Creation Mage (War Mage Academy Book 1)

by Dante King

  “Hot damn, I love magic!” I said.

  However, as I looked at the scene of the carnage I had just wrought, I heard a shriek. Looking over at where Bradley was battling my Lightning Skink, I saw the epic-looking beast stutter—like a poorly tuned TV—and then explode into sparks. Bradley was blown backward by the detonation and lay stunned on the grass. The skellies, almost as one, turned in his direction. It was almost as if they could sense the weakest living person in their vicinity.

  A handful of the skellies made a half-assed attempt at grabbing Nigel as he dropped suddenly out of the night air—not quite intentionally, it looked to me. To be honest, if the rest of us hadn’t been there, I had a feeling that things might have gone badly for him. As it was, Rick was on hand to grab an animated skeleton in each enormous fist and swing them together like a pair of macabre hand cymbals. This gave Nigel the room he needed to whip out his vector—a wand—give it a flourish and summon a pretty neat little localized tornado which spun the skellie like a top until it spun apart from the finger bones inwards. Not wanting to miss out on the last little pocket of resistance, as far as we were concerned, I stepped in, skewered the last skellie through the back of the rib cage with my staff and flipped him over my shoulder, pulverizing its skull on the edge of a handy tomb.

  “My goodness,” Nigel said, puffing out his flushed cheeks and staring around at the scattered bones that surrounded the four of us. “I have to say that, as potentially dangerous as that was—what with the animated dead having quite the penchant for peeling the flesh of the living from their bones—it was rather good fun, wasn’t it?”

  I laughed and slapped Nigel on the back. It wasn’t taking me long to gain some serious respect for the unassuming dude.

  Damien gave me a friendly punch on the arm. “That fucking Lightning Skink, man… Unreal!”

  I grinned. “This coming from the human flamethrower.”

  Damien flicked a flake of ash from his bare chest, all cool indifference.

  “Though I did notice that you struggled to get it up a couple of times there,” I quipped.

  Damien punched me again and laughed. “Ah, fuck you, man.”

  “Hey, it was probably just the booze,” I said, holding my hands up.

  This really tickled Rick. “Ha! Good one, friend!” The giant Islander guffawed and gave me a good-natured push, which almost sent me face first into a headstone.

  “What happened to that Lightning Skink anyway?” I wondered aloud. “It just glitched out and disappeared when I cast the Storm Bolt.”

  “Perhaps you exceeded a magical quota of some kind?” the ever analytical Nigel said.

  I thought about this, but only for a moment. It was becoming clear to me that I was going to have to get a lot of questions answered if I was going to become the magical badass that I was already envisioning.

  “What about the fiery fuckwit?” Damien asked, nodding his head to the far side of the graveyard.

  I looked over to where he had motioned and saw that the remaining skellies—about thirty or so of the creatures—were converging on Bradley Flamewalker. He might have had armor and he might have been angry, but I didn’t think that would be enough to stop a swarm of the undead from pulling him apart like a roast chicken.

  “They really pull your flesh off your bones? Flay you sort of thing?” I asked Nigel.

  “That’s what I’ve read,” Nigel said.

  “Pretty rough way to go,” I mused. “Even for a guy like that who’s so spoiled that putting him in a barrel of salt wouldn’t save him.”

  “What do you want to do?” Rick asked.

  “Well, the prick told me—before he Hulked out—that he’s been put in our frat by Chaosbane.”

  Nigel nodded. Damien sighed.

  “A friend then,” grumbled Rick. “though he might not know it yet.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking, big man,” I said. I dusted myself off and hefted the staff. “Let’s go and save the silly son of a bitch.”

  Bradley was at the bottom of a shallow slope, toward the far end of the graveyard. He was looking pretty disheveled and the worst for wear, and I was imbued with a distinct glow of satisfaction that it was my awesome energy lizard that had ruffled his feathers to such a degree.

  Not bad for never having it cast it before, I thought. I didn’t voice it, but I was beginning to hope that I was going to turn out to be a bit of a natural at this spell-casting lark. It seemed that my childhood and young adult diet of action films, sci-fi and fantasy novels and sporadic boxing lessons at the gym had actually all been part of my training for this life.

  My three fraternity brothers and I dashed down the slight gradient toward the mass of skellies. The undead were swarming all over the armor-clad hulk that was Mega-Brad, their sheer weight of numbers clearly taking their toll on him. He’d mash one of the persistent, single-minded skeletons into the ground with a flaming fist and crush another into powder with his other hand, but then four more would determinedly scale his back. Their finger bones scraped across the face of the orange armor, which I could see was becoming slightly more transparent.

  “He’s weakening!” I yelled, putting on a burst of speed.

  When we were still ten yards from Flamewalker, Rick performed his earth-surging maneuver. The cracking, rippling shockwave was fairly weak by the time that it struck the swarming, struggling mass, but it was still strong enough to knock all the combatants on their asses.

  A few of the sprightlier skellies—those with the tattered remains of their muscles still clinging to them in grizzly shreds—were already making a beeline for Mega-Brad, who was on his hands and knees and looking like a man who didn’t know quite how he’d gotten there.

  Damien hit the skellies with another blast of fire, just as they were stretching out their hands for Flamewalker’s neck. The skellies were incinerated where they stood, charred bones flying away like leaves before a storm. I wasn’t sure if he did it on purpose, but the flames seemed to carry a touch more juice than was necessary. When the smoke cleared, Mega-Brad was left standing there looking pretty fucking bewildered, soot-stained, and missing both his eyebrows.

  “That’s a good look for you!” I yelled, as I wiped out three skellies with a single swipe of my kick-ass staff.

  The four of us mopped up the last of the animated skeletons in pretty short order. I liked to think that we would have presented a pretty epic sight, battling the undead under the light of a full moon in the middle of a graveyard that looked as if it had just suffered at the hands of one of the more malicious sorts of hurricanes.

  The last skellie was tossed into the air by another one of Rick’s earth-ripplers, spinning higher into the night sky, with a flick of Nigel’s wand, so that its thrashing form was silhouetted black against a backdrop of stars, set alight by a burst of flame from Damien and then disintegrated by a beautifully aimed Storm Bolt from yours truly.

  Silence settled like snow amongst the graves.

  I looked over at Bradley Flamewalker. He was sitting, leaning tiredly against a miraculously intact wooden grave-marker. Even as I eyed him, the vulcanized-looking armor faded, retracted, and disappeared from his body. I blinked a couple of times and, suddenly, he was back to his usual size—no longer a fire-breathing, seven-foot, incandescent jerk-off.

  “You got all that angst out of your system, have you, Bradders?” I asked.

  Bradley looked up. The eyes in his haughty face were suddenly rimmed in black. He looked like he’d been on a bender for about three days and was crashing.

  Clearly, no matter the size of the stick up your ass holding you up, maintaining a magical shield for that long takes its toll.

  Bradley gazed around at us. It was hard to tell what was going on in the mind behind that exhausted expression. Doubly hard, due to the fact that the dude was missing both his eyebrows now.

  “Well,” he croaked, “I guess I owe you guys an... apology.”

  Rick made a rumble of disbelief in his thro
at, and Nigel let out a soft whistle from between his teeth. I got the impression that hearing a high elf swallow his pride was about as difficult a task as putting socks on a chicken.

  “It’s not often that someone tries to kill me,” I said. “In fact, that was a first for me.” I gave him a hard look then, a look that said that if he ever fancied trying again then I’d be waiting for him. “It’s an invigorating experience.”

  The night seemed to hold its breath then, as our two gazes flickered like fencing blades. Then Bradley bowed his head and rubbed casually at one pointed ear.

  “I’d always been led to believe that pure humans were an unsophisticated bunch, you know,” he said. “The sort of uncouth trash that thought a seven-course meal was a burger and a six-pack.”

  I raised an eyebrow at this.

  I could go for one of those seven-course meals right now, I thought. Nothing puts an edge on your hunger like taking out a hoard of the undead.

  “Turns out,” Bradley continued, “that you’ve got some real skills.” He smoothed his dark hair back from his face. Then he stuck out his hand. “I owe you guys one,” he said. “I’m big enough to know when I might have been wrong. When I might have been a little hasty in my judgment.”

  I shook the proffered hand. It was, surprisingly, hard and callused. Bradley shook hands with the rest of the crew.

  “I owe you guys my life,” he said, simply.

  No one said anything. Flamewalker looked around at his less than won-over audience. He grinned sheepishly. “Look, you kicked those skellies asses. Obviously. I’d be more than happy to join your fraternity. If you’ll have me.”

  I felt a hand on my arm.

  “We talk, friend,” Rick rumbled in my ear.

  I nodded.

  “Wait here,” I told Flamewalker, and myself and my trio of frat brothers walked a little way away.

  “I’m not sold on this asshole, man,” Damien said as soon as we were out of earshot of Bradley. “You can’t trust high elves. All they care about are themselves. And the fact that Flamewalker’s family are basically the aristocracy here…”

  “I think that could work for us,” I said. “The guy owes us his life. Surely that counts for something?”

  Damien looked skeptical. I looked at Rick, but his craggy face gave nothing away.

  “Without blowing my own trumpet too much here,” Nigel said, “I’d be inclined to agree with Justin. I come from a fairly well-to-do magical family, and I can tell you that if there’s anything that carries any sort of weight among such families, it’s a life-debt.”

  “I think having someone high-born like Flamewalker batting for us is going to be good for the frat,” I said. “Especially as he owes us big time.”

  Damien cracked his knuckles. “Fuckin’ fine,” he said, “but I want that prick to know that he’s going to have to gain some serious brownie points before we accept him fully—definitely before I trust him.”

  I nodded. “Fair enough. How about we make him our ‘low-man’?”

  “What’s this low-man?” Rick asked.

  “It’s the guy in a frat who resides at the bottom of the barrel,” I explained. “Basically, he’s going to be our fraternity house-bitch. If he can stick it out for a while, then we’ll know he’s not just talking through his ass now. Everyone okay with that?”

  My frat brothers nodded.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s get back to the house. I could use a beer.”

  We sat out on the porch, watching the moon sink slowly toward the horizon. Below us, the town still slumbered. Apparently, magical explosions and spells flying about the place were par for the course as far as living in a wizarding community was concerned.

  “Guys,” Bradley said, after he had taken a long and grateful pull on his mead, “I really do appreciate you letting me stay—even if I have to play the role of this ‘low-man’ that you speak of.”

  “You do,” said Damien.

  Bradley nodded, taking the mild rebuke with good grace. “Still,” he said, “you know I was goddamn inferno. I tried to kill Justin.”

  I waved it away. I had a feeling that Flamewalker trying to off me was only the start of many confrontations to come.

  “I mean, I went full Crimson Titan on you, and you kept your cool…” Bradley said.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said, almost choking on my mead. “Crimson Titan?”

  “Shit,” Bradley said, suddenly looking like a man who’d been caught rubbing one out, “did I say that out loud?”

  Everyone on the porch laughed.

  “Who the hell is the Crimson Titan when he’s at home?” I asked.

  Bradley peeled off the label from his bottle of mead, held it between his fingers, and it flashed into flame and was gone. “The Crimson Titan,” he said, with the air of a man intent on ripping the band-aid off as quickly as possible, “is a superhero I made up, when I discovered that I could conjure that molten armor.”

  “How freakin’ old were you when you came up with the name?” Damien asked.

  “Uh, it was, uh, last week, actually,” Bradley said.

  The frat burst out laughing yet again. Rick’s applause was so slow it was like one of those ironic golf claps.

  “You’re a bigger nerd than all of us combined!” Nigel said.

  Bradley grinned, clearly stoked at this thawing of the general mood regarding himself.

  “That might be the truth,” he said, “but you know what else?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “I might make a goddamn incredible goulash. Can I tempt you boys? I’m not sure if it counts as dinner or breakfast, but I could sure eat.”

  This suggestion was greeted with much approval and we went inside so that Bradley could get cooking.

  While Bradley busied himself in the kitchen, I sat at the counter with another cold bottle of mead and mulled over my first day in the magical world. It had been one for the books, that much was certain—it was safe to say that there wasn’t any other time in my life where my day had ended in a fight to the death with a guy like Bradley Flamewalker, before having to take on a small army of animated undead.

  Hells bells, but that was a rush! I thought. If the rest of my magical career is anything like that, I doubt there’s going to be a dull moment.

  It felt nuts to think that, only that morning, I’d been sat in my uncle’s shop flicking disinterestedly through a spellbook that I’d thought had been a phony… My thoughts turned to my uncle, and I wondered how he was getting on. Wondered whether he had secretly known that this day would come, somehow?

  My exhausted brain flitted about, dwelling on whether or not there might be something to this whole Sex Mage thing that Chaosbane had mentioned.

  After all, I did sleep with Janet Thunderstone, and the next thing I know I’m laminating some unfortunate bastard across the walls with a Storm Bolt.

  I smiled to myself as I took another swig from my bottle of mead. How was I going to set out to prove whether or not I was a Sex Mage? There was only one way that I could see…

  The goulash was, as Bradley had promised, pretty damn good. The five of us sat around the table in the rather dilapidated dining room, drinking and eating and swapping tales about where we’d come from and how we’d come to be at the Academy.

  “I was always going to be sent to Mazirian,” Bradley said, through a mouthful of beef and carrot. “Without sounding like too much of a pompous ass, my family is one of the highest ranking in Avalonia, and our magical abilities stretch back generations. There was never any doubt that my path would bring me here.”

  “You failed at the whole not sounding like a pompous ass thing just then, you realize,” Damien said.

  Rick snorted into his goulash, sending a piece of pepper spinning across the table and onto my plate.

  “Thanks, Rick,” I said.

  “The same can be said of you and your family, can’t it, Windmaker?” Bradley said, pointing his fork in Nigel’s direction. “Thoug
h, of course, I believe that they perished in the Void Wars.”

  “What?” I looked up from my plate.

  Nigel had gone the same red color as his plate of goulash. He shook his head. “Maybe we can talk about this another time,” he mumbled.

  What the hell? Nigel’s whole family was wiped in this—this Void War, whatever that was? Guess I’m not the only orphan at the table.

  Bradley looked like he’d just realized what an insensitive thing this was to say. He scrambled for a save. “What about you, Damien?” he asked. “You were born here, but ended up in the human world?”

  “That’s right,” Damien said, and he launched into how he’d run away from home at the age of eight and somehow managed to slide between this world and Earth.

  I’d already heard how he’d come to run with that Los Angeles gang, and I tuned out for a while, lost in my own thoughts. My ear was recaptured however, when Rick said something about the Mage Games.

  “What’re the Mage Games?” I asked, mopping up some sauce with a chunk of bread.

  “The Mage Games,” Bradley said, “were brought in after the end of the Void Wars.” He spoke with the surety of someone who has been bred on history. “The hope was that the Mage Games would bring the different kingdoms together–weave a common thread through them–and prevent the growth of dissent among the general populace.”

  “Sounds like a noble goal, but what the hell are they?” I asked. “They sound like some sort of sport.”

  “You are right, friend,” Rick said, in his subterranean voice. He’d already demolished three helpings of goulash and was eyeing Nigel’s half-full plate intently. “They are games. Magic games. All the peoples of our world have their favorite teams, their favorite players. They’re played in elemental arenas—huge battlegrounds—and televised via drone to the world.”

  “Sounds like sports all right,” I said. “So, what, it’s like Quidditch or something?”

  Damien snorted at the look of puzzlement on Rick’s face. “Nah,” the Fire Mage said, “it’s more like college sports back in the States, you know? Fucking die-hard supporters and huge crowds on game day. There are four types of match in the Mage Games; Death Match, Capture the Flag, Monster Slaying, and Obstacle Course Race.”