**************** CHAPTER THIRTEEN
They say that in the nanosecond or so before death, your entire life flashes before your eyes, probably so that you can panic and be seriously concerned right from the start of your journey into the afterlife that you've fucked up royally from start to finish and shouldn't be trusted with another rebirth into life, let alone be granted white robes, a halo and harp for the rest of eternity. Well it didn't happen to me... probably because I was so already so brain dizzy with all of my internal emergency alarm circuits blinking red that it couldn't spare the time to dissect thirty years of screw ups into a one or two second summary.
I thought for sure that the ten foot creature was going to just merely squash me with a foot, or maybe just jump up and down on top of me for awhile, but Chuckles was still in fine humor and now her thought he was probably letting me off much too easy by killing me right away. In our less than five minute duel I hadn't shown that I couldn't even momentarily inconvenience it, let alone actually hurt it! If this had been a professional boxing match, the referee would have rung the bell on me long ago. The bastard seemed to be completely immune to anything I could cast at it and my desperation physical attack on its sort-of rubbery skin had pretty much ignored that magically enhanced force too. His own physical assault had in return left me rather mangled and had knocked my my eyes quite out of focus. Even the notion of trying to crawl away was well beyond my my currently capabilities. Under the circumstances, I was willing to declare the bout a tie.
Now the giant walking turd was standing over me laughing. No, he wasn't going to finish me off quickly. He was enjoying himself far too much, and he was going to make Aunt Millie's favorite (and only) nephew plead for death long before it would ever finally come. I might be a righteous asshole sometimes, but I just fight to win and never draw out a fight for my personal amusement or any sadistic notion of prolonging my opponent's agony, but then again I do have some principles. This nasty huge dark skinned visitor apparently didn't... but then again, almost none of them did.
That's why the wizards of virtually all of the civilized worlds don't like
any
visitors much, and really stomp down upon renegade bastards that summon these assholes. Deseret has never given a shit about playing by the rules anyway, and if breeding pits like this one turned out to be common-place around here, some GWA wizards back home were going to go postal upon reading my report... assuming I lived long enough to write it.
Chuckles was just winding down his laughing exercise for the day, and was now pondering what to do to me next when Sean finally decided to make a reappearance. The best I could tell, the little traitor had taken off with Miranda when my jolly huge playmate first appeared. Frankly, it was a bit late for advice now -- I really would have preferred having his help earlier. At the moment I was pretty much out for the count and I didn't think I could even find even a thimbleful of magic now, let alone channel even a drop of it. I'd already hit this guy with my best stuff and it didn't even singe his crotch hair.
"Aye, lad. This is one of their masters, a dark lord of darkness he is from that terrible realm that you sealed the other portal to earlier. This body is not his own but a hybrid construct made of matter from both his world and yet ours. No, your powers were not great enough or of the right sort to defeat him, but now you've still got one last chance... but only for a moment! Hurry! Reach for the silver ammo balls in your pocket and focus upon them; be swift, lad!"
But I couldn't. For the moment I could only feely the power around me smirking, and dancing like a butterfly just out of my reach, evading my feeble attempts to channel and use it.
"No, not that way, feel inside yourself... focus on your arm. Upon the bracer that melded to your arm during the fire in the theater. Yes, there! Let
that
power flow of its own now around your fingers and the silver and manipulate it -- let it flow through them and melt, not molten or hot but soft and cool, flowing like quicksilver, lad... let them flow!"
Manipulation. It's a tricky skill that not a lot of magicians have much aptitude for, but I had just enough of a knack for it that I mention it upon my business card. Yeah... that's me showing off again. It's flashy, but a really functionally limited sort of magic that's better for parlor tricks than 'save-your-ass' techniques. I only learned it because it nicely complimented Arc-Tec fabrication, to more easily mold or sculpt the design of an artifice -- helping to turn form into a more aesthetically pleasing design... and thus improved function. In a nutshell, this is the art of manipulating or subtly altering a non-organic material's form or appearance. A wizard with a genius for manipulation can turn a rock into a coffee cup (the manipulated item must always retain an equal mass) but no one can do the same trick with organics, such as to turn a prince into a frog. As far as I know it can't be done.
In this case I
think
I understood what Sean wanted me to do... and like an idiot, I should have thought of it earlier. Note to self, I was going to make myself one heck of a set of silver brass knuckles the next time I had a quiet week or two!
I should have figured this out earlier! The skin of this hybrid creature was largely immune to the magic of this world but silver, being the innately magical substance it was, should be able to penetrate it. Probably the Thompson gun loaded with silver bullets wouldn't have hurt it much either, but it might have been distracting and I might have gotten lucky with a well coordinated attack. With the silver now beginning to coat my hand like a cooly flexible glove I could now almost feel the golden bracer below the skin of my right arm 'click' and connect to it and I could feel its internal power flow now up into the metal. Weird... very tingly and peculiar, but it would do.
The bracer, an unknown, unidentified piece of pre-Columbia Inca magical art had melted into my arm, or rather it had grafted itself onto me internally in the great searing heat of my battle against the fire god. It was stuck on for good, fused underneath the skin of my arm. I'd pretty much ignored the thing, really assuming that it was just a big stupid hunk of 'Hamburger Helper', or Artifact-level magic that helped to boost your own inate abilities, and nothing more. Now I wasn't quite so sure. Even looking at the bare skin it was hard to tell that the bigger looking freckles were really just sub-dermal traces of the Greater Arcana Stones that powered it, or other parts of the Arc-Tec circuitry. I'd traded a lot of labor time for just a couple of the stones and these were definitely factory seconds, right out of the scratch and dent surplus pile. Buying a single 'good' one would have cost me more than I could make in a year, and then I'd have to stand in line to find anyone to sell me one. Somehow, this 'flawed' device had now merged with me and probably contributed to my augmented powers. I wondered now if Sean had tweaked or helped to arrange this accident in some way, but that was a question for later.
"That's the way!" Sean whispered inside my head. "Now wait to strike... he'll want to hold you close, to watch your eyes at the moment when he kills you slowly, to savor it. You'll only have one chance to strike first, so you must wait to take it. Keep your hand in your pocket until then, to hide it and focus every ounce of magic you can muster to flow into the silver when you strike."
Actually, I had no trouble restraining my attack for another moment or two. When Chuckles grabbed the mangled front of my suit to pick me up, my body suddenly wanted to report a rather long listing of broken and shattered bones, twisted and torn muscles and more back problems than a convention hall full of chiropractors could have handled. I nearly blacked out with the pain as he used two hands to pick me up off of the floor and hold me up for a final bit of taunting.
