by Matthew Peed
“Why are you being so difficult?” he growled.
“Because I don’t feel like giving you anything,” I answered honestly.
“You little brat!” he shouted, stepping forward.
I lifted my arm, lightning arcing across my skin and between Helios. I made sure that the mana rolled off it so that even non-mages could feel it. A small crowd had formed around us, as such things attract attention, but they immediately backed away when I created my lightning. Gulv spun around me as he floated near my head.
“I warn you, I will not hesitate,” I said calmly.
My father was a relatively powerful Air mage, but he was a coward. He glared at me before he backed away, his guards forming a protective wall around him. I laughed but let him move away, then lowered my arm, letting the spell die.
I turned to one of my guards and ordered, “Please tell the nobles left for today that I will reschedule our meetings. I’m in a foul mood.” I had taken a few steps away when my barrier activated. I could sense the needle-like strands of wind impact its surface. One of my guards wasn’t so lucky and had several holes through one of his arms, as well as his legs. The armor made by Regan protected his vitals, but it would still be painful. Anger rippled through me. How dare he attack me, his own bloody daughter, and my people?! Lightning flashed around me, uncontrolled and raging.
I turned back around to see my father being held back by two of his guards but with an expression of victory on his face. It quickly changed to horror, though, as he saw I was unharmed. My grip tightened around Helios as I tried to control myself.
“My lady, there are innocents around,” one of my guards said urgently.
“Don’t worry . . . I won’t hit them,” I murmured before I exploded toward my father.
Lightning rippled around me but avoided any people it came near. Father’s guards reformed their wall but were looking like they would rather be somewhere else. I pulled Helios around and impacted the chest of one of the guards. A decent dent formed in his armor, and I unleashed a full dose of lightning into him. It got so hot that I not only electrocuted him but cooked him.
I spun around and kicked the next guard, angling the kick so that he shot into the air, and sent him flying with a burst of lightning. The bystanders would be able to avoid him when he came back down. My mana surged and I sent out a burst of lightning around me that struck the rest of the guards. Six bodies fell to the ground. I wasn’t sure if they were still alive.
My father managed to avoid the burst by creating a wall of air in front of himself. He was well into tier two, so he should have been able to protect at least one of his guards. The fact that he chose not to just made him look even worse in my eyes.
“Don’t you realize the consequences of your actions?!” Father shouted, a terrified look in his eyes.
“I want to see anyone try to take my valley from me! This is MY land, MY people,” I growled in answer.
“How could you gain so much in so little time?” he whimpered.
“I didn’t try to use my friends and family like chess pieces.”
“You would never understand. The world isn’t such a nice place.”
“Maybe. You’ve certainly shown me that.” I nodded and raised a lightning-clad fist, ready to drive it through his skull.
“My lady! Please wait,” one of my guards shouted.
“What is it?” I saw it was the man my father injured. He held his arm while another guard wrapped bandages around his wounds.
“I understand your wanting to kill him, but it would be more useful to keep him alive,” he argued. “Plus, he was so weak that I barely even feel these wounds anymore,” he added, patting his leg.
I noticed him wince, but he did a remarkable job hiding it with a smile. I might not have seen it without my enhanced senses.
I looked back to my father. “Very well. I know a good place to throw you.” I smirked. It would be a waste not to make him suffer for the incident he caused today. Gripping his hand, I channeled lightning through it, making sure that it flowed back into me rather than the rest of his body. He screamed from the pain as the skin under my fingers quickly turned black.
“Stop! Please stop!” Father begged, tears running down his face.
I released his hand and turned to the guards. “Take this man to the jail. I’ll see to his future accommodations,” I ordered. I glanced at my father one more time, then walked away without a second thought. I didn’t think he would ever be using that hand again without a high-level healing.
Chapter 3
Regan
I cracked my metal knuckles as I looked around the area. It looked as though we would be stuck there for a few hours, but I wasn’t going to let it go to waste. If the necromancers wanted to play hardball, I was game. The main thing about zombies were their wave tactics. They would literally swarm their enemies until there just weren’t any left to withstand them.
Unfortunately for the necromancers, robots have the same play style. If they were going to respond to everything I threw at them, then I would just throw so much that they got overwhelmed for once. I moved to the surface under Alpha and looked around. I needed a good location to get started, and I didn’t want to disturb the husk of the dryad until Anubis was able to perform his magic on it.
A suitable spot appeared roughly a kilometer away. I needed a clearing, so I tossed one of my black hole gems into the air. The surroundings were quickly pulled up. I controlled the spell so that the ground would remain roughly how it was. When the spell was completed, I quickly created a Terra spell to smooth over the roughed-up turf.
My original goal was to do this much closer to Alara, but I wanted to force everything to ground. I had no idea what was hiding where, and using an air assault, while faster, left me exposed and at risk of passing a threat from the rear. It was a good thing I was uniquely equipped to handle an enemy like this.
Pulling materials from my subdimension, I started designing a starg . . . I mean a portal. I have got to watch those copyrights, I thought with a chuckle. Being trapped in that tower for so long had given me time to watch just about everything science-fiction related. My favorites, of course, were the three Star shows.
I designed a giant portal that would allow hundreds of my automata to pass through at once. It was connected to one of the floating islands, which was set to explode if something managed to breach my defenses there and was deemed too dangerous for the dungeon. It was an extreme precaution, but being that close to my core, I didn’t want to take any chances.
Internal teleporting inside the dungeon didn’t require any type of device, which made wherever I put the portal moot, but I didn’t want an adventurer to stumble upon an army of robots teleporting god knows where. However, teleporting outside my dungeon required a decent amount of mana to perform. Constructing a portal there would cut the mana cost by nearly half or more if it was maintained.
Thinking ahead a bit, I added a dialing system. That way, later on I could add portals in other places to allow rapid transportation. I could potentially link it to another planet, though the mana cost would be horrendous. Maybe I would design an energy storage crystal that would force adventurers to dive in my dungeons in order to use the longer-range teleportation. I still couldn’t understand how the demon world had managed to gather enough mana to create not just one portal but hundreds across the world, if the records were to be believed.
The portal mainly consisted of my mithril alloy. It cost several million points in mana but was worth it. Much like the sphere around my core on Alpha, nothing was going to be able to get through this easily. I decided to add some aesthetics around the area to make it fit in a bit better.
I went with a quartz material for the main structure around the “hardware,” the pure white material versus the black ground and forest making it stand out. I used a paneling design to give it a futuristic feel. The whole construction was one hundred meters wide with about one hundred meters in height. It was not small at
all, but I wasn’t trying to hide, after all. I created a large temple-like structure around the portal, going with a Greek feel.
A few dozen meters from the pantheon-like building, I created a pillar every twenty meters and inlayed hundreds of magic scripts for defensive spells. Everything from barrier magic to illusion magic, I didn’t hesitate to throw the magic down. This was the first line of defense straight into a deep section of my dungeon. I didn’t want something to make its way in without my knowing.
I glanced over to the dryad, wondering if I should include it in the enclosure. Anubis really needed to wake up so that he could do his ritual. I could do it myself, having studied it three times, but I was worried that it would be corrupted by my mana much like everything else I used magic on was. Izora was still getting used to her, what I liked to call, “battle robes,” while the goblins were slowly changing further into a machine-type lifeform.
I used gears with treelike branches interweaving through them for a little visual touch. I hoped that Alara would like it when I freed her. Was this like getting flowers for a girl you liked? Since dungeon cores could literally create anything they wanted, I needed to think up a good present for her. Men brought flowers to the first date, right? I mentally laughed at the thought. Rather than a date, it was more like a fight to the death.
I was finishing up the structure when I felt Anubis awaken. The unholy-mana-absorption device finally finished, and he groaned as he stood up from the operating-table-like bed he was on. Vetur clapped him on the shoulder and helped him up. Those two were really like brothers.
I could see the mechanisms inside his body warming up as he activated and moved next to him, waiting for everything to start up. It was strangely interesting, as none of my creations needed sleep. I never had to wait for them to wake up. Finally, it looked like the process was done as he released a pitch-black breath of smoke from his nostrils.
“Anubis, how are you feeling?” I asked, truly concerned about the effects absorbing so much unholy mana might have had on his psyche. Anubis, as well as most of the creations from my dungeon, was like a child to me. I would hate for something to happen to him due to my oversight.
“I never want to go through that again,” he moaned in answer. He turned to Vetur. “Thank you, brother. If not for you, I would be a melted puddle of metal outside.”
“I will not let you die in battle without me, my friend.”
Vetur smiled, and they clasped hands, grinning. I wanted to shake my head. I just knew these two were going to die in a battle surrounded by enemies. Likely laughing the entire time.
“Are there any lasting effects?” I asked, turning the conversation back to the topic at hand.
Anubis checked his body over, then closed his eyes as he did an internal check. “None at this time. I feel Father’s help saved my mind from being corrupted.”
“That’s good. I won’t allow this to happen again. Even with the loss of Gamma, we can still proceed via air and will be doing so, but I’m launching some additional forces. If they are going to use wave tactics on us, we’ll do the same.”
“Yes, Father,” Anubis said and looked off into the distance. “The dryad’s soul dwindles. I am amazed she held on even after igniting her pool, but it won’t last for much longer.” Anubis tried to stand, and I sensed several gears inside his body start to whine in protest.
“How long do you think she has?” I asked quickly.
“Minutes . . .” Anubis answered.
“Then I’ll have to work fast.” I grinned.
I pushed him back on the table, then used my magic to create a diagram of his internal workings. I saved all my creations’ diagrams on a type of mental drive so that I could repair them if the worst should happen. While the siphon device had indeed cleansed his body of the tremendous amount of unholy mana, the damage was still done. Rusted gears, twisted circuitry, and other corrupted hardware were the significant result.
Because it was unholy mana, his body couldn’t just “heal” like my automata normally did. I held my arms out over him and changed its structure. After a few seconds a mini assembly line was created over Anubis, with hundreds of arms with dozens of types of tools.
Above the construct, I formed the new parts out of mana. I decided to go ahead and replace the parts with a new version of Anubis’s metal while I was at it. Mithril, the metal of the Celestials, as the mortals called it, could be alloyed to just about everything. I had the goblins and labs working to find as many different combinations as possible.
One of the permutations they’d found was with Anubis’s metal. The alloy created was much more durable and allowed for a higher level of mana absorption. Its mana cost was lower than the defensive version but still decent enough to warrant a double check before using it to create things. So far, I mainly used it for the Anubis swords I’d sent to Valamar and the one I’d given to Vetur earlier.
My assembly line went to work pulling out the damaged gears. Specially designed gear arms allowed for his internal structure to continue to function without pause while the new gear was inserted. Two thousand four hundred fifty-nine gears were corrupted along with various numbers of circuits and mechanisms that needed to be replaced.
The assembly went into overdrive as corrupted parts were flung from Anubis’s body and the new parts were inserted without pause. I worked quickly, not wanting to take too long and risk the dryad. At one point a flung gear nearly smacked Vetur in the head, but he managed to dodge it.
Fifty seconds give or take went by while I replaced Anubis’s chest plate. All the corrupted parts were absorbed, and I backed away from the table to allow him to stand. This wasn’t the first time I’d tried to raise the power level of one of my creations by replacing the parts. The other times, though, had never managed to yield much of a gain.
Anubis channeled his mana through his body, then stood up. I could sense his body truly incorporating the new parts. Maybe that’s where I went wrong. The automata I tried with never had a true consciousness. Anubis’s power began spiking to a new peak. It stopped just before he hit what would be considered tier three.
“You’re repaired. Quickly, go help the dryad,” I said, grabbing his shoulder.
“Yes, Father!” Anubis exclaimed.
I teleported him outside next to the still-smoldering stump of the dryad’s tree. I would have watched him, but I had my own job to work on, so I moved back to the portal structure and generated a ball of mana between my hands, so powerful that it turned a dark orange color as it quickly moved toward nonvisible levels.
I was creating a portal. Different from a Teleport spell, it would be like a doorway permanently set in this spot. This also meant very high initial mana cost, but once it was created, there was much less upkeep. With my mana generation capabilities, I could easily maintain it for the duration of this campaign or even well into the future if I chose to do so.
The ball of mana grew denser as I poured more mana into it. It was slowly losing its color becoming completely clear. I knew if I dropped it or even used it as an actual weapon, I could easily level a city and the surroundings with ease. Finally, after nearly three hundred million mana, the ball reached maximum density. I felt it was on the boundary of changing into another form, but I didn’t have the leisure nor the safety for continuing to condense it.
I wove a shell of Spell script that would build the pathway to the portal in the dungeon. It had to include every variable so that the bridge would exist separate from this reality but would allow people from it to still move through it. If I wrote the script wrong, people could end up shredded to pieces during the traverse. Luckily, I had plenty of practice with my Teleport spells. This one mainly required the borders of the bridge to be properly defined.
Three hours later the script for the primer spell was done. It was some of the most complicated spellwork I had done to date. Even my creations’ minds were less complex than this spell. I walked up to the opening, where an invisible wall pressed against
me. I pressed the ball against it, and the ball sank into nothingness.
I quickly teleported a kilometer to be safe. Gears of all shapes and sizes made from magic formed inside the giant circle that made up the portal. I wasn’t sure why my magic was represented by gears rather than circuitry, but I liked the aesthetic and didn’t try too hard to change it.
The gears started to turn as arcs of mana shot off the portal’s surface. The gears fused into bigger gears as I felt the bridge form. Finally, when there was only a single gear that took up the entire surface of the portal, it acted as if it were pulled back into a single point.
A whirling pool of white light formed after that. I looked at it in appreciation. Back on Earth science fiction and then regular science had tried to create a wormhole. I’d opened up a door to all kinds of possibilities. A doorway to the future if you will. I nodded and walked forward.
When I reached the portal, I stuck my arm into it and could see it in my main dungeon. That was an interesting feeling for me. Nodding to myself, I stepped through. A feeling of hot, then cold and I was at the island created for it. I looked at my arm and saw some ice covering it. Frowning, I reached over to touch the gate.
I added a new sequence that would adjust the surface of the portal so that people didn’t suffer from the effects of thermal dynamics on the fluids that weren’t part of themselves. Technically, their particles were moving faster than the speed of light, then instantly slowing down to re-form their bodies. It wasn’t surprising that the moisture on the surface of their skin would also superheat, then supercool as they crossed through.
“Ignea,” I called through the dungeon.
She appeared a moment later. She was bigger, as she mainly spent her time cultivating mana in the dungeon. Right now, she tended to her treant forest on the sixth floor. They were getting rather large lately, and I was planning on moving them to one of the floating islands. The adventurers left them alone, but only because there were a lot of them now.
