning to the other weapons he’d designed and put into production over the long night.

“Some of the trolls are going to have long-range attacks, and they’re smart enough to use cover, so in order to make our flying advantage really matter, we’re going to have to make some cover of our own.

This,” Perry said, patting the next weapon, “Will create a thick, caustic cloud nearly a block in diameter that will viciously burn any living thing inside that cloud. It won’t kill ‘em, but it’ll distract ‘em while you line up the killshot.”

He moved over to the helmet beside it.

“The sensors in this new helmet will allow you to see through that cloud and fish out burning trolls who won’t be able to see you back until they’re already dangling from your hooks.”

“You’re gonna be in teams of two. One with the smoke bombs, one with the net. Look for soft targets standing with their thumb up their ass. Hit em with the gas, then drag them over to Lake Michigan and feed them to the home team. Rinse and repeat.”

“We are not here to engage in a fight, we are exterminators. If one of the trolls has ranged capabilities or they hunker down inside a parking garage or something, report their location to control and move on. I’m working on solutions for the more obstinate ones. All you guys have to do is punish them every time they poke their heads out into daylight.

Now,” Perry said, rubbing his hands together. “Who wants to test out the prototypes?”

Green Shamrock stepped up and volunteered to be the first adopters.

Brave decision. Dumb, but brave. First adopters usually got the worst of it.

It wasn’t half an hour later that Perry was sipping his morning coffee on top of an abandoned building, setting up his experiment on Gna’kis when he spotted a squirming troll being flown over to Lake Michigan by two of Green Shamrock’s team members.

And…

Perry followed the tiny dot with his gaze, until it dropped into the lake, a massive swell of water indicating the giant had caught the attention of one of the football-field sized carnivores.

“Ah…I love feeding my enemies to wildlife in the morning.”

This was a major step forward.

Reducing the number of men needed to deal with a single troll from an entire squad to just two men, and even allowing them to dispose of it…

That put Karth on a clock.

He would have to escape the city before his army became diminished enough that Perry could pin him down and ask some very pointed questions.

I wonder how he’ll react to that? Immediate withdrawal or a suicide mission?

Suicide mission seemed more in character for trolls as they generally seemed to have a poor sense of self-preservation, having relied on their admittedly impressive regeneration for what Perry could assume was millions of years of evolution.

…Did life on Manita evolve? Question for another time, I guess.

Perry focused his attention on the summoning circle, with demonic script surrounded by bone and dirt, with Heather’s smartphone in the center.

Heather’s gonna kick my ass, Perry thought, taking another sip of coffee to prepare himself before he summoned Gna’kis.

Perry lit the straw and fat candles before he deployed the flake of realm-piercing crystal and unzipped reality.

A tiny figure fell through the breach in reality, landing on the ground with a wet plop.

It was a fetus.

Huh.

The tiny creature stirred, and Perry could make out more detail as it moved.

The legs were fused together at the hips, only one arm seemed to work, while the other arm was composed of a twitchy steel prosthetic. Half of the demon’s head was crawling with microchips and the eye on that side had been replaced by an oversized camera lens. One of those photography student’s massively expensive camera lenses with a hundred times zoom.

It squirmed over to the cell phone, dragging a trail of slime along behind it as it did.

“Gna’kis, I presume.” Perry said, hands behind his back.

The fetus turned its head toward him, the camera eye focusing and unfocusing on his face.

“Paradox. I’ve heard of you, boy.”

“Don’t call me ‘boy’,” Perry said, squatting down beside the tiny demon. “When you’ve only just been born yourself.”

“I’ve existed for millenia-“

“Doubt it. You began forming out of ether when Manita connected to earth and you weren’t born until technology-related sin really took off with the advent of the internet in the late nineties. Am I right?”

The baby demon glared at him for a moment.

“What do you want?”

“Who brokered the deal between you and the trolls?” Perry asked.

“I did.”

“Bullshit. You’ve got the power to enter our world of your own volition and subdue a raging troll long enough to carve your symbol onto his forehead?”

“…Yes.”

“Okay, obviously you’re under some kind of geas not to spill the beans on your boss.”

“I have no superiors! I am Gna’kis, lord of sinful technology!” The baby demon mewled.

“I’m gonna feed you to Ex’bergazzat.” Perry said, pointing at another, larger summoning circle. “He’ll consume your portfolio with gusto while enjoying the most recent human beats.”

“…I can give you powers.” The baby demon said, immediately changing it’s tune. “I can turn public opinion in your favor. I can smear anyone who dares disparage you online! I can give you access to your girlfriend’s phone!”

“Pass.” Perry said, waving the offers away. Maybe one day he’d desperate enough to take him up on the ‘public opinion’ offer, but today was not that day.

“What I want to know. Is who. Brokered. The Deal?” Perry asked, enunciating each word clearly.

“I did.” The baby demon answered with mechanical precision before it began sobbing.

“Okay,” Perry said, leaning down and picking up the slimy turd. “I’m going to point you in several different directions. And each time I point you in a direction, you’re going to say ‘that’s where they are.”

“I brokered the deal.”

“I know you did,” Perry said placatingly. “This is completely unrelated, understood?”

“I brokered the deal.”

“Mmhmm,” Perry hummed, pointing Gna’kis north. “Now say it or I’ll feed you to Ex’bergazzat.”

“That’s where they are.”

Perry pointed Gna’kis east and repeated the process, then south.

When he turned the baby demon to the west, the creature began babbling admissions of guilt nonstop, taking credit for arming the trolls without stopping to pause for breath.

So they’re to the west, Perry thought to himself, eyes narrowed, tossing the sobbing fetus back in his circle. At least it’s not Gramma.

And they’re really good at writing binding demon legalese.

Try as he might with twenty questions, the compulsion on Gna’kis was strong and comprehensive, preventing Perry from prying anything more out of the tiny demon. All he was able to learn was that the mastermind behind the troll attack was male, not human or troll, existed on Earth, and he was to the west.

Is waterboarding a baby demon an acceptable thing to do? Perry thought, glancing at the shivering fetus curled up in the center of the circle.