Omnimage

by Simon Archer

  Oh, my god, this was how Sorcerer King Grune became a god, wasn’t it? Whatever school of magic he had, I had, too. Damn, if he’d prepped his strategy right, stayed on a small scale and under everyone’s radar until he was in the big leagues, nothing would have stopped him. Anyone they would have sent to fight him would have simply added to his strength. The stronger the opponent, the better the gains of the drains.

  Alright, possible theories aside, I was making discoveries about magic one small bit at a time. In order to get the most out of my spells, I was going to have to commit them to muscle memory, rather than conscious thought. That probably was only going to come with time.

  Also, I had to be careful about that magic-leech ability I didn’t know I had. Why didn’t that show up in the status screen? Goddamn it, that thing’s usefulness was becoming spotty, at best.

  Enough thinking to myself, it was time to end this stage of the fight. With an impact karate chop to both of their noggins, both the ankle biters had bitten their last ankle today. The floor of the stage was suddenly filled with unconscious bodies, crowding up the walking space like natural hazards. The sumo goblins sprawled out onto the most floor, so I found it imperative to roll them out the opening that the third one had made when exiting.

  Just after I’d gotten the first one out, yet another goblin jumped me, scrambling onto my back like a manic little toddler hyped up on too much sugar. The fucker had gone and stabbed me in the neck with a broken bottle, and suddenly the floating red numbers were flowing out as much as my blood.

  Oh, he banned magic but allowed glass shivs? I didn’t realize we were in prison. Goblins were truly barbaric.

  Feeling a bit angry, I chose to forego the pleasantries of allowing these goblins to live, seeing as they didn’t show the same courtesy to me. With a claw grip, I latched myself onto the bastard’s shoulder, sending an impact from my palm directly into his internal organs. Then, feeling greedy, I tried to feed my magic into him just like I’d done for the other two.

  As I kept flowing my magic into him, nothing else was happening. He struggled and coughed up blood, loosening his grip as his internal bleeding drained his strength, but his conscious brain stayed with him the whole way. But his magic was not becoming a part of my own as the other ones had done.

  Maybe it had a recharge time? If so, I would have had to pick my targets with even more care. Having seen enough, I used the magic filling his body to cause a full-body rupturing of impacts, riddling him with internal injuries while I watched him lifelessly fall to the floor.

  The bleeding wound was still a problem, though, and I couldn’t even try to heal myself without making it look obvious. My only saving grace was my high armor stat, keeping the wound from being immediately fatal as I ripped off some cloth from a goblin’s unconscious body to make something of a bandage for the time being.

  As if this wasn’t enough of a clusterfuck, I heard two footsteps crash onto the platform, shaking the boards below me as I got up to turn around. Standing opposite of me was another hobgoblin, just about as tall as me and quite a bit thinner, but with a redder hint to his skin than the classic goblin green. He wore only a loincloth and a pair of metal gauntlets, one of the hands of which was holding a ball of bright, red flame. A marvel of magic, the sphere was nearly perfect, save for the flickering tails at the top that was customary for all fire. The hot orb of brightness danced from one glove to the next as the fire hobgoblin tossed it between the two.

  “What the hell, Gak’Nak?!” I shouted up to the referee chief, who couldn’t have been paying attention if he was allowing a goblin with a fireball into this no-magic fight. “I thought you said we couldn’t use flashy magic!”

  Note: I specified his phrasing of ‘flashy magic.’ My magic had been completely invisible thus far. It was technically still legal. I also didn’t want the stage to be set on fire, but that seemed inevitable at this point. The victory would have to be on principle.

  “Oh, lay off it, Jeremiah.” Gak’Nak chortled with his whole belly, having gotten a little tipsy himself in the short time of combat we’d seen ourselves in. “I said that you weren’t allowed to use flashy magic. I didn’t say anything about the ones fighting you!” He thought he was so funny, laughing at his own bad joke.

  I was not laughing.

  Instead, my preoccupation was with dodging the fireball that the red hobgoblin threw while preparing to dodge the next one he’d swelled up in his hands like they were filled with fiery helium. Already, the balls of fire were coming at me like a barrage of tennis balls from a launcher. Because there was at least some decency in this hellhole of a situation, the fireballs only caught things on fire when they landed instead of exploding in a burst of flames like I’d feared at first.

  I gave the red goblin a look with the analyst screen to see his stats:

  Leytati, Takatak Flameborn Lv 24

  Health: 480 Magic: 2880

  Armor: 25 Aegis: 110

  Abilities: Magmaskin

  Magmaskin: A powerful pyromancer’s blood flows with the heat of volcanoes. Their power in the art of magical flames has given them a greater affinity for fire, so that their very skin exudes and heals from fire.

  +immunity to fire

  +healing from fire magic

  -120 resistance to water magic

  +120 fire damage to creatures and objects from physical contact

  Oh, okay. No setting him on fire, no letting him set himself on fire, no sources of water nearby to squelch the fire, and no fake-punching him or I’d be set on fire. And considering how crazy this Leytati looked, there was going to be so much fire.

  Hikki, if you weren’t so cute…

  21

  I continued to dodge the flames coming from the fire hobgoblin Leytati’s hands, and the wooden platform arena we stood on was not taking it well, rotting more and more to ash with every new splash of fire that fell over it.

  “What’s wrong, smoothskin?” Leytati’s voice husked and musked out of him like he’d been incubated in a smoker as a baby. “Don’t tell me the mighty, pale, baby-skin outsider who killed Gojobo on accident is scared of a little heat, now?”

  “I take it you’re upset about that.” I dodged another flame, gambling on distracting him a bit to buy some time while I came up with a plan. “Was he your buddy?”

  “He was my rival!” Leytati threw an angry mass of glowing, flickering heat. “The one thing that kept me from the chiefdom, my rightful place, and you ruined everything! Not only did you kill him, robbing me of the chance to one day prove that I was better than him, but you stole the successor spot out from under me!”

  “Both of those were completely by accident,” I said, noticing a bit of a pattern in the nature of my adventure, “I wanted to just leave, but Gak’Nak insisted on the marriage.”

  “What are you talking about?” Gak’Nak interrupted, “you practically begged me to let you marry my daughter! Certainly didn’t hesitate to tell me off about her before!”

  That asshole and his technicalities.

  “You’re the one thing keeping me from my destiny!” He threw another ball of fire. “When I lead the Takatak people, we will rise to the greatest heights, like no goblin tribe has ever seen! We’ll sweep over Grosrove and take it in a hellstorm of fire and blood!”

  “You sound like a pleasure to be around.” I stepped around the fire to the most stable part of the platform, putting out what parts of the growing inferno I could. I wasn’t going to lose this fight on another technicality by falling off the crumbling arena. “How do you plan on getting around their defenses? No other goblin tribe seems to have tried this idea of yours out for themselves, have they?”

  “They all lack ambition!” He shouted at the top of his lungs. “Idiots like Gak’Nak only wish for goblinkind to scurry in the dark like rats or moths. I say,” he dramatically created a larger ball of flame, “let’s bring the light!”

  Alright, dodging something that big was going to be impossible. Getting h
it by it was a big no-no. Letting him get hit by his own fire was also not good. Casting any sort of overt spells was out of the question if I didn’t want the chieftain to execute me. Should I have just held my ground and taken this flame to the face, banking on the hope that he’d destroy his own ground to stand on and disqualify himself? Maybe as a backup plan. Now, I just needed an actual plan.

  His fire consisted wholly of magic. I was learning how to control magic in this fight. If I could somehow have control over his magic, then I’d kick his ass. Not anything like a meat-puppet or a zombie, although the idea does sound like a lot of fun, now that I was entertaining it. I could have made him dance for me like his poor little life depended on it, then rip him to pieces at my leisure and pleasure.

  No, too dark. Reel it back.

  If I could tap into that same magical power that fueled his flames, I could have redirected the fire somewhere else or, better yet, restore my own supplies of magic with it. I had fire magic of my own. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that I could have at least caught it.

  All of my other options led to death by increasingly painful methods. It was worth a shot.

  I just had to picture that ball of fire like the goblins, or my club, or my own body. Only by subjugating the magic as if it were from my reserve could I have even hoped to attempt this. I had to imagine the channels within it, feel out the flow of energy, and use it to my own advantage. The power had to be mine and mine alone, completely under my whims.

  And I had to not catch on fire in the process.

  The flame ball grew, now bigger than a beach ball, and more like a medicine ball. Leytati, satisfied with the size, hurled the massive heat lamp of death over his head and right for me. With a hand out, I started to release my magic into the air like open wires, hoping to connect with the inherent magic of the fireball as it nearly blinded me.

  By a gracious miracle, I’d actually made contact with the giant fireball. I could feel my magic swirling through the miniature storm of primordial energy that was inside of it, keeping its shape and generating its flames at the same time. The closest analogy I had to the sensation was like placing my hand in a blasting jet in a hot tub, but hotter and without being wet.

  But, in that collection of milliseconds, I could also feel that my magic wasn’t getting through the whole thing in time to put a stop to it. Sure, I could have defused it a little, but it was right in contact with my hand. I wasn’t getting out of the way in time to avoid him burning me to a crisp, at least not without some extra help.

  Thinking quickly, I aimed for the center mass of the swirling energy and shot an impact blast at it, destabilizing the whole thing before it got any closer to me. The heat caught my hand and a bit of arm before the ball had stopped moving, but I had to take what I could get in terms of victories. Thanks to the control of the magic that I’d wedged in there, the thing didn’t explode on us like it seemed fit to this time around.

  Hell, it probably would have caught most of the goblins in the audience if he had allowed it to go off on its own. That bastard was going to set the whole village on fire just to get his revenge on me and potentially get the Takatak chiefdom, if even that.

  What was he planning to do after he’d burned the tribe to ashes? What was his big strategy here? How was he going to go on his fiery crusade against Grosrove if all of his potential soldiers were charred crispy? Dumbass.

  The impact magic dissipated the flames, which quickly vanished before everyone’s eyes, much to the ooh’s and ah’s of the people. They were ecstatic at the sight of it, like fireworks right in front of them. Leytati was not. He’d ignited his fists and ran at me like a crazed bull, roaring out his frustrations at my foiling of his big bomb. Just being near those things was enough to singe my skin, and they weren’t even making contact with me.

  It didn’t help that he didn’t have to care about all of the flames that he’d set down over the platform, just stepping wherever he pleased while I had to take care of my smooth, smoothskin skin. And I couldn’t punch him back unless I wanted to get a beating of my own by way of second-degree burns. I knew that just a quick touch would have proven far more deadly than I could have afforded, even from just the proximity. ‘Magmaskin’ wasn’t just a name for a name’s sake. He brought the volcano with him wherever he went.

  Also, the ass had burnt all the rotten food, filling the air with the nastiest smoke I’d ever smelled in my life. It was like I was inside the dumpster that a dumpster fire was burning in. The smell crawled its way to the back of my throat and tickled my gag reflex.

  “Why! Won’t! You! Stay! Still?!” Leytati’s fiery hands couldn’t touch me with how high my acrobatics skill had become. “Just! Die! Already! You! Coward!”

  Even at this stage, my grace rivaled every battle ballerina that ever lived. I also imagined that there weren’t too many battle ballerinas, so assuming I was the best of them was a safe bet.

  But, like every warrior too big for their britches, I wasn’t immune to my own hubris and got a nasty punch to the chest. My tunic had just begun to smolder before I ripped the burning pieces off, leaving my skin partially exposed. My defenses kept the damage in the safety zone, and I could have taken quite a few more, but that didn’t stop the pain.

  “Ha!” The fire goblin celebrated his temporary victory, so far being the only one in his flurry of blows. “Not so tough now! Are you? Smoothskin! I’ll cook you! Alive! Slowly! With every strike! This wedding! Was supposed to! Be mine! But I’ll be! Happy enough! When we serve! You up as! The main course! At your own wedding! Hahaha! Haha!”

  “That doesn’t seem in my best interests, Leytati.” I ripped off a piece of board leftover from the fence edge of the platform, giving it a few swings. “You know, it’s sad that you had to fall into the ‘hothead with fire powers’ cliché. Just think of all the things you could have done if you could control your temper. You could make some cash running your own sauna or tanning salon. Or you could have helped out the chefs with the feast today. We already have the main course for it, by the way, and it’s going to feed everyone, not just the three or so of us my one slab of flesh would provide for. You know, useful things, instead of this tantrum you’re throwing now.”

  “Shut! Up!” Leytati filled every swing with all of his momentum.

  Wasteful. Even with my limited experience in fights, I knew he was just asking for a beating with that style of combat. Of course, he probably felt that he could have afforded to be so reckless with his skin being on fire… which was mostly true in this exact scenario where his opponent couldn’t overtly cast a spell against him. Did I have the tricky skills necessary to pull off impacting him without touching him? Eh, probably not. Especially when I could have just…

  With a hard smack, I channeled an impact spell right into his face, cracking the board against it, now that I’d finally gotten used to it enough for it to count as an arcane conductor. It wasn’t a very good one, but it got the job done, knocking the poor, long-nosed bastard flat on his face. The plank had caught fire, thanks to the magmaskin, so I threw it away as Leytati picked himself up and turned to me.

  Fun fact I’d just learned about the specifics of magical elements: while impact magic didn’t have much range and took quite a bit of magic to conjure up into usable effects, it counted as physical damage for the sake of armor and aegis resistances, for some reason. Whatever the case for that was, that impact spell, plus my strength, had taken out nearly a third of his health in one shot.

  “You stupid smoothskin knife-ear!” His stance faltered from the head trauma. “Just for that, once I break your legs, I will defecate in your mouth, then set it on fire!”

  “Why, though?” I recoiled at his explicit threat. “I don’t even know how to respond properly to that. I guess I’ll just correct you on the ‘knife-ear’ slur. I’m not an elf.”

  “You sure look like one.” He brought his fiery fists back up. “You’re not fooling me, ‘Jeremiah from Earth.’ You’re just an
other Grosrovian looking to wipe us off the face of the continent. You’re scum, just like the rest of them. No, you’re worse. At least they have the decency to stay topside and not butt their noses in where they don’t belong!”

  “You’re going to make us drag this thing out, aren’t you?” I took a few steps backward, muscling through the heat of the ashen planks of the flimsy platform Leytati had created. “If that’s what you want. You’re only going to make this more shameful for yourself when this smoothskin kicks you to the curb without any flashy magicks.”

  “Who asked you?” He threw a few more fists out into the air, missing me with the dazed expression on his face.

  I looked up at his stat screen, catching the word ‘confused’ underneath his name. Huh, nice. Head trauma had actual effects. I could have guessed what that did to their abilities, namely reducing their chances to hit things, including me with those flaming knuckles.

  The only problem now was hitting the guy again. Even with the dazed headache I gave him, I doubted that he would have fallen for the board to the head trick again, and each one I had to pull from the decreasing selection of good wood for beating, which took a while to turn into a usable arcane conductor.

  It wasn’t my proudest moment, but I was going to have to win on a technicality if I wanted to get out of this alive. The plan was simple but tricky. Like I had toyed around before, the idea was that I just had to be on the stage, regardless of wherever the stage was or in how many pieces. Getting the stage to crack in such a way that it left me with enough room to still be on it while also causing him to fall off, all without touching him or making it look obvious that I was doing anything, would be tricky. In order to do that, I was going to have to channel the magic distinctly through my feet, so no one saw me crouching over and slapping the ground suspiciously. All of that was going to require a level of control I wasn’t anywhere close to mastering. But it was either that or death, so I was going through with it.