Death's Mantle 2

by Harmon Cooper

  “So that’s another thing that could have happened. Sometimes they actually merge together; other times they are both present separately on a person’s body.”

  “Good to know. I appreciate your patience.” Lucian stood, and as he did he did something that he had never really attempted before. He placed his hands at his sides and bowed toward Yoshimi. “I hope I’m doing this right,” he said, his head still down.

  “You amuse me, Lucian,” was her only reply.

  “Okay, well, I’ll get out of your hair, with your hair clip. Sorry. I bet I’ll have other questions though, and once I do, I’ll be sure to give you a shout,” he said with a wave. “Also, I don’t know why you would ever need me for anything, but I am here if you do need me for something. So there.”

  Yoshimi stood, bowing to him as well. “I may take you up on that offer, Lucian.”

  Chapter Twelve: Potions, Potions, Potions

  Lucian started to float up into the air, where he crossed his legs beneath him. He hovered there, looking out at the lake that sat in front of his workshop.

  Sabre City was behind him now, all the buildings empty even though flying vehicles moved through the air. Surrounding the lake were acres upon acres of thick woods, a place Lucian had never ventured.

  His predecessor’s home was beneath his feet.

  Hugin and Munin buzzed around, both looking happy, if two spherical drones with beaks could look happy.

  “Anything?” he asked the two of them, referring to the search they had performed earlier in the library.

  He thought for a moment about giving Hugin the ability to speak but decided against it, not sure what kind of voice he would give his creation. Then again, he could always just take it away once his crow spoke to him…

  “Whose voice would you like?” he asked Hugin as he gazed at his crow.

  His crow did a backflip.

  He considered giving Hugin a feminine voice, but then Lucian always thought of his two crows as male, and he knew doing that would throw him off a little bit.

  A smile came to his face when he gave his crow the voice of Old Death, a bit haggard, ancient, and constantly teetering on the verge of collapse.

  “I can talk,” Hugin said, his beak moving. “How wonderful.”

  Munin looked to his counterpart, and made a gesture that reminded Lucian of a shrug.

  “Just temporarily,” Lucian told Hugin. “Now, did you find anything that would help me locate him?”

  “There are many interesting books in that library, some of which would interest you greatly, but we didn’t find anything that we thought would help. Cuthbert has taken extensive notes in some of the books, but nothing regarding a location he might have gone. There was also a notebook of insults he had written down.”

  “I figured as much,” Lucian said. “Maybe we should check around the South Wind. Maybe he didn’t go very far from there.”

  “That isn’t a bad suggestion. And he did like the desert. At least, I believe he said something to that effect. Perhaps we can check there.”

  “Which one? There are lots of deserts.”

  “He had a couple of books on the Gobi Desert,” Hugin explained, “one about an American who had traveled there in the early twentieth century, a man who the author claimed Indiana Jones was based upon.”

  “Some guy traveled to the Gobi Desert and they based Indiana Jones on him?”

  Lucian did what he would have done had he been alive. He pulled out his smartphone and typed in a question about who Indiana Jones was based on.

  He came to a page about a man named Roy Chapman Andrews, an archaeologist who had led expeditions through China and Mongolia in the early twentieth century, his expeditions famous for discovering fossilized dinosaur eggs.

  Lucian dropped to a sentence claiming that the movie wasn’t based on this man, that it was based on this archetype of an adventurer/archaeologist, although Chapman fit the bill.

  “Not quite,” he told Hugin, “but I see what you’re trying to say. Sorry to fact check you there,” Lucian said as he threw his phone over his shoulder, the device fizzling out of existence. “So Old Death was interested in deserts.”

  “I believe so,” Hugin said, still using Lucian’s predecessor’s voice. “Perhaps we could check the deserts.”

  “That’s some task,” Lucian said. “But it at least gives us a start. And if any of those assholes from the Committee come sniffing around here, I can say that I’m at least working on something, that I got a lead.”

  Lucian took away Hugin’s ability to speak, his crow nodding.

  He would have to decide later if he wanted his crow to speak to him all the time. It was a bit jarring, especially with the quiet he had grown used to, and choosing his predecessor’s voice was definitely not the way to go.

  As Lucian levitated, his legs still crossed beneath him, he began to change the color of the sky, darkening it, a purple hue running across everything above him as stars took shape.

  “Potions, potions, potions,” he said, recalling, or at least attempting to recall, exactly what Yoshimi had said about using his own power to make an elixir.

  But what would this elixir do?

  Lucian was still deciding that; he figured it could be handy to have one that, for example, doubled his strength, replenished his Soul Points, or one that made him twice as fast as he normally was. Then again, perhaps he could just give himself those skills with a wave of his hand.

  Still, part of him liked the idea of being able to down a potion and get a power.

  As much as he tried to get away from being a guy who had grown up playing too many video games, it was always part of him. Any gamer alive would love to be able to actually use potions to enhance their powers.

  And here Lucian was, in whatever his “life” could be considered, and he had the actual opportunity to make them.

  But how?

  He began with a beaker, which he quickly dropped, realizing it was a bit contrived.

  With a wave of his hand, a cauldron appeared in front of him, floating.

  “That’s more like it.”

  Curling his fingers, Lucian scooped up some of the water from the lake, depositing it into the cauldron, where it began boiling.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” he told Hugin, whom he felt was judging him. “Since when have you known me to do things the normal way?”

  Lucian sluiced his hand through the air. The water began to circle inside the cauldron, bubbles popping off it.

  As it did so, he stretched his palm out above the liquid and imagined his Soul Points coming through him, merging in his head and moving down his body, out the palm of his hand.

  Sparks and whirling bits of energy fell from his palm into the swirling water. It changed the color of the liquid, becoming black, thicker.

  “That did something,” Lucian said, looking at his stats. “A lot of something, by the looks of it.”

  “But we aren’t done here,” he said to his two crows. He imagined himself pressing even more power into the liquid. Once he figured he had done enough, he created a ladle.

  “Too much?” he asked Hugin, who nodded.

  Lucian banished the ladle and summoned a small glass bottle. He dipped it into the liquid and filled the bottle to the top.

  Once he was finished, he stepped down from the air, walking a few paces away from his kettle.

  “Here goes nothing,” he said as he threw it back, wincing at the sour flavor.

  His heart started to race.

  Lucian placed his hand on his chest, even though he knew he didn’t actually have a heart, feeling once again what he had felt so many times up until the point that he had died.

  A full-on panic attack came, Lucian getting down onto the ground, his heart beating so hard that he could feel it in his wrists, his breath shortening.

  “No,” he whimpered, laying his back on the ground, trying to steady his breath, to lower his heart rate as he relived his heart condition.
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br />   He began to feel lightheaded, his vision blurring, his two crows floating above him as his chest pulsed.

  The feeling went away and Lucian sat up, gasping.

  He began to spit up the black liquid, eventually crawling over to the lake and dipping his head under the water. He drank as much of the water as he could, and laid back, his hands on his stomach.

  “Don’t laugh at me,” he told his two creations, both of whom buzzed above him.

  Ezra the cat had joined them now, the feline perched under the floating cauldron, looking up at it as if he were judging if he could jump high enough to reach it.

  “I’ve got to try again,” Lucian told his companions as he levitated back into the air, crossing his legs beneath him.

  He focused on the cauldron for the second time, the water swirling within it, his hand over the surface of the liquid as energy poured out of him.

  Lucian had the notion to summon Yoshimi with her hair clip, but decided against it, figuring he would do it another time, that he needed to forge his own path.

  He had to be able to do these things on his own.

  He also needed to know more about the power he possessed, and he felt foolish for not digging deeper into it earlier. Then again, Old Death’s teaching style had mostly been for him to go around and figure it out himself, which had allowed Lucian to create without limitation, but he also didn’t quite know what he was doing.

  And he had a feeling, especially if he planned to become a hunter of Death Hunters, that he would need to know more about his power.

  He also needed to know how to locate other Deaths.

  This last notion was especially important. It seemed that anyone could locate Lucian when they wanted, but he could not locate them.

  Yet another thing he planned to ask Yoshimi.

  Lucian focused more energy into the cauldron, humming the theme music from a popular JRPG that had a particular tune that played when someone crafted a potion.

  “That should do it,” he said again as he checked his stats, seeing that he had poured another thousand Soul Points into it.

  Lucian shook his head.

  It was amazing how many points he still had left. He recalled the days when he was running around with less than two hundred points; how pathetic that seemed compared to where he was now.

  And he knew that he would grow stronger.

  It was inevitable, especially with the way he played…

  “It’s not a game,” he reminded himself as the glass container lowered into the cauldron, coming out with the black liquid inside it.

  But the system Lucian had devised, and the way he went about doing it, made it feel like a game at times.

  He lowered to the ground, this time stepping a little closer to the shoreline, the waves rippling toward him and then moving away, the twinkling stars above casting blips of dancing light on the surface of the water.

  Hugin and Munin lowered in front of Lucian, Hugin buzzing with worry.

  “It’s fine; I can’t die like this,” Lucian said, mostly for himself.

  He took a deep breath in, and threw the potion back.

  His arms exploded off his body, the air misting with blood.

  His heart wasn’t thrumming this time around, but he did feel like an idiot for what just happened. He also realized a fatal flaw in his experiment: if he had an actual stat sheet, he would be able to see what the potion did, if it actually did anything at all.

  But he didn’t, and he didn’t feel like making one at the moment.

  That was one thing Lucian hadn’t really introduced to his role.

  He’d never been the type of gamer that really looked at those things, unless he was trying to min-max something, and while he had built some of his Grim Reaper user interface from scratch, there were details he didn’t want to add to it, knowing that they would only distract him in the end.

  But without being able to check what the stuff did, aside from blowing off his arms, what good was it? And further, if he could create a potion that had a specific task, like doubling his strength or his speed, how would he tell it that? Also, how would he rate himself if he were to create a stat sheet?

  When he’d created weapons earlier, they just sort of took shape, Lucian having to do little aside from imbuing them with his imagination. Making potions apparently required more effort, and if not effort, more know-how.

  “Yoshimi,” he whispered to himself as he gave up on his project, the cauldron falling to the ground and shattering.

  After his arms reformed, Lucian turned his attention to the giant creation he was working on, which was situated to the left of the lake.

  He still had over seventeen hundred soul points left; he figured he would put as many of them into this newest creation of his as possible.

  He’d already crafted the legs and waist, so he started there at the next logical location, pouring his energy into the torso as locking mechanisms cascaded up the sides of his creation’s legs, merging over its inevitable stomach and doubling back down, the object growing stronger with each pass, more durable.

  Lucian did this until he was starting to feel lightheaded.

  As Ezra came over to him, weaving between his legs, Lucian slowly moved back to his workshop, where he crawled into bed.

  He thought about playing video games for a moment, but he ended up watching a rerun of a sitcom he had been a fan of as a child.

  It wasn’t the same now that he was Death.

  Chapter Thirteen: Hallucinations

  Lucian awoke, no dreams.

  He recalled Old Death telling him that he would have vibrant dreams in his new role, yet he never had them, or if he did, he could never remember them.

  He sat up, noticing that it was still dark outside. With just a thought the sun began to rise, its orange light reflecting off the lake.

  His crows were at the end of the bed, resting on a pillow, Ezra wrapped around them. The cat turned onto its back, curling its paws to its chest and looking adorable.

  It yawned as Lucian sat up, crossing his legs beneath him.

  A hot cup of coffee with just a touch of cinnamon appeared in his hand. He patted his lap, inviting Ezra to him.

  Lucian sipped his coffee as he looked out at the absolutely gorgeous view he was presented with every morning. The sunsets were equally stunning, Lucian never having lived in a place with such a fantastic view when he had been alive.

  It made him think for a moment about the people on Earth who could afford incredible views, what their perspectives must be like. The people waking up in a penthouse in Manhattan, or someone with a home with views of the mountains, or the ocean.

  It must have been nice.

  Once Lucian was done with his coffee, he walked out to what he considered his training area and equipped the ax he had received from Menor.

  It glowed with energy as he looked it over.

  Lucian threw it into the air, the ax’s handle slamming back down to the palm of his hand.

  “Just like Thor,” he said as he raised a pillar of stone from the lake.

  He hurled the ax at the pillar, the weapon cutting through it and returning to his hand. He shook his wrist out and the teeth on its bit appeared, gnashing, growing in size.

  “I wonder where he got this thing,” Lucian said, realizing that the former Death Hunter had probably created it. For some reason, it hadn’t disappeared with his body, perhaps because Lucian grabbed before its owner was officially dead.

  He raised a few more pillars from the water, cutting into each of them. He then threw the ax in a circular pattern, as if he were Mario throwing Cappie.

  “Woo-hoo,” Lucian said under his breath, mimicking Mario.

  He practiced with his weapon for a little bit longer, and then decided to do what he should have done last night, but had ended up expending too much energy fiddling around with elixirs and his newest creation, which was still resting to the left of the lake, awaiting Lucian’s next surge of energy.

&nbs
p; He pressed his thumb and pinky together and appeared at a coffee shop, where he saw Katy seated at a table with her friend, Julia.

  As Lucian focused on the two of them, their death dates appeared.

  Name: Julia Reynolds

  Date of Birth: 10/16/1995

  Date of Death: 08/07/2086

  Name: Katy Weston

  Date of Birth: 11/18/1994

  Date of Death: 10/24/2097

  “Did he ever say what he wanted? I mean, I know some people don’t want to talk about that kind of stuff, but sometimes…”

  “All Dad ever said was that he was going to win the lottery, and that he would probably die right after he won because he had pretty bad luck. But that he was going to make sure that he set it up in a trust fund for me.” Katy shuddered. “This just doesn’t seem real. I had literally just spoken to him, and sent him money. And…”

  “No,” Julia told her she took a sip from her coffee. “You told me.”

  “It just all came apart so quickly. It seems so surreal. And now…”

  “Did he leave you any debts?”

  “Actually, no.” Katy wore a big scarf even though it was warm inside, her cheeks red, Lucian wishing at that moment that he could reach out and comfort her. “I figured he would have, but he was renting his flat from a friend, and he stopped using credit cards years ago after he couldn’t get anymore because of his bad credit. I don’t think they could have come after me anyway, but at least he didn’t have that kind of debt. This has been a hard month or so,” she said. “First Lucian, now this.”

  “That’s right,” her friend said. “You went to his funeral, right?”

  “I did, and it was so sad. Sometimes I wonder if things would have been different had I been there.”

  “You shouldn’t think like that.”

  “No, I’m serious. How would things have been different if I was there to help him, to take care of him?”

  Julia frowned. “Lucian was a grown man; he could take care of himself.”