Omnimage

by Simon Archer

  Now to see who we were dealing with as the leader of these evil Grune clerics. I skipped through the text scrolls I’d already seen and just skipped down to all the relevant and/or new information for simplicity’s sake:

  Exalted Blood of Grune, elf cleric Lv 45

  Health: 4500 Magic: 24750

  Armor: 90 Aegis: 270

  Abilities: Divine Overshadow, Sorcerer King’s Blessing, Unholy Magic,

  God’s Chosen

  Sorcerer King’s Blessing:

  +4500 magic reserve

  +450 magic salvage

  +45 aegis

  +45 resistance to light magic

  +450 resistance to spells cast from a cleric or paladin of the Aurum Phoenix, or a member of the Order of the Golden Feather

  Unholy Magic:

  +2250 magic reserve

  +225 magic salvage

  +450 spell strength

  +Activate - Blood Magic: when magic reserve is depleted, spells can tap into health to cast them at half the point cost

  +29.25% chance to transform into a Great Horror of Eldritch Realms when health is fully depleted, and the mage is not dead outright; raises to 90% when Blood Magic is also activated

  God’s Chosen: Having proven themselves to a god through a special act aligned with the god’s purposes, this mage has been given powers above their peers to rule over them and to punish those who would dare oppose the wishes of their divine master.

  +1% to all stats for every holy relic of their god

  +23% retribution on all heresies

  +Activate - Altar Vessel: When praying while wearing a holy relic of their god, the mage acts as an altar for their god for the purposes of a cleric’s Divine Empowerment

  He was a much better version of all the other guys walking around him, and he was a walking church for them as well. I was curious what churches did for clerics, though I could have guessed at least some of the things, like empowering their divine spells. But what was ‘retribution?’ That had to be something along the lines of divine punishment if it involved heresies. Were clerics punished on their powers for not following their gods? I wondered if there was a way to exploit that.

  I had to think of something to exploit quickly, or I’d have had my fragile human body’s several weaknesses exploited by being murdered.

  “Enough of this nonsense!” the Exalted Blood cleric shouted. “You have been a loose end in the machinations of our glorious dark king for long enough, and now you will be expunged from the face of this world long before its cataclysm.”

  “Alright, I’mma need you all to play along real cool-like with what I’m about to do, okay?” I whispered to the group, thinking of a plan. “Hikki, sneak around to the side and see if you can flank them or trap them, but don’t move until I give the word.”

  “Of course.” With a tiny flurry of change, the goblin druid turned into a small mosquito-like insect, flying through the air beside the pillars to do as I instructed.

  “Delilah, Star,” I addressed the other two, “we can’t hope to beat a group like this, so we’re about to bluff the shit out of these guys. That means you’ll both have to keep your mouths shut. Star, you especially. I’m probably going to be saying some pretty blasphemous shit about the Aurum Phoenix, so you need to zip it.”

  “I can promise nothing,” Star said earnestly.

  “I’ll take it.” I turned my attention to the cultists, taking slow steps forward. “Hey, what was that about a cataclysm?”

  “You and all of Neo Ceissein will know in time,” the Exalted Blood said, “except, you will know nothing because you will be dead. For the glory of Sorcerer King Grune!”

  “Why don’t I get to live through this cataclysm?” I asked him, still inching forward while my two girls followed slowly behind. “Sounds like a rip-roaring good time to me. Is this something that Grune is orchestrating?”

  “By the word of Grune himself,” the Exalted stated, “you are to be eliminated so that your precious seed can be extracted, and the rest taken back with us for our dark king’s purposes.”

  “Hey! Back off!” Delilah couldn’t help but speak up at the cultist’s poor wording. “No one gets his seed unless they become a consort! That’s the rule!”

  “If that is what they wish for, then they are far too late, I fear,” Star chuckled. “Jeremiah has already given his seed away. I would think that you will find him hard-pressed to give up any more of himself.”

  “What do you mean?” The Exalted whipped his hood over to Star while the other cultists stopped their chanting to murmur their worries to each other. “What have you cretins done to the seeds? Are the seeds gone?”

  “Well, he can’t very well give it to you right now,” Delilah continued. “He’s all but tapped out as of a couple of hours ago. It takes a while for the--”

  “--courier to travel to the main kingdom of Grosrove!” I finished the sentence for Delilah with a lie, having caught on to the misunderstanding before anyone else had. “I’m sure that it’s halfway there by now. You’ll never find it now.”

  “Hey, I was--!” Delilah sassed me.

  “Sh!” I shushed her, glaring a silencing glare.

  “That is impossible!” The gold leader dramatized with his hands. “You cannot have removed a Seed of Voloth! You do not have a mage of sufficient strength to accomplish a feat of magic like that!”

  “Oh, really?” I bluffed. “Would a mage with the power of all of the mages have the strength to do that?”

  “No,” the Exalted Blood faltered. “Do you mean that you somehow channeled all of the seeds at once using the seed within your chest?”

  Good. They knew about the seeds and that I was dropped off in this area, but they didn’t know what happened just before and after I got teleported out of that massacre. Grune probably told them to look for someone in these caverns and take the seeds from them, thinking that I was harboring all of the seeds myself. They don’t know about the Omnimage I’d become yet.

  And there was my exploit.

  “Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t.” I shrugged. “Who’s to say what happened? Maybe ask the head honchos of Grosrove about it. I’m sure they’d love to talk to you Grune types once they have all of that power to back themselves up.”

  “Sir, what are we going to do?” one of the regular Bloods whispered to the Exalted, though I could still hear the voices bouncing off the cavern walls. “If we return to Umbravon empty-handed, then we are sure to be killed on the spot!”

  “We have nothing to worry about,” the Exalted quietly chuckled, “if it’s going to Grosrove, then it’ll go into the hands of the Order of the Golden Feather’s cardinals, and we will be victorious either way.”

  “Oh, are you talking about that spy in the Order?” I said, hiding my internal celebration of the fact that I was so right about a spy in the Order, “I wouldn’t worry about him. Thankfully, our spy told us about your Golden Feather spy, so now we know how to work with the Golden Feather and avoid you guys knowing about it.”

  “You’re bluffing!” the Exalted spit out at me, “we would know if there was a Golden Feather among our ranks, or even someone reporting to the Golden Feather! Your magics are not as subtle as you might think, birdfeeder.”

  “Good thing we’re not any part of the Order, then.” I gave my nails a nonchalant lookover as I continued my elaborate lie. “We were actually just about to place another spy in their ranks, too, as you can see by the shiny display over here. But, now that our people in Grosrove are getting the seed, there’s no need for that. And there’s no need to hide anything from you anymore. We’re way past the point of no return, and you’ll be downright fucked once the ritual commences.”

  “I do not remember any of--” Star began to speak her thoughts aloud.

  “Shut. It.” I leaked through my clenched teeth.

  “What ritual?” The ground beneath the Exalted Blood cracked as lashes of shadowy energy and rage exuded from his cloak to strike at the stone below him
. “What are you hiding?”

  “Oh, have you not heard?” I turned back to cultists. “We found a way to harness divine energy to use in great magical bursts, and there was this horrid little hovel of a home base we recently found that we wanted to demolish. I’d get some change of address forms on the way back home if I were you guys.”

  “Oh, dear,” the Exalted’s shadow magic retreated as his mood calmed down, “you must not have heard the news, then? If you plan to use divine magic, you will have to do so with someone other than your precious Aurum Phoenix, as I’m afraid he’s been put out of commission by a superior god. So sorry about that.”

  “Why would we have to use the Aurum Phoenix?” I asked him.

  “Who else would you use?” the Exalted questioned me right back. “The Aurum Phoenix, even in his weakened state, is the only god with any semblance of power next to our great Grune. Even if you put the other gods together, they would not hold a candle to his great might.”

  “That’s why we’re not using any of them,” I explained my bullshit plan as I made it up on the spot, “we’ll be using Grune. Against his will, of course.”

  “What are you blathering about?” the Exalted tried to laugh off his rage as it returned to him, “you want to use Grune’s power? You believe he’ll just let you tap into his grace without you bending your knees down and groveling like beasts?”

  “Well, that is the point of the spell we took from you guys,” I lied yet again, working off of a major hunch. “Why bother anyone but the best god around now for the power that we need?”

  Grune ascended to godhood, and the Aurum Phoenix was crippled beyond even a god’s ability to recover at nearly the same time. Coincidence? Very unlikely. They had to be directly related, and I was going to find out for sure now. If I was right, then we were golden. If I was wrong, we were dead anyway.

  “How did they find out about that?” another Blood cleric whispered to their leader, “I thought that Grune kept that spell a secret from everyone, even after he ascended!”

  Bingo! Thank you, Years of Reading and Watching Fantasy Stories. You’d saved the day once again.

  “You can kill us if you want to, but that seems like a waste of time, if you ask me,” I finished up my ruse, “every second you waste with us is a second more we get towards the ultimate goals of our mysterious third party in this special game for Neo Ceissein. The smart thing to do would probably be to get that courier intercepted before it makes it to Grosrove or wherever it’s going. Who knows what exactly I’ve been lying about? I sure hope I’m not just lying out of my ass to throw you guys off and spread distrust among you all. That would mean you’d never find out about the spy we have in your ranks. Oops! Did I say too much? Or better yet, can you really afford to take the risk?”

  “Damn it!” the main cultist threw his hands up like he was holding a ball in front of his face. In a short time, a ball did appear in front of his face, made up of shadows with the imprints of tortured faces shifting in and out of it. The shadowy ball dropped to the ground, filling the cracks made in the ground by the shadowy whips he’d given off previously. “If we cannot spend the time to kill you, we’ll let the cavern do it for us!”

  The cracks in the ground split and burst ever further, spreading to the edges of the cavern we were in as small geysers of dark power sprung forth from them over and over again, acting as knives to cut through the stone. In no time at all, the whole cavern was covered in cracks and bursting shadows, creating a thunderous shaking of stones and rocks that fell down from the ceiling.

  “Goddamnit, not again,” I said aloud.

  The cultists around the gold-adorned leader began to chant, summoning a smog of shadowy energy that looped around them in a hoop. As the hoop shrank around them, the cultists disappeared as they touched the shadows, their bodies turning into darkness and absorbing into the shadows themselves. The Exalted Blood stared at me before he was taken into the shadows himself.

  “I hope you live through this,” he said, “so I can kill you with my own hands. You and all of Neo Ceissein will drown in fire and darkness!”

  “Sure thing, bitchtits,” I said back to him.

  The shadows overtook him as well, as the last cultist to disappear, and the shadow loop faded away into nothing, leaving no trace of them but the falling rocks and shadowy explosions that shook more loose.

  “Move!”

  The group of us ran towards the closed exit, pushing ourselves as much as our legs would carry, which meant that Delilah was way ahead of us. Hikki met her at the circle of spikes that barred our way out, shapeshifting into her goblin form and putting her hands against the stone to move it with her earth powers. As Star and I caught up to the rest of them, we watched as the goblin druid strained and groaned with her spells, channeling green energy into them. As the light danced around them, they jiggled and shimmied a little, but the rocks wouldn’t give way to her touch.

  “Jeremiah, I--” Hikki pressed her hands harder against the stone again. “They will not move! I swear, I am trying with everything I can, but--”

  “Stand back, Hikki.” I ushered her to the side. “Star, you think you can help me give a hard knock on this door?”

  “I would rather help you break it down, Jeremiah.” The dense demon knight held her golden greatsword over her head. “If that is all the same to you.”

  “I guess we can do that instead,” I relented, not saying another word about the lack of subtext she had as I lifted my maul above my head, “let’s rock.”

  “Ha!” Star laughed at my last sentence. “That is funny because we are surrounded by rocks right now! Very clever, Jeremiah!”

  As I rolled my eyes at her adorably simple brain, I channeled all of the enchantment and impact magic I could into the head of my maul, and the two of us brought our weapons down upon the wall of interlocking spikes. Like it was made of styrofoam, the stones gave away at our strike, and the glorious light of day shined through. We hurried out of the crumbling tunnels and into the fresh air to see the world for the first time.

  Overall, this was a victory.

  Sure, we still had a lot to do and a lot more monsters and evil to smite. Grosrove was the target of a Grune cult, the Order definitely had a high-ranking spy in it, and I had no idea where to even start looking for Galdrin. On top of that, I was sure that Star’s father was going to rear his ugly head at some point in our future as long as she traveled with us. Whatever. Bring it on.

  But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. If we were lucky, the Blood of Grune cultists would start tearing itself apart, looking for an imaginary spy. And nearly none of us, besides Hikki to a small extent, had any experience of the surface. We had places to see, things to find, stuff to do. The world was our oyster, and I had the unlimited potential to take advantage of it.

  And all of that was for the future. For now, it was nothing but yellow sunshine and warm breezes. In less than a couple of days, I’d changed worlds, witnessed a tragedy, lost some friends, gained some powers, gained some new friends, got married, won a tournament, and thwarted the plans of an evil cult time and again throughout just by surviving it all.

  And that was just the beginning.

  The world of Neo Ceissein hadn’t seen all that I could yet, but it was about to find out.

  Author’s Note

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