by Harry Nix
As he was checking, he realized he should start naming things properly. Sex magic was only called that because that’s what Juno called it. But then he thought of them as mana, not magic. The blue bar didn’t even have a name, either.
He’d stopped programming the game only recently but already he was getting sloppy.
Alex brought up his homebrew healing spell and had another read through it. He was fairly certain it wasn’t to blame for the silver in his eyes – after all his hand had metal in it and he hadn’t used the spell then. But something was clearly happening with his eyes and he didn’t want to wake up in the middle of the night screaming as silver decided to start burning again.
He closed the healing spell and brought up Know Thyself, the very first spell he’d learned
Working quickly, he began compressing it, folding it over on to itself. At first it was easy but soon it felt like he was pushing heavy weights. He began to feed mana into it as he went, and it grew easier again.
He had to use a significant jolt of red sex magic to hit Know Thyself 50x. Then he made a new one, repeating the process until he had another. That exhausted most of the red.
Pushing the two 50x spells together was like trying to move a mountain. Alex started dropping bursts of pain into it.
Finally he grit his teeth and pushed. For a moment he felt like his skin would split and then suddenly the two spells collapsed together. As it did, it gulped down what was left of the red sex magic, all the pain and some of the nature. He had the sliver of death remaining, a bit of blue and what was left of the green.
“Okay, maybe that's enough,” April said from beside him, sensing what he was doing.
Alex had up his status screen and was looking at his eyes. There was no new useful information there.
With his mana dropping rapidly from powering the spell, Alex glanced over the rest of the screen.
Active spells:
Great Barrier
Know Thyself 100x
Alex frowned. He knew the Great Barrier was a spell, but it had never appeared in his list of active spells before.
He looked at it, curious, and his desire to know what it was manifested itself. The spell opened up.
Normally a spell would be compressed gibberish that he’d need to crack with more power but the Great Barrier was readable code, with no compression on it.
A new screen opened and code spiraled down it. Alex felt a pain in his lungs as a deep and ancient cold settled there. The Great Barrier was millions of pages, maybe billions. It was libraries on top of libraries with uncountable books within.
“What was that?” April asked in alarm.
Alex started flicking through the code, looking for anything that made sense. His mana was dropping precipitously now to keep the code open.
“I need some more mana. Can you get Juno and Nia?” he said as calmly as possible.
April paused, unwilling to leave his side but then bolted out the room calling for them.
Alex kept scrolling, opening up a new window ready to copy. But he’d reached his limit, his homebrew fireball spell taking up space. He cleared it away without a second thought.
Juno came racing into the room with Nia and April behind her, a look of panic on her face but then stopped short when she saw Alex was sitting there unharmed.
“What magic handkerchiefs out of the butt stuff are you getting into now?” she demanded.
“I can see the code of the Great Barrier. I can read the spell,” Alex said.
That shut Juno up. She stood there with her mouth half hanging open, a shocked expression on her face.
Alex's mana was almost gone now.
“Need any mana you can give me,” he said.
Immediately, April touched his arm and started pouring mana into him as fast as she could. She grabbed Juno by the arm, snapping her out of her shock.
“Feel what he's doing!” April said.
Juno put her hand on him and poured mana through it. Nia touched both April and Juno, so they could draw on her too.
Alex found the code suddenly turned to long strings of numbers and digits. One even looked familiar, maybe it was the code he thought meant werewolf? There was no time to check now. He started copying as fast as he could while trying to draw on the magic around them to keep the spell open.
It wasn’t long before Juno and April dropped their hands away, their magic exhausted.
All of Alex’s mana was gone now, the green consumed and then the tiny sliver of death. The blue dropped to empty. The pain was extraordinary, a roaring agony and wounds opened up and down his arms. Alex was still drawing on the magic around him and saw the pain magic bar flickering. He was feeding on his own pain and it hurt badly but there was a sweet seduction to it, just like he’d experienced at the Corvus outpost. He could see why they cut themselves and used the pain to cast powerful magic.
“Alex, stop!” April yelled.
But he couldn’t. He kept flicking through the code, trying to copy parts of it to study later. The pain was growing and wounds opened on his face. Juno and Nia were yelling but it was a distant roar.
He flicked to a new page and there, jammed in amongst the code was an image. He copied it and it came straight across.
Then he let the spell go, the relief overwhelming.
Alex came back to himself to find the three girls still yelling at him.
“I’m okay,” he whispered through cracked lips. He didn’t even have enough power to cast Know Thyself right now. He just kept drawing on the magic, letting it heal his body.
“Do you want to explain why you did this to yourself? What could possibly be worth it?” April said.
She was furious, maybe even more than Juno and Nia.
He tried to concentrate on what she was saying but he couldn’t look away from the image he’d copied.
On it was a giant ball of light, like the sun, rays coming down to touch the backs of countless werewolves. Some of them had their arms up and their heads back, as though they were howling in joy. Others were hunched over in pain.
Alex wasn’t sure what exactly the image was showing.
Was this magic pouring down upon the werewolves? Or was it being taken from them?
Epilogue
Another abandoned building in the Baxter industrial district. This one hadn’t been used for a long time; the piles of materials had mostly been washed away so the golems that formed were muddy and poorly defined.
“Prince,” the vampire said and then looked down at his body. The spell was doing its best to model a patterned waistcoat but with limited materials it was mostly a mess.
“Great, I wear this amazing suit and look at this! Can’t we sometimes meet in nice locations? Or at least get some colored sands dumped in here?”
“Eric,” a golem said, stepping out of the shadows.
“Henry,” said another.
Henry and Eric stood there staring at Prince, radiating disapproval.
He waved them away. “Yes, what is it? Implementation of the plan not quite sticking to your ideal?”
“The frog was a bit much, don’t you think?” Eric said.
“Almost burning them to death in a sealed cabin was a bit much, don’t you think?” Prince said back. He then turned to Henry.
“It was a nice move with the water balloons though. Very well done.”
“That wasn’t me.”
“Well, it worked out nicely anyway.”
Eric started pacing, bits of his golem falling off and rejoining as he moved. If they wanted to use this meeting place again they’d have to arrange for some clay at least to be dropped here.
“Jasper is dead and Alex has the territory now. His pack is growing quickly. We need to keep the pressure up, or he might just decide to stay wild and live out there. Ideas?”
“Attack his father-in-law’s pack. Familial tie, dead werewolves. Now that Alex is out in the open there is a case for destabilizing the packs again, yes?” Henry said. He waved and
a muddy chair formed behind him but then broke to pieces, the spell unable to hold the materials together. He sighed and remained standing.
Eric turned to Prince who was standing with his arms crossed.
“Tell us,” he said.
“I don’t know if you’re ready for this level of idea.”
The vampire was still annoyed about being chastised over Bailey. The others had seen this plenty of times before though so they just waited him out.
“Fine. As much as we vampires love the sociopolitical pressure cooker stuff and indirect forces, time is of the essence. If Alex is still considering retiring to the countryside and living a peaceful life we must disabuse him of that notion immediately. We need direct action.”
Eric rolled his eyes at Henry at Prince paced. The vampire always loved the dramatic and setting up shocking statements in particular.
“What kind of direct action?” Eric finally said.
“It’s simple. We need to kill one of his wives.”
About the Author
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More crazy harem, mages and werewolf stuff coming!
Cheers,
Harry
www.galacticroyale.com