Necro

Ch02

***

“Wake up.”

“Fuck off,” Marshal grunted. Coughing violently, he leaned back into the truck seat and groaned as he clutched his chest. While not in absolute agony, he still felt tender. “What the hell did you do to me?”

Eva snorted softly, “I told you it would hurt.”

“You said you’d knock me out.” A glimpse of motion in the corner of his vision drew his eye to a translucent shade of a person sitting in his passenger seat.

Long, straight black hair framed a delicate looking face and stood in stark contrast to her milky pale skin. Her frame, topping out at no more than 5'2” was tiny compared to Marsh's six feet. She was curvy, though not particularly blessed as far as assets went. She wore a black shirt or top that seemed to pull double duty as a skirt, coming down to her upper thighs and slit down the sides, in addition to a pair of tight brown pants of some sort. Her feet, however, were completely bare.

The most striking feature about her was her eyes—a shade of red-orange he hadn't seen outside of colored contacts before.

“I did,” came the short reply, before she added, “I don’t really have access to most of my spells at the moment, so I can’t do anything about the residual bruising.”

“Fine,” Marshal grunted. “So, what next? Who are we taking revenge against?”

“I want to track down the people who put me in this situation and make them suffer.” Tilting her head to one side, Eva added, “We should leave this warren and go south.”

Pulling his glasses off, Marshal rubbed at his eyes and the headache beginning to build behind them. “Do you actually know who it is you’re looking for? And what’s to the south? In fact, where the hell are we? Earth doesn’t have kobolds, last I checked.”

“We’re not on Earth,” Eva answered, before amending that statement with, “At least, not entirely. An alternate Earth, perhaps. Definitely not the Earth you know. The planet is called Terra Majora—creative, I know. Blame the Elves. We're on a little island corresponding roughly in location and terrain to Ireland on Earth. I say roughly because, last time I checked a map, the landmasses were similar but not identical.”

“Uh huh,” Marsh deadpanned. “And when was the last time you checked a map?”

The lich shrugged. “A few hundred years ago. I lost track of time. As to your other question—to the south should be my castle.”

“Your castle?” Shaking his head, he waved her off. “Later. So, why bring me here? Never mind how, I assume it's some magic bullshit.”

“The arrangement was mutually beneficial. You wanted to avoid prison for murder, I want to murder people for leaving me in a prison. We can help each other. Now, if you've no more questions—”

“I have several,” he countered, glaring at the lich.

Eva returned the glare with equal force. “We have to go. Now. The longer we sit here, the more danger we're in. They'll have felt me breach the gap to bring you over using your power and they won't be pleased about it.”

“'They?'” Marshal repeated, then blinked. “Wait, no, first: my power?”

The lich rolled her eyes. “Of course that's what you'd focus on,” she grumbled. “Yes. Your power. I've spent the last few hundred years trying to escape my self-made prison by using what little power I had available to try to recreate and perfect my old master's spells. Master Magnus was a madman, but madness and brilliance tend to go hand in hand—especially where wizards are concerned.

“I managed to find a way to view other places outside of this realm, but I could never interact or communicate with anything in the target realm. At least, not until I came across your world. As soon as I did, your power drew my spell in and the two connected in a way I wasn't expecting. It allowed me to hear and see things at a level that I hadn't been able to previously—and to speak to you. Your power, Marshal, creates bridges. It's the culmination of Master Magnus’ life's work—in a form that doesn't require spells or calculations.'

Marsh frowned. “'Bridges?'”

“You can connect two points in space, skipping the space in the middle.” Eva paused, thinking it over before adding, “Your science fiction media calls the phenomena a wormhole.”

“Wormholes,” Marsh deadpanned. “You're saying I make wormholes.”

“Yes,” Eva agreed. “Well, you've only made one successful wormhole—but you held it open for nearly thirty years and I was able to expand it to fit your truck to get you here.”

Shaking his head, Marsh asked, “What about the rest of that? Who is this 'they' you're worried about?”

“Elves. Gods—well, most Elves may as well be gods. Other wizards. Any one of a hundred other interested parties. Master Magnus. Mostly though, we're worried about the first two.” Marshal opened his mouth and Eva growled, “Yes, Elves. Yes, Gods. No, probably not friendly. There’s only one I’d even remotely trust and that’s only to trust her to use us to her own ends and maybe, if we’re lucky, make sure we don’t die in her little schemes.” She pointed back behind the truck, towards the source of the rushing water sound. “The exit is over there.”

Marshal started to shift off the seat again as he began making plans for a hike, then changed his mind. “You can do magic.”

“Yes...” Eva agreed. “I'm surprised you were so quick to believe me.”

“Seeing is believing,” Marsh countered.

The translucent girl sighed. “Unfortunately, I am limited right now in both scope and power. I have more power now than I had yesterday, thanks to you—but it's still not what I'm used to working with. My primary field of study was in Soul Magic and Necromancy, though Master Magnus made sure I was well grounded in the basics and I studied pretty much anything that caught my interest. It's how I got us here, actually—residual necromantic energy left over in that cemetery along with the two fresh kills you made used to fuel your own power and make a big enough hole under us to fall through. Why?”

Grinning, Marsh sat back in his seat. “I'm not leaving my truck. Or my gear. We need to cross ground fast, right? Are there roads? Fields? Fairly open terrain to move across?”

“Last I checked,” Eva nodded.

“Then we'd do it a hell of a lot faster on wheels than on foot. You know damn well what I put into this thing and the sorts of terrain she can cross. Problem is, she won't fit through that tiny little gap in the wall back there,” Marshal pointed to the gap in question.

A smirk stretched across Eva's lips as she imagined it. “Yes. Yes, this is a good idea. Do you have something to write with?” Popping open his glove box, Marshal produced a black magic marker and waved it at the lich. “Excellent. You'll need a surface to permanently affix a pattern to and... I'll need to borrow your body.”

“Explain,” Marsh demanded, even as he reached down and pulled the release lever for his hood.

Eva followed along beside him as Marshal made his way to the front of the truck and popped the hood open, before climbing up onto the brush guard over the grille to inspect the metal underside of the hood. “We're sharing the same body. I'm already borrowing your senses—and I must say, it's very nice to be able to truly feel again. If you allowed me to, I could move your limbs as well. It would be much quicker than trying to describe what you need to draw. Quicker and less likely to violently explode when—not if—you get something wrong.”

Regarding the lich for a long moment, Marshal finally shrugged. “Fine. Go for it. I'd prefer not to see my stuff go up in a blaze of glory.”

The woman's shade smiled, then disappeared. An instant later, his right hand twitched before his head shifted up to regard the hood. The marker came up and he watched as a passenger as his body moved outside of his direction to draw some sort of pattern on the underside of the hood—a circle with some symbols he recognized and many more he did not. After a few minutes of work, his head nodded and he capped the marker, before Marshal abruptly felt like he was in control of his own body again.

“Now what?”

The shade reappeared, this time leaning against the side of the truck, her head tilted to peer up at the pattern she had used him to draw. “Put your hand on it and I'll do the rest.” Turning those burning eyes on him, she added, “Try to follow along. This is your first lesson in using magic: channeling mana. Having me guide you should be enough of a shortcut to cut months, if not years, off your study in the subject. I know you’re not stupid, but mana manipulation is something of an art form and takes years of practice to master.”

Raising an eyebrow at that, Marshal shrugged before placing his fingers on the circle. A tingling, cool feeling pushed outwards from his chest, traveling down his arm and out of his fingers. The squiggles Eva had drawn in black magic marker lit up with a blue light reminding him of a certain kind of radiation. The truck shifted under him and he shoved off it, dropping to the ground as it shrank down before his eyes, finally stopping when it was roughly the size of a child's pocket car.

“Okay,” Marshal turned a grin on the shade of the woman beside him, “that was kind of cool.”

“I'm glad you think so.”

Picking up the miniature truck and gently closing the still-open hood and door with a couple of soft clicks, he asked, “How long will it last?”

“Normal shrinking and stasis runes tend to last about a week on an average charge. Master never liked to settle for ‘normal’ or ‘average’ though, so he drilled it into my head to always add an array to absorb ambient mana to everything I plan to make permanent. It’ll last until you reverse it,” Eva answered. “And before you ask, even turning it upside down and shaking it won't affect anything inside of it—even the liquids will remain exactly as they were before it was shrunken.” She gestured towards the kobold corpses Marshal had left behind. “One last thing, before we leave…”

“Yeah?” Marsh asked, pocketing the truck and following the see-through lich as she moved.

“I may as well start rebuilding my army here and now.”

Blinking, Marsh asked, “Undead army?” Eva nodded. “Those?”

“In life, they were stupid, rat-faced little shits. In death? They are small, tireless, semi-autonomous borrowers. The things I can do with a group of kobold zombies…” The lich took on a far off look, a smirk spreading across her face as she giggled quietly to herself. She came back to herself after a moment and waved Marshal over. “I can’t do this by myself yet. For now, I’ll need your body to cast for me. So, pay attention while I work and you may just pick something up.”

“Fun,” Marsh drawled, his tone laced with sarcasm.

On the inside, however, he felt like a kid in a candy store as he and Eva worked together to raise the fallen kobolds. When the first reanimated it moved away under some silent mental command from Eva, beginning to round up the ones furthest away and drag them closer. The next to be raised followed suit, and Marsh realized Eva was an old hand at this as she already had an efficient system in place to get corpses to her as quickly as possible.

“Not all of these are viable,” Eva explained, gesturing to one in particular that was missing the top of its head above the jaw—a victim of Marsh’s shotgun at close range. “In the future, try to keep in mind that the less damage you do to their bodies, the more useful they are initially and the less work we’ll have to put in to make them useful again. Try to leave heads, brains, and spines intact as a first priority. Secondary priority goes to skeletal muscles and bones—if it doesn’t have a frame to hold itself up or muscles to move, it’s useless. I detest having to sew parts from multiple corpses together to make a working one, and since I don’t have hands, guess who gets to do it in my place.”

“Fuck that shit,” Marsh shook his head. “So, aim for heart shots if possible.” As the last of the usable kobolds was revived, Marsh asked, “Now what do we do with them?”

“We… uh.. Shit!” Eva cursed, stomping one bare foot soundlessly on the floor. “I had a bottomless bag specifically for corpses and zombies at one point, but I imagine that was looted when those do-gooders killed my body.” Turning to Marshal, she hummed and asked, “I don’t suppose—”

“No,” he denied. Eva shot him a flat look. After a minute of staring between the two, he finally rolled his eyes. “How long would it take to make one of my bags bottomless?”

“Longer than we have,” Eva admitted. “But I can do it to all of them when we get a chance to stop, so while you would be losing one bag, you would gain more than enough space from the others to make up for it. Until then, we can unshrink the truck and load them into the back, then shrink the lot down.”

“Works for me,” Marsh agreed, turning and making his way back to the relatively flat area where the truck had initially appeared and pulling the matchbox sized vehicle out of his pocket before placing it on the ground. The resurrected kobolds followed, climbing into the back of the truck as soon as it had been expanded and the tailgate let down. The truck full of corpses found its way back into his pocket and Marsh headed for the exit.

The entrance to the cave was barely wide enough for him to slip through sideways and curved in the middle, which he was almost certain was intentional. “Did you find this cave?”

Ahead of him as she lead, Eva shook her head. “No. I created it.”

“I thought you said you studied Soul Magic and Necromancy,” Marshal pointed out.

Eva turned a wicked smirk on him, almost a leer really. “I did.” When he gestured for her to go on as he shuffled along, she explained.

“Most necromancers waste their talent raising shitty undead of some sort. Most undead are little better than flesh golems and completely incapable of following any order more complex than 'stand here,' 'move this,' or 'kill anyone who isn't me' without direct guidance. Utterly worthless, except as either a demoralization tool in a war or as cheap manual labor. I've used them for both, to great effect, but it's still a waste of talent. The only reason I even bothered to rez the kobolds was because they’re useful as infiltration units, and as soon as I find something to replace them with I will.”

She gestured for him to duck and Marshal narrowly missed cracking the side of his head against a rock. “Some necromancers venture into Soul Magic and figure out how to capture a soul and bind it to a body—turning it into an undead, skilled, and intelligent corpse golem. Those are only truly useful if you come up with a way to make the body indestructible. Usually those also wind up yanking their own soul out and sticking it in something more permanent than a frail mortal body, so liches aren't exactly new or rare. It's a poor method of immortality, however, and is best used as an additional safeguard on top of whatever other measures a wizard takes to stave off death. I believe I am the first to do what I did.”

“Which was?” Marshal asked over the roar of water. Around them, the tunnel finally ended and he found himself stepping out into fresh, cold air—heavy with the scent of a nearby river. The mouth of the cave was set into the side of a mountain and obscured by green shrub in a way that would be all but invisible until one was pretty much right on top of it. Breathing deeply, Marsh grinned. “Fresh air.”

Turning in a circle, he took in his surroundings. Everything was so very green—covered in moss, grass, scrub plants, or huge trees growing up the side of the mountain. Where it wasn’t green, dark gray rocks jutted from the mountain creating boulders, overhangs, and other obstacles. “Yeah, I’m not getting the truck through here,” he muttered and started walking towards the stream he could hear. “Keep going. What did you do different?”

Eva's eyes had gone half lidded as he inhaled, clearly enjoying the sensation herself. “I captured souls. And while it's been done before to increase a lich's strength, no one had done it quite the way I did. Most just eat the souls they capture, directly empowering themselves and sometimes gaining a little knowledge, but otherwise wasting it. I made phylacteries for the souls I took and I chose my targets carefully. A corrupt magistrate, but renowned for his skill over fire spells. An assassin gifted in stealth and manipulation of shadow. Anyone who attacked me and showed any sort of exceptional skill was added to my collection, along with the prey I sought out directly. By the time of my demise, I had amassed quite a collection of souls, each with unique knowledge and skills, or an abundance of power. The last, my crown jewel, was an Elf. The fool said my art was an affront to the gods and he did his best to shuffle me off the mortal coil. In the end, I won, and his soul was mine. Oh, you have no idea what sort of things the Elves are hiding—and this was a young one! Imagine taking a hundred years to learn everything you could about sword work. Then taking a hundred years to do the same with the bow. Another hundred each for every other weapon under the sun and countless other skills besides—and constantly practicing all the other skills you’ve amassed so that none of them get rusty. It was almost overwhelming. It was... humbling.'

Marshal turned a frown on the necromancer beside him, before asking, “So how did you win in the first place?”

“Overwhelming brute force,” Eva answered with a snort. “He didn't expect me to have eaten a dragon. And even with that sort of power backing me up, it was still entirely too close to a fair fight for comfort. If I’d had the time, I would have set traps. Unfortunately, he ambushed me—not the other way around.”

“I see,” Marsh nodded. “So, elves are nasty.”

“Elves, with a capital 'E.' And yes, they're nasty. Elves rule the world, or did the last time I checked. I doubt much has changed in that regard since I was killed.”

Nodding at that as he came to the stream, Marshal asked, “Which way?”

The shade beside him looked around with a frown on her pretty face. “Downhill.”

“Helpful as always,” Marshal snarked, but turned to follow the stream down the hill, which would probably lead them out of the mountains. The terrain was not particularly hard to traverse on foot, despite the impossibility of getting his truck through it, leaving him wishing he’d thought to load up his dirt bike or ATV into the back of the truck before he left home.

If Eva had told me she planned to spirit me away to another world, I’d have packed a whole lot more—all the guns and ammo instead of just what I brought, the bike and the four-wheeler, maybe the boat. Hell, I could have loaded up my trailer with all of that and brought it.

To pass the time, he asked, “So, these 'Elves.' What kind of elves are we talking about and why do they rule your world?”

Eva turned an amused look on him. “There are more races of Elves than there are races of humans. ‘High’ Elves—probably the ones you think of when you think ‘elf.’ Hair colors ranging in every human shade you’re used to and a few you aren’t, fair skin, slim build. They’re the most dangerous. They have a name for their race, but it’s in High Elvish—which they don’t teach to anyone but the very few High Elf children born—and it’s pretty much unpronounceable by anyone but them since it’s one part vocal, one part magic tonal so don’t bother. Dark Elves, Winged Elves, and so on. The Elves have been interbreeding with every sentient on the planet for long enough that their offspring have formed individual races. You could technically call them all ‘half-elves,’ but there is no such thing as a ‘half-elf.’ Elves breed true, for the most part, and simply assimilate the best parts of whatever it was they bred with.”

“‘For the most part?’” Marshal asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Humans are the one exception. No one is sure why. Well, no—I’m certain the Elves are sure why and are keeping it to themselves. However, I can tell you the effects of such pairings. If no new Elven blood is introduced, within four generations most of the Elvish features are washed out, leaving a fairly normal-looking human. They’ll always be prettier than other humans, but that’s the only real outward sign. Internally? Every single one of them is capable of using magic, in every generation afterwards, to varying degrees.”

Stepping over a downed limb, Marsh hummed as he turned a thoughtful look on his companion. “So all human magic users are descendants of Elf/Human pairings?”

“Not all, but most,” Eva agreed. “As to your other question, why do you think they rule?” Moving around to walk in front of him, she kicked off the ground and floated in midair. When Marsh simply looked at her expectantly, she sighed. “Spoil my fun. Fine. They're immortal.” She tilted her head to one side for a moment before clarifying, “Or perhaps I should say they don't age like most other races, they're extremely powerful and skilled, and they are very, very difficult to kill. They are not truly unkillable, just ageless.”

“So, overwhelming force is required,” Marsh lead, and Eva nodded.

“If you're lucky, it'll work and they'll die for a while. And then the little shits go right back to their little Well of Souls and are reborn into a new body within the year—memories and skills intact, so all they have really lost is the time spent training their bodies.”

It was impossible to miss the bitter tone in her voice, but Marsh chose not to comment on it. A race that was agelessly immortal, had the weight of millenia worth of experience and skill on their side, and even if you managed to kill one they just respawned? Sounded like bullshit to him.

Instead of commenting on it, he asked, “How old are we talking, here? A few thousand years?”

Eva's red-orange eyes were flat as she answered, “Eighty million years, last time I checked. Elves were the first hominid species to walk this planet, and they were around when dinosaurs were still a valid threat. There are still Elves alive who walked Terra Majora in those days—in the same bodies that stood toe to toe with things like the T-Rex—and those are the ones you do not cross.”

“So, very long-lived,” Marsh surmised. “I take it they've ruled since then?”

Eva nodded. “Elves have directed the evolution of every sapient species on the planet—uplifting many into sapience and creating even more.” She frowned as she said, “Imagine a race who feel like it is their duty to shepherd every other race along in its growth. Who engaged in selective breeding and experimentation in order to create better examples of those races—to bring out the best in each of them. Who ruthlessly culled every failed evolutionary branch to prevent it from spreading its genes.”

Marshal hummed, pushing aside a branch the lich had simply floated through. “You know, I can't tell if that's good or bad from a moral standpoint. And I don't think I care. So, I'm guessing these guys are kind of dicks who look down on everyone.”

“Pretty much,” she agreed with a nod. “I've got no complaints about them turning the world into their own personal experiment, considering the benefits outweigh the downsides. My problem is that most of them are, as you said, dicks.”

“I see,” he muttered, mentally making plans to avoid the Elves if at all possible. He didn’t particularly feel like dealing with something that could kill him with a thought.

The pair fell silent as Marsh walked, both of them keeping an eye out for trouble as they moved. Marshal was excited to experiment with magic, but rezzing those kobolds had been draining—leaving him tired in a way he had never been before. Some careful self-examination with that new power gave him a rough idea that it was slowly recharging or refilling—but he had no real way to gauge how long that would take, as he was new to this whole ‘mana’ thing.

On the other hand, there was a restless energy building in him, entirely different from the cool feeling of the mana he could faintly feel in his body. It felt like electricity—like a static charge building up, waiting to be used. He realized that it had replaced the constant feeling of strain he’d had so long that he had simply stopped noticing it, and without that strain he felt like he could do anything.

Everything I read online said powers are supposed to be instinctive. So, let’s instinct this thing, he mused, focusing on that static feeling and trying to will something to happen. Something in his head just clicked and he realized what he needed to do.

Focusing on a spot several yards ahead and fixing that in his mind, he concentrated and a moment later, reality distorted in front of his face. A faint blue light and distortion—like looking at the world through swirling water—formed, a few inches across. Ahead of them, an identical distortion formed in the space he had been aiming at. Looking at the distortion in front of him, he could clearly see the scenery on the other side of the wormhole. “That is… very cool.”

“It really is,” Eva agreed. “I kind of thought you’d ask me to start teaching you magic.”

Marsh shook his head. “I still feel tired from helping you rez those damn kobolds.”

Eva smirked. “If you had asked, I’d have told you to wait an hour or two to recharge anyway. This is better. I can feel the energy inside of you when you use it. It’s close enough to spirit energy that one can fuel the other, but it’s distinct.”

“Thought you said you used necromantic energy to fuel it,” Marsh pointed out and the shorter woman shrugged.

“Lesson time, it seems. All energy is separated into spectrums.”

“No shit, Sherlock.” Marsh rolled his eyes, focusing on the two portals and willing them to move while they walked—the first moving further away while the closer one kept pace with him, allowing him to see out of his new vantage point. A thought had the further portal zipping upwards and reorienting itself, giving him a bird’s eye view of the area.

The lich flipped him off before continuing. “All energy, including magic. Every wizard knows this. What most of them don’t know is that it’s not a straight line—it’s more of a sphere. Pretty sure the Elves know, but I think that old lech Magnus was the first human to figure it out on his own, and he taught me.”

Tilting the upper portal, Marsh spotted the edge of the forest—and beyond it, rolling green hills and valleys for miles. “How’s that relate? Also, is this safe? Can the Elves detect it?” he asked, gesturing at the portal.

Eva shrugged. “It’s safe. They’d have only picked up crossing over due to the influx of Necromantic energy.”

“Great,” Marsh nodded.

Focusing his sight through the two portals, he willed a third into being outside the tree line while allowing the portal in the air to dissipate. With a flex of will power and that static buzz in his body, he forced the portal to open up wide enough to walk through. Between one step and the next, he moved from the forest onto the top of a grassy hill. He frowned as he closed both portals and shot a look at the floating lich. “I didn’t even feel that. It took more effort to walk through than it took to open the hole.”

“Of course. You’ve been holding open a pinhole between universes for thirty years, Marsh. Local portals don’t require nearly the sort of energy it takes to cross the space between. The powers of your Earth are like muscles—the more you train them, the more you get out of them. You’ve been training—albeit unknowingly—all that time.”

Smirking, she added, “Now, be a good boy and put some more miles between us and that cave before you break out the truck.”

“South?” Marsh asked, and Eva nodded. Creating another set of portals, Marsh repeated the process, stepping across them to a point several miles ahead.

“Now, as I was saying,” Eva continued. “The soul is a real thing and composed of energy. There are about a hundred names for it, but for simplicity sake, call it ‘spirit.’ Spirit can change states into many different other forms of energy—mana, ‘life’ energy or chi as you know it from those silly cartoons, and others; in addition to a pretty much limitless variety of combinations of them.

“People on your Earth with powers process Spirit into fuel for their abilities. But that’s all internal energy. There is also energy outside the body just as there are cosmic rays, things floating around the EM spectrum, and so forth. Necromantic energy is Spirit that’s left behind in corpses. The soul is usually gone, but it’s left behind traces—think magical radiation. Most energy floating around outside the body can’t be reconstituted into Spirit, but Necromantic energy can—because it pretty much is spirit, just on a slightly different wavelength.”

Marsh sighed, shaking his head. “Okay, enough. I get it. Note to self: if I ever want a cheap power boost, stop by a cemetery.”

Eva smirked and nodded. “Exactly. The dead are dead—they aren’t using it and they’re not going to complain. And if some lingering ghost does complain, you can eat it too. Now, why aren’t you doing the smart thing and just moving us across the island?”

Turning an annoyed look on the lich, Marsh gestured around them. “I was enjoying the scenery, thank you.”

“Ugh. Sightsee later, get us moving now.”

“Fine,” Marsh grunted. Looking straight up, he took a rough estimate of distance, shrugged, and opened a portal. Wind rushed around them, roaring into the closer portal and causing Marshal to have to grab his hat to keep it from being swept off his head.

“You idiot! Don’t open portals into space!”

“It’s not space,” Marsh denied, eyeballing the island the portal had appeared over and aiming for the southern coast. The wind stopped as the new portal formed and the higher of the three closed behind it. The portals widened and he stepped through onto rocky shore, the sound of waves rolling over the coast and the scent of sea spray filling his senses as the portals closed behind him. “There, see?”

“Asshole!” the lich growled, glaring at him before her eyes shifted to the side and went wide. “Duck!”

Marsh ducked, shifting backwards. The slick, smooth rocks shifted under his boots and he lost his footing. Hitting the ground, he rolled as something shiny swished through the air where his head had been. Coming up into a crouch, Marsh’s mouth fell open as he spotted the threat.

Blue scales, fangs, long serpentine lower body and the upper body of a particularly well-built man greeted him wielding a golden colored bident. The naga—his years of video games and D&D sessions refused to allow him to classify it as anything else—reared back and stabbed forward again. Two things happened then: Marshal got serious and the snake-man died.

A portal opened in front of the naga’s bident while a second opened over the beast’s sternum, just beneath where Marsh guessed the ribs to end. The bident slammed into the naga’s chest cavity, the force of its own momentum sending it falling backwards, bright red blood leaking from its new wound. Pain and confusion crossed its mostly-human face before it slumped over, dead.

Marsh stood to his feet, brushing off his pants and coat as he looked around. His long distance portaling had put them right on the edge of a little village on the shoreline, composed of piles of those smooth rocks and timber taken from the nearby forest. Marshal considered running as he took in the village, which had quickly raised an alarm. A squad of six new nagas, each as large as the last were quickly slithering his way up the beach.

“Are they sentient?” he asked, casting a sidelong glance at Eva.

The lich frowned. “Yes. Also highly territorial and aggressive. Some of them can even use magic.”

“They attacked me first,” Marsh pointed out, and Eva shrugged.

“They attack all other races on sight. Time to decide: run or fight.”

A spear flew through the air, forcing Marshal to sidestep or get impaled. Reaching under his jacket, he drew the 1911. “Fuck them.”

Beside him, a smile entirely too full of teeth stretched across Eva’s face as she watched. Gods, I can’t believe that cunt almost undid my work. I haven’t had this much fun since I launched my first campaign across the mainland. This is going to be great.

Two portals, each barely two inches across, formed—the first in front of Marshal and the second in the face of the lead naga. Bringing the 1911 up, Marsh pointed it at the portal and squeezed the trigger. Once more, the locals of this world froze as they experienced gunfire—and its results—for the first time. With the portals, Marshal hadn’t even had to aim—he may as well have just stuck the gun in the naga’s face.

As it turns out, while naga hide is tough, a .45 caliber jacketed hollow point round is tougher. The bullet left a hole in the creature’s face while back of the its head exploded in a small fountain of gore. The spent brass casing tinkled quietly against the rocky shore as the portal shifted and the second shot rang out and another naga went down. “Want to rez any of these?”

“Absolutely not,” Eva denied. “Too big, too slow, with nothing to show for it.” Glancing down at the first naga’s bident, she hummed. “They’ve got a source of orichalcum around here somewhere though, so you’ll want to see if they’ve got processed bars of it. If not, the weapons and armor could be useful.”

“Commentary later,” Marsh grunted, shifting to the side and line-of-sight portaling himself away from a naga that had closed in on him. Unlike the kobolds, the gunfire only spurred the nagas into attacking all the harder and they were quick to figure out his portal-in-the-face trick.

Unfortunately for the first naga to duck as soon as a portal appeared in its face, they were not quite as fast to figure out portals appearing behind their heads. Shouts in whatever passed for their language sounded across the village and Marsh portaled to the top of a bluff overlooking the village.

“Should have done this to begin with,” he muttered, quickly eliminating the rest of the guards before turning his attention on the other nagas. A large group of them had fled into the water—women and children from the look of things, assuming those were breasts he saw, accompanied by a group of three of the big male nagas. “Let them go?”

Eva snorted softly. “I’d like to say exterminate them all and mount their corpses on pikes along the shoreline as an example to others, but no. Let them go.”

Marsh raised an eyebrow at that, stepping off the bluff and into the middle of the village as he began engaging in the time honored tradition of adventurers everywhere—looting the dead and stealing their things for himself. His newly working power put an interesting twist on that process. And all the while, mist rose off the corpses and trailed its way to him, easing the fatigue he’d felt after animating the kobolds.

Knowing he’d have to load it all up into the truck anyway, he unshrank the vehicle in what passed for the naga town square and then went building to building portaling everything of interest into the back of the truck with the kobolds. A second pair of portals off to the side allowed him to keep a watch over the village to make sure the nagas wouldn’t return before he was finished and, if they did, he could deal with them. “Why the desire to display them?”

Eva frowned from where she sat cross-legged in midair. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to tell you,” she muttered. Sunset eyes met Marshal’s green for a moment before she looked away. “This was my home. Years before I was killed, I lived in a little town on the eastern coast. It was mostly farmers and fishermen, but my family could use magic. I was something of a prodigy when I was born, but my parents couldn’t afford to send me to any school beyond the simple one in the village—and definitely not a school for magic.

“My mother was never interested in magic, but my grandmother knew a great deal about spirits, along with some herbalism. So, I spent my time studying under my grandmother and, when I could, engaging in self-study. Then, one day, Master Magnus passed through our village. He had come for me, as a favor to his goddess. I spent a decade or so studying under the lecher, being dragged across the islands and the continent on whatever harebrained scheme he had concocted that month. It was fun.”

As she talked, Marsh watched her face shift through emotions—nostalgia, bitterness, annoyance, even longing. While he was an ass by nature, Marsh knew the lich well enough to know when and how to pull her out of a funk. Moving into the largest house in the village, he set about ransacking the place. “This trip down memory lane come to a point any time soon?”

“Asshole,” the woman grunted, turning a glare on her companion. “Yes, it has a fucking point. The point is, eventually I ‘graduated.’ Master Magnus acknowledged me as a master myself—a Master of Necromancy and Spirit Magic. I made my phylactery and came home to visit my parents. When I got home, though, I found out that my parents, my grandmother, and nearly everyone I had known had died in my absence. A plague swept the island, eradicating every person living on it. My first death was spent puking and shitting my guts out in absolute agony for three days straight before I died of dehydration. Then I rezzed my corpse and went to see the rest of the island.”

Balling her fists up and crossing her arms under her breasts, she glared—and though she was looking at him, Marsh got the feeling he wasn't the target of her ire. “Everywhere I went, it was the same story—every town, every city, wiped out. I was the last living soul on the entire island. So began my first campaign. I animated the bodies of my family and friends and had them bring me more bodies.

“More and more, spreading across the island until I had everyone under my control—over ten thousand soulless husks, waiting for orders. I razed every settlement—burned them all to ash. Plague control at its finest. Then I rebuilt. I had thousands of laborers build a grand city to honor the dead—my Mausoleum. When I was done, I laid my family to rest and we cut down half the trees on the island to make ships to get us across the water, where I began tracking down the source of the plague and killing everyone who raised a sword to me. I tracked them all the way to the continent and I killed them all to a man, then I brought my army back and laid them to rest beside my family.

“When I left again to seek out Master Magnus, this was an island of the undead—my island. My home. So to see inhuman filth stain its shores is an affront I cannot stand… but I have been dead a long time and I do not know the state of things here. Until we take a lay of the land, it would not be wise to start killing everything we come across and raising another army. Before that, though, we need to recover my other phylacteries.”

Exiting the last house, Marshal nodded and portaled back to where he had first faced off against the nagas, where he began collecting his spent brass for later reloading. “What will those do for us?”

“Access to more schools of magic,” Eva answered, watching Marshal work. “I’d hoped there would be a store of orichalcum bars, but the weapons will have to do. You can melt those down into more ammunition and casings. They’re magically conductive, so we can enchant whatever you make.”

“Magic bullets?” Marsh asked, pocketing the last spent shell before moving to the next site. When Eva nodded, he asked, “What about enchanting the weapons themselves?”

Eva wagged a hand back and forth. “We can try, but results will vary. If you could find someone to build copies out of more magically conductive material? Absolutely.”

“If it doesn’t stand up to chamber pressure, then it’s worthless to me even if it is magically blue and glowy,” Marsh pointed out.

The lich shook her head. “You’d be making it out of better material than orichalcum. This stuff is the equivalent of magical pig iron. It’s crap, but it’ll carry a charge and I can do things like make bullets that explode when they hit, or pierce more than they should.”

“Fair enough,” Marshal agreed, pocketing the last of his brass and portaling to the truck. In the back was an assortment of spears, bidents, the odd trident, and several short swords—all made from the same gold-tinted metal. Rolled up to the side were two of the large fishing nets the nagas had been using, along with several smaller nets. Marsh had taken one look at the big nets, muttered something about a ghille suit, and portaled them to the truck with a smirk on his face.

In addition to that, there were a pair of small wooden chests. The first was filled with silver and gold coins—older looking and round, this time, compared to the bar style coins he had found with the kobolds. The second box was filled with pearls in shades of white, red, blue, and black in sizes ranging from peas to one black pearl as large as a baseball. There had been no books or anything else of interest, really.

If it weren’t for the chests of coins and pearls, Marsh would have thought they were the equivalent of a small fishing village with nothing of any real value. This seems more like a case of their society not valuing things the same way ours does. That is, spartan living conditions and little in the way of personal possessions with a community coffer of funds. Shit, they’re scaly commies.

“You seemed excited about the pearls,” Marsh pointed out, closing the two boxes and sliding into the truck. The engine roared to life and he maneuvered around what passed for houses here before pointing the front of the truck at an incline leading back up onto higher ground. He had decided that he’d had enough of randomly opening portals into trouble and he wanted to take in the scenery for a while.

Besides, with it getting dark, he would want to find somewhere to hunker down for the night soon. Apparently, Terra Majora and Earth were in roughly the same position in space in their respective universes—seasons were the same and the time was accurate for a jump eastward across six time zones.

From the passenger seat, Eva nodded. “Pearls are highly magically conductive. More importantly, they can be used as what amounts to mana batteries. They can be used to store ambient mana and then discharged later. Think of them like rechargeable batteries that never go bad. They’d fetch a fortune pretty much anywhere.”

“Anything else I should be on the lookout for? Jewels?”

“They aren’t as valuable as pearls,” Eva shrugged. “On the other hand, they’re more versatile. You can enchant—essentially program—a jewel with a specific spell and so long as it has power it can do that spell until it runs out. They suck at holding mana by themselves, but they’re excellent at storing raw spirit—don’t ask me why. They make great phylacteries.”

“Uh huh,” Marsh nodded. “So these phylacteries of yours that we’re going to be tracking down…”

“All made from precious gems, yes,” Eva nodded at the unspoken question. “Speaking of, turn eastward. The reason I was having you come down here was to retrieve one of the two easiest. The closest is a few miles away.”

Marshal hummed before shaking his head. “I’ve got a better idea. Let’s set up camp and do some recon first. I don’t want a repeat of the incident with the nagas. It’d be even worse if I drove into something that could fuck up the truck.”

“We should be outside the nagas’ patrol area shortly, but I would like to put a few more miles between us and them, just in case they do decide to pursue. Your truck won’t exactly be difficult to follow.”

Marshal shrugged, reaching over and turning on the radio, only to be met with static. Frowning, he hit the button to connect to his phone. A moment later, classic rock began pouring from the speakers as the pair fell into silence.

A little something from the vault that I've had floating around for a while now.

Some notes, to preface this:
1.) This is too hot for QQ. They'd Rule 8 me just for posting it, citing it as 'too political.' It's not exactly politically correct, either.
2.) This was storyboarded in 2014 and I finally got around to writing it in 2016, around the time people started pulling down statues, but before wide-spread rioting, because it's actually part of a connected series of stories that I never got around to writing much for.
3.) The setting for this particular story is only on Earth for the first half of the first chapter, so everything else that takes place after is in a fantasy world. The Earth part is there to set up where in that particular timeframe this story would fall (after a story with a placeholder title of 'Hero' which would follow the building of a hero team after people started developing powers).
4.) Believe it or not, I made this before reading Worm.
5.) This story is dead and not ever likely to see any sort of work ever put into it again, but I figured I'd share it here and see what you guys think.

So, without further ado...

+++++

Necro

+++++

“Tragedy struck today as three of the Free Western People’s Republic’s top first string defenders, Black Friday, Pride Parade, and Santa Muetre, were brutally murdered by Valiant Rex, a member of the National Socialist Militia of Supers. In the studio with us this morning is Professor Paul Steinberg of Berkley University, an expert in the field of supers and their impact on today's society. Professor, what can you tell us about this tragedy and its potential impact?”

“Well, Carol, this is what happens when you give violent, literal Nazi bigots like the NSMS power of any sort. Guns were bad enough, but that day thirty years ago when the first reports started coming in of people developing paranormal abilities... I couldn't stop shaking—literally shaking—at the thought of these sorts of 'people' with even more power to oppress others with their horrible, fascist ideology. That is why we must push forward, progressing ever onwards, past this sort of racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-immigrant barbarism—”

“God Marsh, why the fuck do you watch that trash?” the voice of Robert 'Marsh' Marshal's coworker spoke over the talking head on the video stream he had been watching. “I mean, do you hear this shit? It's a complete hatchet job.”

“I do,” Marsh agreed, sitting back in his chair and spinning it around to look at his coworker. “And two reasons. Firstly: personal amusement. Listen to the wording and the tone used—this is all scripted and rehearsed beforehand, and they're being fed cues over their ear pieces. It's the same thing on every 'major news outlet.' They always keep coming back to the same talking points, trying to hammer the same appeals to emotion disguised as facts in, like they think that if they repeat it enough it will make people believe. To be fair, that tactic used to work, before the internet. Before a single meme could destroy the official narrative and cause a major media organization to lose face. Back before you could cut and paste this kind of thing side by side with all the other idiots saying the exact same thing, in the exact same tone, like a bunch of mindless automatons.”

“Okay,” Jim agreed, nodding his oversized bobble-head. Given its faintly red coloration and the fact that Jim kept it shaved out of preference, rather than show off his bald spot, he'd earned more than one 'dickhead' comment in the past. That was before he became the sort of person you simply didn't make those kinds of comments about.

Jim was what Marshal figured happened when powers didn't match the person. Jim had been a fat I.T. nerd for decades and had had the body to show for it, right up until his powers kicked in. Now, Jim was built like a brick shit house. All that fat had evaporated over the course of a few days, leaving behind a slab of what the girls in the office liked to covertly call 'beefcake,' in between their twittering and barely disguised looks of lustful longing.

Not that Jim minded the looks, these days. The man got more play than any three guys Marsh knew. 'The fat man's revenge,' Jim liked to call it.

A physical enhancement package didn't necessarily make one pretty, though—so Jim's oversized head, which had looked pretty normal on his supersized body, now made the balding man look like the sort of bobblehead toy Marsh remembered being popular back when he was a kid.

Jim's next words brought Marsh back to the present and out of his staring at the man's unfortunately sized head. “So, what's the second reason for watching that trash?”

“Oh, that's easy.” A grin spread across Marsh's bearded face. “If you want to truly understand the way your enemy thinks, observe him. Listen to the lies he tells himself, his followers, and his enemies. Watch what he shows you, both the message as a whole and the subtext. Take note of who he has proselytizing for him and how they do it. Once you know all of this, the enemy becomes easily recognizable—familiar to the point that you can spot him in any crowd. And familiarity breeds contempt.”

Jim gestured back to the stream playing on Marsh's monitor. “Looks like they're about to show footage. Bets on it being edited?”

“Considering they've had a good two hours to play with it? No bet,” Marsh shook his head.

On screen, a view of the news room—currently showing a black woman in a pantsuit and a tweed-wearing man with pasty skin, curly hair, and a big nose that only stood out more under his needlessly oversized ‘retro’ glasses—was replaced by what looked like a cell phone video.

It was, of course, taken with the phone standing up—because apparently no one knew how to turn the phone sideways to get wide-screen video. The scene the video opened up to was what 'official' news agencies were calling a “peaceful protest,” which was anything but.

The protesters—rioters, really—stormed down a street in black masks, hoodies, and balaclavas. Some of them carried flags—most of which Marsh didn't recognize beyond the same clenched fist pattern repeated over and over in different color schemes with different letting around them, though he did note more than one hammer and sickle flag being flown. Smoke rolled across the area with no discernible origin, but Marsh's research had shown it to be the result of a police car set on fire by Molotovs thrown by the aforementioned peaceful protesters.

At the front of the pack, things looked a little different than the rank and file useful idiots. A group of thirty men—and Marsh used the term only loosely—all identical marched, danced, twerked, undulated, and dry humped their way up the street. All of them were actually a single super: Pride Parade—an individual out of San Francisco, gifted with the ability to duplicate itself seemingly without limit.

Its costume consisted of what Marsh would tentatively call hooker boots, if they weren't bring worn by a man, assless chaps, an oversized flashing rainbow LED cod-piece, and a domino mask—leaving its upper body bare and exposing its many painful looking piercings and bad ink across its scrawny form. “It” because Pride Parade was extremely vocal to anyone who would listen that it was some sort of trans something-or-other and changed pronouns every other week.

The two ahead of Pride Parade were a morbidly obese black female in a white spandex leotard dripping with sweat even in the poor quality footage, calling herself Black Friday—one of the “healthy at every size” crowd—and a small, shirtless Mexican man covered in Day of the Dead themed tattoos, save for a large one across his back labeling him as a member of La Raza. Marsh had no idea who these two clowns were or what they could do and he didn't care enough to look into it—he only knew as much as he did about the living rainbow brigade because it was a media favorite.

Opposing the marching rioters were several groups of both supers and normies arranged in a protective formation around what looked to be a statue of a man on a horse. The normal people there were dressed fairly conservatively—jeans and tee-shirts or slacks and button-downs—with nothing obstructing their faces. Some of them carried flagpoles bearing the American flag, the Confederate Battle Flag, the state flag, or the NSMS party flag: a black sun on a red background. While most of them were unarmed, a number of them bore rifles, shotguns, pistols, and other weapons clearly visible.

At the forefront of the opposition were a trio of men.

Valiant Rex: a man who stood just under six feet tall, dressed as a roman warrior clad in red and gold—complete with shield, lance, and a gladius strapped to his side. From what Marsh remembered, Rex was a physical enhancement package with a dash of extras that he refused to disclose.

The Asguardian: a seven foot hulking slab of Nord, with a braided blond beard and long hair to match—a hammer and axe strapped to either side of his hips. This one Marshal had remembered thinking of as a cheap Thor clone without the fancy hammer, who could throw around some sort of elemental arctic wind. Despite his size, he wasn't a physical enhancement package—it was just freakishly good genes and hard work.

SpecFor: standing at 5'6”, he was the shortest of the three, but arguably the most dangerous—and definitely the most well armed. He wore a mixture of military style clothing, body armor, and carried at least six different guns at all times. SpecFor—or Special Forces—had a pretty specialized power that allowed him to use any weapon he laid hands on as though he were a grand master of it, and then turned it up to eleven.

If the world's greatest sniper could hit a target in the head from three miles away, SpecFor could shoot the bullet that sniper shot out of the air before it reached its target from twice that range and kill the enemy sniper with the ricochet. His power didn't just apply to guns, but they were SpecFor's weapon of choice—probably because his power didn't provide any physical enhancements to strength, speed, or anything else. On the other hand, speculation on the internet said some of SpecFor's abilities bent the laws of physics in improbable ways, especially where firearms were concerned.

While all of the supers on the opposing side of this riot in progress were low-tier power-wise, the man standing off to the side—opposite the police and apart from both the protesters and counter-protesters—was anything but.

Null: the one super everyone in the world knew on sight. His outfit didn't exactly stand out—being all black and gray fatigues, body armor, and long coat. Even his mask, while memorable, was nothing to write home about. Normally a curved, blank white face outlined by a glowing red LED border, he occasionally used the mask to display a simple animated mouth and eyes to convey emotions when he was speaking—or for intimidation.

No, unfortunately for Null, it wasn't so much fame as it was infamy that had made him a household name the world over. The current Second (American, for those outside the good old U.S. of A.) Civil War as it was being called had been a long time coming and had actually been going on covertly for decades, but it had finally escalated to armed and superpowered violence as a direct consequence of Null's involvement.

A certain vocally left-leaning American hero known the world over calling himself American Sam had, to put it bluntly, gone nuts and attempted to raze the city of Baton Rouge to the ground after conflicts between protesters attempting to remove Confederate statues and armed citizens willing to fight to preserve their history had ended in the deaths of six of those so called peaceful protesters. Baton Rouge was part of the patrol zone Null's team had covered at the time—before the team fractured following the incident.

Three of Null's team had shown up and attempted to talk American Sam down, but Sam wasn't having any of it. Sam had, in turn, convinced one of Null's own—Shield, a former football player who had had a short-lived pro career for the Saints before a knee injury put him permanently on the bench—to turn against his team, citing issues of racial solidarity with those killed.

While Oni—the Japanese demon themed, fear aura and sword wielding female third member of their team—had stalled Shield, Null had drawn American Sam's ire to himself and taken a beating in doing so. American Sam used Null like a human wrecking ball, smashing through downtown Baton Rouge and knocking over more than one building before Null had finally put him down—by popping Sam's head like an overripe watermelon.

Speculation ran rampant about his powers, but the one thing everyone could agree on was that it was some variant of telekinesis—and they only had that much because of evidence left over from the fight with American Sam. Null never used his powers in the sort of displays most supers did, so finding video of him doing anything with them was nearly impossible. However, given the fact that Sam had been ranked in the top ten strongest supers in the world, opinion said that Null should be ranked somewhere in that list above Sam.

The fact that Null had taken time out of his usual patrol schedule to show up two states away told Marshal that he was likely looking to avoid a repeat of the Battle for Baton Rouge, as it had been called. When the fighting did break out, this was proved accurate as the masked hero stepped in between the groups and began forcibly separating those fighting—everyone he hit going down and not getting up again. When Rex began screaming incoherently and stabbing people, Null was already cut off by the protesters around him—and many of the black-wearing bunch looked to be doing everything they could to put themselves between him and Rex, some of them even throwing themselves at him bodily and latching on to try and hold him in place.

The footage of Rex impaling Black Friday to a tree on his spear, stomping Santa Muerta's head in, and beheading the original Pride Parade Al Quaida style was of course censored but not so much that anyone watching couldn't tell what was going on. It was only after those three were down that the black-clad mob had rapidly dispersed, the person with the cell phone camera joining the rest of the rabble in retreat. The video stopped after that, switching back to the same two talking heads that had been on before.

“He was clearly not operating under his own control.”

“Obviously,” Marsh answered under his breath.

The word was still enough to draw a raised eyebrow from Jim, whose bobble-head split horizontally with a wide grin. “Talking to your ghost girlfriend again?”

“I will remove his intestines through his nose and feed them to him.”

“She says 'hi,'” Marsh deadpanned, closing the video stream.

Only about thirty percent of the world's population even had the potential to manifest super powers. Marshal was one of the lucky few that tested positive for a genetically heritable power. Sadly, Marshal's power wasn't anything as strong as telekinesis, as cool as weapon mastery or elemental manipulation, as iconic as super strength and flight, or even as useful as duplication.

Ever since he was six, Marshal had had the voice of a woman stuck in his head. For the first year or so she didn't even speak English, but she picked it up quickly. It probably helped that Marsh was in elementary school, learning the basics of the English language himself at the time.

The woman in question would never give him a straight answer as to whether she was living or dead, or even where she was. The only answer he'd gotten out of her had been a name: Eva. It wasn't exactly helpful in narrowing things down, much to his frustration—and her vocal amusement. What she would tell him though was that her voice being in his head wasn't actually his super power—only a convenient byproduct. And while Marsh had tried to test himself for some other manifestation of his power, whatever it was had too high an activation cost—that is, it required more power than his body produced naturally to use it, making it useless.

Keeping Eva a secret in a world where people had super powers turned out to be pretty pointless, so Marsh hadn't bothered. When people who found out inevitably tried to ask her questions, they quickly stopped asking when she proved intentionally irritating and abrasive at best. Eva did not like fielding questions from peons and simpletons and had no qualms about voicing her opinions on the matter to Marshal. Thus, Marsh wound up acting as her brain-to-mouth filter more often than not if she ever did bother trying to communicate with anyone aside from himself.

Jim turned a knowing look on his coworker but brushed it off. “You know they're going to turn these jokers into martyrs.”

“No doubt,” Marshal agreed. “It was probably the entire point. Everyone with sense is going to see that someone puppeted Rex into doing that, but the left isn't going to care. The million dollar question now is, who's their new super with the MC powers?”

“I'd worry more about it if the Empress wasn't immune,” Jim shrugged. “It's not like they can take over the country.”

The Empress was exactly as her name stated: the Empress of the Free United States of America—or at least the parts that recognized her rule. Beautiful, blonde, elegant, and extremely powerful—within the top three supers worldwide. She was the sort of woman girls aspired to be: strong and confident without sacrificing her looks or femininity, or coming off as abrasive.

She had popped up out of nowhere a decade ago as a teenager, making her way onto the political scene and swiftly inserting herself into politics in a way that should have been impossible—but for her was an every day occurrence. No one knew what her power was exactly, mostly because the few instances there were of her actually using any sort of power tended to white out every camera filming it and eye witness statements were sometimes confused. The results, however, spoke for themselves.

Such as the Russian Incident the previous year.

During a visit to Russia to speak at a conference, the Empress had been attacked at range with either a missile launcher or an RPG. When the smoke from the blast cleared, cameras watching the event showed that not even a hair on her pretty head was out of place. She had lifted a hand towards the shooter's position and every camera watching whited out. Audio recordings picked up something that sounded like thunder, followed by a rumbling. In the wake of her return fire, the abandoned building the attacker had used was taken out, leaving behind only a pile of smoking rubble.

Immediately following that incident, as in the minute of, the Empress had made a single post to her public social media account.

@godEmpress: A few things you should avoid using if you intend to kill me and live to see tomorrow: conventional weapons, mental attacks, energy attacks below Tier 10 (1 megaton for those of you not in the know), poison in all forms, environmental manipulation for those of you clever enough to try sucking the oxygen out of a room, drowning, punches, starvation, and power nullification. #SamsonOption #DIF

No one had taken her up on the blatant challenge to just try dropping a nuke on her head if they wanted to kill her.

“I don't think we want to see what happens if some idiot tries it,” Marsh shook his head, standing up from his desk and stretching. A twinge in his right shoulder caused him to wince and bite down on a curse.

“Dude, you should just get a healer to look at that,” Jim opined.

Marshal rolled his eyes. “Don't have the money. Anyway, I forgot to bring my lunch in this morning so I'm going to head back to the house and grab it. You mind covering a while?”

“Sure, no problem,” Jim nodded, dropping into the seat behind his own desk and kicking back.

Seeing the man clearly intended to take a nap while he was out, Marshal refrained from comment. If the phone rang, Jim would get it... or send it to voicemail. Not like it mattered much either way. Snagging his long brown insulated duster off the back of his chair, Marsh tossed it on and made his way to the parking lot. Digging into his pockets, he came up with his keys and thumbed the remote unlock button for his truck. Dropping into the driver's seat, he started the truck and moved out onto the highway.

“There, I'm going. Are you happy?”

“No.”

“You've been giving me the cold shoulder for the last six months and you finally decided to talk to me again today? What are you up to?”

“Me? Nothing. I have only your best interests in mind.”

“Uh huh,” the man muttered, green eyes rolling at the woman's words.

***

“I told you so.”

A wet flesh-on-flesh slapping sound filled Marsh's bedroom as two bodies writhed and moaned in what he supposed was ecstasy. One of those two enjoying themselves on the bed was Janet—Marshal's fiancee.

The other was not Marshal.

Marsh stood in the bedroom door, just out of line of sight of the two lovers, his right eye beginning to tick in time with the sounds accompanying the other man's thrusts into his fiancee.

“She's faking it, so there's that at least.”

Marshal ignored Eva's commentary for the moment. Instead, his hand slipped inside his jacket, unbuttoning the top two buttons of his shirt and finding the comfortable weight hanging under his left armpit. There was a quiet hiss of metal on cloth as he drew the pistol out of its holster and leveled it on the bed. The green and red dots of his sights lined up on the unknown man's back, center mass. The sound the safety made as he clicked it to the 'off' position was buried beneath the other sounds of the room.

“Neighbor. If she hears the shot, she'll call the police. Even odds as to whether cops or supers show if that happens.”

Marshal paused, his finger halfway into squeezing the trigger before he was reminded of the elderly neighbor across the street. Mrs. Smith had made a nuisance of herself for years, with her habit of nosing into others' business. Switching the matte black Colt 1911 to his left hand, he reached back under his shoulder and pulled open the extra pocket he had sewn onto the concealed carry holster. The two magazine pouches under his right arm hadn't been quite large enough to fit the suppressor, so he'd had to improvise there. Drawing out the short tube, he spun it onto the threads extending from the end of the barrel.

“Thank you.”

The words were enough to bring the activities on the bed to a halt as both its occupants seemed to realize there was someone else in the house with them. Janet's eyes widened in panic upon seeing him. “Marshal?!”

“Oh, shit!” the other man's exclamation came as he caught sight of the pistol being leveled at them again.

“You're welcome.”

Three squeezes of the trigger and three muffled shots turned the man mounted on his former fiancee into a bloody sack of meat. Two holes sat clustered one atop the other in the middle of the unknown man's back, the third in the back of his neck as Marshal allowed the recoil to walk the sights up.

While the first two shots had not punched through, the third had—and had left bright red blood and white bone painted all over Janet's face. A shift to the right and a fourth and fifth shot put two into the traitorous blonde whore's filthy mouth before she could scream—the same mouth that had kissed him goodbye and told him she loved him just that morning, before he'd gone off to work.

“We need to talk,” he finally said, safetying the weapon. Unscrewing the suppressor, he slipped it and the gun back under his jacket and buttoned his shirt again. His stomach turned and his lip curled in disgust at the sight left on the bed—the smell of voided bowels had quickly filled the room.

Also filling the room was a pale white mist rising off the fresh corpses. It drifted lazily like smoke for a moment before abruptly being sucked towards Marshal, where it disappeared and Eva made a quiet sound of satisfaction.

People who say revenge won't make you feel better are full of shit. I feel better already.

“Oh, now we need to talk?” Eva's voice dripped with sarcasm, on top of its usual honey-and-smoke tone, no sign of whatever satisfaction she had gotten out of the kills, or whatever that mist was, in her voice.

Moving out of the bedroom, Marshal made his way to his rec-room—or rather, his 'man cave' as Janet had had a habit of calling it, and always in a tone suggesting that she didn't approve. He didn't give a shit if she approved or not. It was his house, left to him by his father before he'd passed on.

In hindsight, it was probably part of what had convinced her to cheat. She had spent the better part of two years slowly transforming the clean, rustic wood and stone interior of the home into something he barely recognized—tacky rugs in bright colors all over his smooth hardwood floors, mounted trophies that had belonged to his great grandfather removed and relegated to the attic, pea soup colored wallpaper fouling his bedroom walls after she had demanded he put up drywall since wallpaper wouldn’t go over the log walls.

He taken all of these small losses with a smile, because they made her happy. The rec-room was the the only place left stubbornly untouched—the last pocket of resistance to her war on all things masculine in the house.

“Yes,” Marshal pushed open the door, making his way to the safe in the back and inputting the key code. The safe was yet another thing Janet had demanded. She claimed guns in the home made her feel unsafe and had argued him damn near into the ground to try and get rid of them, before he'd finally gotten a safe and locked them away, save for the one he carried every day. Out of sight, out of mind—and out of reach from her trying to pawn them, as he'd heard a buddy had gone through with his own wife. “I thought you weren't speaking to me.”

There was a soft, indelicate snort of laughter so close to his ear he almost felt her breath. “Only because you refused to listen, Marshal.” The words paused before asking, “How many of those are you planning to run away with?”

“Not all of them,” Marshal answered as he began checking the weapons secured in the gun safe. Four of them were AR patterned rifles, each fitted with different accessories, in two different calibers. The fifth weapon was a shotgun in a bullpup pattern—a 12 gauge semi-automatic that had cost him a pretty penny a few years back.

“And where do you plan to run from this? There are supers capable of tracking you.”

Hefting the shotgun out of the safe, Marshal moved over to a nearby table and set it into a waiting soft case. Making sure the weapon was securely strapped in, he went after his second and third choices—a pair of ARs. One chambered in 7.62mm with a medium barrel, currently fitted with a red dot with a booster scope on top, a set of flip up sights in case the red dot failed, a foregrip, and a flashlight. The other in .308, with a long barrel, scope, bipod, and suppressor attached. The bag already contained any other attachments and tools he might need to swap out on the rifles for an extended trip at the range or a hunting trip—scope, laser sight, suppressor for the 7.62, cleaning and maintenance kit, spare batteries, and so forth.

“Uncle Jim's cabin,” he answered distractedly. His uncle Jim—not his coworker by the same name—kept a hunting cabin up in Montana, in the mountains. The cabin was off the grid and the nearest neighbor was a mountain east of it. Marshal had updated it a few years back, adding solar panels and a marine battery array to avoid using the generator as much as possible to avoid repeat trips into town to get fuel for it—that, and he just didn't like the noise of having to run the jenny full time just to power the freezer, radio, and television.

The trip getting there may be a problem, however, if the bodies were discovered any time soon. Montana was a long trip up from south Arkansas and as Eva had said, there were supers capable of tracking him down if one of them took an interest.

The voice was quiet for a long moment before giving a soft hum. “It's not a terrible plan. Staying would be suicide. I could do better, though.”

Securing the other guns, Marshal zipped up the case and moved across the room to open up a locked metal cabinet. Inside, the upper shelves of which were covered in neat stacks of 30 round magazines—all loaded with either brass 7.62mm or .308 rounds for his rifles or hand-loaded 12 gauge rounds for his shotgun.

Sadly, he only had four spare magazines for the 1911, two of which were already secured in his shoulder holster while the other two were in his truck's glove compartment. Well, it's a sidearm. I'm not going to be using it to hunt, so I won't be blowing through magazines that fast. And if I run across a super or cops, I don't intend to get into a firefight. If they catch me, they catch me. I won't be the asshole who kills somebody just doing their job.

“If you've got a better plan, I'm all ears,” he countered, picking up the first stack and transferring it to pockets in the brown gun bag. The gun bag wouldn't hold all the magazines he had, but that was what the duffel bag in the bottom of the cabinet sitting on top of his ammo boxes was for.

“Go where they can't find you.”

Marshal rolled his eyes. “Thank you for that oh so helpful advice,” he muttered, sarcasm dripping off the words as he closed up the gun bag and set about transferring magazines to the duffel bag. “You wouldn't happen to know of somewhere harder to find someone than the middle of nowhere, would you?”

There was a faintly amused tone to her voice as she answered, “Only if you're willing to give yourself to me, body and soul.”

Chuckling darkly, Marshal shook his head. “My name isn't Faust, woman.”

“And I am no Mephistopheles,” Eva countered hotly, amusement shifting to something close to offense.

“So you say,” Marshal hummed.

It was an old argument between the two—familiar ground. As a child, she had been the invisible friend whispering in his ear. As he grew older and came to realize her nature, he began to suspect something of more malevolent origin—which she had denied. The fact that she refused to tell him much about herself beyond superficial details had not done much to help assuage his doubts.

He finished packing away loaded magazines and moved on to boxes of ammunition—metal containers with water tight seals. They fell into silence while he worked, loading the duffel bag and moving it outside to the back seat of his pickup, followed by the bag with the rifles and shotgun. Then, just in case he needed it, he took out the shotgun and leaned it against the passenger seat pointed into the floorboard. His reloading equipment went into the back next, along with the sealed containers of powder, primers, and everything else he would need to make new ammunition.

If I'm going to be going completely off grid for a few years, I'll need to make this stuff last before I have to go resupply. Note to self: stop somewhere and buy a small mountain of asswipe. I'd rather not do without that. Add soap and other toiletries to that list.

A few changes of clothes went into a trash bag, tossed negligently on top of everything else in the back seat of the big, black pickup's extended cab before he snagged his 'go bag' from the rec-room and tossed it in as well. Finally, he changed out of his work clothes and into a more comfortable set of jeans and a long-sleeved dark green flannel button down shirt, throwing the shoulder rig on over it and his long, brown jacket on over that. He made one last trip to the rec-room to top off the magazine in his pistol before heading to the front door.

Looking around at the living room, he sighed quietly. I'm going to miss this place.

Unfortunately, there was more of a risk of getting caught if he tried to dispose of the bodies and stick around than if he simply disappeared. His last stop in the house was the small closet beside the front door, where he lifted an old black Stetson cowboy hat off of one of the pegs there. The hat was older than he was, but was well cared for and waterproof—and one of the few things of sentimental value he didn't want to leave behind, as it had belonged to his grandfather.

Heading back outside, making sure to lock up behind himself, he started the pickup and backed out onto the road. He sent the old lady next door a friendly wave as the truck roared away and settled in for a drive. “Town first. Fill up the tank and the reserve and get some basic necessities while I'm at it, pull some money out of my bank account, then head north. Should be able to make it into Kansas before I need to stop for the night. Buy dry goods and supplies there then move on.”

Fifteen minutes and a stop at a gas station to top off his tanks and pick up some odds and ends—food, water, soap, and toilet paper—later, the voice in his ear spoke up again. “Turn off here.”

Marshal raised an eyebrow at that, considering it for a moment. The last time he hadn't listened to Eva had been six months ago, when she had warned him that Janet was cheating. He had told her to fuck off and the next words she'd uttered had been today, to convince him to return home—specifically so she could remind him that she had been right.

The woman had a vindictive streak a mile wide.

“Fine,” he grumbled, following her directions and leaving the highway. Over the next several minutes, those directions lead him over poorly maintained county roads, finally ending up on a dirt road leading to a church and cemetery that seemed to have been forgotten for the last fifty years. “Why are we here?”

Instead of answering, Eva asked, “Did you bring your bolt cutters?”

“Does a bear shit in the woods?” he retorted, clicking his seatbelt off and hopping out of the cab of the truck to move around to open the toolbox mounted on the truck bed. Digging out a set of bolt cutters, he made his way to the gate and clipped the chain holding it shut. Pushing the gate open, he replaced the bolt cutters and closed up his tool box before driving through the gate and onto the narrow service road through the cemetery. “So, why am I here and not—oh, I don't know—halfway to the county line by now?”

“You never answered my question.”

Marshal frowned at that before pointing out the obvious. “You never asked one.”

He very carefully did not smirk as he heard a feminine growl and what could only have been the gnashing of teeth. “You are an ass.”

“You know me so well.”

Eva sighed, took a breath, and asked, “Will you give yourself to me, body and soul?”

Marsh hummed in thought, fingers drumming on the steering wheel as the Ford idled. “What exactly does that entail, and to what purpose?”

“To answer your second question first: revenge.”

Nodding, he glanced at the clock and saw he'd wasted five minutes here already. Going to need to yank the battery on my cell phone, before I start moving again, he thought as his mind wandered. “Okay. And the first?”

“Is a bit more difficult to put into words. You would become mine. By that same note, I would be yours.”

Marshal rolled his eyes. “Helpfully vague. I'm not committing to anything until I know more.”

The voice in his ear growled quietly, annoyance slipping through for a moment. “You wouldn't believe me if I told you.”

A world full of super powered people and he wouldn't believe her? It'd have to be pretty far out there, then. In that case, “Probably not,” Marsh agreed, nodding. “I'm more of a 'seeing is believing' kind of guy.”

“Fine. I didn't want to do this until after you had agreed, but I can work with that.”

Frowning, he asked, “Do what, exactly?”

Eva provided no answer and Marsh was quickly growing impatient—he had a limited window to get out of the state before someone found the bodies and this was cutting into it. The longer they sat here in this foggy cemetery, the less time he had to put distance between himself and the scene of the crime. Wait. Fog?

His eyes narrowed as he swept them across the ground around him, where a thick fog was beginning to rise up—of the same kind that had risen off the fresh corpses of Janet and her fuckboy. The radio, which had been quietly pouring out the sound of the local rock station broadcasting Hell's Bells, spat static. “What the—”

The world went black and for just a moment, Marsh felt a sense of weightlessness—at the same time, his whole body hurt like an all-over muscle cramp. Then his stomach rose as he fell. A second later, the truck's suspension protested as it came to a stop, as though he'd just dropped several feet.

“—fuck!” The cramp relaxed, but more than that there was a feeling of a weight being released—like he'd finally had a chance to set down something he had been carrying for years without realizing it. The feeling left him lightheaded but feeling suddenly energized.

Light had not returned, save for that of his clock and radio. A dull, constant, quiet sound like rushing water echoed all around him through the rolled down truck window, while the sound of static filled the cab from the speakers.

Reaching over, he hit the power button for the radio before turning on his headlights. He blinked as his lights illuminated what looked like a cave of some sort. Hitting the high beams, he flipped the toggle switch he'd mounted on the dash that controlled the flood lights on the top of the vehicle, in addition to the brush guard in front. Six extra lights flooded the surrounding area and he whistled, noting that the sound echoed faintly off the far walls.

What the lights showed was definitely the interior of a cave—complete with stalactites and stalagmites, along with the sound of bats protesting the sudden noise of his entrance and the rumble of the truck's idling engine. Reaching down, he found a small knob mounted under the toggle switch for the lights and tilted it left. There was a faint mechanical hum as two of the lights mounted above the truck responded, panning at his direction.

The lights revealed that the cave was in the neighborhood of a hundred yards long and perhaps half that wide, with a ceiling around ten yards above his head. Not exactly huge, but not small either. I'd love to explore, but I'm not getting lost in this place.

Panning the lights around to the right, several somethings caught his eye. Something shone, refracting the light that hit it while around it were other, dimmer reflections off of what he believed to be metal. Several yards behind that, several pairs of yellow circles also shone in the light, causing the hair on the back of his neck to raise. “What is that?”

“Something important to me,” Eva answered quietly—tiredly.

Several of the round circles winked out in pairs and Marsh realized why they unnerved him—they hadn't winked out, they had blinked. “What are those?”

“Kobolds. Annoying little shits. I'm sorry, I should have mentioned the infestation earlier. They won't let you leave here alive.”

Marsh frowned. “Anything like the kobolds I'm familiar with from fantasy?”

“Three and a half to four feet tall, rat-faced burrowers? Yes, pretty much.”

“And they can't be reasoned with?” the man asked, reaching back into the back seat and pulling his vest from the top of the pile, before shrugging out of his coat and slipping it on.

“Can you reason with a rat?”

Shaking his head, Marsh watched as the glowing eyes approached, the creatures becoming visible as they moved into the light. They were hairless, ugly little abominations that looked to be part man, part rat—complete with long, naked tails. Some of them wore crude furs from other animals, looking for all the world like they should have rotted and fallen off by now, but the majority of them were nude—to Marshal's disgust. Many of them carried sharpened sticks, while most had short clubs.

As they neared, he shifted his foot onto the accelerator and revved the engine, turning the truck's low idling rumble into a roar in the closed-in confines of the cave as it shifted slightly on its struts, giving the impression of some great, angry beast. It apparently did an admirable job of spooking the kobolds as they chittered, shrieked, and backed off again.

Reaching over to the passenger seat, Marshal grabbed the shotgun. Digging through one of the magazine bags, he pulled one out and slammed it into the gun before loading several more into the slots provided by the vest. Turning back around, he saw the kobolds had drawn close again. Revving the engine again, he pressed the horn and sent them scurrying back.

As soon as he felt they were as far back as they were going to get Marshal killed the engine and stepped out of the truck, wrinkling his nose at the stink of shit, piss, and spoiled meat that filled the cave. Flipping on the light affixed to the front rail of the shotgun, Marsh stalked out in front of the truck into the path of the headlights. The kobolds went wild at the sight of him, shrieking and charging in a mad rush to be the first to get to him. As they neared, he brought the shotgun up and tucked it into his shoulder, centering the red dot on the first target.

A single shot cracked in the cave, thundering against the cave walls and bringing the shrieking horde of rat-faced half-men to a standstill. The kobold he'd aimed for dropped to the ground, its face, neck, and upper chest nothing more than ruined meat. The light on the end of Marshal's weapon swung left to the next target and several kobold heads turned to track it. The weapon sounded off again and the second kobold dropped in the span of only a few seconds.

Shrieking began again in earnest as several of them resumed the charge, trying to get in close enough to stab Marsh with their makeshift spears. None of them made it as they fell to the thunder of his gun. The rest, seeing their brethren slain so easily, turned and fled. For a moment, Marshal considered letting them go. Eva's voice disabused him of that notion.

“Kobolds breed like rats and prey on humans—especially children. If you don't eliminate the little vermin to the last, they'll just breed more of themselves and go right back to attacking travelers and settlements.”

Marshal nodded, his boots thumping against the stone cave floor as he strode off after them, firing into their retreating backs as quickly as he could to prevent them from getting into some little hole somewhere he couldn't follow. “I find myself at a loss.”

“Oh?” Eva asked. “Three o'clock,” she added, pointing out a fleeing form off to Marsh's right which had nearly reached a tunnel. Marsh leveled the light on the target the woman had pointed out and fired before moving on to the next.

“Found out my fiancee was cheating on me.” The shotgun sounded off and he switched targets again.

“Committed double homicide.” The Kel-Tec punctuated his statement by ending another kobold.

“Fled to somewhere obviously not Earth with the help of my imaginary friend, who it turns out is not imaginary.” Boom, headshot.

“Did you have a point in all of that whining?”

Marshal growled, kicking a kobold corpse as he put a load of shot into the last kobold running away. “I am not whining, you bitch.”

“Sounds a lot like whining to me,” Eva countered before adopting a high falsetto. “'Oh woe is me, I didn't listen to the wise and intelligent woman who has known me the longest and the dumb blonde cunt I've been shacking up with decided to get a little strange on the side. Poor me, I grew a pair of balls and killed the cheating whore and the bastard she was fucking behind my back and now the weight of them feels funny dangling there between my legs after all the time I spent without them while putting up with her. As if my life couldn't get any worse, now I have a fresh start and all I can think about is what I left behind. Boo hoo.' Try being dead and isolated in a fucking cave for a few hundred years, then get back to me.”

“You done?” Marsh asked, rolling his eyes.

“For now,” she agreed. “You missed one, by the way.”

“No I didn't. I just wanted to see how close it thought it could get, throwing its shadow on the ground like it is,” Marsh denied, spinning in place and leveling the shotgun on the kobold that had been sneaking up on him—at an angle between him and the truck, its high intensity lights still flooding the cave—with a knife in hand. He shot from the hip since it was close enough to use the beam of his flashlight to aim.

The kobold was blown backwards, its chest cavity sporting a multitude of new holes. Surveying his handiwork, he grinned and flipped the safety on the weapon. “Fuck I needed that.”

“That's more like it,” the woman purred in his ear. “This is the man I helped shape over all these years. Not some sad sack pushover, kowtowing to the first woman to come along and spread her legs. Remember that, Marshal. You're a man—not one of those sorry excuses too afraid to even call themselves men. Act like it.”

Marsh rolled his eyes. “You say that like you have some sort of personal investment there,” he muttered, examining the corpses and finding nothing of any real interest. Even the knife that had been used against him was inferior to any of the many knives in his own gear, let alone the Ka-Bar he carried on his person.

Eva snorted softly. “You say that like I don't.”

Shrugging, Marsh made his way over to the crystal that had caught his eye earlier. It was surrounded by a small pile of little metal rectangles—mostly copper, but a few in silver and two that looked to be gold. Picking one up, he found it to be stamped with characters he couldn't read and a seal of some sort that looked like a dragon's head. Dropping what he'd loosely call a coin, he gestured towards the crystal. “So, what is this thing?”

Eva hesitated for several long moments before finally saying, “In a word: me. What's left, anyway. It's my phylactery.”

Marsh raised an eyebrow at that. “Your soul jar? Like a lich?”

“Exactly like a lich,” Eva agreed. “As in, I am one. I was a mage who studied necromancy and soul magic. Can story time wait? Let's just take my crystal and the loot and go. I need to see the state my lands have fallen into since I’ve been otherwise incapacitated.”

Marsh sighed, turning and making his way back to the truck. Killing the engine, he rooted around in the back seat and pulled an empty garbage bag from the roll—one of the kind meant to stretch under weight, because he didn’t want anything he used them for rupturing in his truck. Stowing the shotgun, he made his way back over to the pile of money and began tossing the bar-shaped coins in. Once those were stashed he looked at the crystal resting on its pedestal. Roughly five inches long and an inch or so in diameter, it looked to his untrained eye like a piece of quartz or perhaps diamond. “This isn't going to be like that one Indiana Jones movie, is it?”

“No. I didn't set up pit traps or a boulder. Sorry to disappoint you,” Eva snarked.

“Ha ha,” Marsh grunted, picking up the crystal and pocketing it before heading back to his truck.

“You're going to want to take a seat for this next part.”

Marsh blinked, tossing the bag of loot into the back seat. “What next part?”

Eva sighed quietly. “I don't want to leave something so valuable as my soul just sitting out where anyone can steal or break it. I want to put it somewhere relatively safe.”

“You stuck it in a cave for how many years?” Marsh lead. “What’s wrong with just burying it somewhere?

“No. Absolutely not,” Eva denied, clearly not too keen on the idea given her tone.

Sighing, Marsh nodded. “Fine. Where, then?”

“In your rib cage, with those fancy guns safely between me and anyone or anything looking to destroy me.”

Laughing quietly, Marsh dropped into the driver's seat and shook his head, fishing the crystal out of his pocket to inspect it again. “I am pretty sure humans don't work like that. We don't exactly have a lot of extra space in our chest cavities. Besides, something tells me that what you have in mind is going to hurt like a bitch.”

“Oh, I assure you, it will hurt like nothing you’ve ever experienced. I’ll reshape the crystal to burrow through your chest and wrap around your ribs themselves.”

“Yeah, no. Not happening. Sorry, looks like we’ll be finding a rock to hide you under,” Marshal shook his head.

Eva sighed. “It’s not like there aren’t benefits for you.” Taking his silence as a sign to continue, she added, “You would gain access to magic, through me.”

Magic.

Magic was something no one on Earth had. Oh, sure, there were power sets that could manipulate probability and do all sorts of things that looked like magic, but none of it actually was. Besides, it’s magic. It’d be worth it just to see what it can do.

With that thought in mind, Marsh asked, “If I agree to this, can you knock me out first?”

He could almost feel the lich roll her eyes. “Fine, you big baby. Is that a yes?”

“Yes, it’s a—,” Marsh agreed, only to be cut off as the crystal in his hand pulsed and he passed out, slumping over the steering wheel.

“Well, at least this means I don’t have to go the brute force route. I’ll try to be gentle,” the lich promised.

In Marshal’s hand, the crystal brightened as tiny filaments protruded from it, piercing the flesh of his hand and going straight for bone. Eva had not lied—merely not given Marshal the entire truth. While the majority of the crystal would find a new home around his ribs, the rest would stretch out fine pieces of itself across the rest of his body to create what would eventually look like a secondary nervous system.

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