Wandering Warrior: Judge - Chapter 21 (Patreon)

Chapter 21

“What in the Trinity happened here?”  Leedy’s voice coming from farther up the trail let both of us relax.  Jess went over to intercept them and explain what happened, while I walked back over to get a closer look at the ghoul.

This wasn’t my first experience with one, but every world was different.  Past run-ins were only guidelines, and I was looking at the proof of that right now.  I had never run across an undead that could still keep moving and fighting after their brain had been pulped.  Even ancient vampires had to heal the damage before doing anything else, and liches abandoned the body they were inhabiting and returned to their phylacteries.  For a much lower-tiered undead like a ghoul to keep on swinging, there were either some much different rules this world followed, or I was missing something.

I poked at the burnt torso with my sword while holding my breath.  The others eventually joined me, after piling up the more mundane zombies in a nearby clearing.  While I was doing my inspection, the ghoul still rasped at me, its single eye following my every move.

Cross was standing nearby, so I walked over to talk to him.  “Has anyone ever figured out why destroying the brain doesn’t kill these things?”  I wiped off my sword before sheathing it, not wanting to dirty the scabbard.  “Or do other kinds of creatures keep fighting with most of their brains missing?”

“Oh, there’s plenty that can keep fighting without a brain.  Golems, trolls, certain kinds of giant insects, bone fiends, you.  All kinds.”  I looked at him with a cocked eyebrow while I collected my spear-staff and mace.  He managed to keep a straight face before glancing back at the ghoul.  “But, to answer your question, no.  There hasn’t been a lot of study on how ghouls work, considering how hard it is to catch one without destroying it.  Not to mention, there aren’t very many of them.  Ghouls are one of the rarest forms of undead out there.  I’ve only seen them farther north, and even then, this is only my third.  There are plenty of stories about them, but most are just retellings of battles during the last great undead incursion, which was long before I was born.”

“Fair enough.  I suppose it’s worth checking to see how this thing ticks.”  I crouched over the chest of the monster, making sure not to let it touch my clothes.  That was a smell that would never come out.  I pulled out my folding knife and checked to make sure it was sharp.  The blade on my spear-staff would work, but it was too unwieldy for fine work.

“What are you doing?”  Murphy stood next to me, his hands gripping the haft of his weapon hard enough to turn his knuckles white.  “Do you need help killing it?  That tiny knife won’t do much.”

“I’m doing something called an autopsy.  Most of the time, it’s what you do when you want to know how someone died.”  I started the incision, cutting around the bony plates of its armor.  “In this case, I’m doing it to find out how this thing didn’t die.”

“You are an odd man.”  Murphy turned and left, joining the others in their attempt to finish cleaning up after the battle.  Leedy was pouring oil over the corpses to burn the remains, while everyone else made sure there were no body parts or stragglers left behind.

While I was not a trained medical examiner, I had enough experience to know what should be inside a human-like creature, and what shouldn’t be there.  After poking around for a bit, I finally came across something.  Besides all of its organs being oversized to the point of ridiculousness, there was a small black orb about the size of a marble settled behind its heart.

The moment I touched it, the limbless creature tried to thrash and bite me.  I tugged the glass-like object free, and it was like unplugging an overly excited blender.  It just stopped, going completely still.  While holding the orb, a screen flashed in my vision.

Quest Update!

Rare Quest: Track down Silver Star - Ongoing

-You have discovered a clue to the location of the lost airship.  Continue to gather information and items that will help you solve the mystery behind what caused this world’s greatest invention–and future ruler–to disappear.

After getting an update like that, I immediately inspected the orb I was holding with my magic.

Item: Lesser Monster Core

Type: Undead/Darkness Aspect

Grade: 2/10

Description: A core of condensed mana used to empower or control rare subspecies of undead.  Can be used to empower enchantments, or absorbed to boost mana capacity.  Undead aspect makes this unsuitable for consumption by the living.

**Warning**

This is an Object of Power not native to this plane of reality.  Handle with care.

Now that was unexpected.  Monster cores were something I had read about in the great libraries of the elves in world eight, but in their archives, any monsters that created them had been hunted to extinction by greedy hunters looking for easy power.  No other worlds had mentioned them, and I guessed they had either never had them, or the beasts had met similar fates long before I had shown up.

And the warning?  That was something new.  As far as I knew, the only thing jumping between worlds was me.  To find this meant either the ghoul was a traveler like me, or something that allowed it to gain a core came from a different planet.  Just what kind of things were on this lost airship?

“What’s that?”  Jess snapped me out of my thoughts, and I stood up from my crouch over the corpse.

“It’s what allowed the ghoul to keep going after I blew its head off.  And I bet it’s why my sword was able to hurt it so badly.”  I held up the core.  “This is condensed magic.  It’s very dangerous, and unsafe for anyone but me to handle.”

“Doesn’t look like much.”  Jess leaned forward to get a closer look.  “What are you going to do with it?”

I put it in the same shielded pouch I kept other enchanted items in.  “I’m thinking about using it to power some runes.  Maybe use it to make a trap, or bomb.  Something that otherwise I would have to actively power with my own mana.”

“Can I help?”  She started kicking over one of the severed limbs of the ghoul toward the pile, making sure not to stab herself on the pointy parts.  “I would like to learn how to make something like that.”

“Sure, but only as an assistant.  You have to learn how to control your own mana before trying to empower runes into actual enchantments.”  I found a thick stick to use to roll the torso.  Getting my own staff dirty wasn’t something I wanted to do.  “After all, you just went through a whole battle without trying to use a single spell.”

Jess grimaced and gave the limb an extra hard kick.  “I forgot.  It’s still not real to me.”  She waved her hands, as if casting a spell.  “Magic isn’t instinctual yet.  Running away and ambushing anyone who chases me is what I’m used to doing.”

“That’s not a bad thing.  Standing and fighting overwhelming odds is a good way to end up dead.”  I levered the torso onto the pile, causing it to shift and almost collapse.  “Oops, sorry guys.  This thing is heavy.”

Leedy was pinching his nose closed to avoid the smell, and already had a burning brand ready to throw on the pile.  “Don’t worry about it.  Let’s get this over with and try to find those missing villagers.”  He put action to words, and lit the oil-soaked remains.

We cleaned up as best as we could while the fire burned down.  Murphy and Cross had to take the horse farther down the trail, since the smell was too much for the poor animal.  It was almost too much for the humans as well, but we couldn’t leave an untended fire in the middle of a forest.  I was still on the fence about burning the whole thing down, even if rash decisions made in anger were seldom seen as good ones the next day.

As the flames were starting to die down, Murphy came back to talk to us.  “I think you should see this.”  I went to follow him, but he held up a hand to stop me.  “Not you.  Corporal Leedy.  You haven’t been through here before, so you can’t know if the trail has been moved. ”

“Moved?”  Murphy ignored my question, and Leedy hurried off with him while I stayed with Jess.  Thankfully, she answered before I could ask.

“He doesn’t mean the trail was literally moved from one place to another.”  Even though she didn’t roll her eyes, I still felt it.  “Sometimes, bandits will clear out a new path–even mimic the markings on the trees–and cover up the old one with bushes and stuff.  It’s a lot of work, but it lets them set up an ambush site of their choosing.”

“Ah, I see.  At first, I was thinking there was some kind of earth mage running around playing pranks on people.”  I thought about it for a second.  “This is much worse, though.  If that’s what happened, the bandits are very organized, and there’s a whole bunch of them running around out here.”

The two of us fell into silence, both contemplating what it meant.  While I had no idea what Jess might be thinking, I was trying to put it all together.  Missing villagers, wandering bands of undead being led by a rare ghoul, roving well-organized bandits, wendigos, dinosaurs, and a bunch of vampires being led by an unknown pretentious person called themselves the Destitute.  Add in the quest update for the missing Silver Star, and I was starting to get the feeling that everything connected somehow.

“Do you think it’s burned down enough that we can leave?”  Jess kicked at what looked like a charred femur, knocking it back into the hottest part of the dying fire.  “Those villagers aren’t going to save themselves.”

“Why don’t you try and put the fire out with magic?”  I pointed at the center of the fire.  “You can try to cast a water spell to put it out, but that’s the easy way.  The one you should try is visualizing taking the heat from the fire and dispersing it into the ground.  Being able to bend reality–or brute force it–into whatever you want is a great way to strengthen your willpower.  Think of it as proving you have what it takes to handle more complex magic.”

Jess gave me a sharp nod of agreement before focusing all of her attention on the fire, squinting hard in concentration.  It was hard not to smile.  She was practically vibrating with excitement.  If she managed to pull it off, I would start her on mana exercises that would make it easier for her to expel more energy from her body at once.  If she couldn’t do it, I would have her practice elemental control.  No sense in being able to cast more powerful spells if you couldn’t exert the willpower to manage them.

While she was busy, I reloaded my wrist gun and refilled the makeshift powder horn.  After that, I looked over the rubbings of the runes on the gauntlets she was wearing.  Since I was a qualified runesmith, it was easy to see how mana would flow through the symbols.  What wasn’t easy to see is how the separate runes came together as a whole, creating the enhancing effect I knew had to be the final result.

Being from another world and all, runesmithing should have been hard for me.  Instead, I had looked at them like electrical circuits in a machine.  Each rune had a different job. Some runes were conduits, some were resistors, converters, storage, and of course the runes that executed the purpose of the circuit.  Most series of runes created a type of closed circuit, with the power source funneled through ‘positive’ conduits until it hit the rune that did the thing, and a ‘negative’ conduit that ensured the mana going through the execution rune was at the proper power limit, so the whole thing didn’t explode.

A basic light enchantment had a rune that held mana, another rune that funneled mana into the actual ‘light’ rune, and another rune that took any unused mana and sent it back to the storage rune.  Almost exactly like a battery with a positive wire leading to a lightbulb, and a negative wire leading back to the opposite side of the battery.  If I wanted to make a flashbang, I would just leave off the ‘negative’ rune that led back to the storage rune and allow the light rune to overload and explode.  More complicated enchantments were usually run like a series circuit, or a string of lightbulbs.  It made it dangerous if a rune failed, because it would cause a cascade failure that usually destroyed the object the runes were carved on.  That was why most people stuck to simple enchantments.

All in all, it was a pretty simple way to look at runesmithing, but it had worked across every world I had come to so far.  Even though I didn’t know exactly what each rune on the bracers did, I could see how the mana would flow through them.  The confusing thing about what I was looking at with the rubbings from the bracers was it should be a singular closed circuit.  Instead, I was looking at a parallel circuit, where every execution rune had its own direct link to the much larger power supply rune, with a shared negative link.  It made them safer individually, but if the power supply or negative rune failed, it would mean more than the bracers would be ruined.  They would go off like a stick of dynamite.

“Hey Jess, I think it might be a good idea for you to give me those bracers back.”  I glanced up to see her drenched in sweat, her face still scrunched up in concentration.  She was either too focused to have heard me, or decided to ignore me completely.  “Jess!”  I snapped my fingers, and she finally looked at me.  “Why don’t you take a break?  Straining yourself too much will only slow down your training.  And hand me those bracers so I can make some adjustments to make them safer to use.”

Jess handed me the bracers before flopping to the ground and staring sullenly at the dying embers.  “What am I doing wrong?  I can’t seem to do anything right.”  She pulled out a waterskin and took a few sips.  “Maybe I’m not meant to be a mage.”

“You’ve been practicing for one day and are already prepared to quit?”  I shook my head as I packed away the bracers.  “If that’s how you are going to act, I guess you really aren’t meant to be a mage.”

“That’s not what I meant!”  Jess jumped to her feet.  “I’m not going to quit that easily.  You just wait and see.  I’ll get this done, even without those bracers to help.”  She stormed off, moving to the other side of the fire.  As she left, she shouted back at me.  “You know, it’s okay for people to vent from time to time!”

I fought the smile that tried to turn up the corners of my mouth.  Angry determination was still determination.  With her distracted, I got back to experimenting with the core.  I tore off a strip of torn clothing from my pack and tied a knot in the center around the black monster core.  There were two equal tails coming off each side, and I stretched them out on a nearby rock.

Pricking my thumb, I used the tip of my pocket knife to write runes in my blood.  It would have been better to use crystal dust mixed with some kind of oil and somebody else’s blood, but I wasn’t exactly drowning in useful materials at the moment.

The first rune I drew was meant to connect to the orb as a power source, instead of drawing in ambient mana, or mana imbued by the user.  I made sure to use the strongest rune I knew, even though it was far stronger than the material could handle.  It was better that the fabric overloaded from rune failure than the orb.

Next, I used a connection rune that led to a series of runes that created a light spell meant to cast a cleansing aura.  It was what almost every entrance to an elven nature temple used as a way to ensure no corruption or undead could pass, with the theatrical side-effect of making people feel a sense of awe when going inside.  They were the very first runes I had ever learned, and were a strong baseline I could use for future experiments.

Since I was secretly a rebel without a cause who just wanted to blow stuff up, I also wanted to see what would happen when the runes used were the exact opposite of the elements contained in the core.  Cause, ya know, science and stuff.

I repeated the sequence on the opposite side of the knot, pricking my finger again so I could have enough blood to get the job done.  Having two rune sequences would either let me run the same test twice, or one time with double the power.  Either option would have to wait, since Leedy came running into the clearing with his sword already drawn.

“We’ve found them, but it isn’t good.”  Leedy motioned for the two of us to follow him.  “Come on, before it’s too late.”