Mana Mutation Menace (Journey to Chaos Book 3)

by Brian Wilkerson

  “Well done,” the intercom said. “This is the first time you’ve reached this room as yourself instead of as Grendel. Please confirm this with the identity sign.”

  Grendel groaned and obliged. Lifting his right hand, he tapped out “Shave and a Haircut” on the wall.

  “Thank you, Mr. Watley. Please refrain from using your barrier in this room.”

  Grendel ran right through the crisscrossing beams, barely grimacing as they scorched and melted his skin. They left nasty marks, but he ignored them. Next, twin flamethrowers fired from either side and engulfed him. Like an orc, he emerged with only minor burns. The next obstacle was a row of spinning blades. Grendel stopped and used a wind spell to arrest their motion. Then he walked through unharmed.

  The final gate was enchanted with ordercraft runes. In response, he extended his soiléir claw and its chaotic tip gleamed. Then he thrust into the Lawful Shield guarding the door. The barrier buckled and dissolved under his power. With a roar, he shattered it. Laughing, he retracted the crystal into his body and soul.

  More golems awaited him. They stood guard around a cage in the center of the room that was further shrouded by force fields. Inside this cage lay Kallen, chained to the floor and quivering in pain. The sight enraged Grendel and he ran forward.

  The golems intercepted him and he bashed them without a care. He even used one as a club against the others. Electric shocks ripped screams from Kallen’s throat and incited Grendel to greater madness. So blind was he that he didn’t notice Kallen’s appearance flickering or her screams skipping.

  He pounded on the force fields with monstrous savagery. If he were thinking clearly, he would notice that the generators for the force field were to either side of the force field itself. Eric Watley would have seen them, evaluated them, and destroyed them, but Grendel decided on a different angle.

  Out of his mind by now, he invoked the power of death. Senescence flowed from his soul, through his hands, and into the floor. Its metal and electronics rapidly aged and rusted, corroding its spells into uselessness. A door opened and Talbot marched forward. He wore a suit of armor like a dragon.

  “Mr. Watley, control yourself. Your actions have consequences. Refraining from dark magic—”

  Grendel cut him off with a roar. Then he ran forward and tried to grab the threat with his left hand of death. Talbot nimbly avoided his hand and tripped his foot. Grendel sprawled face first. Talbot stood straight once again and continued, “—is one of the ways you prove your sapience.”

  Grendel jumped up and lunged again. Talbot ducked, sidestepped, and dodged all of them. Then he redirected a kick and again stole Grendel’s balance, and this time, he did not let the monster stand up. He stepped on its back with his dragon greaves. Grendel struggled. Talbot kicked him in the head. When at last Grendel forced him off with a spirit blast, Talbot merely jumped back and prepared a mana bolt. He fired just as Grendel stood, knocking him immediately on his ass.

  “Subject failed. End simulation.”

  The remaining golems deactivated and the force fields around Kallen disappeared as well. Kallen herself vanished. Grendel looked on in confusion. He quickly came to the conclusion that, because Kallen was not within his sight, Talbot must be tormenting her somewhere else. He snarled and rose to attack again.

  “Eric, stop!”

  A door opened and Kallen entered. Unfettered and unharmed, she sprinted to him and hugged him. At once, peace filled him. Talbot made no move against either one of them, so he couldn’t be a threat anymore. Eric settled for hostile looks at the armored human.

  “As we thought, he can’t tell the difference between the real thing and a fake,” Talbot said. “Someone could use that against him.”

  “Don’t talk about Eric like he’s not here!” Kallen shot back. “Besides, that was a high-level illusion. If I were in Eric’s place, I would have fallen for it too.”

  “You did,” Talbot reminded her. “We still have the footage.”

  Kallen took a breath and squeezed Eric to send more positive waves into him. He was still in grendel form. She gestured and he leaned forward. She whispered the poem in his ear and his head returned to human form, but nothing else did.

  “I just can’t do it. The grendel is too strong.”

  “Eric, I tell you this every time—there is no grendel. There is only you and your perceptions.” She knocked on his skull. “There is no one in here except you yourself.”

  “It’s savage and hungry and horny! I’m nothing like it! I’m just cursed with the ability to take its shape. It’s like the universe is accusing me of fratricide.”

  Eric’s body shifted. His bones shrank, his muscle mass decreased, and his skin transformed from the ambiguous metal to flesh. In a flash of light, his clothes reappeared. These were a gift from Kallen, or more appropriately, a gift from Dnnac Ledo that Kallen arranged for him to receive. A full set of clothes that would change their size and shape and even appear and disappear into a hyperspace pocket depending on his current state; such a thing was easy for the elves. Given the trade embargo, it was much harder for Kallen to get it out of the village.

  Now human, he shifted his right arm into that of a grendel and then back again. Then his left arm and back again. He did this for each part of his body, except for his head. He did several parts at once, but his head was never in the combination. Finally, he transformed every part of himself, but his head remained human.

  “Why isn’t this good enough?”

  “A family is walking down the street,” Talbot said. “Two parents and a child. One of them does something, anything, that sets you off. Because of this, you bite their head off. While the survivors are crying, the city guard is hunting you down. You kill more of them before they put you down. That is why it’s not good enough.”

  Eric scowled at him.

  “Mr. Watley, you asked for a goal; something you could achieve to prove to me that you are not dangerous. I have given you what you wanted.”

  “But Uncle Talbot—”

  “Stop calling me that. I have a job to do and I take my job seriously. If just one life is lost because of my leniency, then that blood is on my hands. That is why I am serious.”

  “Yes, sir...”

  Tasio appeared in a poof.

  “You’d think for a girl with three heads, she could come up with something better.”

  “What’s he talking about?” Eric asked.

  “It’s nothing!” Kallen said. “Or rather, it’s something, but it’s nothing you need to worry about now. I’ll tell you later. It will be a surprise.”

  Tasio shrugged and disappeared.

  Kallen walked over to Talbot and talked to him about something in a hushed tone. Before he could eavesdrop, Eric was pulled away by the scientists for more tests.

  Over the month or so since he woke up in the medical tank, there had been no end to the tests, experiments, and evaluations. Now that he could transform parts of his body into a grendel, they could finally confirm that, yes, he was indeed a grendel. In retrospect, it was obvious. When his body transformed, his cells would naturally transform along with them. He looked human because his DNA was human. When he looked grendel, it was because his DNA was grendel. There was something else that facilitated the change.

  Everyone agreed that this “something else” was chaos. After all, it was a lesser form of chaos that transformed him in the first place. Mana was constantly flowing through everyone and everything and it was chaos itself that built and sustained the universe. So far, it had proven difficult to pinpoint exactly where this chaos existed in him, but they were not about to give up.

  They measured his strength and compared it to orcs’. They measured the durability of his metal skin and compared it to dragons’. They determined his body could survive in the Arctic cold unassisted for much longer than a human’s could. They took every sort of sample of every part of his grendel form (Up to and including peeing in a cup. It was more like a bucket.) and studied th
em to find out what made him tick. They even remodeled a certain room to flash every notch on the light spectrum in order to determine exactly what a grendel looked like.

  Groundbreaking data came in every hour. In the three weeks since Eric’s first voluntary transformation, new ideas about mana mutation were proposed and old ideas gained the strength of theories. The scientists were thrilled and referred to this month as the Miracle Month of Medical Mana Mutation Discovery. For Eric, it was one of the worst months of his life.

  Some of the tests had been painful, some invasive, and some annoying or boring. He made his complaints, and while they were heard and noted, they accomplished nothing. Talbot simply told him to grin and bear it for the sake of posterity; it was one of the “safety hoops” he had to jump through. Worst of all, he still couldn’t contact his guild or anyone in it. All he could do was speak with Kasile over their private line. What he heard made the month even worse.

  She talked non-stop about Lunas. How kind he was and how wise and noble; it was sickeningly sweet. More worrying than that was how she agreed with everything he said and put it into her policies. She had become a puppet queen and she didn’t realize it. While he endured yet another chill test, he talked to her again and she mentioned marriage. The only reason there wasn’t a ring on her finger at that very moment was Siron’s intervention.

  It was the final straw. Now was time to leave.

  Eric dashed to the airship hangar and Kallen’s Albatros IX. Not bothering with his newly re-learned politeness, he opened the door mid-step. In the main area of the ship, Emily stood straight without her shirt while Kallen healed a wound on her stomach. At the sound of Eric’s entrance, she turned red and grabbed her shirt.

  “Don’t grendel knock?!”

  “Why are you covering up? According to my human memories, I’ve already seen everything under there.”

  “JERK!”

  She gut-punched him and stomped into the cabin. Eric stepped back from the force of the blow and was momentarily winded, yet his instincts did not label her as a threat. This puzzled him. When he recovered, he asked Kallen a silent question.

  “She was coming back from assignment in the Tangogese Swamp.” Kallen wiped up purple stuff from the spot were Emily stood. "There was a gash from plolantic that was I curing.”

  Eric shrugged. “Okay. Right now, I need your help with a different sort of monster.”

  Kallen sighed and mopped up the rest of the mess. “No matter how much you may dislike him, Talbot is not a monster.”

  “I’m not talking about him. Lunas proposed to Kasile.”

  Kallen stopped cleaning and gaped in alarm. “Are you serious?!”

  “Yes. She’d be engaged right now if it weren’t for Siron.”

  Instead of disposing the towel into a waste bin or laundry hamper, she just burned it with a fire spell. She was on her feet and at the door before her next words left her mouth.

  “We gotta stop that right now!”

  “Exactly, which means I need to get out of here pronto. Which means I need to convince Talbot to let me out. Which means I need to know anything that could help me stay in control during a full transformation. Tasio implied that you know what I need.”

  Suddenly, Kallen was bashful and hesitant.

  “Kallen!”

  Kallen turned away from him. “He... He wants me to show you my chimera form, my true form, the one I pick up in the Siduban Chaos Explosion. I don’t do that for just anyone.”

  “Why not?”

  Kallen hugged herself. “It’s a reminder of the worst time of my life. You may think you have it bad, but it’s nothing compared to what I went through.”

  The quiver of her voice stirred the grendel; not to eat or to fight but to protect. Rationally, Eric knew that he couldn’t protect Kallen from her memories, but he was itching to take some kind of action. Seeing Kallen emotionally vulnerable was a baffling experience.

  “I was a damsel in distress, but there was no knight to save me because I was treated like a dragon. There were no laws to protect me so they did whatever they wanted to me. If I told you half of what they did, you’d try to kill all of them for being threats.”

  Her body melded and shifted. It grew bigger and broader. Fur and scales replaced bare flesh in but a few random spots. Fungus that he’d only seen growing in a chaotic zone grew in her and on her. Patches of her form gleamed as if with radiation. From this chaotic mass grew four heads: a goat with green fur, a dragon with golden brown scales, a lion with silver grey fur, and a black and white snake extending from her rear. The human head was gone.

  “This is what happened to me,” the goat head said. “This is my true form. I am not human. I am a chimera.”

  “By the blessing of Lady Chaos, I was empowered,” the dragon head said. “Now I can continue my parents’ work.”

  “By the curse of Lady Chaos, I lost everything,” the lion head said. “I must find my little sister and cure her.”

  “They can’t make up their minds,” the snake head said. “By the way, it’s been a while since hablo espanol contigo. There are few forms that allow me to speak directly to mortals. Usually, I have to use tricksters, Y that’s like playing telephone, except when they’re doing it deliberately, wakari masen. Wakari mas ka?”

  “No, I don’t understand that. In fact, I don’t understand any of this.”

  Despite its fearsome appearance, Eric didn’t consider the chimera to be a threat. It was still Kallen and Kallen was not a threat.

  “My three forward heads represent three facets of myself,” the goat head explained. “The snake tail thinks it’s Lady Chaos. I think it’s my religious nature or my imagination. It never makes sense, so I ignore it.”

  “Sumimasen, Kallen. For me, time and space are things that happen otra hambra, so I don’t have the same frame of reference that you do. Coko des ka?”

  Kallen’s chimera body receded. Despite protests from the snake, her human form returned. Her clothing returned as well. She too possessed elven clothing to keep her expenses down. There was no indication that she had been a four-headed chimera moments ago. To Eric, she hadn’t changed at all. She was still Kallen.

  “I like your true form.”

  “Thanks...” She stroked her hair once. “The point is that they are all me. Who I am does not change between forms because my soul stays the same and so my mind stays the same. Kallen the chimera is not different from Kallen the human because both have the same memories and experiences. It’s what I’ve been telling you. The grendel is not some alternate personality that you need to suppress or accept. It’s just you as you are right now.”

  “Then why has my behavior changed? Why do I think differently?”

  “Because you have changed. Nothing chaos touches stays the same. Since coming to this world, it has changed you twice, and believe it or not, the second one is the lesser of the two.”

  “Really? I’d like to hear this argument.”

  “A monster is functionally the same as a mercenary; killing for food. In your case, money to buy food. You protect your family. You are not malicious in your job. You require mana to live and be effective. The only thing that’s truly changed is physical appearance. Tell me that your transformation from Eric Watley of Threa to Eric Watley of Tariatla was less radical in your change of behavior and I’ll drop it.”

  “Assuming I believe all that, how do we convince Talbot?”

  “Like this.”

  Kallen knocked on the door of each of the leading scientists involved with Eric’s case; loudly and passionately until they got out of bed and answered the door. The especially stubborn or heavily sleeping were visited by The Trickster.

  Due to the late hour, they were all irritated, but Kallen put on the charm, explained her plan, and encouraged them to brag. Despite losing sleep to her actions, they were excited to receive recognition. They wanted to confirm Eric safe as much as Eric himself did. One does not embark on an impossible task involving dangero
us creatures just to make money. They were idealists looking for a cure, they were Chaosists, Orderists, or Noitearcans on a holy cause, nerds who thought the field to be fascinating, or adventurers who decided to get respectable but wanted to hang on to their lifestyle.

  Kallen gathered the disparate disciplines together and they formed their argument. Then, they pulled Talbot from his bed in order to present their findings. When he, in his grogginess, protested that it could wait until morning, Kallen countered that it was Eric’s freedom on the line and that he himself wouldn’t want to wait if the situation were reversed. Grudgingly, he put on his uniform and sat behind his desk.

  The thesis of the presentation was that Eric stood as a stable and mentally healthy individual who was not a threat to anyone. To prove this, they put forward five points. The first was that there was no anger or malice in his monster mindset and instead there was only responses to threats, food, and obstacles. The second was that his response to threats was heavily conditioned by the rules of his guild. The third was that he was not sexually a threat to anyone because of his new mindset. The fourth point was that he was not a culinary threat to anyone because of his ability to survive on mana alone. The fifth was Kallen’s own record of behavior.

  The lack of maliciousness in monsters was a long-proven fact. Monsters could feel anger but could not direct it towards anything in particular; they were too stupid for that. When they attacked, it was because they were hungry, felt threatened, or they simply felt like it. In any case, there was no need to fear that Eric would attack someone who called him a derogatory name, at least not any more than they had to fear from any other sapient. On the contrary, Eric’s threat response would be a judgment call, just as any sapient’s would, and this judgment was guided by the rules of the Dragon’s Lair charter.

  The Mother Dragon insisted on a code of conduct for her “children” to ensure they behaved themselves. This code included rules of self-restraint such as “never kill the client” and a sense of professionalism such as “we are professionals, not mongrels.” It also fostered a sense of communal cooperation and well-being that transcended blood and race such as “the guild shall be our home and everyone in it shall be family.” This nicely coincided with the pack mentality sometimes found in cohesive monster groups. They believed these rules to be hard-wired into Eric’s brain with Eric no more able to disobey Ridley the Dragoness (in her capacity as the leader of the guild) than a bee would the queen of its hive.