Creation Mage 2 (War Mage Academy)

by Dante King

  Alura ignored her and led me onward, through another room. A hand clutched at me from a shadowy corner, and I came face to face with a blue-skinned young woman with hair that fell across her shoulders like snow and breath that steamed in the air. She regarded me through ice-chip eyes that glittered with unconcealed lustful intent.

  “Why, hello there,” she said, and her frosty breath tingled where it touched my face. She spoke in a silky voice. From this close, I was engulfed by her scent; crisp, fresh, and resinous as a mountain wind running through a pine wood. “And who might you belong to?”

  “I belong to myself,” I replied. Despite Alura’s hand dragging at me, I was finding it hard to tear myself away from those cool eyes.

  “Ah, but perhaps you would consider renting yourself out to me for the day, eh?”

  “I—what?” I asked, only half realizing what the Ice Elemental had just said to me.

  Alura was suddenly at my side, her white and gold eyes making the Ice Elemental take a step back, the crooked smile on her face fading a touch.

  “Flurris,” Alura said, “Justin is my guest.”

  “Pity,” said the captivating Flurris. She gave me a wink and melted back into the shadows of the parlor that we were in.

  I turned to Alura as another couple of Elemental sorority sisters fired catcalls and wolf-whistles my way.

  “Am I looking particularly handsome this morning or have I accidentally fallen into a vat of Elemental pheromones without noticing?” I asked.

  Alura gave me a regal smile. The undulating, warping outfit that clung about her like smoke and mist shifted so that the outline of her entire body was momentarily revealed. I swallowed.

  “We Elementals,” she said, “are an old, old race of peoples. Our memories stretch back a long way, to times that were simpler and more...straightforward. We are possessed of high passions, deep emotions, and...large appetites. Compared to human females, our sexual desires might seem a little more intimidating, perhaps. And we are not ashamed to voice our opinions on that score.”

  Alura guided me through the dim parlor and out into a large kitchen. Unlike the homely one back at my frat house, with its huge iron range and furniture that looked like it had been whittled out of whole chunks of wood by a craftsman with more enthusiasm for whisky than woodwork, this one was all sleek lines and stark colors.

  The countertops were all of polished red marble. More flowering ivy crawled up the walls and across the ceiling. The enormous dining table and chairs were all made of impossibly delicate-looking ice. The whole place was lit by more stormy mood-lighting.

  Again, I felt like I had walked into some highly elite and expensively decorated club of some sort. Low, relaxing house music was playing from some hidden system.

  The kitchen was filled with more young women, sorority sisters of different hues and looks and shapes, all of whom looked up at us when we entered.

  “Who’s this then?”

  “Damn, Alura, girl, you’ve only been here five minutes and you’re already bringing hotties home!”

  “Get ‘em, girl!”

  “Mmmm, I’d like to show him a trick or two…”

  These were only some of the comments that my overloaded ears managed to hear and process. There were plenty more that I didn’t catch, but I lost them in the building murmur. The young women got off the stools they were perched on, moved away from the walls they had been leaning against, and began to encroach on Alura and myself.

  At this point, I felt very much like the mouse in the cat-house—if the cats were all stunning Elementals of different and fascinating types, dressed in next to nothing and with expressions of such open sexual desire that it would have made Jenna Jameson blush.

  “You better have brought him around to share, Alura,” said one woman, who was obviously a Fire Elemental, judging by the way flames danced across her bare arms and along her shoulders.

  “Shouldn’t you be at the Academy, Ashe?” Alura replied with a half smile.

  “Spoil sport,” Ashe said before she tipped me a lascivious wink.

  “Alura, honey, you shouldn’t have!” another woman said. She was curvy, with a Kim Kardashian ass, skin the color of freshly churned earth, and an elaborate, bright green mohawk that looked more like a soky plant than actual hair.

  “I know I shouldn’t have, Tera,” Alura said, putting a hand possessively on my shoulder, “and I didn’t.”

  The Earth Elemental, Tera, pouted, showing off a set of lips that I couldn’t help but imagine would feel mighty good wrapped around my—

  Someone grabbed my ass from behind, and I turned to see a short little Elemental, with wispy golden hair and eyebrows, wearing an extremely tight playsuit of mirror-bright silver, through which I could clearly see her nipples.

  “Tell me, sweetie,” she said, her voice so husky and sultry that it was all I could do not to push her up against the nearest wall and peel that jumpsuit off of her, “have you ever fucked a Storm Elemental before?”

  This was all getting a bit much for me. I mean, I was just a man for Heaven’s sake, and I didn’t think the male libido was meant to be thrown unawares into such a hotbed of temptation and outright propositions. I held up my arms and yelled over the building clamor.

  “Ladies! Thanks very much for the reception. I can’t remember the last time I was given such a warm—if not positively volcanic—one. I’m flattered by all your kind and rather flustering remarks, but I’m here with Alura.”

  There was a chorus of groans and complaints at this.

  This is crazy, I thought. I’ve never had much trouble with women before, but this is next level! I’m fucking irresistible to them.

  I tried to stop my traitorous eyes zipping about the gathering of young women pressed in around me, moving from one gorgeous face to the next jaw-dropping backside, and on to the next exquisite and tempting set of tits.

  But hey, it's good to know that if I’m keen on continuing my, ah, scientific research of sleeping with all sorts of different magic users, then I can always come here to conduct experiments.

  The possibilities of what these sorts of experiments might involve were enough to get me a little hot under the collar.

  “I’m sorry, ladies,” I said again, “but Alura is giving me the tour. I’m all hers.”

  I turned my attention back to the Gemstone Princess and found that she was looking at me with a mixture of appreciation and avarice. Her crystalline cheeks had also fogged slightly, and I thought that that might be the Gemstone Elemental equivalent of a blush. My words, in front of the rest of sorority sisters, might have hit her in a bit of a soft spot.

  “Come,” she said, “let me show you around properly.”

  We were followed from the room by a host of good-natured and filthy remarks.

  Alura took me through a passage, which led, apparently, to a dead end and a bookshelf.

  “There’s the entrance to a secret passageway if ever I saw one,” I said, nodding at the heavy ebony bookshelf.

  I scanned the spines of the volumes on display. There was not a single one that looked familiar to me—and why would there have been? I could feel Alura watching me from behind as I studied the books, trying to pick the one that might act as the lever to the secret door that I knew was concealed there.

  “All right,” I said eventually, “I give up. What one is it?”

  Alura gave one of her reserved little laughs, which I supposed became part of a Princess’s makeup after spending so many years trying not to offend anyone. She reached past me, her body brushing mine in a most delightful way, and yanked a candle sconce on the wall—burning with the same rose pink-colored tapers as the chandeliers—next to me.

  “Ah!” I said, snapping my fingers and grinning. “The sconce! That would have been my next guess, I promise!”

  Alura smiled and said, “Everyone always thinks it’s the bookshelf.”

  “Did you?”

  “No,” she said, “but I have a politician’s
mind remember, Mr. Mauler.”

  The staircase beyond wound downward and spat us out into the sorority’s dungeon.

  “Well, I shall tell you one thing, Alura,” I said, looking around at the neatly laid out space before me. “This place is a lot more refined, a lot more put together, a lot more mature than the one in my frat house.”

  “You mean,” Alura said, giving me a look that was so old-fashioned she might have dug it up in a coal seam, “that it’s a lot more feminine.”

  I raised my eyebrows at this succinct summary. “That could be it,” I admitted.

  “Yours isn’t like this?” Alura asked me.

  I compared the rough equipment in the dungeon of our fraternity with the gleaming target dummies and potion-mixing area of the sorority’s one. Our equipment was scattered higgledy-piggledy around the room rather than placed in neat rows that were actually conducive to training. The rough wooden beams of the ceiling and the worn mats on the floor of our dungeon paled in comparison to the crisp and unsullied springy white mats of the sorority’s.

  Plus, this dungeon was completely free of tears in the fabric of the world and diabolical monsters intent on turning your guts into tooth-floss.

  It might have been disheartening to see a dungeon that was so much better than the one in my frathouse, but I wasn’t envious.

  In fact, I was fucking inspired.

  Chapter Ten

  “Next to this set up,” I said to Alura, “ours kind of looks like hell with everyone out to lunch.”

  The Gemstone Princess laughed and took me by the hand. She walked me over to a section of caged off, empty pens lining one of the walls.

  “These are the monster terminals where our members can summon creatures in an enclosed area,” she explained. “They allow an Elemental to fight them without the possibility of being overwhelmed by a monster that another one of our sisters is fighting at the same time.”

  “Handy,” I said, thinking back to the spontaneously appearing manticore. “How do you choose the monster? Is there some sort of occult vending machine or something?”

  Alura gave me the politely confused look that I was getting more and more used to receiving when explaining things with earthly references. Then she said, “The poltergeist helps choose what level, what kind, and what number of monsters show up when each girl steps into the enclosure. This ensures that no one accidentally matches themselves up with something that will undoubtedly kill them.”

  “And these?” I asked, pointing toward a series of targets that were lined up along something that looked very much like a firing range you might find back in my world.

  “Quick-draw vector firing ranges,” Alura explained. She pointed over to the far corner of the dungeon where a series of unfamiliar machines had been set up. “And that is a gymnasium of sorts—magically-based and focused, of course.”

  I puffed out my cheeks, impressed.

  “Who the hell set all this shit up?” I asked. “Your poltergeist? Or some mysterious benefactor who decided to install some hidden cameras in the bathrooms as part of the deal?”

  “It’s all been built and managed by our resident poltergeist,” Alura said. “And I don’t know what ‘cameras’ are, but if I asked him nicely, I’m sure he’d fit the bathrooms with them.”

  I was about to reply with a quip, when a shape suddenly appeared out of nowhere at my elbow. He was surrounded in the luminous green aura of your typical spirit or ghost, so I assumed that this was the sorority’s poltergeist. He was elderly and wrinkled as a raisin. He was elegantly dressed in a ruff and doublet, with a pair of rather saucy stockings and curly-toed shoes. On his head perched an outrageously flamboyant hat sprouting enough rare and enormous feathers that it would have caused a vegan to faint at twenty paces. Topping this strong look off was a monocle and a mustache that was so straight and crisp you could have ripped it off and used the two halves as clock hands.

  “Having traveled between worlds, young master,” the poltergeist said, in a plummy, aristocratic accent, “I am most acquainted with your recording devices. And I would not need such devices in this sorority house. The things that I have seen occur in this here dungeon, would make a discerning member of the male sex like you positively cream your undergarments.”

  I eyed the poltergeist with mild distaste. It was one thing to burst out of the ether without even a subtle cough or ahem, but to then start banging on about creaming underpants…

  “Who’s this creepy old bastard?” I asked Alura, nodding sideways at the specter and pointedly ignoring his little snort of outrage at being addressed thus.

  “This is our poltergeist,” Alura explained patiently.

  I looked over to a partitioned alcove where a number of wooden hot-tubs were lined up next to a couple of massage tables.

  “And you don’t find that uncomfortable?” I asked. “That this old fop can just pop in and out of the joint, see you bathe, and do whatever else you randy Elementals do when you’re in a hot-tub together?”

  Alura arched one of her sharp eyebrows at me, her eyes communicating to me that I had no idea what she and her sorority sisters got up to in those jacuzzis.

  “We are accustomed to the dead watching us. You don’t have poltergeists in your world?”

  “No,” I said, without pausing to think.

  “How can you be sure with entities that spend much of their time as invisible phantasms?”

  Now that I came to think about it, there had been one time in college, when I had been playing hide the pastrami with a girl who I took a couple of classes with. She had been on top, riding me like I was a mechanical bull, her hair flicking backward and forward and occasionally whipping me in the eye, when I thought I saw the curtains in the corner of my room move. This had put me off my stroke a little bit—though my initial thought was that one of the guys from my hall was about to jump out and play some hilarious prank. I had kept an eye on the curtain, and had seen it twitch a couple of other times. I strained my memory. Had there been a little flash of green light? A hint of something being not quite there?

  I gave my shoulders a little shrug. Hell, who was I to be sceptical about poltergeists living on earth? Up until about a week ago, if someone had told me that there was a host of magical worlds beyond earth and that I had a talent for casting spells and blowing bad guys apart, I would have had to say that that person was nuttier than squirrel shit.

  And now look where I am, I thought. Standing in the middle of a magical dungeon, in between a perverted ghost and a sparkling woman whose pinky could probably buy me a couple of sports cars.

  I began to think there might be something between the Gemstone Princess and myself. A spark. I speculated as to how I might go about instigating the sort of hot and heavy action that inevitably ended with a new spell in my spellbook. I was just thinking of making a move when my eyes landed on the poltergeist. I stopped in my movements. Alura saw where I was looking.

  “Ah, don’t worry about Frederick,” Alura said.

  “Frederick?”

  “The poltergeist,” Alura said.

  “Yes, young master, please be assured that I am able, to all intents and purposes, and as far as humans might be expected to understand it, turn my eyes and ears off during, ah, delicate situations.”

  “And you’re going to do that now, are you?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes, young master,” Frederick said obsequiously.

  Alura shot the spectral figure a sharp look from her sparkling eyes. “No, Frederick, you will disengage your sight and hearing and rely upon those senses that are usable only by those who have passed on. That’s a sorority order.”

  Frederick slumped his shoulders. “Aye, Your Majesty,” he said sadly. He shimmered in the air, like a television picture with intermittent signal, then straightened. “It is done, your Majesty.”

  Alura did not bother to answer. There would have been no point anyway, Frederick had seemingly now had the same hearing as your average lamp-post.

&
nbsp; “Alura,” I asked, “why did you want to come to the Academy? It seems to me that your people are already a pretty magical bunch, right? Your old man, the Prophet King, doesn’t strike me as the sort of guy who got to where he is just by being the shiniest rock in the pile.”

  Alura shook her head and gave me a sideways look through eyelashes that were as fine as crystalized strands of spider’s web.

  “Many Elementals have a natural affinity for magic,” she said, “but I wanted to come to the Mazirian Academy to learn how to control my magic fully. To refine it. To sharpen it.” She sighed and grinned at me. “I also wished to see the outside world. I have often begged my father to allow me outside our underground home, but he never gave me permission to do it.”

  “Why now do you think?” I asked.

  She turned to face me fully. “Because of you, Justin. That is what I think. It seems to me now that he was waiting for something, and that something might have been you. He gave you the black crystal staff that he had hanging above his throne for my entire life, and that must count for something.”

  “Is the outside world living up to your expectations?” I asked. “It must be different in a lot of ways.”

  “Oh, but it does and it is! Out here, in the moving air, I am seeing such beautiful sights! Like the golden orb in the sky called a sun. It is so beautiful. It must be a very special crystal indeed.”

  “Uh, that’s not a crystal I’m afraid to say,” I said to the Princess.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a big ball of burning gas,” I said. “Millions and millions and millions of miles away. So far away and so vast and dangerous that it’s basically beyond our understanding—my understanding most definitely.”

  “I think you are modest,” Alura said, taking a step toward me and laying one of her shimmering hands on my chest. “I think there is a lot more to you than you, perhaps, show on the surface.”

  “That’s very good of you to say,” I said. “And I hope you’re right.”