Out of the darkness came a pair of men, one fat and the other muscular. The fat man Laurence recognised, but the muscular one he did not. Before he could even say a word the muscular man shouted “PRISON BREAK!” Trevor moved to the side and began panicking. On the journey Laurence had learned that Jake was Trev’s best friend, and the reason why they had even joined the Frontier Guard was because Jake had an uncle in the guard, who got the two men in when they were considered worthless by the rest of their town. Trevor owed Jake his future, so when he saw that Laurence had Jake on his pet dog seemingly kidnapping him he broke down. He desperately tried to pull his sword from its sheath, but confronting Laurence he could not help but feel his palms become sweaty. Trevor knew he was not really built for combat, but he had to do something.
Laurence reacted immediately. The muscular man was blocking his way, so he ran towards the man and thrust his blade. He was not used to fighting on hilled ground, so did not account for the fact that he was on a slope. His blade was true, but it was far too low, harmlessly passing between the guard’s legs. He realised that he had a chance to try what he had just realised was possible with his hammer and swung upwards with all his might. The hammerhead connected with the guardsman’s crotch and there was a large crack with a popping sound. The man’s pelvis was shattered and his groin was completely destroyed. He keeled over, the pain was too much and had simply killed him outright. If he had survived, then his tumbling down the stairs would have done the job in its place.
Running over to the permanently stunned guardsman, Laurence said “Trev, please, help us get out of here. Jake got injured helping me get out of the prison cell and now if we don’t get out of here he’ll die”. Hearing that, Trev snapped out of his stupor and grabbed the lantern.
“Alright Laurence, Jake trusted you, so I will too”. He smiled, “I’m not the smartest person in the world, so I reckon you could be tricking me, but I don’t feel you are”. He led them upstairs and towards the exit of the wall. “If we go this way it will lead us to the waste. Is that alright?”
“Yeah,” Laurence replied, glancing at his pointer stone before putting it back in his bag. “I need to go that way anyway. If we can get to the next stele then we will be free”.
“Alright kid, I’m trusting you with this”.
Trev led the group down several winding paths as a loud bell rang. It was audible wherever they went, and was obviously the sign for someone getting out of prison. Every so often they would come across a group of soldiers, but Laurence easily dispatched most of the people he came across. There were no more awkward mistakes like the one with the man on the stairs, but he did practice using his hammer swing rather than thrust for a lot of the enemies. Unfortunately due to the thin corridors he could only manage down or upward arced strikes. Eventually they reached the gate to the wasteland, where a group of ten men and the commanding officer of the garrison stood. He had a crazed look in his eyes, and a bandage round one side of his face.
“Boy, this is as far as you go”. He drew his sword menacingly pointing it towards Laurence. “And Trevor… I never thought you would succumb to this madness. I knew Jacob would eventually, he was weak of heart. But you? I thought you were too stupid. Congratulations”.
Laurence could tell that the commander was trying to get under Trev’s skin. Attacking his best friend’s character and attacking his own weak spot. Trevor bit his lip, holding back a bitter remark and just said, “I trust you with this, Laurence. You’re the only one who can get all of us out of here at this point”.
“Okay”. Laurence responded. It was time to kick things into gear. He started pushing mana into every muscle in his body and his power exploded. He sprang into the open area at a speed that defied normal man, swinging his hammer down into the middle of the crowd. The men split apart but one was too slow, his head bursting like an unripe melon. Before anyone could react he twisted sharply and brought his hammer down towards the four men to the left. The hammer missed one man by mere millimetres, but the blade did not. He was cut in half all the way to the ground, the tiles lining the floor cracking upon impact. Quickly pulling the hammer in an upwards arc Laurence thrust into his third victim’s chest, destroying the heart. He kicked the corpse away as it relieved its contents on the ground and threw his hammer at the final man in his sight. It skewered him in the diaphragm and began disintegrating, until all that was left was a man, slumped on the floor, suffocating to death.
Laurence turned the moment the hammer left his hand and began dashing towards the men who had dodged to the right. There were five of them, not including the commander, and within the three seconds that it took for Laurence to deal with the men on the left they had readied their swords and shields. The display just now had shocked the men, but they were trained professionals, the elite of the Frontier Guard. They were used to their companions dying, and saw Laurence as their ultimate threat. They thought they were ready, but very little would ready them for what happened next.
Laurence sprinted forward and smashed his right shoulder into the furthest forward man, catapulting him into the commander and another man who stood behind him. Quickly bringing his hammer down he used the weapon to stop his forward momentum, while caving in the now grounded soldier’s chest. He spun, stepping forward and cut another soldier in half with the blade, then twisted back to face the men behind him. One man actually managed to get a sword stroke in towards Laurence, but the childish embodiment of a meat grinder struck his shoulder with the hammer before he could complete the stroke, severing his sword arm. The man began screaming and fell to the floor as blood pumped out of his stump with reckless abandon. Laurence lifted the hammer over his head and let it fall behind him, killing the last standing man by crushing his skull.
The only people left after the flurry of blood and gore were the commander and the final guard. Because the guard fell on top of the commander, the torture obsessed leader of this place was struggling to get up. He pushed off the guard and drew his longsword. Quickly standing and readying his weapon. “Boy, are you prepared to go one on one against me? Or will you hide behind sneak attacks and strange magics?”
Laurence stopped with a confused look on his face. There was a time and place for blaming your defeat upon the opponent cheating, but Laurence had entirely overwhelmed the guardsmen when they had set a trap. This unabashed denial was bizarre. The man should be like the only surviving guardsman, crawling away in fear. And yet he stood, with unwavering determination that he was in the right and that Laurence was cheating. It was odd to say the least.
“Fine. I’ll just beat you on your own then”. He had had enough of this man, and wanted to make a point. The captain had no way of hurting him. None. So Laurence did the only thing that he could consider reasonable, he ignited his hammer and swung it. The blade cut through the left arm of the captain, cauterising the stump as it passed. He then cut the captain’s sword arm off, again flesh sizzling as the wound sealed when he passed.
The captain screamed as his arms were both severed by a child, in his eyes this was an entirely unforeseen circumstance. A seven year old child, no matter how strong should not be able to dominate an adult as Laurence had done. The child then turned and swung across, severing the captain’s legs. He screamed once more as he fell forwards, onto the ground. Laurence flipped his body over and said, “You can stay here now. I doubt anyone will come and save you, but you can scream your heart out if you want”. He smiled menacingly and stared into the eyes of the man. “In the words of Eman Kent, ‘What was won is no longer here. Those who are alone will know true fear.’”
He stood and ushered his group through the field of corpses, leaving the limbless captain to defecate himself out of terror. There was nothing left for them before the wall, so they began walking into the waste. Soon they were nothing but specks on the horizon, and the captain was still alone.
A week later the group had rested up and Laurence had spoken to Trev about their precarious situation. Laurence told him about how they ended up in the awkward position he found them in, and explained the nature of the tower. He also treated Jake’s wound until the young man was no longer a complete invalid. He was still wounded, but he was now on the mend. During the day Laurence began instructing his two counterparts in the Inner Flame Formation, just to see if he could. He instructed them in what it would do and how it could help Jake heal himself, and within about three days both men had got a grasp on the mana in the area. They spent the mornings breathing and practicing the Inner Flame, and the evenings travelling towards the door to the next floor.
Life went by quite peacefully until around eight days into the waste. They were two weeks from the next gate at their current rate but because of Jake not being fully healed they could not go much quicker. They were just setting down for the night in an enclave beneath a hill when a young man, covered in mud leapt off the top of their hill. He landed amongst the group and they scattered, looking at him warily. He was a long, thin man. More bone than flesh, with dreadlocks, and beads everywhere. He was truly wild, and had obviously lived in the wasteland for a very long time.
Being the first person they had seen in a very long time they were not sure how to approach him, however he did not give them the opportunity. He looked at them, shocked, for a few seconds then said something in a language that no one understood and sprinted away into the distance. He was running scared, they could tell that, but from what they had no idea.
“Who was that?” Said Laurence.
“I think that was a wildling,” said Jake. “That was the first I have seen, but they don’t speak the language of the empire”. He stopped for a moment and then said “That raises the point, how are you talking in Empire when you aren’t even from the same plane of existence?”
“I don’t know. I assume that there is a natural tongue that all planes in Babel follow?” Laurence replied.
“I assume that is the reason why we have different accents, yet are using almost all the same words. Most people consider wildlings to be uncultured barbarians, but he was terrified of something. There’s nothing that wildlings are afraid of other than..”. Jake paused and all the colour drained from his face. “Oh no. Oh no, no no no. This is bad”.
“What is?”
Jake tried to stand up but couldn’t support his upper body as well as he would have liked. His feet slipped out from under him and he toppled over onto his hands and knees. “There’s a Chaos Storm coming. It’s the only thing that wildlings would run like that from. We have to move and either get underground or somehow stop ourselves from being exposed!”
“What’s a Chaos Storm, Jake?” Said Trev as he and Laurence helped move all their gear near to the hill they were sheltered by.
“How do you not remember, Trevor? The storm comes once every hundred or so years in Odnw’Aldn, but in the waste they occur often and at random. If you’re a living thing caught in it then it will warp your body and your mind. All that’s left of you will be a withered representation of your previous self”. He paused and shivered at the thought of the storm. “Records say that people who were only slightly exposed to the storm heard it laughing as it ate the land up. It wants to send the world mad”.
“Well I will get to making us a proper place to hide out then. Can you work out how long we have?” Said Laurence. The child immediately flicked through the book of creation until he found what he was looking for, a Quick-House that could fit four people. It required very little technical skill, but it did need something else to be built quickly. What was required was something called Trueforming, which was the special ability of the practitioners of the Book of Creation. In theory, anyone could craft runes and imbue them with magic, but only the Creation practitioners ever did.
Trueforming was the ability to shift the shape and nature of matter from one form to another. It used your mana to change the nature of reality in its most basic form. With just a thought a person could transform lead into gold, albeit at a large cost to their mana pool. The difficulty with trueforming was that the higher the power of the object, the greater the mana cost would be, and if you were not careful then you could easily over-use your mana reservoir which would reduce your lifespan. A person trying to trueform could easily create a Saint level weapon or material, but if they were of the saint level then they would only be able to do it at the cost of half their mana pool. If they wanted to create something of the Heaven rank, then it would take at least ten years off their lifespan as well as their entire pool.
This was all something that Laurence and Damascus had gone over during the last week. They would often talk about it during travel, which confused Trev to no end, as for some reason he was the only person in the group who could not see the odd sprite. They had spoken about trueforming in great detail, and how it was what all children who had been exposed to the book of creation would be able to do first, but at complete random. It was apparently a way for the universe to offset the demanding nature of the skill with the children’s lack of control. Finally it was time for Laurence to put into action everything that he had learned over the week and make the party a safe place from the storm.
He began channelling mana into the air around him, bending the space he stood in to his will. It was a slow, insidious process to him but happened in mere moments to the rest of the world. Soon the muddy ground began twisting and rising around the boy as he moved it to form a wall to protect them from the elements. The mud rose in sinuous pillars at Laurence’s command, thickening and growing until all the spires reached the peak of the hovel they were hiding in. Laurence’s brow was riddled with sweat as he continued making the place stable and safe from exposure to the terrifying storm. He grew pillars out of the ground to support the roof and condensed the mud until it was solid rock then finally let go of his control. It was by far the hardest thing he had ever done, and almost completely drained his mana reservoir of all its power. The entire thing felt like it took Laurence about an hour, taking the matter around him and refining it, twisting it into the shape and form he desired, but it had taken mere seconds to raise the entire hut from the ground.
As he finished the hut Laurence could no longer stand, and collapsed onto his rear, rather unceremoniously, looking at his completed work. What he stood inside was a hill to the outside world, but inside was a functioning home. It had a pit to keep the fire going in, a smoke exit to get the smog out of the area, softer resting areas for them to sleep in and a single door, that could open and close. However the room was not finished. It could protect them from normal weather fine, but if anything could break through the three inch thick stone walls then they would be immediately exposed. Laurence wanted to inscribe the area, just to finish the job, but he had absolutely no spare mana left. He could barely stand, let alone focus.
After about five minutes of straining to do anything Laurence remembered that Tony had told him he could restore his mana using something but he could not focus enough to remember what. His body thrummed with tiredness and annoyance, so he tried to relax by practicing the Inner Flame Formation. After circulating his mana a few times he found that it was restoring much quicker than he was expecting. Laurence also noticed his tiredness also alleviated faster than even when he slept. He could feel his nerves, lined with mana, igniting and becoming molten. It should have hurt but instead he just felt rejuvenated. The weariness that permeated his entire being was just washed away by that river of fire.
When Laurence had refilled half his reservoir he stood up and stretched, feeling better than if he had slept for days. “How are things looking?” He said.
“Well you’ve been out of commission for an hour, and the storm is going to hit us in around five minutes,” said Damascus, “I’m glad to see your first trueforming went well though. Are you all done?”
“No. I need to inscribe before the storm hits, but that won’t drain me as much as changing the shape of that dirt did”. He replied. He immediately began cutting into the walls with a short blade of mana. He cut and cut, foregoing strengthening every section and just casting the inscription over the entire house. It would cost him even more mana, and be less powerful, but would be far quicker than any other method and now time was of the essence.
Mere moments before the winds picked up and the storm hit did the boy finish inscribing the glyphs into the walls. It was a nerve-wracking moment for the group because now would be when their defences would be tested. The winds whipped against their base as they curled up next to the fire, rain smashed against rock and lightning fired off again and again. The storm was beyond intense. It seemed to ease up for a short while, but then the laughter started. It was a low laugh to begin with, quiet but omnipresent, echoing over the landscape as creatures would scream and die, warped beyond recognition from the bizarre rain. After a while the laughter picked up and became louder. There was an underlying sense of malice coming from the laughter as if it knew the power it had and revelled in that knowledge. It was like the laugh of a mad god, giggling as it ruined all it surveyed.
The storm began firing off bolts of lightning with reckless abandon, striking in every direction. Eventually it even struck so close to Laurence and the rest that they could feel the shock wave. The only thing they could do was hope that they were lucky and Laurence’s defences would hold. Finally the laughter began to fade and the storm moved on. It was an arduous wait, but eventually the world was quiet again.
Jake looked out of the hut and told the rest of them it was all clear of the cataclysm that had passed them by. They were prepared to see some damage but were not ready for the destruction they were confronted with the moment the sun assailed them once more. In front of the group was a bombsite. Beyond them for miles around were pits created by lightning strikes and torn up debris. The forest they had holed up around half a mile away from had been transplanted all around them and there were now new hills. The wasteland had entirely changed its face, but Laurence’s pointer stone still said nineteen days away, so all they could do was bear with the changes and move on.
They travelled for the next two weeks without incident. The young men were able to spend the time slowly healing up, while Laurence picked up the art of enchantment. He spent hours with Damascus each night just talking about the finer points of creating a powerful tool or device, and after two weeks of learning he finally understood how the myriad of strange objects came to be. He learned that when a person gains a deep understanding of trueforming they could write his sigils on the smallest forms of matter that made up the objects, what Damascus called ‘atoms’. He began to understand that the way he had been creating tools was rudimentary in comparison, and that while it was not necessary to make all your materials through trueforming, all inscribing should be done that way.
The process of learning this took him a lot less time than Damascus thought it would have, but a lot longer than Laurence would have liked. However he did not have much time to contemplate it because they arrived at the stele the day after he finished working through that section of the book. He was now an expert on enchanting in theory, in practice he had yet to try it a single time.
Over the three weeks they had been traveling, Jake and Trev had learned a lot about the tower they supposedly lived in, and had decided that they wanted to explore it on their own. They thought it would be an awful idea to ride on the coattails of a child through this, so they told Laurence, Yun and Damascus that they would be going their separate way in the tower.
“We will miss you guys!” Said Laurence as they opened the door. It might be a long time before he met them again, so he pulled out a gift that he had been preparing for the last week of travel. In his hands were two red books, identical to Laurence’s Book of Creation in every possible way. “Here’s a gift. You guys are now practitioners of the Book of Creation, so use it wisely, and when you meet me you can show me how far you’ve come”. He gave his two friends the books and smiled as he watched them disappear into the tower.
As the two guardsmen left the group Damascus swore and looked apologetically at Laurence. “Sorry Laurence, but I am going to have to go as well. Jake never gave my ring back, so I am going to have to go with him!” He began fading away as his ring moved away from the boy and the wolf. “Before I go, I think you really do have what it takes to inherit the will of Hephaistia. Good luck kid!”
And then Laurence and Yun were once again on their own.
