WAR: What Is it Good For 11 (Patreon)

Magi.

One who walks with death.

Kenny King felt a frown pull his lips down, the words still rolling around in his head, trying to make the pieces fit as he stared out over the skyline. The view from the rooftop of Blüdhaven Central High was as depressing as always, the school itself jam-packed between a half-forgotten strip mall and an old, crumbling rowblock of houses one stiff breeze away from giving up. Four stories high, just enough to put him a little above the surrounding decay, he could see the oily gray shimmer of the harbor from here, a slick, polluted ribbon cutting through the city. Nothing out there was beautiful. Nothing was surprising enough to take his mind off the topic at hand.

Specifically…

“Not even gonna hold you, Weeg, but… yeah, that kinda sounds gay as hell,” he clicked his tongue, the sound sharp in the quiet air. “Tryhard as fuck too.”

His best friend shrugged, leaning up against the rooftop entrance that had brought them up here, the metal door scarred with a decade’s worth of graffiti and rust. “Not like I came up with it, fuck I care?” He rolled a cigarette between his thumb and pointer, and Ken was still trying to process the casual impossibility of what he’d seen five minutes ago. Luigi had just muttered a few words, something that sounded like old, angry Italian, and snapped his fingers. A tiny, perfect flame had bloomed from his fingertip, a magic trick that was anything but. “That’s how I learned it. That’s what it is.”

He shrugged back, not sure what else to say. Fair enough.

The last half hour had been a crash course in a world he didn't know existed, and Ken couldn't deny that he was starting to feel like he was drowning. It was one thing to know that you were in a very big, very fucked-up world. It was a whole other thing to get dick-slapped in the face day after day with just how little you knew about it in the first place.

Magi. His frown deepened. Is that like the same thing as Homo Magi? Sure, he knew about Zatanna, right? Both sets of his memories, the sixteen-year-old Blüdhaven kid and the twenty-two-year-old from another world, told him enough about her. In his last life, she was pretty much the strongest thing in magic behind Doctor Fate, kicking ass and showing ass everywhere from comic books to TV, animated and live-action. Lookin' at you, Smallville.

In this one, though, she was just a stage magician. No public superheroics, not yet. Made sense, he guessed, because as far as he fucking knew, most people didn’t even believe in magic. Which was all kinds of weird, because Dr. Fate was literally flying around with that golden toilet seat on his head and had been for like five years, apparently. People were stupid.

“...and are there a lot of other maguses around?” he gave his friend another look, a single eyebrow raised high. “...like you?”

Luigi took another long pull from his cigarette, the tip glowing a bright, angry orange. “Don’t ask me that shit, man. I thought you were a magus too. It’s… a… bunch, I guess.”

“…a bunch?”

The loud, frustrated sigh that left Luigi came with a whole mouthful of thick gray smoke, a cloud that the wind immediately snatched away and shredded against the hazy skyline. “Yeah. I don’t know. You’re the one with the Mystic Eyes. I thought you were one of ‘em, man. Part of some kinda clan, maybe.”

Mystic Eyes. Another thing Luigi had told him all about on their way up to the roof. A special form of supernatural power focused on the eyes, letting you do weird shit with just a look. It was simple enough, sure, and it matched what he knew of the Sharingan, but that sounded like Mystic Eyes could be fucking anything. X-ray vision, petrification, seeing the future… a whole grab-bag of bullshit.

“...so,” he let out a sigh with the single syllable, “what’s your magic?”

Those dull coppery eyes, nowhere near as red as they were in the stairwell, flicked over his way, and a smirk, slow and knowing, spread across Luigi’s pale face. “Yeah, I know you’re not a magus now.”

“…why?”

Luigi snorted, a sharp, dismissive sound. “From what I know, that’s like askin’ a girl to whip out her tits. Or stickin’ your hand down my pants to guess the size.”

“Oh,” Ken blinked. “So, I’m not supposed to do that?”

“What? Ask about that shit?”

“No,” Ken scoffed, a flicker of his old, sarcastic self cutting through the confusion. “Stick my hand down your pants. Yes, ask about your magic.”

Luigi rolled his eyes. “First, it’s called magecraft. Not magic. Another point to you not bein’ one of ‘em, not gonna lie.”

“Magecraft? Why?”

“Magic is for Magicians, aka Sorcerers. The real big dogs,” he said, waving one hand around in the air, the cigarette held between two fingers like a prop in a gangster movie. “Magecraft is like… it’s what lets you do things that are possible with human effort and science but through… cheatin’… with magic energy…” He frowned, the cigarette bobbing between his lips as he thought. “...I think?”

“You think?”

“I’m thinkin’ right now, yeah.”

“And Magic?”

“That’s the big shit, man. It’s like time travel and reality warpin’ and doin’ impossible shit with souls.”

“I thought doin’ anything with souls was impossible, not gonna lie.”

“Yeah, the world’s a big fucking place, chief,” Luigi dropped into a squat as the words left his mouth, his arms hanging over his knees like he had suddenly become a Russian gangster instead of the Italian kid Ken knew and sometimes hated. “What about you? You say you’re not a magus, but you’re pretty much burstin’ with od, man. What’s up with that?”

“Huh?”

“What, you haven’t noticed? Your energy’s been runnin’ this whole time.”

Ken blinked down at himself, confused. It has? He knew he could feel the chakra in his system, the way it circulated all around, kinda like blood, a constant, low-level hum, but… it’s active all the time? He blinked back up. “I… don’t know how to turn that off.”

Luigi made a face, a genuine look of baffled disbelief. “That’s… kinda fucking crazy. You’re just on all the time? And you’re not tired or like… dizzy or overheatin’? Nothin’?”

“Am I supposed to be?”

Luigi frowned a little. “Kinda, yeah. Most guys I know, they gotta be careful with their output. You burn too much od, you pass out. Burn it all, you die. You’re just… leakin’ it, and you’re fine.”

“…oh.” He shrugged. Seemed normal to him.

Luigi just shook his head, still looking at him like he was a math problem he couldn’t solve. “Wait, wait, wait, back up. How long have you been like this? Had your…”

“…chakra?”

Luigi nodded slow, the word foreign and awkward in his mouth. “Yeah, your… chakra.”

Ken shrugged again. “Friday night… about that, yeah. It just popped in a little bit after another vampire attacked me.”

“Vampire?” Luigi’s head snapped up, his coppery eyes suddenly sharp, focused, all the lazy energy gone.

“Yeah, this goth girl attacked me on Friday, and then before that, this weird greaser dude tried to drink me in an alley the day before.”

“How’d you…” The obvious question hung in the air. Not fucking die?

“Well…” Ken went into the whole story, explaining the whole summoning thing he’d been getting and how he figured it was like a metahuman ability; even the memories that came with the eyes and the knowledge of chakra and hand signs too. He left out all the stuff about the Crosscutters and Morituri, though, pretty sure that wasn’t his secret to go blabbing around. As his story came to an end, Luigi just shook his head.

“Nuh-uh.”

“What do you mean, nuh-uh?”

“That don’t sound like no meta-power I ever heard of,” Luigi smacked his lips. “Nothin’ like that’s gonna drop a whole Foundation on your head.”

“You an expert on magic and metas too, Weeg?”

“Nah, but all I’m sayin’ is like…” Luigi sighed again, putting out his cigarette on the rooftop’s loose gravel. “More than likely, could be you’ve got a divine hitchhiker, man. Some Divine Spirit might’ve marked you at birth and finally pulled the ripcord. Happens in old stories, all the time. A god leaves a seed, danger wakes it up. Explains the sudden juice, the mystery grab-bag, the knowledge and the eyes.”

“Oh…” Ken frowned, rubbing his chin slowly. That would explain a lot, right?

"Speakin' of vampires," Ken’s attention snapped back to Luigi as those six syllables slid out of his friend’s mouth, “you wanted to know about my magecraft, right?”

"Fuck, yeah," Ken said, the memory of the basement stairwell, of those obsidian claws, still a fresh, cold knot in his gut. “You grew claws or some shit, bruh.”

Luigi nodded, a flicker of something dark and ancient passing through his eyes. “Yeah, Iron Nails of Ash. It’s a pretty simple one. Always keep some ash somewhere on me. I can tap it to do all sorts of shit.”

Ken blinked. “Ash?”

Luigi smirked back, a flash of his silver grillz in the gray light. “Vampire ash is loaded with magical energy, bruh. You dust one, you basically get a battery and a little how-to guide baked into its spooky dust. My family figured out how to turn that into spells a couple hundred years back, so that’s what I do.”

“You hunt vampires too?”

Luigi’s smirk vanished, confusion clear on his face as his cigarette, now unlit, hung loosely from his mouth. “How the fuck would I not, man? This is Bludhaven, bro. The only reason I’m even in this shitheap is my family moved back here after like World War I or somethin’ ‘cause of all the fuckin’ bloodsuckers.”

“…oh.” He was unsure how to ask his next question.

Luigi didn’t have family… not anymore, at least. He knew they’d all died around the time he was ten, a home invasion that the cops had never solved. He knew Luigi was pretty much an emancipated minor, living off what he called a ‘trust’ until he was eighteen. 

He never really talked about it, but judging from what Ken noticed before, the casual way he talked about magic and fighting… well, he doubted it’d be a pretty conversation. So, he asked the second question on his mind. “That why you were so strong back there?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Red eyes too?”

“You know it.”

“…is that also why you look like you’re auditioning for a role in a Buffy reboot all the time?”

“…ye.”

He couldn't help it. A snort of laughter escaped him. “One piercing, two piercings, three piercings, ah-ah-ah.”

“…dickhead.” Luigi shot him an annoyed look for his spectacular impression of everybody’s favorite vampire, but there was no real heat in it. “And here I was gonna be nice and show you some stuff so you wouldn’t get caught with your pants down by another leechette.”

Ken’s laughter slowed a bit. “W-what? Not gonna teach me how to cast fireb—”

It happened in the space between one heartbeat and the next. A jolt, not of pain, but of… information. The world slowed for an instant as something new, something hot and structured, flooded into his brain. Knowledge of something out-of-this-world landing in his head and fusing with what he already knew, the foreign data of a spell slotting itself neatly into the chaotic, stolen framework of his chakra system.

It was a key finding its lock, melding together into something he could make use of.

“…holy shit.”

Luigi suddenly stood up straight, his coppery eyes wide, and grabbed Ken’s shoulders. “What? What just happened? You just… you zoned out for a sec, and your od spiked like crazy.”

Ken just grinned back, brain still buzzing as much as his insides were.

“I can cast fireball.”

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

New Moon - 250 NP

First formal introduction to the Moonlit World of magic, a dangerous world that draws you in the more you get involved.

Roll: [Fireball – World of Warcraft] – 50

A fundamental spell of destruction, you hurl a ball of fire at your target that explodes on impact. The fireball deals moderate fire damage and has a brief casting time, making it a reliable offensive spell. With practice, you can reduce the casting time and increase the intensity of the flames.

Nexus Points: 200