The Enchanter (Project Stellar Book 2): LitRPG Series

by Roman Prokofiev

  “But if they all died, how do you know all this?” I asked.

  Evyl and Gnarl exchanged quick glances.

  “Because I was there,” Gnarl said. “Not in person. I sent my digital lookalike to the meeting – my virtual clone. So I saw all that with my own eyes.”

  Kai spat out a blob of blood. “What a bunch of crap. The meeting was filmed, and we still have the surviving fragments of the original footage.”

  “Which is Stellar’s fabrication. To doctor something like that is a five-minute job for any Technomancer. It’s just that there’s a certain truth you’re forbidden to believe.”

  “Yeah, sure. You’re dead right there,” Kai said with a sarcastic nod. “You’re the ones who fabricated the footage in order to appear holier than thou. Nothing new there.”

  ‘You’re right. I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know – and neither can you. He’s got his evidence right here,” Gnarl touched his own temple, his watchful stare drilling a hole in me.

  I think he meant what he’d just said. He probably believed every word of it. Still, there was one tiny little detail that betrayed his true intentions. The Possessed had demanded I disable my cogitor – but they hadn’t exacted the same demand from Kai. Which meant that all their promises to set my friends free were a lie to begin with. They had no intention of letting them live: they knew my friends wouldn’t make it back to the nearest Stellar terminal.

  “Evyl, start preparing him,” Gnarl went on. “Listen, Grey, I’m going to remove the collar now and inject you with Umbra. It might hurt a little. You’ll have to grin and bear, I’m afraid.”

  Evyl ripped the Lorica cuirass off me, then peeled off my jumpsuit top. The collar clicked open, freeing me from its freezing grip. In the meantime, Gnarl was performing cautious manipulations with the Umbra receptacle, preparing to inject me with it in the solar plexus. Right into my Source. I still had a few seconds before that happened – giving me one last elusive chance to change something.

  My Azure was at zero. But the Leader of the Pack was a passive ability, wasn’t it? Unbeknown to everyone, my psionic perception still worked: I could sense Gnarl’s powerful, icy-cold mind and could feel the flow of hatred coming from Evyl. I felt the frustration in Kai’s mind trapped within his collar, and Alice’s barely kindling consciousness...

  Further! I had to go further.

  My psi-field gingerly reached out to the drowsy hatchling within the safety of his egg, touching him with its gentle fingers. The baby was ready to hatch; all he needed was a tiny effort, just a tiny little push...

  “I can sense mental activity!” Evyl said anxiously. “That’s him—”

  Too late, lady.

  The powerful psi-impulse had instantly awoken the sleepy hatchling. I sensed his mind reaching out trustfully to me, impatient to break free.

  As if in slow motion, I saw Gnarl and Evyl turn to face the egg which was erupting in a series of cracks as my mind came into resonance with the baby’s. Silently I screamed my head off, appealing to him,

  “Wake up! Arise!”

  The egg exploded, showering everything around with precious glittering shrapnel. The blast rendered everyone blind for a second. A circular wave of A-energy — so powerful you could physically sense it — rolled away from it, leaving everything in its wake surging with blue charges of A-energy: the grass, the ruins, the Rogues and the surviving cyberwargs, the Possessed... and the three of us too.

  The surge hit us like a million-volt electric charge, instantly knocking our souls out of our bodies. My Azure meter immediately filled to the brim. A human body just couldn’t survive that kind of impact.

  Activation No 32

  I opened my eyes. The baby chick’s birth had stunned or killed everyone around. The Rogues lay on the ground like scattered dolls. Gnarl had frozen mid-motion like a jammed mechanism, his body surging with tiny crackling discharges. Evyl lay at her mentor’s feet, her body hunched at an unnatural angle.

  The newborn chick stood but a few paces away from us. Big-headed and yellow-eyed, covered in glittering white fluff, he stood awkwardly on unsteady legs, trying to spread his rudimental wings. I hadn’t expected him to be so huge. How had he fit inside the egg at all?

  The chick craned his long neck, opened his beak and emitted a thin, ear-rending squeak.

  I was free from my collar. My Azure stocks were maxed out. My enemies were out cold. The hatching of the chick had given me a second chance, and I jumped at it.

  Speck of Ra! Reinforcements with Light!

  The straps of leather binding my hands exploded in flames, singeing my wrists, but I didn’t care. Pushing myself upward from the wall, I kicked the frozen Gnarl in the chest with my both feet, aiming to bring him to the ground. As if! I might have just as well kicked a cast-iron monument. He didn’t even budge.

  Weapons! Where were our weapons? I scanned the area desperately for our gear while trying to set Kai free. His host had died too, unable to survive the A-wave – but he couldn’t resurrect because of the collar’s Al-field blocking all incoming Azure.

  I cast Reinforcements with Light on my hands, and the metal of his collar crumbled in my grip like old plastic. As soon as it was removed, Kai opened his eyes. I was about to help him to his feet – but instead, he gave me a sharp tug, throwing me to the ground.

  The blue flash of an impulse charge burned a hole in the stone wall right above our heads. Our enemies were coming round too. Gnarl stirred with a deep sigh, scrambling to his feet. Evyl darted toward us, pointing her pulse gun.

  Then she died. A lithe black shadow blocked her path, intercepting Evyl in one powerful lunge. Alice’s bonds lay ripped on the ground next to her broken collar. The giant Azuric beast in his serrated onyx hide pinned Evyl to the ground and gutted her instantly like a straw doll.

  No idea what might have caused him to show up. Whether it was the rise of the Black Moon in its glowing corona, or the surge of Azure which had accompanied the hatching of the chick – but the Beast was back, as large as life and twice as ugly.

  Evyl’s hot blood splattered all over us. With a despondent cry, Gnarl hurried to her help, trying to wrestle her body from the monster. He even managed to do so: I watched in amazement as he sent a wheezing Beast flying through the air. Still, the monster immediately tensed and lunged back at Gnarl, scooping him up in his claws.

  The air reverberated with Gnarl’s desperate screams. The two became a hissing, wailing knot of flesh as the Azuric monster got busy ripping Gnarl apart ignoring the damage to his own body.

  The bleeding lump of raw meat next to them transformed back into Evyl as she reincarnated. She tried to scramble back to her feet... but right now, Gnarl was tied up fighting the Beast, and we were a mere couple of paces away from her.

  Once free, Kai moved fast, incredibly so. It was probably his cogitor guiding him. He made full use of the few grace moments that the arrival of the Beast had granted us. My Rat gun dropped into my grip; the transparent blade of Gerda’s Frost glinted in his own.

  Evyl tried to fight back but she was too slow: her new host body was not a patch on the one she used to have. We attacked her from both sides, leaving her no fighting chance. I blinded her with a Flash, then watched as her body in its flowing blue robes rose into the air, pierced by Kai’s desperate lunge which turned her into a frozen ice statue.

  I emptied an entire clip into her, reinforcing one of the slugs with Light and activating a Flash once it was already inside Evyl’s crumbling body. Take that, lady!

  What once used to be the host body of Evelynn Mail smashed to smithereens. Its tiny icy fragments melted in mid-flight, showering us with a spray of bright red.

  A few squiggly blood marks left on the grass was all that was left of Evelynn Mail. I checked the place but couldn’t find the slightest trace of Umbra. Which could only mean one thing: we’d dealt her the ultimate lethal blow.

  A new message confirmed my suspicions:

  Judge: mission upd
ated. Criminals eliminated: 2/10.

  As for the Beast, he’d finally found his match in combat. At first I thought that Gnarl didn’t stand a chance, simply because the monster’s indecent regeneration levels allowed him to ignore any amount of incoming damage. The creature was bent on sinking his teeth and claws into his opponent, trying to maul and rip him apart at any cost. But he wasn’t really succeeding: the ancient Technomancer proved much sturdier than he looked. I watched in disbelief as he ignored the monster’s teeth and claws, literally tearing him apart with his bare hands, punching right through the Beast’s onyx armor.

  Finally, an ear-shattering choking scream hung in the air. Gnarl shrugged the Beast’s mauled body aside. The monster wasn’t dead yet: he simply couldn’t die, his wounds closing as I watched. Still, Gnarl was in no mood for playing a merciful winner.

  My heart clenched when I saw the purple glint of the Lash of Void flash through the air. Alice’s body may have been indestructible, but that didn’t apply to the two souls trapped inside.

  Gnarl went in for the kill. The flow of energy was so thick you could actually see it, and it kept growing. The Azuric lasso sank into the agonizing monster’s flesh, surrounding him with a halo of forking discharges. The Beast howled and croaked, pierced by the Voids’ countless attacks. He couldn’t die for a long time; I thought I could make out Alice’s agonizing groans in the echoes of his desperate screams.

  “Kai, come quick!”

  We both took our chance, attacking Gnarl from two sides: me with Fang and the Rat gun, Kai with his late wife’s sword.

  Gnarl swung round to face us. The purple lasso in his hands had already expired. The smoking lump of what used to be the Beast crashed to the ground.

  I kept firing at point blank but he didn’t even seem to notice. Even reinforced with the fire of Ra, my expanding bullets didn’t seem to deal him much damage.

  He'd lost his long headdress in combat, and now his blue cape hang open too, revealing the body below in all its horrendous glory. I was staring at the face of a deadman almost devoid of flesh. Now I could see why the surge of Azure had knocked him out for several seconds: his body was just too synthetic. His host must have been hundreds of years old; he was basically a living dead stuffed with a plethora of cyber parts.

  I stared at the horrendous tangled knot of steel and dead flesh coursing with the glittering iridescent flow of Umbra which seemed to have replaced both this creature’s soul and his blood. The sight was so nauseating that I knew straight away I wasn’t going to “embrace” this substance despite all their stories and promises. This... this simply couldn’t be benign.

  “You killed Evie,” Gnarl said.

  It sounded like a death sentence.

  All of the Incarnators I’d ever met or come across, whether dead or alive, seemed to value quality gear and weapons above all else. They all sported high-class bionic armor. Gnarl, however, didn’t seem to care. He'd never had any weapons on him or wore anything other than his flimsy blue cape. Now I knew why.

  His modified body, with only a token amount of flesh still clinging to it, was both his armor and his weapon. Now it was transforming before my very eyes, shielding him with a layer of black armor and shaping him into something decisively non-human.

  During my brief stint in this world, I’d already seen an impressive amount of most unspeakable shit. And still he’d managed to surprise me. The Chthonic abomination that towered before us just proved how limited my ideas really were. The four-armed Lion Face hadn’t even scratched the surface.

  He resembled a cross between the mythical Naga serpent and a Tarantula tank. This was worse than any of the Azuric entities I’d come across. Only his head and his torso remained unchanged, albeit touched by decay.

  Powerful pulse guns slid out over his shoulders, looking like the fighting legs of a praying mantis. His lower body had turned into a swirling knot of fat segmented metal tentacles topped with sharp four-digit pincers.

  I finally thought of reactivating Miko to help us. Gnarl swayed toward us, pelting us with a hail of pulse gun fire.

  Kai promptly conjured up a force shield – but Gnarl’s attack proved to be a decoy. His lithe tentacles slid around the shield and hit Kai in the back, piercing his body and ripping him to shreds.

  A blob of blood was all that was left where he’d just stood. A four-digit pincer squashed my friend’s severed head in its grip, sending a brief flash of Azure all around.

  Kai’s consciousness, which only a moment ago had been shining so bright next to mine, erupted in an agony of pain, then shut down. I couldn’t sense his presence anymore.

  “Dead,” Gnarl croaked in a metallic voice, towering over me. “Just like that other bitch.”

  I kept squeezing the trigger but it clicked impotently: I’d run out of ammo. I launched another Flash but they seemed to have no effect on him in the slightest. His steely tentacles hit me like attacking snakes, impaling me and pinning me to the ruins by my shoulder and both arms. I screamed, unable to hold back the pain, trying in vain to break free.

  Gnarl moved closer to me and leaned down to face me from his enormous height. He seemed to be bent on finishing what he’d started. He was holding the black cartridge containing Umbra; the purple light at the end of the Lash of Void glowed stronger with every passing moment.

  “You stupid fool. I just want to—”

  An ear-rending whizzing sound tore through the air, drowning out his words. I heard the thunderous flapping of giant wings. A colossal shadow blocked out the stars, the clouds and the glow of the Black Moon. A crashing gust of wind scattered us over the ground.

  The forgotten chick squawked desperately in the grass nearby. A furious bellowing screech answered his call from above.

  The Roc! He'd come to rescue his baby!

  He dropped upon us out of the blue — literally. His giant claws scooped Gnarl up, smashing his metallic tentacles and turning him into a deformed lump of junk. The bird then turned his attention to me, cleaving me in two uneven halves with his deadly accurate beak.

  I received a message saying that my Integrity had been compromised. Still, the remaining 42% was still plenty to reincarnate.

  “Grey, that would be a highly improvident thing to do!”

  Miko was right. I should play dead, really. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me that the Roc knew how to fight Incarnators. He switched his attention back to Gnarl now, ripping him apart in a cacophony of squawking, banging and screeching.

  Gnarl too must have realized that trying to resist the monster was pretty pointless. After all, he too could always restore his host’s body once his tribulations were over. Still, his host’s non-organic nature played a bad joke on him. The Roc made quick work of him, ripping him apart and scattering his body parts over a large area, screaming furiously all the while.

  Once he was done wreaking revenge, the monster uttered a totally different sound. The newly-hatched chick heard it and replied, peeking out of the undergrowth. He climbed up the Roc’s proffered wing and buried himself deep into the fat plumage of his dad – or was it his mom?

  The Roc took off. After a brief while, his winged silhouette disappeared into the night sky.

  Activation No 33

  Repairing the damage to your host’s internal systems...

  Success! Incarnation complete!

  Current Azure count: 31400/34100

  Gnarl and I resurrected almost simultaneously. Okay, so I had a bit of a headstart because by the time the Roc was finished with him, his body’s Integrity had dropped way below the required limit.

  Not that it stopped him though. Gnarl had no intention of dying today.

  That was horrible. His remains, scattered all over the scene, were coming together as if drawn by an invisible magnet. They joined and fused back together, forming a disgusting living cadaver.

  All of a sudden, Miko highlighted the whole area in 3D, outlining Gnarl’s remains. One of his body parts was glowing a bright red
.

  Miko was almost shouting,

  “Grey, quick, take this! That’s the Lash of Void!”

  It was so close. Just a few feet away. A severed hand still clutching the silvery hilt.

  In order to resurrect, Incarnators need to preserve at least 30% of organic matter. Gnarl had already done so. His steely tentacles whooshed through the air, reaching for me – but I’d already picked up the Lash of Void and activated it.

  The branching discharge of Azuric lightning lashed out, entangling Gnarl’s hideous frame. He emitted a thin creepy scream that made your blood curdle, writhing at the epicenter of the surging energy of Void. I didn’t stop. Finally, after several seconds, the mechanical cadaver crashed down, crumbling like a rotten hollow tree. It was as if someone had pulled out some kind of backbone that used to keep him together, scattering him around like a broken thread of beads.