Werewolf Mage 2

by Harry Nix

  April's eyes widened and when she went to put down her milkshake, it fell over on the grass. She ignored it.

  “You seriously just grew more muscle. How do you do that?”

  Alex shrugged, gritted his teeth and hit the minus button on the strength attribute. This one was worse than cutting back memory. It felt like chunks of flesh being ripped out of him. A sudden sharp pain went through his body and that strange taste returned.

  After a moment the pain faded and Alex was left staring at his attributes, deciding he didn’t feel like experimenting anymore. He was having the familiar problem anyone who has ever played in RPG has: what do you increase first?

  Unlike a game however, he had no idea why he’d acquired this point or when, if ever, another one would appear.

  Although he could see advantages to being faster or stronger or even to heal quicker, his eyes kept coming back to the memory attribute and the expansive feeling of having more space to work in.

  One of the major barriers they'd encountered was he simply couldn't copy larger spells from Juno. He was unable to cast a fireball because he didn't have enough space to hold the spell at all. Juno had explained that practice would expand this space and enable him to cast more complicated spells, but for a normal witch or magic user it took years of study to do that.

  With the psychotic mages who after them, and now necromancers, Alex knew he didn't have the time to wait. Feeling that he could spend all day second-guessing himself, Alex finally hit the plus button on memory, feeling that same expansiveness return. Down the bottom of the screen a small square with commit appeared on it. Alex hit it before he could change his mind.

  Immediately, all the attributes grayed out and everything appeared back to normal, except of course when Alex checked, he had far more space to play around the spells now.

  “I think I just directly modified myself to improve my memory so I can cast more complicated spells,” Alex said to April.

  April shook her head in disbelief. “It’s kinda gross the puppet show Juno puts on about you and your butt but damn, she’s right. No one had this power. I’ve never heard of it.”

  As Alex sat there looking at a blank screen with a blinking cursor he decided it was time that he should attempt to write his own spell.

  From reading the spells over and over again, he’d uncovered similarities. Parts of the telekinesis spell were within the unlock spell. The unlock spell needed telekinesis to push on the tumblers to open a physical lock. He’d also found similarities between spells that affected the body.

  For example, the shield spell had a section that had appeared after he’d tied a physical movement to activate it. It was ridiculously complicated but Alex believed that somehow the spell was tracking the palms of his hand, measuring where they were and then where they ended up. If it was in a specific narrow range that meant he’d thrust his hand out in a stop motion and the spell should trigger. Within that section of the spell there were long, complicated numbers that Alex believed referred to body parts. This was backed up by a similar section in the flame finger spell. When it was cast, a flame would appear on his right-hand pointer.

  Alex brought up the flame finger spell and looked through it. Scrolling down, he came to the section that had the numbers.

  52487503.3982.203.34202.3.2938820…

  It was long and ridiculous but he was convinced that this was the location of the tip of his right finger. That somehow those numbers broke down the exact location of the patch of skin where flame finger would appear.

  “When you make a new spell and you decide to make it appear on your right or left hand or somewhere else, how do you do it?” he asked April.

  “My spells appear to me as music. Sometimes it’s actual sheet music that I see. At other times it sort of appears as a song, bits of music that I can cut into pieces and move together. My left hand is a certain piece of music. My right hand is a different piece of music. Over time I’ve learned different locations from other magic users.”

  “So do you think every organ in your body would have a different piece of music?”

  April nodded. “Absolutely. I already know the heart is a different piece of music from the right kidney.”

  “Can you show me those?”

  April shook her head. “I don’t have any spells memorized targeting those body parts.”

  Alex went back to looking at his spell and opened up telekinesis in a separate window.

  “Why can’t you use telekinesis to reach into someone's chest and pull their heart out, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom style?” Alex asked.

  “You can't penetrate through a body. Telekinesis is line of sight. Even if they had their mouth open, at best you could grab the tongue. Maybe their eyeball but even that is incredibly difficult. Telekinesis for most magic users is blunt force.”

  “That Wand of Expansion that we took from those mages that I used on the blood golem… Juno said you could use it on someone, fling the bubble into their body and kill them. How does it do that?”

  “That's why it's worth a stupid amount of money. The enchanter who made that wand has worked out how to penetrate into a body. You can guarantee there’s probably one or two enchanters who know how to do that and they keep that secret closely guarded.”

  Alex looked back to spells, scrolling through them, pondering what April had said. The very fact that the Wand of Expansion existed meant that it was possible to penetrate through a body. That meant something like telekinesis was simply limited because it didn't have the right code inside.

  Alex wished he still had the Wand of Expansion to study but unfortunately he’d had to use it to destroy the blood golem, leaving nothing behind but a fancy stick. He suspected though that other spells might provide clues on how to achieve the same result of penetrating the body. Even a healing spell might have something in it. After all, the one that Juno used was cast upon touch and then somehow the magic went through the body, finding wounds and repairing them.

  Why would touching someone allow the magic to enter? Alex had other thoughts in his mind about how exactly the magical code worked as well. The shield spell for example was somehow monitoring the entire body when it was in operation. When something hit, like a bullet, he thought it was concentrating power at that spot in an instant, to defend against it. That meant that the function of monitoring could be cut away and used separately. Perhaps it could run continuously in a passive state, waiting for an attack. Maybe instead of triggering shield it could trigger telekinesis and fling the bullet back at the attacker?

  “You have that look on your face like you considering doing something ridiculously dangerous that’s going to get me chewed out by an angry werewolf and upset witch,” April said. She picked up her milkshake cup and collected Alex's, taking them inside before returning to sit on the grass once more.

  Although Alex was concentrating on spells, he quite enjoyed watching her come and go.

  “I don't have years to wait to get good at this. I'm going to need to take some risks to work out how to write my own spells without dying, and I think today's the day to try,” Alex said.

  April put her hands over her face. “Oh please don't. Your wives will kill me,” she groaned.

  “This first one is going to be safe. All I’m going to do is work out how to flick a flame away from my finger. That's all.”

  April sighed. “Okay, fine,” she said.

  Alex went back to his empty screen and blinking cursor. So far he'd only talked to Juno and April about their magic, but it seemed the basics of what they were doing when they created new spell were the same.

  Juno described it as cutting and mashing together and so did April. Maybe that saved them from too many mishaps, operating at a higher level.

  He had code and an incredible level of granularity, more than either of them. Alex figured this had to be an advantage… although it did mean he might kill himself if he went too far.

  Alex already had flame finger and telekines
is open. Using the simple copy and paste commands he cut chunks out of both, assembling them in on an empty screen. He copied the section where the flame appeared on the tip of the finger and the bit that he thought was the creation of the flame itself, although he didn't understand any of the commands within.

  He had no idea how flame was created out of thin air, didn't even know what actually was burning. Was it was the air itself? What was the fuel source?

  From telekinesis he took the parts he thought had to do with pushing or throwing of movement.

  April sat back in the sun and closed her eyes, tilting her face back. Alex looked at her neck and the curve of her cleavage before returning to his work.

  As he assembled the new spell he could feel a kind of wrongness in his mind as he read through it. The disjointed pieces didn't fit together.

  He started cutting and deleting small lines and that feeling began to subside. It was like the code read smoother, even though he wasn’t sure what it did most of the time.

  Alex soon found himself typing, his fingers touching nothing in reality, writing new code half-remembered from the spells he’d studied. It almost felt like some other part of him was creating the spell. Whatever it was, it seemed to have a better grasp of the code rules and logic than he did.

  He finally entered the last symbol, a curved bracket, and to his surprise the execute button at the bottom of the spell lit up. He realized it had been grayed out until now, the spell unable to be cast.

  Alex glanced at April who was now watching him. He had so many screens open in front of him that it was like looking at her underwater.

  “I'm about to cast it, so be ready,” he said.

  “This is madness,” April murmured. She stood up in preparation and Alex decided that was a good idea too. He moved away from the lemon tree in case something went wrong.

  The new spell had no title yet so Alex named it flame flick hoping that this was actually what would happen.

  He took a deep breath and steeled himself, hoping he wouldn't burn to death or rip his body to pieces and then tapped the execute button. Immediately the spell compiled, running through and collapsing into smaller components until all that was left was a pure mathematical expression that vanished faster than Alex could read it.

  The flame lit up on the tip of his right finger just like when he cast flame finger. But Alex felt a different sensation in his body. The flame wasn't bound there. He could concentrate and throw it using telekinesis. Alex flicked his hand, hoping to throw the flame a little way across the yard.

  The flame moved but something was wrong. The drain on his mana grew stronger as the flame flung off the end of his finger, trailing fire behind it, stopping about eight feet away.

  It was like the flame had stretched from the tip of his finger. It looked similar to Juno’s fire whips, except in this case it was a long rigid line.

  “You tried to make a flame sword?” April asked, taking a step back.

  “Not exactly but I guess this isn't too bad,” Alex said, experimentally moving his hand. The line of fire felt lightweight, like he was holding a stick. The flames made a roaring sound as they washed through the air.

  At the speed Alex's mana was draining he wouldn’t be able to hold such a spell for long. It was like he'd cast flame finger thirty times over and each point along the line was a new instance of it.

  Still, he hadn't died so he was calling it a success. He canceled the spell and immediately saw his mana began to climb.

  “Okay good work for today. Now let's go inside and not do anything else. Let’s just sit quietly on the sofa and, I dunno, discuss chess moves. Nothing dangerous,” April said.

  “As soon as I try something else,” Alex said, already opening up a new empty spell screen. Since he'd increased his memory he now had much more space to work in so he could hold what he retitled as flame sword and also create an entirely new spell again.

  He duplicated the flame sword spell, except this time he cut some of the numbers out of it, thinking that perhaps he could summon the flame somewhere in front of him and then flick it so it wasn't bound to a body part.

  As he deleted the numbers he wondered what would happen if he just altered them. Would it summon a flame inside his chest, or in his brain, killing him?

  The execute button flickered between grayed out and active as he edited, the code switching between viable and not. For not the first time, Alex wished the virtual spellcasting system didn’t drain so much mana. It was, at this point, practically useless. He’d thought it would be a safe way to make new spells and test them out but it used so much mana it was actually more dangerous.

  Alex deleted a few more numbers and the execute button lit up again.

  The spell compiled and cast, pulling on his mana but nothing happened. No flame appeared in front of him or on his finger. He had a feeling that something was there, that he could push on it or throw it but there was nothing for him to grab that he could see.

  April must've felt the pull on the magic. She looked around and then back to Alex.

  “Was that it? Did you do something?” she asked.

  Alex stretched out his hand, seeing if he could feel anything.

  “I summoned the flame but it’s not here,” Alex said and then suddenly realized what that meant. The flame could be anywhere right now – maybe even in the gas line supplying the house!

  Alex hastily canceled the spell and then shot off toward the house with April rushing behind him. The second he was inside he caught the scent of smoke. They burst into the lounge and found the curtains ablaze.

  “Put it out!” April yelled.

  Alex turned about-face and ran for the bathroom. He grabbed a towel and turned on the shower to wet it. It only took a second but it felt like an eternity. Alex bolted back to the lounge room, barely realizing he'd shifted as he'd run.

  He found himself in front of the fire with no towel in his hand. The shifter charm had taken it, treating it like it was a piece of clothing.

  As Alex cursed and shifted back, the towel appearing again in his hands, April rushed past him with a saucepan full of water, which she threw onto the curtains. Her aim was good and she put out most of the flames. Alex then used the wet towel to beat out the last of the fire.

  The moment it was out and they were staring at each other in shocked silence, the smoke alarm started shrieking.

  “Those girls are going to kill you, and then me and then probably bring us back to life just so they can kill us again,” April said.

  “We can still fix this,” Alex said. He opened the front door and the windows and turned on the ceiling fans. Soon the air cleared and the alarm stopped.

  Alex returned to the lounge to survey the damage and realized that April was probably right. The curtains were absolutely destroyed. There was a black soot mark up to the ceiling and even a bit of the wooden curtain rod had been charred and would need to be replaced. It looked bad but he wasn’t feeling bad. He’d had an awesome day of magical experimentation and some burned curtains was a cheap price to pay for the new knowledge.

  “And here comes the execution,” April said as Nia and Juno pulled into the driveway in Boris.

  “We can make it to Mexico if we leave now. Tequilas for breakfast,” Alex said with a grin.

  10

  “One time I went to a party and I didn't even drink anything. I just was near someone who had a single beer and when I came home my grandmother sniffed me out,” Juno said.

  “I can see four guards I think,” April said, looking through the pair of bedazzled binoculars at the Corvus outpost.

  “It's true, her grandmother has an amazing nose for mischief. I've seen it myself,” Nia said.

  “Lots of spikes on the walls too,” Alex said.

  April passed him in the bedazzled binoculars so could take a closer look. The four of them were up on a rooftop quite a distance from the outpost.

  “This other time I came home and she just sniffed in my direction and
then she suddenly was like where did you go, who were you kissing?” Juno said dramatically.

  “To be fair, you did have a love bite on your neck,” Nia said.

  “I covered it up with concealer!” Juno said.

  “Yeah, but it didn't quite match your skin color so… you know,” Nia said.

  Alex was only half listening as he scanned over the building again. The Corvus outpost must have been a factory in its past life. There was a large building, three stories, in the middle, lots of lights, four patrolling guards, spikes on the fences, and a single entrance at the front that was sealed by a large heavy electronic gate with a guardhouse.

  After Juno and Nia had returned from their shopping trip and Juno had freaked the hell out about the fire, Alex had immediately been put to work editing some rings that they could sell to raise some cash to add to their dwindling funds.

  Alex had suggested that a dose of sex magic would get the job done faster… but Juno was far too stressed out of her mind and Nia was siding with her out of sympathy (or perhaps fear the little witch would murder both of them if they vanished off to the bedroom). So Alex used his blue mana to edit the rings.

  He told Nia and Juno about his new “attributes point” level up but Juno was far too stressed to really take it in. It was, as usual, incredible, astounding, surely impossible for anyone else. He was the only werewolf mage so no one had any idea how any of his magic worked or what he was capable of. Alex himself wondered how it all would have presented itself if he hadn’t been a huge gamer and computer programmer.

  After editing the rings, they’d all gone out to buy new curtains, rods, cleaning products and paint. Alex had then played home handyman, sanding off the burnt paint and repainting everything.

  The wall was flawless in Alex's opinion but Juno could swear that she could still smell smoke and her grandmother would surely discover what had happened.