Birdsie
The God-Emperor of Mankind
A/N: 2,056 words, 11,491 characters, average reading time of 7.5 minutes.
Of Knights & Pinecones
Dean gave me a doubtful look, clenching his fists with uneven breathing. Hesitation was plainly visible in his blue eyes.
"Alan, are you sure?" he asked lamely. "I'm not certain this is... a good idea, at all. Fighting a... a wizard in his own tower seems unwise, to say the least."
"What other option do we have?" I demanded in a hushed whisper, teeth gritted. "We either go in there or Thamior kills Douglas!"
"Fuck." He shook his head with eyes closed in bemusement. After a moment of silent consideration, he sighed and nodded in acquiescence, but the look he gave me was painful, like he stepped on glass.
"Fuck, okay. Fine," he said in a soft voice.
I reached into my bag, rummaged through the items, then found one of the two heavy objects within and gripped it.
A Stechkin pistol; the syndicate specialty for assassin agents and self-defense. Nineteen rounds per magazine, muzzle velocity of 400 meters per second, 10mm ammunition. It will kill anything remotely human that's not wearing armor in two shots, or one if you get lucky. I looted it from the corpse of that hitman that tried to kill us on the space station, before we got dimensionally shunted into a fantasy world.
I figure this is a time as good as any to put it to good use.
I gave him the Stechkin and two extra magazines then handed him a pineapple-shaped Mk2 grenade; old surplus from WW2.
"Just remember this is, like, a wizard we're fighting. If he conjures up some energy shield, don't waste ammo shooting it," I warned him, which felt kind of stupid in retrospect. Telling a crack sniper and marksman how to shoot when I'm a swordsman might be a little arrogant, but you can never be too safe.
"Don't you have a silencer to go with this thing?" he asked, loading in the magazine and placing his thumb on the safety. He looked at me with an unamused expression. "It'll give us tinnitus for three days."
"Stop being a baby," I told him, unsheathing my sword with a metallic hiss.
The short blade glowed a dim green at the edges, promising certain death to anything that came in contact with it. The Deathblade was an enchanted sword I looted from the corpse of a Death Knight we killed. Granted, a Death Knight is dead to begin with, so we killed it deader. It curses anything it hits with necrotic force; wounds that never heal, nasty infections that keep spreading. It eats away at a creature's life-force, and works just as well at creatures that aren't exactly alive to begin with, like animated furniture.
I walked forward and opened the front door slowly, looking in as I went.
For the foyer of a wizard tower, the place was surprisingly tame in decoration.
Creaking wooden floor from what I hazarded was oak wood. The walls were standard masonry, stone-and-mortar. No loose rock or detritus anywhere. A cleanly-built chamber of large gray bricks. To the right of the entrance, there was a coat hanger with an arrangement of colorful cloaks with five-pointed yellow or white stars on them. Next to it was a small dresser with a mirror and a collection of velvet shoes, most of which had pointy upward-facing tips.
I entered the room, Dean creeping in after me. I motioned for him to leave the door open, in case we needed to bolt suddenly.
"This isn't as bad as I thought," he said, looking at the coat hanger and inspecting the presumably magical cloaks without awareness they could be trapped.
The only way further in was a set of circular stairs leading upwards to the next floor, which, frankly, did little to put me at ease. A menacing staircase in a wizard's tower was guaranteed to be full of traps.
I wandered back out, picked up a rock, and threw it on the first stair, causing a number of white-blue rays to shoot from the walls and encase it in ice. Simultaneously, a loud, nasal 'wa' sound could be heard, dragging on and on. A siren; an alarm.
Behind us, in the entrance, a number of gargoyles dropped to the ground and began to move inside.
"Fuck," I said primly, stepping back. I reached into my bag and withdrew the pinecone the Druids gave me. They could see the future and told me I'd need it for defeating a wizard, so surely this was the right time to use it?
"Dean, get over here!" I barked.
"What did you doooo?!" he yelled, running up to me.
"Take my hand," I ordered.
"What? I'm not-"
"Do it!"
He glumly complied. I threw the pinecone at our feet like a smoke-bomb, but instead, it exploded into the ground, creating roots. Then it grew branches, leaves, and a thick bark, beginning to sprout upwards - an instant tree.
"What is th--whaaa!" Dean cried as a branch extended beneath his legs, and he held onto the tree.
I looked down, holding onto a branch, as the gargoyles began to climb the tree with their claws. Others began to flap their heavy, gray wings, rising into the air and intending to attack from up above. Only half would be in melee range, so it's a good chance to split responsibilities.
"Dean!" I screamed. "Shoot at the flying ones, I'll take care of the climbers!"
"Aaaaa-hahaaaa!" he replied, taking the Stechkin in his hands and letting out a staccato of shots, followed by the distinct sound of crumbling stone.
I held my sword tight and slid down alongside the bark of the constantly-growing and shifting tree. A branch grew under my feet halfway down, the tree responding to my intent and giving me a platform.
A gargoyle screamed at me with a nasty, bestial screech, and I responded with a flawless stab of my Deathblade. The green aura of my sword spread across the gargoyle, the curse of destruction causing stone to crumble and ripple. The gargoyle turned into dust.
I caught another, swinging the Deathblade in a wide arc and bisecting the body of a gray, stone beast. It promptly let go of the tree and its two halves disintegrated mid-flight, scattering into the air in a rather picturesque way.
Looking up to see how Dean was doing, I saw that he managed to shoot down two evil beasts. The gargoyles were stone and didn't care much about getting damaged, but he managed to shoot down the stumps holding their wings to their bodies, rendering them flightless and causing them to fall, which itself caused the gargoyles to crumble into pieces.
As if on cue, the tree began to creak and strain. This was followed by the sound of crumbling stone and an explosion, as the tree ignored the basic laws of hardness and momentum, breaking through the ceiling and onto the second floor.
The druids who gave me the pinecone said it'd keep growing until it reached the size of an elder tree - those are as big as skyscrapers from what I remember.
On the second floor, we were met with an assembly of iron golems that started to climb the tree. I told Dean to not waste ammo on them - they wouldn't be hurt by bullets and were slow climbers anyway, taking several seconds to barely ascend a meter higher, so I didn't bother taking them down.
The wizard's defenses probably didn't take into account giant, divine trees growing out of nowhere in the middle of his tower.
Soon, the tree broke into the third floor, which looked to be some kind of laboratory. I hopped off, and Dean hopped off after me, both of us deciding this looked promising. We stole several potions of healing for the upcoming fight and for whatever followed. We took a few other potions and items that looked interesting: red stones that exploded when thrown, flasks of bubbling green acid, and strange, swirling purple potions - presumably hallucinogenics.
Once our robbing spree was finished, we walked up to the tree - which temporarily slowed its growth to let us take some time robbing the place - and it to created two, wide, thick branches that we stepped on. With that, the tree returned to growing as our elevator.
We broke through every floor, tearing defenses apart and plundering any useful items. This included a scroll of time stop - which explained how the bastard captured Douglas in the first place - and an anklet that let me move faster, which I instantly put on.
Finally reaching the last floor - a small astro-laboratory with star maps on the walls, a giant brass telescope on a platform, and shelves stocked with indexes of star systems - just on time for the tree to arrest its growth, we looked to the completely bewildered Thamior gawking at our arrival.
Thamior looked like a very stereotypical wizard: thin blue robes with yellow stars on them, a pointed hat with more stars, a long white beard that concealed most of his mouth and a wrinkled face. Pinpointing his age was difficult, but he was definitely over seventy. The only difference between him and normal wizards was that his bushy eyebrows were frozen in a rictus of rage, instead of the typical melancholic aspect of old wisdom. He didn't appear to be armed with any wizarding accessories like a wand or staff.
"You!" he yelled. "I knew I should have turned you into frogs! You dare? You dare break my tower, destroy my creations, steal my-"
I took out the scroll of time stop and cast it. The scroll crumbled into ashes, and I ran toward the frozen wizard, swinging my sword to deliver a killing blow.
At the last moment, the time stop ran out and the wizard managed to step back, narrowly dodging my attack.
He raised both hands, one aimed high, the other low. "Fulgoris!" he incanted, and a crackling spray of cyan lightning emerged from his fingertips.
I held my sword up in front of me, letting the metal blade absorb most of the charge. I felt small tongues of electricity licking my arms and hands, numbing my fingers even through the leather gloves I wore. The pressure was too great, and I instinctively took several steps back before he could increase the spell's intensity.
"You dare?" the wizard asked, positively seething, as he continued casting the lightning spell to keep me at bay. If this were a cartoon, steam would probably be coming out of his ears in two streams. "Using my own scroll against me!?"
"Give us our friend back, fiend!" I declared my intent now, realizing maybe I should have done this first. If I kept doing things like just now, I'd probably get a bad reputation as the 'shoot-first-ask-questions-never' sort of hero.
Speaking of shooting, I subtly messaged Dean to shoot the bastard in the head by silently mouthing 'fucking shoot him' with my head minimally turned in his direction, and I grimaced when he didn't do so instantly.
"Your friend is nothing but a battery for my magic! He has a gift he refused to explore, and now, he is mine! You are fools, coming in here to save him from me! Do you even know who I am? I am Thamior the Great, Thamior the Wise, Thamior the Conqueror! And who are you to question my greatness and unlimited power? Now-" BANG!
The wizard's skull developed two red holes, a streak of brain matter leaving through one of them and freckling the floor in red. His body slumped and dropped with a gormless expression, eyes sliding up to the top of his skull as his throat made a strangled, gurgling sound.
I turned to Dean, sheathing the Deathblade. "You couldn't have done that earlier?" I took off my gloves and rubbed my hands to get rid of the numbness that Thamior's lightning induced.
He shrugged at me. "I thought he might say something interesting, but he didn't. I don't like monologues."
"Whatever," I replied with a sigh and put my gloves back on, clenching and unclenching my fingers to test if my nervous system was still working correctly. The fingers felt a little unresponsive, and still numb, but I could still hold a sword tightly. Good enough.
"Let's loot the corpse and find Doug."
"Alan, are you sure?" he asked lamely. "I'm not certain this is... a good idea, at all. Fighting a... a wizard in his own tower seems unwise, to say the least."
"What other option do we have?" I demanded in a hushed whisper, teeth gritted. "We either go in there or Thamior kills Douglas!"
"Fuck." He shook his head with eyes closed in bemusement. After a moment of silent consideration, he sighed and nodded in acquiescence, but the look he gave me was painful, like he stepped on glass.
"Fuck, okay. Fine," he said in a soft voice.
I reached into my bag, rummaged through the items, then found one of the two heavy objects within and gripped it.
A Stechkin pistol; the syndicate specialty for assassin agents and self-defense. Nineteen rounds per magazine, muzzle velocity of 400 meters per second, 10mm ammunition. It will kill anything remotely human that's not wearing armor in two shots, or one if you get lucky. I looted it from the corpse of that hitman that tried to kill us on the space station, before we got dimensionally shunted into a fantasy world.
I figure this is a time as good as any to put it to good use.
I gave him the Stechkin and two extra magazines then handed him a pineapple-shaped Mk2 grenade; old surplus from WW2.
"Just remember this is, like, a wizard we're fighting. If he conjures up some energy shield, don't waste ammo shooting it," I warned him, which felt kind of stupid in retrospect. Telling a crack sniper and marksman how to shoot when I'm a swordsman might be a little arrogant, but you can never be too safe.
"Don't you have a silencer to go with this thing?" he asked, loading in the magazine and placing his thumb on the safety. He looked at me with an unamused expression. "It'll give us tinnitus for three days."
"Stop being a baby," I told him, unsheathing my sword with a metallic hiss.
The short blade glowed a dim green at the edges, promising certain death to anything that came in contact with it. The Deathblade was an enchanted sword I looted from the corpse of a Death Knight we killed. Granted, a Death Knight is dead to begin with, so we killed it deader. It curses anything it hits with necrotic force; wounds that never heal, nasty infections that keep spreading. It eats away at a creature's life-force, and works just as well at creatures that aren't exactly alive to begin with, like animated furniture.
I walked forward and opened the front door slowly, looking in as I went.
For the foyer of a wizard tower, the place was surprisingly tame in decoration.
Creaking wooden floor from what I hazarded was oak wood. The walls were standard masonry, stone-and-mortar. No loose rock or detritus anywhere. A cleanly-built chamber of large gray bricks. To the right of the entrance, there was a coat hanger with an arrangement of colorful cloaks with five-pointed yellow or white stars on them. Next to it was a small dresser with a mirror and a collection of velvet shoes, most of which had pointy upward-facing tips.
I entered the room, Dean creeping in after me. I motioned for him to leave the door open, in case we needed to bolt suddenly.
"This isn't as bad as I thought," he said, looking at the coat hanger and inspecting the presumably magical cloaks without awareness they could be trapped.
The only way further in was a set of circular stairs leading upwards to the next floor, which, frankly, did little to put me at ease. A menacing staircase in a wizard's tower was guaranteed to be full of traps.
I wandered back out, picked up a rock, and threw it on the first stair, causing a number of white-blue rays to shoot from the walls and encase it in ice. Simultaneously, a loud, nasal 'wa' sound could be heard, dragging on and on. A siren; an alarm.
Behind us, in the entrance, a number of gargoyles dropped to the ground and began to move inside.
"Fuck," I said primly, stepping back. I reached into my bag and withdrew the pinecone the Druids gave me. They could see the future and told me I'd need it for defeating a wizard, so surely this was the right time to use it?
"Dean, get over here!" I barked.
"What did you doooo?!" he yelled, running up to me.
"Take my hand," I ordered.
"What? I'm not-"
"Do it!"
He glumly complied. I threw the pinecone at our feet like a smoke-bomb, but instead, it exploded into the ground, creating roots. Then it grew branches, leaves, and a thick bark, beginning to sprout upwards - an instant tree.
"What is th--whaaa!" Dean cried as a branch extended beneath his legs, and he held onto the tree.
I looked down, holding onto a branch, as the gargoyles began to climb the tree with their claws. Others began to flap their heavy, gray wings, rising into the air and intending to attack from up above. Only half would be in melee range, so it's a good chance to split responsibilities.
"Dean!" I screamed. "Shoot at the flying ones, I'll take care of the climbers!"
"Aaaaa-hahaaaa!" he replied, taking the Stechkin in his hands and letting out a staccato of shots, followed by the distinct sound of crumbling stone.
I held my sword tight and slid down alongside the bark of the constantly-growing and shifting tree. A branch grew under my feet halfway down, the tree responding to my intent and giving me a platform.
A gargoyle screamed at me with a nasty, bestial screech, and I responded with a flawless stab of my Deathblade. The green aura of my sword spread across the gargoyle, the curse of destruction causing stone to crumble and ripple. The gargoyle turned into dust.
I caught another, swinging the Deathblade in a wide arc and bisecting the body of a gray, stone beast. It promptly let go of the tree and its two halves disintegrated mid-flight, scattering into the air in a rather picturesque way.
Looking up to see how Dean was doing, I saw that he managed to shoot down two evil beasts. The gargoyles were stone and didn't care much about getting damaged, but he managed to shoot down the stumps holding their wings to their bodies, rendering them flightless and causing them to fall, which itself caused the gargoyles to crumble into pieces.
As if on cue, the tree began to creak and strain. This was followed by the sound of crumbling stone and an explosion, as the tree ignored the basic laws of hardness and momentum, breaking through the ceiling and onto the second floor.
The druids who gave me the pinecone said it'd keep growing until it reached the size of an elder tree - those are as big as skyscrapers from what I remember.
On the second floor, we were met with an assembly of iron golems that started to climb the tree. I told Dean to not waste ammo on them - they wouldn't be hurt by bullets and were slow climbers anyway, taking several seconds to barely ascend a meter higher, so I didn't bother taking them down.
The wizard's defenses probably didn't take into account giant, divine trees growing out of nowhere in the middle of his tower.
Soon, the tree broke into the third floor, which looked to be some kind of laboratory. I hopped off, and Dean hopped off after me, both of us deciding this looked promising. We stole several potions of healing for the upcoming fight and for whatever followed. We took a few other potions and items that looked interesting: red stones that exploded when thrown, flasks of bubbling green acid, and strange, swirling purple potions - presumably hallucinogenics.
Once our robbing spree was finished, we walked up to the tree - which temporarily slowed its growth to let us take some time robbing the place - and it to created two, wide, thick branches that we stepped on. With that, the tree returned to growing as our elevator.
We broke through every floor, tearing defenses apart and plundering any useful items. This included a scroll of time stop - which explained how the bastard captured Douglas in the first place - and an anklet that let me move faster, which I instantly put on.
Finally reaching the last floor - a small astro-laboratory with star maps on the walls, a giant brass telescope on a platform, and shelves stocked with indexes of star systems - just on time for the tree to arrest its growth, we looked to the completely bewildered Thamior gawking at our arrival.
Thamior looked like a very stereotypical wizard: thin blue robes with yellow stars on them, a pointed hat with more stars, a long white beard that concealed most of his mouth and a wrinkled face. Pinpointing his age was difficult, but he was definitely over seventy. The only difference between him and normal wizards was that his bushy eyebrows were frozen in a rictus of rage, instead of the typical melancholic aspect of old wisdom. He didn't appear to be armed with any wizarding accessories like a wand or staff.
"You!" he yelled. "I knew I should have turned you into frogs! You dare? You dare break my tower, destroy my creations, steal my-"
I took out the scroll of time stop and cast it. The scroll crumbled into ashes, and I ran toward the frozen wizard, swinging my sword to deliver a killing blow.
At the last moment, the time stop ran out and the wizard managed to step back, narrowly dodging my attack.
He raised both hands, one aimed high, the other low. "Fulgoris!" he incanted, and a crackling spray of cyan lightning emerged from his fingertips.
I held my sword up in front of me, letting the metal blade absorb most of the charge. I felt small tongues of electricity licking my arms and hands, numbing my fingers even through the leather gloves I wore. The pressure was too great, and I instinctively took several steps back before he could increase the spell's intensity.
"You dare?" the wizard asked, positively seething, as he continued casting the lightning spell to keep me at bay. If this were a cartoon, steam would probably be coming out of his ears in two streams. "Using my own scroll against me!?"
"Give us our friend back, fiend!" I declared my intent now, realizing maybe I should have done this first. If I kept doing things like just now, I'd probably get a bad reputation as the 'shoot-first-ask-questions-never' sort of hero.
Speaking of shooting, I subtly messaged Dean to shoot the bastard in the head by silently mouthing 'fucking shoot him' with my head minimally turned in his direction, and I grimaced when he didn't do so instantly.
"Your friend is nothing but a battery for my magic! He has a gift he refused to explore, and now, he is mine! You are fools, coming in here to save him from me! Do you even know who I am? I am Thamior the Great, Thamior the Wise, Thamior the Conqueror! And who are you to question my greatness and unlimited power? Now-" BANG!
The wizard's skull developed two red holes, a streak of brain matter leaving through one of them and freckling the floor in red. His body slumped and dropped with a gormless expression, eyes sliding up to the top of his skull as his throat made a strangled, gurgling sound.
I turned to Dean, sheathing the Deathblade. "You couldn't have done that earlier?" I took off my gloves and rubbed my hands to get rid of the numbness that Thamior's lightning induced.
He shrugged at me. "I thought he might say something interesting, but he didn't. I don't like monologues."
"Whatever," I replied with a sigh and put my gloves back on, clenching and unclenching my fingers to test if my nervous system was still working correctly. The fingers felt a little unresponsive, and still numb, but I could still hold a sword tightly. Good enough.
"Let's loot the corpse and find Doug."
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