Grant

  “Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Whose fucking idea was this?”

  My voice went from an escalating scream to a roar all hell broke loose without the slightest warning.

  Blood sprayed in all directions. I tore my warhammer out of another twisted version of a deer crossed with a rabid fox. It still threw me off to see creatures that have nothing to do with each other mashed together as if a mad scientist couldn’t decide between a blender or an orgy. Sharp teeth in a vulpine face but the long body and uniform color of a mature deer. Then with the long fluffy tail that wouldn’t look out of place on some rich russian lady’s fur coat. But then these nasty fuckers had hooved feet wider than dinner plates?

  My boots squelched as my footing wavered in the press of bodies. Like a swarm of piranha devouring a cow, this herd of carnivorous deer-foxes focused in on Eli. The soft, sensitive, ARMORLESS white-boy was essentially prime bait for Earth’s new wildlife. They could smell the weakness wafting off of him. I was almost compelled to swing my warhammer as hard as I could, anything to stomp out the voracious madness in their eyes as they flung themselves at him.

  “He’s worth it! I promise!” Thomas’ assurances didn’t exactly give me hope but I didn’t see any reason that Eli was valuable. Right now, he was a defenseless target. “I swear! I saw his status sheet!”

  “You better not be fucking lying!” I growled, catching antlers across my shield. The earth beneath me was all that kept me from falling as it shifted in response to my magic and my weight, bracing me against rabid deer-foxes.

  “Hey! I didn’t ask for this!” Eli’s softer voice was high pitched with fear.

  “Ha!” Thomas laughed. “But you did agree to it!”

  Snickering to myself, I refocused on the fight instead of my frustration. This was no time to lose my head. Thomas, Elvis and I had to play perfect defense for the kid. We found out the hard way that sometimes, the antlers would glow a deep orange a few seconds for shooting a web of flaming lances. Luckily, Elvis’ armor caught most of that and what it didn’t catch, his greatly accelerated healing factor took care of.

  “This is taking too long!” I yelled, lunging forward to smash a deer-fox in the face. “Thomas, cover me with shields. Everyone, when I hand you a rock, drop your weapon and hurl the rock. They’re trying to tire us out with these wolf pack tactics.”

  My brother took over most of our defense, translucent shields soaking up kicks and charges from the deer-foxes while I bent my focus to pulling up softball size rocks that I shaped from the ground beneath our feet. It didn’t take any extra time to use my Earth Magic to harden the spherical stones so that they had a few spikes sticking out.

  “Little fucks are herding us!” Elvis yelped, fending off three deer-foxes. He bled freely from the gaps in his armor. Thomas’ shields could only cover so much. “Where the hell is Paul when you need him!”

  I wish I knew the answer to that question

  “Or Mike!” I yelled back. “Spineless asshole couldn’t tell his wife ‘no’ and look where we are! Ready, here!” I worked faster, molding more ammunition for us to throw.

  My biggest teammate palmed the deadly spiked rock, hurling it with the force of a cannonball. It blew through two deer-foxes as if they were jelly.

  “It worked!” Thomas yelled, generating another shield that caught a blast of fire aimed straight at me. Trusting in my brother to keep my ass from roasting, I shaped a pile of the deadly ammo.

  “Go for it, Elvis!” I called out, hefting my shield again. “We’ll cover Eli.”

  Thomas pulled back more until his back was almost touching Eli’s shoulder. I covered the other side. My brother’s fighting style was very different compared to mine. I kept to the classic shield and axe tactics, hiding behind the shield to maximize defense and short swings of my weapon when an opportunity presented itself. The only real advantage I had was fouling the footsteps of anything near me with my Earth Magic. More than a few deer-foxes broke their hooved feet in pit-traps I could shape with a thought and more got stuck in mud that acted like quicksand.

  On the other hand, Thomas fought like a turtle for one minute and then like a mad berserker the next. His abilities let him store kinetic energy in his bones and then use it all to enhance his body or generate shields which he put to fantastic use. The translucent energy of his shields were hard to see and I almost had to fight back a laugh. Deer-foxes kept running into hovering circles that were hard to see and immovable.

  Watching my brother fight made me realize that my thinking was just too linear. Earth Magic was at my fingertips and all I had to do was put it to use. The suddenness with which the deer-foxes came up on us put my brain in fight-or-flight mode but intelligent tactics needed to take over where instinct had been operating. Focusing more on defense allowed me to pull at my Terrestria. Stone walls rose around Eli to give him some better cover and all the ground in front of me came to life. Grasping hands of rock yanked on delicate ankles, twisting and pulling in the direction of wickedly sharp stone spears that popped up like bear traps. Concentrated bursts of magic sent jagged pebbles flying upwards targeted the softer underbellies of the beasts.

  Trusting in my armor and shield to keep my vitals intact, my Terrastria quite literally reshaped the battlefield. Within a few minutes, we had completely turned the tide. Twelve deer-foxes lay dead around us and even more were strewn about further away.

  The silence became deafening as the last enemy died at Elvis’ final stone throw and the rest decided to run away and look for easier prey. I looked around, seeing that our journey and the hectic fight brought us in the general direction of the train station. Elvis kept his eyes northward in the direction they’d fled, sending a few more stones after them just to give them motivation to keep heading that way.

  “I’m sorry, but why are we going in this direction?”

  Thomas looked askance at my question. “You’re the one leading us . . . you tell me?”

  “I thought we were looking for Paul.” I said a bit numbly. “And you said he was going in this direction.” I flexed my will, sinking the stone walls protecting Eli. The poor kid could’ve given a cornered rabbit a run for its money. He was trembling and looking around as if something was chasing him. Not that he’s wrong. That herd of deer-foxes came up on us out of nowhere, bounding over a hill and then attacking. I pushed the stone walls faster into the dirt, not wanting him to see the many scorch marks and gouges that could’ve been him.

  Elvis walked over and wiped the blood off his big war ax on a nearby body that was split clean down the middle. “That’s what he said boss, something about people being in this direction the other day.”

  “We don’t have time for this.” I said, thinking the situation over. “Paul is a big boy with big boy superpowers. He’ll be fine. We have other concerns now.” I nodded at Eli and the dead mutant animals around us. “Not sure which is a bigger target, kid with no armor or all this meat?”

  Not wanting to attract more attention than we needed, I started to bury the bodies.

  “Hey! Stop that! Don’t you do what I think you're doing!" Thomas said frantically. “This is good meat!”

  “Thomas, we gotta go.” I said. "We're on a timeclock. Who knows what else is going to decide we’re lunch?”

  He looked around, pointing out the obvious lack of anything around us.

  “Fine, fine.” I agreed hastily. “But we gotta work fast. Anything that had died to clean cuts like a beheading or a straight puncture wound, prioritize those. Get all the good stuff from them. Anything that got squished, leave it for the end. Anything with a ruptured belly goes in a trash pile. We can’t take a chance on tainted meat. The rest, I put it in its own pile.

  “Bro, this is a ton of meat.” Thomas said excitedly. “Think of all the backstraps, steaks, roasts, and burgers we can make outta this!”

  My stomach rumbled at me. “Got it in one, man. Help me load this up.”

  Keeping my self-admonishment to myself because I had a big wagon back at the house for this exact purpose, I got to work finding a tree just the right thickness and length. With that cut down and my brother and Elvis gutting the animals and processing as much as they could, I fashioned a quick and dirty way to haul our catch.

  Thomas looked up at me from his bloody work. “Uh, did you bring any rope? Twine? Five-fifty cord?”

  “Shit!”

  My first plan of tying gutted bodies by their legs to the pole was already a non-starter. Ten minutes later, I had an even uglier solution. Using Earth Magic, I made a long stone box to carry all of our catch in. The walls on the two ends of the box were taller than the long sides, each with a hole in it. This makeshift solution allowed me to put the tree pole, which was several feet longer than the box, through the holes so we could carry the box with the pole resting on our shoulder.

  Elvis paused as his knife started to slide into another fox-deer. “Boss, do your Alchemy power work on this stuff? Living creatures or recently living creatures?”

  Memories that were not my own hit me, pouring from the core of magic in my chest straight into my brain. For a few seconds that felt like a helluva lot longer than a few seconds, I saw Frankenstein-like monsters pouring out of a mad scientist's lab, their limbs stitched together. I caught a glimpse of a crazed man in front of a very intricate ritual circle crafting horrors and abominations that no society should ever have to bear witness to.

  And like that, it was over.

  “Uh, boss? You ok?”

  Sweat dripped down my face and I pulled my helmet off, gulping fresh air as I desperately fought against my suddenly active stomach.

  “No, but I will be.” I said weakly. Shaking my head to refocus, I stumbled over to help with butchering the fox-deer. “And yes, apparently my Alchemy can work on living creatures, but to me, it seems like Jurassic Park. I can, but I should not.”

  Recognizing my tone for what it was, Elvis got back to work. Super strength really made this a much faster task than I expected. Skinning went by quickly with super strength, being able to grip much harder and pull harder with less leverage was a godsend. And the bones, they didn’t get in our way at all. One casual press of a knife or a tap of a warhammer and we were through.

  I tried not to think about it too hard, the fact that the Advent seemed to have implanted even more memories related to my abilities in my core. Experiencing all that from the beginning is one thing, but if I can hallucinate even more crazy alien shit just cause someone asked the right question . . . then what else is implanted in me? What is implanted in everyone else?

  I felt like I was asking the right questions but now certainly wasn’t the time to dive into this. Shit. I didn’t know if anyone else had even experienced anything like this. Admonishing myself to not take anything for granted, I pushed both the memories and questions to the side.

  “Hey Eli!” I said, taking away his knife. “I’ll hang onto that for now.” He was just too slow. Also, his hands were shaky. I didn’t want him to mess up a hide or puncture a bladder. That would ruin the meat. So I gave him a task he was suited for. “You’re on packing duty. Get your hands dirty and pack that box full. There should be no space if at all possible

  I looked up as we were halfway through. “You know, Elvis, what you said does give me an idea. We should waste as little of this as possible. Anything we can eat or use: skins, bones, meat, heart, liver, kidneys, put it in the box. Everything else, guts like intestines and lungs and gallbladder and the other shit, toss it in a pile.”

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  He nodded, working even faster now that he knew I agreed with him.

  “Why not debone the easy stuff right now?” Thomas asked, his knife tapping on a femur.

  “I’m thinking I can use Alchemy to mold bones into cutlery and plates and stuff so we can use metal for weapons and armor. And the skins plus the brains, Alchemy should allow me to make leather or something very close to it. The tendons, those can be turned into string or cord for sewing or rope. The antlers, well, I want to experiment with those.”

  My team nodded as they bent to their tasks. In almost no time at all, the carry-litter was filled to the brim with meat.

  Poor Eli though, cause I made him sit in the carry litter on top of all the bodies. I

  did at least make sure that he was sitting on top of the least bloody skinned fur I could find. He held on to the sides for dear life.

  I didn’t listen to his complaining, not that there was much to listen to. Elvis and I hauled ass while Thomas ran beside me, taking turns with me as needed. My employee with his prodigious strength and stamina just powered on like a steam locomotive. Luckily, we didn’t encounter anything on our frantic run home and it was mostly downhill.

  “Boss, you all right?.” Elvis asked as we set down the carry litter.

  I made a face. “I’m tired, thirsty, hungry, and have tons of work to do. Heh, and I’m betting y’all are too.” I turned to Eli who was green at the gills. “And this poor kid, he got an up and close look at life in the suburbs.”

  Thomas plopped down, his chest heaving with exertion. I grabbed him by the arm, snatching him up so he was standing on his own two feet. “Shit man, hustling eleven deer-fox things and a teenager like that with no break?” He complained, yanking his arm away.

  “Back-yard, you bozo.” I said, with dramatic emphasis on the word ‘back’. “We’re less of a target there than here in the very exposed front yard.”

  “Dude, just put a couple walls out here too.”

  “I’ll add it to the ever-growing list.”

  A few minutes of sweat-filled effort later, my beautiful vision of a wife greeted us in the backyard with a smile and a spread.

  “Clean, cold water! All-day potato stew! And flat biscuit bread with the last of the butter!”

  Thomas lunged for the food but I caught him.

  “Hold on, drink the water first, then get cleaned up. No point in eating without letting your stomach settle after working that hard.”

  He glared at me but assented after Sandra gave me a knowing smile, pointing out three buckets filled with water off to the side. Washcloths sat next to them in a pile.

  “You boys can clean up there, and Grant can clean up all clothes and armor with his Alchemy magic.” She turned to me, her blonde hair catching the mid-afternoon light. “I know your powers can clean the clothes and armor and stuff, but can it also fold the laundry?”

  I laughed but then paused. “Not actually sure. It can probably do more than any of us realize but you have telekinesis. Folding clothes AND putting them away can’t take you more than five seconds.”

  Unamused, she looked at the spread of food and then back at me. “Uh huh, don’t think you’re getting out of laundry just because you can be all Mr. Man now.”

  “Washing and drying? Sure. Folding and putting away? No mam.”

  Eli seemed to shrink even further into himself as my wife and I bantered back and forth.

  “Well, who’s this?” She asked, caught off guard. “You’re supposed to tell me when guests are coming over! I would’ve cleaned up!”

  I opened my mouth to introduce Eli but my wife had already snatched him up in a motherly hug.

  “He’s so cute! And small! Did your mother not feed you?” Sandra snagged the biggest bowl out on the table and filled it up with stew, all but shoving it into his chest. “Eat! Sit!”

  It must have looked strange. Compared to me, a normal looking dude, Eli was small. But compared to Thomas who had put on considerable muscle and then Elvis who was the reason I’d had to redesign door frames, he was a damn twig.

  “Honey!” I couldn’t hold back a chuckle. “He’s not six, he’s- uh?”

  “Seventeen! I’m seventeen. I uh, kinda got younger a week ago. I think I’m sixteen now?” Eli blushed hard as my wife’s eyes got even wider. “Mam”.

  My wife gasped and with all the quickness of striking cobra snagged the bowl of stew I was reaching for. “But you’re nothing but skin and bones! When you’re done with that, eat this and then we’ll talk.”

  Like a whirlwind, my wife had this boy seated with a drink, two bowls of stew, and she was hustling around the garden having her roots pull up piles of potatoes for roasting.

  I laughed as I heard her mutter under her breath about needing to find a cow for some damn butter and milk, then about needing a smokehouse for all the meat we’d been catching. Eli started to eat but some food caught in his throat as he watched the vibrant garden come to life, moving itself around my wife as she picked peppers and potatoes and onions and more things I didn’t recognize. Vines moved out of her way but also caressed her, the way a cat winds its body around your calves when you’re about to feed it. Tomato and tomatillo plants bent towards her as if offering their ripened fruit and even the grass bent in the direction she was walking as if to create her own personal carpet.

  Figuring now was as good a time as any, my team and I cleaned up using the buckets of water my wife had laid out and my Alchemy to clean and refresh our clothes, weapons, and armor. Within ten minutes, we were all sitting at the table trying not to inhale our food like heathens, instead we were desperately trying to match my wife’s slow pace of eating.

  Thomas and Elvis watched my wife as if she were a tiger leashed by a string. They, maybe even more than myself, were fully aware of the lethal destruction she was capable of unleashing.

  Eli sort of kept to himself, gratefully eating the food in front of him but giving very short, shy answers to Sandra’s deluge of questions. It wasn’t until Sandra asked a specific question that I decided to dig in a bit deeper.

  “So, Eli . . .” Sandra said, finishing off her late lunch. “Don’t worry, we have plenty of food for later, so you won’t be hungry if I have anything to say about it, you poor dear. But I am curious, what exactly are your powers?”

  She leaned back and wiggled her fingers, her spoon levitating off the table enveloped in a light blue glow. “I can move things with my mind, fly, and even cool stuff with plants.”

  Elvis tapped Eli on the shoulder and pointed at the massive venus flytrap that clung to the eastern side of the hill that covered my house.

  “When Miss Sandra says ‘cool stuff with plants’, she means magically mutate and control plants.”

  I didn’t think the kid could get any more pale but he made a valiant effort.

  “Elvis, stop scaring him.” I said, rolling my eyes. “My wife is the kindest, sweetest person you’ll ever meet. It’s not her fault she’s the magical version of a WMD.”

  Thomas made a face. “Saved our collectives asses, that’s for sure.”

  I coughed. “True, but still, I want to know the answer to Sandra’s question. What exactly can you do, Eli? Both Elvis and Thomas were quite adamant that your powers were useful . . . or something. I get why your pastor and step-dad made the case to offload you to me, however slimy it seemed, my brother signed off on it.”

  He looked downcast, rubbing at his shoulders.

  “I’ll go first if that makes you feel better.” Thomas said, swallowing the last of his stew. “I have three abilities that work really well together. First, I’ll show you while I explain. Show Status.”

  His blue status screen appeared and he showed it to Eli. I leaned in to take a look as well.

  “I’m not going to show you all the details of the numbers and stuff, but essentially I’m a barrier mage with kinetic energy storage and projection that can use bone magic to store extra energy or project it out as needed.” He explained. “It’s super useful, because I get stronger the longer a fight goes on, and I have a lot of built in durability with the shields I can generate plus the bone armor I can grow at any time.”

  “That’s actually pretty awesome.” Elvis said, nodding with sage approval. “I wonder how long you would last against me?” His competitive grin tilted a bit in the direction of savagery and I knocked against the table.

  “It’s a pretty creative powerset.” I said. “Until all of us get some more experimentation in, I think the title for ‘The Strongest’ will be up for grabs for a while.”

  Sandra sniffed. “Boys, boys. Ahem.”

  I glared at her. “You’re not competing. Nuclear missiles have no place in an accuracy contest.”

  Her smirk annoyed me but my point was valid. We all knew she lay on the power scale.

  “My turn.” Elvis said victoriously. “Show Status.”

  His smugness only increased. “I won’t show all my number details either, but my strength starts at ‘14’ and if I get angry, it goes even higher!”

  Eli gaped and Thomas just stared while my fingers drummed on the table. “Yeah, but it does come with a serious potential downside. That ‘Berserked’ trait is a make or break characteristic. Although, you may not even need to use that trait if you stay armored up. I’m assuming pain or injury would set that off, but the more I make you a human tank, the more dangerous you’ll be. I think that’s the main reason I beat you when I first met you.”

  He chewed on his lip for a second. “I’ve thought about that day more and more.” Elvis rotated his empty bowl before sighing. “Between your Earth Magic that I can’t fight, only avoid, and my ex’s brain whammy, I didn’t stand a chance back then. But now? With your armor plus the tactics we’ve talked about and learned, like using super strength to hurl rocks with the force of a cannon, I do think I stand a better chance now.”

  I smirked. “We’ll see. Honestly, I think a big quicksand pit would take care of you. You can’t jump your way out of that if I can get you in there. It would work on Paul too. Neither of y’all can fly and under the ground, you lose all leverage.”

  Sandra turned a bit green. “But wouldn’t they suffocate?”

  “I’m not going to do it.” I said. “Obviously, it’s just a hypothetical. But that’s how I’d win against people who are damn stronger than me. Unlike you, babe, they need to have their feet firmly planted on the ground to use the strength they have. That, I control. And with that, they would have to either catch me by surprise or get their hands on me long enough to kill me. And I’ve got super strength too, just not to that level. I should be able to shuck my armor and push them off long enough to get control of the earth around me.”

  “I mean, a sniper could get ya.” Thomas smirked, making finger guns at me.

  “Not sure how many people you met fighting down the interstate,” I said, making finger guns back. “But guns don’t work anymore. Well, normal guns. I met some cops that could, and this is me spitballing based on what I witnessed, but they could shoot their guns.”

  Elvis pulled at his collar a bit. “Didn’t they get taken out by the two super powered freaks?”

  I nodded, watching Eli almost faint with fear. “But that doesn’t mean other cops or soldiers or other people didn’t get magical abilities to make guns work.”

  Sandra looked at me and then behind us where my magical tree stood, its taproot splitting my first big Alchemy ritual table.

  “I mean, you have Alchemy . . . couldn’t you get guns to work?”

  “Probably. Anyways, that’s not the point. Eli, what are your powers?”

  Eli pulled up his Status Screen and showed us one by one. I stared at it the longest.

  “What the actual fuck?”