He straightened from his ready stance and, finally, relaxed. The layer of fury that had slipped over his rationalism, like a blackout curtain over an east-facing window, fell away to leave him disconcerted about the experience. [Blood Rage]. That was the second time he'd lost the battle for control when a fight began, had had himself more or less completely lost to the Lord Instinct. This time he'd been able to use his magic, training and a growing well of experience having made the act intuitive enough to not require his active thought. He didn't know if that was good news or not. Now that the doings were done he had time to go back through the sequence of events, concentrating specifically on the words of the speaker. The wound was starting to sting by the time he got it packed with a coagulant herb. [Crow's Fast Fern], no doubt named by an Iriel'en because that joke was a little too on the nose. It stung wickedly, but the trickle of red ceased immediately. Ulric could damn near feel the blood vessels cinching shut. Once bandaged, he turned from the immediate aftermath of the ambush to sort out the whys of it all.
"What the fuck is an M'rakur?" He asked aloud.
They said that he was on M'rakur land, and something about seals. The fuck? Seals? They'd spoken the Valin species language, he understood them clearly, but the word in his mind was missing a context to give it meaning. Some kind of culture-specific thing then. He had his answer when he stripped the corpses, but not before he had himself properly clothed. After he'd cleaned off the blood, theirs and his, that is.
Beneath their clothes, rough cut beast leather and fur, with a little poorly spun cloth that might be low-quality linen, each man was lightly tattooed. Those clothes made him think of some kind of Iron age Danish or Icelandic society, layered garb of thick underthings, thicker than hose but of the same function, under lighter cloth kilt, with thick leather sleeveless vest over top. Hardy folk, they saw no need for oversleeves or coats, even though some of the mornings could still become slightly chilly. Upon the palling flesh, whirls and fractals of ink, black for two of them, red for another, and blue for another gave some significance to the color of the markings but Ulric wouldn't know what it meant unless he got the chance to talk to one of them. Those tattoos piqued his curiosity. Swirls and knots, vaguely Celtic patterns appeared to be highly professional. No ink bleeds, no scarring, vivid crisp lines, whoever these people were, they invested no little effort into the sophistication of the practice of tattooing. Another small mystery was cleared up: parts of the tattoos were missing, overlaid by faded scar tissue that indicated removal by burning. Hmmm…outcasts or criminal branding? The ambush did make more sense then: a good old fashioned mugging. Come to think of it, Ulric hadn't been mugged before. Mostly the people in the Before were law abiding, violent crime was near unheard of. When many more aggressive violations of the social compact led to swift exile into a crippled ecosystem absent the anti-rads and corrective gene treatments that would stave off the inevitable cancer from the nuclear wars, some pocket change lost most of its appeal.
Huh. Now he looked closer, he saw that his own scars held no real similarity to theirs, his being the result of being touched by the maybe god of the elemental mana of Ceraun. Lichtenburg scars branched and jagged faintly from one arm to his neck, across his chest and torso to his back and down the opposite leg, a mirror of the same wounds he'd received from a lightning strike back on Earth in his previous life, and one of the only pieces of evidence he had that his old life wasn't some kind of incredibly involved insanity.
These lads hadn't taken kindly to his having something approximating their tribal markings, criminals that they appeared to be. Maybe he shouldn't have killed that last one, so he could ask questions.
He scoffed at that notion immediately. Sure as shit, if he’d left one alive, one of his buddies would have strolled along to put steel into Ulric's back while he was distracted. That's just how his luck ran out here.
M'rakur was probably a tribe then. One of the groups of people colonizing the wide, wide wilderness between the major settlements. The fact that they were Valin meant that, for definitely sure, Ulric had finally crossed the border into the territories of Prespang. He'd left Orlethrem, the land of the Elves behind.
It did not bode well that the first folk of the human-held lands he met had thought bushwhacking a man while he was sleeping was an appropriate greeting. Maybe humans really were just utter trash across all dimensions? Humanity's defining feature was the superposition of complete jerk-ass and begrudging altruism, was Ulric's assessment back in the Before. The evidence thus far only supported this hypothesis. More experimentation was necessary, he decided as he continued to pick through the belongings of the departed.
The guy that took his Mistral to the chin he didn't bother with, nothing useful survived the spell. He was going to have to rate that one higher up, it was a doozy. The evolution of his [Wind Blade] with a healthy dose of lightning supercharging had not failed him yet. Nor had it failed to produce an unholy fucking mess.
Ulric closed his eyes as he sat cross-legged with the belongings of the men arrayed before him. He tried not to regret the deaths too much but it seemed like he'd killed more humans than he'd spoken to. He also tried to ignore the little whisper that said "And more to come" when he reviewed the body count. His second life was proving to be a pretty rough row to hoe.
"Quit being a bitch Einar, they would have killed you for a pittance and were certainly going to bushwhack you and steal your shit." He reminded himself.
Doing bad things invites bad things to happen. It wasn't true, people got away with heinous shit all the time, but it was a superstition that would not leave him nevertheless. Now that he was capable of wielding power overwhelming, he didn't mind a few habits of restraint from the Before. Just, not too many. Taipan scolded him for being slow to respond to threats.
Would she have thought him too slow just now? He didn't quite chuckle at that, not with the blood still pooling warm in the grass. Even graveyard humor needed some limits.
He mentally recapped the waking, the brief explosive execution of lethality, and analyzed his responses while he packed away his small camp. Overall, performance rated a seven point five out of ten. Dock him a point for the [Blood Rage]. He'd give the difficulty of the scenario a solid nine, his being unarmored, unarmed, and caught sleeping. The only thing that could have been worse was the enemy being a practiced mage or his being injured at the outset. Clearing the enemy weapons from himself with the one weapon was something he'd worked on frequently with Taipan. She, much like Gother, insisted on navigating one's way out of the worst possible positions. Christ's dodge was sublime in its efficiency of motion and the ease of counterplay it provided.
Ulric rubbed the slightly uncomfortable burn on the end of his nose thoughtfully, contemplating Christ’s favored response to a dedicated thrust. The young Aes'r swordsman cut his evasions closer to the bone than Ulric preferred, not having that one's gift for dueling. The results spoke for themselves, however. Obtaining the rapid kills had disturbed his assailants, shaken their confidence, and handed him the initiative to use his battlemage talents to their fullest. Shock and awe were powerful tools. It probably hadn’t done the bandit fuckers any favors to realize that they’d jumped a man asleep, damned near naked, and found they’d cornered a tiger.
It was with a frown that he beheld the long Drak, its crudely wrapped leather hilt bespeaking low quality and rough use. The metal had a bronzish hue, that faint green tinge on the yellow tones. A mild blackening along it's chisel profiled edge revealed the effect of the heat of its bearer's skill upon it and it had a distinct warp That fire infusion skill was nasty. He wondered what type of Vardan fuckery it was?
His grey eyes sheened white as he turned [Scan] on the corpse. Not so much as a whisper of the Akashic impressed themselves on his mind. Nothing. He might as well have [Scanned] a pile of mud. Death, it would seem, cut the Akashic connection. That man's path was no more, whatever imprint he'd left on the web of mana that wrapped this world, it was Varda's alone to ken now. Good to know.
One of the most positive outcomes was the immediate lethality of that first magic, his trusty old [Voltaic Grip]. Ceraun was incredibly potent at ravaging nervous systems; not even the greater physical strength and durability of these Vardan humans was capable of withstanding a thirty amp pulse at some one hundred twenty Hertz. Shirt ripper over there had gone poof, popped like a blown fuse.
"You'll have good company in Hell buddy boy," Ulric informed the dead man sardonically, adjusting his thick traveling robe and affixing the belt made of his predecessor in the Ancient Glade, "The [Forest Lord] was about as mean a thing as ever walked this rock and you both died to the same spell."
Ulric could use his own magic on his weapon, it was designed to hold mana, being of an alloy of metals, one that cut whatever bindings held spells together and thus disrupted them and another that was excellent at conducting mana. The [Afthar'ts Atzalis], or deathless metal. Its creator, Galed Uldin, might as well have named himself the best craftsman in Iriel'en history for figuring out how to recreate the alloy from scratch and cobbled together notes from centuries of research. Svartalfin smiths, the only others who could do it according to Uldin, would probably shit bricks when they found out a non-dwarf had solved the puzzle.
Events had conspired to keep Ulric too busy to investigate the subtleties of Xef'tocht, his masterwork blade. So far, the sword, forged of a magical metal and enchanted using the core of the [Forest Lord], had been used for its phenomenal cutting power, courtesy of an enchanted aura that projected its razor edge away from the actual metal, preserving the sharpness into perpetuity as far as Ulric could discern. Spooky magical bullshit. He'd have to make time to figure out how to utilize it better.
Holding mana was great and all, pushing lightning magic into the sword had done some wonders for adding potency against that thick-hided Ogran bastard, but what would really be neat is some way to…
"You are a mongoloid half-wit Ulric!" He declared.
Not too long ago, thanks to the research of a dedicated scholar of Ash magic, Ulric had learned how to create a semi-mythical substance, a stable solid piece of unaspected white mana, by use of crystallography physics and a career fucking with carbon and metallic nanostructures. The crystalline [Arcanite Diamond] acted like a mana amplifier, resonating with and boosting magic fed into it. Upon saturating itself with mana it would revert to magical plutonium and explode suddenly in an antimagic flash of raw energy.
Suddenly, Ulric was fairly certain he could inset the magical amplifier into his sword, to let the mana conductive blade act as a sink for magic that might otherwise be caught up in the [Arcanite Diamond]. The pure mana didn't want to actually hold those impure manaforms, that was just…quantum magical noise or some shit. Artifact. Imperfections in his casting. If he ran his spellforms through the resonator that was the diamond with the [Afthar'ts Atzalis] there to actively pull the magic back out of the stone he could extend the lifespan of the gem. Maybe indefinitely.
"Holy fuck…you're a fucking genius Ulric!" he counterargued his previous statement.
Xef'tocht might not just be an artifact sword. It might one day be a warmage staff as well. Amplifying and refining spells. That would fit, his being a spellsword, a warrior that used both mundane and arcane weaponry. He'd get right on it, right after he was finished killing the ever-loving shit out of whoever had sicked a pyromancer on him, murdered a bunch of people in their woodland home, and instigated brutality unimaginable to synthesize magical WMDs. Priorities man, you gotta have priorities. But turning his chief melee weapon into a catalyst that would improve his arcane weaponry was now top of his list for R&D budgeting.
Done musing over the possibilities presented by the dead bandit’s skill, Ulric finished packing away the bushwhackers’ belongings and readied TMF1 and TMF2 with a lopsided grin. They did not comment on the increasing preponderance of circumstantial evidence that the unworthy being guiding them was batshit, nor did this information change their conspiracy to lead him off a cliff at the earliest convenience.
As he left the site of his humble camp, bodies left to feed the great birds that already had begun their funeral processions far above, plans and plans occupied him while he closed in on the city looming on the horizon. Grey clouds were closing in, driving low, whispy leader clouds before them in what promised to be a rather nasty rainstorm to be caught by in the open.
Damn it. Taipan and Brighteyes had both told him stories of the barbarian tribes and their caste system that involved tribal markings upon the flesh. Just his luck he'd removed his robe to sleep and they'd taken offense. Then again, there was a non-zero chance these were simply bandits prowling the outskirts of the looming city for travelers like himself, and a lone man, asleep, with a loaded wagon was just far too tempting. The relatively low density of the patterns was indicative of a lack of achievement, wealth, or standing within their tribe, probably. Just the sort that resorted to crime, when they also lacked character.
The rain caught him less than an hour into his travel. Beating waves of droplets turned the distant city into a wall of grey. Already soft ground began to sag beneath the weight of his cart, which correspondingly increased the effort required of the pulling beasts, and their lowing every few minutes made sure Ulric was aware of their dissatisfaction with their lot in life. Well, they could just join the fucking club now, couldn't they?
Mighty though the [Direhorn Oxen] were, fast they were not. The cloying mud gripping the wide wagon wheels did no favors, either. Ulric was on the point of using a [Stone Wall] spell to create thin bands of solid terrain to move across, similar to the wild sled run he'd partaken of on a breakneck return to Iriel. That time he'd run himself to exhaustion to prevent one of the Elves who'd escorted him to the glade from dying or suffering permanent crippling from a ferocious beast ambush. Absent the protection of a squad of Iriel'en warrior elite, he couldn't chance being caught in the open exhausted, trying for the gates of the city that just had to be close at hand. So it was that he did not quite reach the settlement and had to stop at dusk to make ready for one more night in the wilds.
Ulric might be slow sometimes, but he wasn't stupid. Getting set upon before waking was not an experience he cared to enjoy twice. With a dung-fueled fire burning reluctantly in the unrelenting drizzle, Ulric considered his options. First things first, a warning system. He had extra stakes for his canvas Legranel-style shelter's tension lines so he drove them in a perimeter around his camp. Scratching the not-so-scraggly beard that was starting to come in full since he'd left the Moot, Ulric found himself stumped for how to alert himself to anyone tripping the rope he was intending to run around those stakes.
Hmm…ah! Got it, Ulric told himself.
[White Interference]
Channeling his Ceraunic core he neutralized the innate polarity of the magic inside him to generate the unaspected base harmonic of magic, raw and full of possibility. Next, he attuned this mana towards the stolid node of earth magic, Terra. His will was ready, now for the way. Ulric envisioned a wind chime, a hollow, thin-walled cylinder with smooth sides and a opposite-facing holes at the top. Keeping this image strong in his mind he used his magic to coax solid stone from the ground, pushing the precision of his [Stone Wall] spell to its utmost. When the hollow rod of rock was half a meter long he broke it off, continuing to channel the spell.
Using the components of the land around him was far more efficient than trying to convert mana to solid matter, by orders of magnitude. The improvised stone chimes he broke off at varying lengths until he had twelve of the things, each as big around as his thumb. Gently he tapped one cylinder against another and they gave a distinct tone, if not one that was as loud and resonant as metal chimes. Didn't matter, he noted, they would do. The alarm chimes he hung in pairs next to one another on a tight ridge line around his perimeter stakes. Anybody that tripped the rope would set the entire ring to jangling. He tested it with a slight nudge of his hand and was satisfied at the minor cacophony that ensued.
"Problem identified. Problem solved." Ulric intoned smugly towards the naysayer oxen that chewed resentfully from the feedbags he'd slipped over their noses. They'd better enjoy it, he was completely out of the milled grains he'd bought from the Legranel.
A soft thud of additional droppings on the coastal savannah was the only retort they deigned to give him.
"Now then." He told his sputtering fire, "How do I buy some time in case somebody responds to the alarm by just diving on me?"
This was a harder problem. Ulric could see through the walls of his shelter effectively and [Ceraunoperception] was nice in that it responded well to metal, so he could, with fair precision, track weapons. Even so, that would be small comfort when an archer shot him through the walls from farther than his twenty or meters of sensitivity.
"Hmm…" Ulric thought back to the parting gift given him by the Sauri Ash mage he'd bargained with. Werona had showed him her way of "training" a small piece of [Arconite Diamond] to a specific manaform, turning it into a catalyst for that one type of magic. It was a hell of a trick. He now had a gem that would create the Tephras Adept's wicked miniature pyroclastic cloud. That would more than do as a distraction and a way to buy space. Unless you were wearing artifact armor, walking through the burning cloud was not going to be a good time. Even if the attackers had the ability to see through the ashes and cinders, which Ulric couldn't discount because spooky magical nonsense and even spookier Akashic class reality hacks, they would still have to actually go around the cloud.
"Pocket sand plus, plus." Ulric laughed at the little Tephras catalyst.
It was an old joke, from the media archives he'd consumed in his previous life. For some reason, the solution to any encounter in which one might be outmatched was to throw sand at their face. He doubted that was effective against shock troops in carbide-reinforced combat armor, hyperglass faceplates, infrared sights, and depleted uranium assault weapons but the pre-collapse had been, in some ways, a simpler time. Ruinously stupid and wasteful, but simpler.
With an early warning system in place and a deterrent to buy him space and time to put his Ceraunic core's destructive capabilities to work, Ulric felt good about hid odds and turned to his bedroll feeling pretty optimistic. All these precautions were probably a waste of time, as close to the town as he must have been. He was going to learn to stop jinxing himself like that one day.
For the second day in a row, Ulric woke to adrenaline. Rough voices speaking Human tongue. The stone chimes jangled dissonantly in predawn, as best he could judge by the dim light inside his shelter, which must have been what drew him from his sleep. By the racket, somebody was playing in the damned things.
"What ha ye done now ye great oaf?!" demanded an angry voice.
"Hain't nothing left but fer to wrap yerself in the rope an play the music is there?" another asked with heavy sarcasm.
Thick accents, vaguely similar, with what little he'd heard to the men that ambushed him, so not peoples of the cities then. And not so very pleased that their companion had stumbled into his perimeter alarm.
A snort, followed by a clearing of phlegm and a percussive delivery of that blockage to the dirt gave them both answer, before the spitter clarified his position, "And what're the two o ye agointa be chuntering about when I've beat and bunged the both of ye?"
Safe to say that his visitors weren't exactly the sophisticated types.
[Ceraunoperception]
[Warrior's Instinct]
Ulric made ready to roll thunder. Six men, lightly armed, no armor to speak of. Little to no metal on their persons aside from their belt knives, spear points, and arrowheads. He was going to give these people exactly one chance to avoid dying with ozone in their nostrils and then it was game on.
"You lot have intruded on my camp and I do not care for guests, as I have not invited any. What business do you have that you intrude on a man's sleep? I will grant you a count of five breaths to answer to my liking before I destroy you. One." Ulric announced firmly.
The sounds of light booted feet halted as did the heavily accented carping of the men. None answered.
"Two." Ulric continued, Ceraun concentrating in his body, the thin ambient mana being drawn by his core.
He exited his tent with his hand on Xef'tocht's hilt, blade bare, and a visage that spoke plainly his intent once the mercy count was ended.
"Three Four." He stated in clipped tones and saw eyes widen at the short count.
What? Never had he ever said that the breaths had to be evenly spaced or regular. It was his godsdamned camp and he would make the rules.
"Wait! Pause, friend, there's no need for that. We're not here fer bringin troubles. We're here because we been pursuing thieving murdering bastards and their tracks led this way." Exclaimed the first speaker, a young man of similar apparent age to Ulric's reforged body.
The others were of an age to the speaker, except for one who held the lined face of a man past his prime, if not by far. All wore something akin to the garb of a pre-industrial Highlander of the Scots-Angle peoples. Light-laced shirts, heavy bonnet caps, scarves, kilts, barelegs, and the tall calf-high boots were common to the men before him. All of the men wore satchels, all had strung bows across their backs, and each man carried a two-meter spear tipped by a half meter of dark grey metal. By garb and tongue, they were of similar ilk to those bushwhackers, but these were far better kept, less ragged, and armbands on their biceps combined with rings woven into their long braided hair reminded Ulric of the old Scandanavian practice of carrying fungible wealth about the body instead of coins.
In all, this group had a far different vibe to them than the last bunch. Ulric's instincts said they looked more like Human variants of the Elvish Hunters or Herd Riders, rather than marauders. He got a sense of dignity from these. Reining in the hostility, Ulric noted the tattoos, or seals as they had been called by the bushwhackers from yesterday; these were more pronounced, denser in pattern, and with branches. Almost certainly the men before him were of a different sort than those prior. Not that he was going to relax his guard, mind, just that this situation was probably going to end up a variation on the theme of kill them all.
As had become the usual since the season had been warming, Ulric was barechested, though he felt not the chill of the air at the moment. Faint violet pulses ran across the signs of Ceraun's touch, arcing randomly through the lightning-carved paths in his skin.
"Fuck's sake, what'ev ya gotta do to earn yer seals their own light?" Muttered one of the men.
The elder amongst them answered his junior kin's question with trepidation, "I've ne'er heard of it. But there's guessin we're not keen to find out, by the look o'him. Great scary bastard."
The older man who'd offered his two companions buggery as a reward for their jokes by his voice spoke up, which maybe made him the leader and the first one Ulric would kill if things turned that way.
"Shut yer gobs!" he directed to the rest of the group and they fell silent before he returned to Ulric with a more restrained tenor that implied no harm meant, "Ye've my apology fer our forwardness, Honor. We've hunted a group of raping, murdering, thieving exiles from our clan across a week's time. We found their horses dead not a day's travel back and sure as the Coven follow the Twins, they were headed this way. I'd apologize for the early hour, but sleep is something we ain't known this past two nights, not unless it came in a saddle."
Ulric couldn't pick up anything that said the man was lying. His demeanor was firm, not shifty and he met Ulric's eyes with a sort of steady confidence that said he had nothing to hide. Trust but verify. Ulric sidelined his interest in the use of the term Honor when the Valin Highlander spoke to him. Time for that in a bit, if nothing went wrong. As usual, he’d just tell them the truth and see where this went.
"Four men I met yesterday,” Ulric told the bounty hunters or, perhaps, justice-seeking tribesmen, “They claimed that they were M'rakur and took issue with the marks on my flesh and spoke their intent to murder me and take what they pleased. They lay dead about six leagues back for their misjudgment. You lot are welcome to rest here if you give me no trouble, my fire is open to those who hunt criminals. If you think to cause me problems though, you can go see the men you chased, wherever it is you folk go when you die." Ulric offered, with measured cadence.
He wasn't ready to drop his defenses but how this played out was now in these Prespanger barbarians' hands. The brain tiger was more or less alright with this going either way.
They traded glances nervously. The leader nodded his agreement calling out to his men, "Aye, that seems fair. Come then lads, our chase has come to its end, it seems. Fitch, since ye're of the mind that I'm a clumsy oaf, ye can go gather an’ hobble the mounts, being yer so light on yer feet."
A squirrely man with a scraggly beard grumped but headed off to grab the loose beasts that stood placidly saddled some forty meters distant.
Ulric had to appreciate that they'd dismounted and approached afoot, not intending to startle the occupants of the camp as they came in or just try to ride up with the advantage of cavalry. It was another solid mark in their favor. The rest of the M'rakur, if that's what they were, sidled in and took a load off. Now that Ulric wasn't examining them with an eye for combat cues, things like whether the muscles in their legs were tensing to launch themselves at him, hands clenching and re-clenching to find better grips on weapon shafts, or boots shifting to claim a better balance, he could see that these men were exhausted.
Not one lacked bags beneath eyes or the slack features of ones that had pressed hard and, now that they'd stopped, would not manage to continue without rest. Now that he'd offered hospitality he was committed to it. Best be on with it then, maybe this day would set without the Twins witnessing strife, Ulric thought, and knelt to stir the coals of his near-dead fire back to life.
"Alright then, make yourselves comfortable. I'll have a tea brewed in short order. Have any of you the stomach for camp bread and dried meat?" Ulric ventured.
"I'm athinkin I could eat." "Ye'll not find the bottom of my stomach." "Got any beer?" Came the replies.
The leader gave Ulric a warmer appraisal now that food was on the table.
"Since these louts have forgotten their manners, thank you for the hospitality. It is good to meet men who know how to practice Guest Right out in the wilds." He told Ulric with a disapproving stare at his men.
"Aye, it is appreciated." "Many thanks for your fire." "Is that a no on the beer?" chorused the travelers.
He straightened from his ready stance and, finally, relaxed. The layer of fury that had slipped over his rationalism, like a blackout curtain over an east-facing window, fell away to leave him disconcerted about the experience. [Blood Rage]. That was the second time he'd lost the battle for control when a fight began, had had himself more or less completely lost to the Lord Instinct. This time he'd been able to use his magic, training and a growing well of experience having made the act intuitive enough to not require his active thought. He didn't know if that was good news or not. Now that the doings were done he had time to go back through the sequence of events, concentrating specifically on the words of the speaker. The wound was starting to sting by the time he got it packed with a coagulant herb. [Crow's Fast Fern], no doubt named by an Iriel'en because that joke was a little too on the nose. It stung wickedly, but the trickle of red ceased immediately. Ulric could damn near feel the blood vessels cinching shut. Once bandaged, he turned from the immediate aftermath of the ambush to sort out the whys of it all.
"What the fuck is an M'rakur?" He asked aloud.
They said that he was on M'rakur land, and something about seals. The fuck? Seals? They'd spoken the Valin species language, he understood them clearly, but the word in his mind was missing a context to give it meaning. Some kind of culture-specific thing then. He had his answer when he stripped the corpses, but not before he had himself properly clothed. After he'd cleaned off the blood, theirs and his, that is.
Beneath their clothes, rough cut beast leather and fur, with a little poorly spun cloth that might be low-quality linen, each man was lightly tattooed. Those clothes made him think of some kind of Iron age Danish or Icelandic society, layered garb of thick underthings, thicker than hose but of the same function, under lighter cloth kilt, with thick leather sleeveless vest over top. Hardy folk, they saw no need for oversleeves or coats, even though some of the mornings could still become slightly chilly. Upon the palling flesh, whirls and fractals of ink, black for two of them, red for another, and blue for another gave some significance to the color of the markings but Ulric wouldn't know what it meant unless he got the chance to talk to one of them. Those tattoos piqued his curiosity. Swirls and knots, vaguely Celtic patterns appeared to be highly professional. No ink bleeds, no scarring, vivid crisp lines, whoever these people were, they invested no little effort into the sophistication of the practice of tattooing. Another small mystery was cleared up: parts of the tattoos were missing, overlaid by faded scar tissue that indicated removal by burning. Hmmm…outcasts or criminal branding? The ambush did make more sense then: a good old fashioned mugging. Come to think of it, Ulric hadn't been mugged before. Mostly the people in the Before were law abiding, violent crime was near unheard of. When many more aggressive violations of the social compact led to swift exile into a crippled ecosystem absent the anti-rads and corrective gene treatments that would stave off the inevitable cancer from the nuclear wars, some pocket change lost most of its appeal.
Huh. Now he looked closer, he saw that his own scars held no real similarity to theirs, his being the result of being touched by the maybe god of the elemental mana of Ceraun. Lichtenburg scars branched and jagged faintly from one arm to his neck, across his chest and torso to his back and down the opposite leg, a mirror of the same wounds he'd received from a lightning strike back on Earth in his previous life, and one of the only pieces of evidence he had that his old life wasn't some kind of incredibly involved insanity.
These lads hadn't taken kindly to his having something approximating their tribal markings, criminals that they appeared to be. Maybe he shouldn't have killed that last one, so he could ask questions.
He scoffed at that notion immediately. Sure as shit, if he’d left one alive, one of his buddies would have strolled along to put steel into Ulric's back while he was distracted. That's just how his luck ran out here.
M'rakur was probably a tribe then. One of the groups of people colonizing the wide, wide wilderness between the major settlements. The fact that they were Valin meant that, for definitely sure, Ulric had finally crossed the border into the territories of Prespang. He'd left Orlethrem, the land of the Elves behind.
It did not bode well that the first folk of the human-held lands he met had thought bushwhacking a man while he was sleeping was an appropriate greeting. Maybe humans really were just utter trash across all dimensions? Humanity's defining feature was the superposition of complete jerk-ass and begrudging altruism, was Ulric's assessment back in the Before. The evidence thus far only supported this hypothesis. More experimentation was necessary, he decided as he continued to pick through the belongings of the departed.
The guy that took his Mistral to the chin he didn't bother with, nothing useful survived the spell. He was going to have to rate that one higher up, it was a doozy. The evolution of his [Wind Blade] with a healthy dose of lightning supercharging had not failed him yet. Nor had it failed to produce an unholy fucking mess.
Ulric closed his eyes as he sat cross-legged with the belongings of the men arrayed before him. He tried not to regret the deaths too much but it seemed like he'd killed more humans than he'd spoken to. He also tried to ignore the little whisper that said "And more to come" when he reviewed the body count. His second life was proving to be a pretty rough row to hoe.
"Quit being a bitch Einar, they would have killed you for a pittance and were certainly going to bushwhack you and steal your shit." He reminded himself.
Doing bad things invites bad things to happen. It wasn't true, people got away with heinous shit all the time, but it was a superstition that would not leave him nevertheless. Now that he was capable of wielding power overwhelming, he didn't mind a few habits of restraint from the Before. Just, not too many. Taipan scolded him for being slow to respond to threats.
Would she have thought him too slow just now? He didn't quite chuckle at that, not with the blood still pooling warm in the grass. Even graveyard humor needed some limits.
He mentally recapped the waking, the brief explosive execution of lethality, and analyzed his responses while he packed away his small camp. Overall, performance rated a seven point five out of ten. Dock him a point for the [Blood Rage]. He'd give the difficulty of the scenario a solid nine, his being unarmored, unarmed, and caught sleeping. The only thing that could have been worse was the enemy being a practiced mage or his being injured at the outset. Clearing the enemy weapons from himself with the one weapon was something he'd worked on frequently with Taipan. She, much like Gother, insisted on navigating one's way out of the worst possible positions. Christ's dodge was sublime in its efficiency of motion and the ease of counterplay it provided.
Ulric rubbed the slightly uncomfortable burn on the end of his nose thoughtfully, contemplating Christ’s favored response to a dedicated thrust. The young Aes'r swordsman cut his evasions closer to the bone than Ulric preferred, not having that one's gift for dueling. The results spoke for themselves, however. Obtaining the rapid kills had disturbed his assailants, shaken their confidence, and handed him the initiative to use his battlemage talents to their fullest. Shock and awe were powerful tools. It probably hadn’t done the bandit fuckers any favors to realize that they’d jumped a man asleep, damned near naked, and found they’d cornered a tiger.
It was with a frown that he beheld the long Drak, its crudely wrapped leather hilt bespeaking low quality and rough use. The metal had a bronzish hue, that faint green tinge on the yellow tones. A mild blackening along it's chisel profiled edge revealed the effect of the heat of its bearer's skill upon it and it had a distinct warp That fire infusion skill was nasty. He wondered what type of Vardan fuckery it was?
His grey eyes sheened white as he turned [Scan] on the corpse. Not so much as a whisper of the Akashic impressed themselves on his mind. Nothing. He might as well have [Scanned] a pile of mud. Death, it would seem, cut the Akashic connection. That man's path was no more, whatever imprint he'd left on the web of mana that wrapped this world, it was Varda's alone to ken now. Good to know.
One of the most positive outcomes was the immediate lethality of that first magic, his trusty old [Voltaic Grip]. Ceraun was incredibly potent at ravaging nervous systems; not even the greater physical strength and durability of these Vardan humans was capable of withstanding a thirty amp pulse at some one hundred twenty Hertz. Shirt ripper over there had gone poof, popped like a blown fuse.
"You'll have good company in Hell buddy boy," Ulric informed the dead man sardonically, adjusting his thick traveling robe and affixing the belt made of his predecessor in the Ancient Glade, "The [Forest Lord] was about as mean a thing as ever walked this rock and you both died to the same spell."
Ulric could use his own magic on his weapon, it was designed to hold mana, being of an alloy of metals, one that cut whatever bindings held spells together and thus disrupted them and another that was excellent at conducting mana. The [Afthar'ts Atzalis], or deathless metal. Its creator, Galed Uldin, might as well have named himself the best craftsman in Iriel'en history for figuring out how to recreate the alloy from scratch and cobbled together notes from centuries of research. Svartalfin smiths, the only others who could do it according to Uldin, would probably shit bricks when they found out a non-dwarf had solved the puzzle.
Events had conspired to keep Ulric too busy to investigate the subtleties of Xef'tocht, his masterwork blade. So far, the sword, forged of a magical metal and enchanted using the core of the [Forest Lord], had been used for its phenomenal cutting power, courtesy of an enchanted aura that projected its razor edge away from the actual metal, preserving the sharpness into perpetuity as far as Ulric could discern. Spooky magical bullshit. He'd have to make time to figure out how to utilize it better.
Holding mana was great and all, pushing lightning magic into the sword had done some wonders for adding potency against that thick-hided Ogran bastard, but what would really be neat is some way to…
"You are a mongoloid half-wit Ulric!" He declared.
Not too long ago, thanks to the research of a dedicated scholar of Ash magic, Ulric had learned how to create a semi-mythical substance, a stable solid piece of unaspected white mana, by use of crystallography physics and a career fucking with carbon and metallic nanostructures. The crystalline [Arcanite Diamond] acted like a mana amplifier, resonating with and boosting magic fed into it. Upon saturating itself with mana it would revert to magical plutonium and explode suddenly in an antimagic flash of raw energy.
Suddenly, Ulric was fairly certain he could inset the magical amplifier into his sword, to let the mana conductive blade act as a sink for magic that might otherwise be caught up in the [Arcanite Diamond]. The pure mana didn't want to actually hold those impure manaforms, that was just…quantum magical noise or some shit. Artifact. Imperfections in his casting. If he ran his spellforms through the resonator that was the diamond with the [Afthar'ts Atzalis] there to actively pull the magic back out of the stone he could extend the lifespan of the gem. Maybe indefinitely.
"Holy fuck…you're a fucking genius Ulric!" he counterargued his previous statement.
Xef'tocht might not just be an artifact sword. It might one day be a warmage staff as well. Amplifying and refining spells. That would fit, his being a spellsword, a warrior that used both mundane and arcane weaponry. He'd get right on it, right after he was finished killing the ever-loving shit out of whoever had sicked a pyromancer on him, murdered a bunch of people in their woodland home, and instigated brutality unimaginable to synthesize magical WMDs. Priorities man, you gotta have priorities. But turning his chief melee weapon into a catalyst that would improve his arcane weaponry was now top of his list for R&D budgeting.
Done musing over the possibilities presented by the dead bandit’s skill, Ulric finished packing away the bushwhackers’ belongings and readied TMF1 and TMF2 with a lopsided grin. They did not comment on the increasing preponderance of circumstantial evidence that the unworthy being guiding them was batshit, nor did this information change their conspiracy to lead him off a cliff at the earliest convenience.
As he left the site of his humble camp, bodies left to feed the great birds that already had begun their funeral processions far above, plans and plans occupied him while he closed in on the city looming on the horizon. Grey clouds were closing in, driving low, whispy leader clouds before them in what promised to be a rather nasty rainstorm to be caught by in the open.
Damn it. Taipan and Brighteyes had both told him stories of the barbarian tribes and their caste system that involved tribal markings upon the flesh. Just his luck he'd removed his robe to sleep and they'd taken offense. Then again, there was a non-zero chance these were simply bandits prowling the outskirts of the looming city for travelers like himself, and a lone man, asleep, with a loaded wagon was just far too tempting. The relatively low density of the patterns was indicative of a lack of achievement, wealth, or standing within their tribe, probably. Just the sort that resorted to crime, when they also lacked character.
The rain caught him less than an hour into his travel. Beating waves of droplets turned the distant city into a wall of grey. Already soft ground began to sag beneath the weight of his cart, which correspondingly increased the effort required of the pulling beasts, and their lowing every few minutes made sure Ulric was aware of their dissatisfaction with their lot in life. Well, they could just join the fucking club now, couldn't they?
Mighty though the [Direhorn Oxen] were, fast they were not. The cloying mud gripping the wide wagon wheels did no favors, either. Ulric was on the point of using a [Stone Wall] spell to create thin bands of solid terrain to move across, similar to the wild sled run he'd partaken of on a breakneck return to Iriel. That time he'd run himself to exhaustion to prevent one of the Elves who'd escorted him to the glade from dying or suffering permanent crippling from a ferocious beast ambush. Absent the protection of a squad of Iriel'en warrior elite, he couldn't chance being caught in the open exhausted, trying for the gates of the city that just had to be close at hand. So it was that he did not quite reach the settlement and had to stop at dusk to make ready for one more night in the wilds.
Ulric might be slow sometimes, but he wasn't stupid. Getting set upon before waking was not an experience he cared to enjoy twice. With a dung-fueled fire burning reluctantly in the unrelenting drizzle, Ulric considered his options. First things first, a warning system. He had extra stakes for his canvas Legranel-style shelter's tension lines so he drove them in a perimeter around his camp. Scratching the not-so-scraggly beard that was starting to come in full since he'd left the Moot, Ulric found himself stumped for how to alert himself to anyone tripping the rope he was intending to run around those stakes.
Hmm…ah! Got it, Ulric told himself.
[White Interference]
Channeling his Ceraunic core he neutralized the innate polarity of the magic inside him to generate the unaspected base harmonic of magic, raw and full of possibility. Next, he attuned this mana towards the stolid node of earth magic, Terra. His will was ready, now for the way. Ulric envisioned a wind chime, a hollow, thin-walled cylinder with smooth sides and a opposite-facing holes at the top. Keeping this image strong in his mind he used his magic to coax solid stone from the ground, pushing the precision of his [Stone Wall] spell to its utmost. When the hollow rod of rock was half a meter long he broke it off, continuing to channel the spell.
Using the components of the land around him was far more efficient than trying to convert mana to solid matter, by orders of magnitude. The improvised stone chimes he broke off at varying lengths until he had twelve of the things, each as big around as his thumb. Gently he tapped one cylinder against another and they gave a distinct tone, if not one that was as loud and resonant as metal chimes. Didn't matter, he noted, they would do. The alarm chimes he hung in pairs next to one another on a tight ridge line around his perimeter stakes. Anybody that tripped the rope would set the entire ring to jangling. He tested it with a slight nudge of his hand and was satisfied at the minor cacophony that ensued.
"Problem identified. Problem solved." Ulric intoned smugly towards the naysayer oxen that chewed resentfully from the feedbags he'd slipped over their noses. They'd better enjoy it, he was completely out of the milled grains he'd bought from the Legranel.
A soft thud of additional droppings on the coastal savannah was the only retort they deigned to give him.
"Now then." He told his sputtering fire, "How do I buy some time in case somebody responds to the alarm by just diving on me?"
This was a harder problem. Ulric could see through the walls of his shelter effectively and [Ceraunoperception] was nice in that it responded well to metal, so he could, with fair precision, track weapons. Even so, that would be small comfort when an archer shot him through the walls from farther than his twenty or meters of sensitivity.
"Hmm…" Ulric thought back to the parting gift given him by the Sauri Ash mage he'd bargained with. Werona had showed him her way of "training" a small piece of [Arconite Diamond] to a specific manaform, turning it into a catalyst for that one type of magic. It was a hell of a trick. He now had a gem that would create the Tephras Adept's wicked miniature pyroclastic cloud. That would more than do as a distraction and a way to buy space. Unless you were wearing artifact armor, walking through the burning cloud was not going to be a good time. Even if the attackers had the ability to see through the ashes and cinders, which Ulric couldn't discount because spooky magical nonsense and even spookier Akashic class reality hacks, they would still have to actually go around the cloud.
"Pocket sand plus, plus." Ulric laughed at the little Tephras catalyst.
It was an old joke, from the media archives he'd consumed in his previous life. For some reason, the solution to any encounter in which one might be outmatched was to throw sand at their face. He doubted that was effective against shock troops in carbide-reinforced combat armor, hyperglass faceplates, infrared sights, and depleted uranium assault weapons but the pre-collapse had been, in some ways, a simpler time. Ruinously stupid and wasteful, but simpler.
With an early warning system in place and a deterrent to buy him space and time to put his Ceraunic core's destructive capabilities to work, Ulric felt good about hid odds and turned to his bedroll feeling pretty optimistic. All these precautions were probably a waste of time, as close to the town as he must have been. He was going to learn to stop jinxing himself like that one day.
For the second day in a row, Ulric woke to adrenaline. Rough voices speaking Human tongue. The stone chimes jangled dissonantly in predawn, as best he could judge by the dim light inside his shelter, which must have been what drew him from his sleep. By the racket, somebody was playing in the damned things.
"What ha ye done now ye great oaf?!" demanded an angry voice.
"Hain't nothing left but fer to wrap yerself in the rope an play the music is there?" another asked with heavy sarcasm.
Thick accents, vaguely similar, with what little he'd heard to the men that ambushed him, so not peoples of the cities then. And not so very pleased that their companion had stumbled into his perimeter alarm.
A snort, followed by a clearing of phlegm and a percussive delivery of that blockage to the dirt gave them both answer, before the spitter clarified his position, "And what're the two o ye agointa be chuntering about when I've beat and bunged the both of ye?"
Safe to say that his visitors weren't exactly the sophisticated types.
[Ceraunoperception]
[Warrior's Instinct]
Ulric made ready to roll thunder. Six men, lightly armed, no armor to speak of. Little to no metal on their persons aside from their belt knives, spear points, and arrowheads. He was going to give these people exactly one chance to avoid dying with ozone in their nostrils and then it was game on.
"You lot have intruded on my camp and I do not care for guests, as I have not invited any. What business do you have that you intrude on a man's sleep? I will grant you a count of five breaths to answer to my liking before I destroy you. One." Ulric announced firmly.
The sounds of light booted feet halted as did the heavily accented carping of the men. None answered.
"Two." Ulric continued, Ceraun concentrating in his body, the thin ambient mana being drawn by his core.
He exited his tent with his hand on Xef'tocht's hilt, blade bare, and a visage that spoke plainly his intent once the mercy count was ended.
"Three Four." He stated in clipped tones and saw eyes widen at the short count.
What? Never had he ever said that the breaths had to be evenly spaced or regular. It was his godsdamned camp and he would make the rules.
"Wait! Pause, friend, there's no need for that. We're not here fer bringin troubles. We're here because we been pursuing thieving murdering bastards and their tracks led this way." Exclaimed the first speaker, a young man of similar apparent age to Ulric's reforged body.
The others were of an age to the speaker, except for one who held the lined face of a man past his prime, if not by far. All wore something akin to the garb of a pre-industrial Highlander of the Scots-Angle peoples. Light-laced shirts, heavy bonnet caps, scarves, kilts, barelegs, and the tall calf-high boots were common to the men before him. All of the men wore satchels, all had strung bows across their backs, and each man carried a two-meter spear tipped by a half meter of dark grey metal. By garb and tongue, they were of similar ilk to those bushwhackers, but these were far better kept, less ragged, and armbands on their biceps combined with rings woven into their long braided hair reminded Ulric of the old Scandanavian practice of carrying fungible wealth about the body instead of coins.
In all, this group had a far different vibe to them than the last bunch. Ulric's instincts said they looked more like Human variants of the Elvish Hunters or Herd Riders, rather than marauders. He got a sense of dignity from these. Reining in the hostility, Ulric noted the tattoos, or seals as they had been called by the bushwhackers from yesterday; these were more pronounced, denser in pattern, and with branches. Almost certainly the men before him were of a different sort than those prior. Not that he was going to relax his guard, mind, just that this situation was probably going to end up a variation on the theme of kill them all.
As had become the usual since the season had been warming, Ulric was barechested, though he felt not the chill of the air at the moment. Faint violet pulses ran across the signs of Ceraun's touch, arcing randomly through the lightning-carved paths in his skin.
"Fuck's sake, what'ev ya gotta do to earn yer seals their own light?" Muttered one of the men.
The elder amongst them answered his junior kin's question with trepidation, "I've ne'er heard of it. But there's guessin we're not keen to find out, by the look o'him. Great scary bastard."
The older man who'd offered his two companions buggery as a reward for their jokes by his voice spoke up, which maybe made him the leader and the first one Ulric would kill if things turned that way.
"Shut yer gobs!" he directed to the rest of the group and they fell silent before he returned to Ulric with a more restrained tenor that implied no harm meant, "Ye've my apology fer our forwardness, Honor. We've hunted a group of raping, murdering, thieving exiles from our clan across a week's time. We found their horses dead not a day's travel back and sure as the Coven follow the Twins, they were headed this way. I'd apologize for the early hour, but sleep is something we ain't known this past two nights, not unless it came in a saddle."
Ulric couldn't pick up anything that said the man was lying. His demeanor was firm, not shifty and he met Ulric's eyes with a sort of steady confidence that said he had nothing to hide. Trust but verify. Ulric sidelined his interest in the use of the term Honor when the Valin Highlander spoke to him. Time for that in a bit, if nothing went wrong. As usual, he’d just tell them the truth and see where this went.
"Four men I met yesterday,” Ulric told the bounty hunters or, perhaps, justice-seeking tribesmen, “They claimed that they were M'rakur and took issue with the marks on my flesh and spoke their intent to murder me and take what they pleased. They lay dead about six leagues back for their misjudgment. You lot are welcome to rest here if you give me no trouble, my fire is open to those who hunt criminals. If you think to cause me problems though, you can go see the men you chased, wherever it is you folk go when you die." Ulric offered, with measured cadence.
He wasn't ready to drop his defenses but how this played out was now in these Prespanger barbarians' hands. The brain tiger was more or less alright with this going either way.
They traded glances nervously. The leader nodded his agreement calling out to his men, "Aye, that seems fair. Come then lads, our chase has come to its end, it seems. Fitch, since ye're of the mind that I'm a clumsy oaf, ye can go gather an’ hobble the mounts, being yer so light on yer feet."
A squirrely man with a scraggly beard grumped but headed off to grab the loose beasts that stood placidly saddled some forty meters distant.
Ulric had to appreciate that they'd dismounted and approached afoot, not intending to startle the occupants of the camp as they came in or just try to ride up with the advantage of cavalry. It was another solid mark in their favor. The rest of the M'rakur, if that's what they were, sidled in and took a load off. Now that Ulric wasn't examining them with an eye for combat cues, things like whether the muscles in their legs were tensing to launch themselves at him, hands clenching and re-clenching to find better grips on weapon shafts, or boots shifting to claim a better balance, he could see that these men were exhausted.
Not one lacked bags beneath eyes or the slack features of ones that had pressed hard and, now that they'd stopped, would not manage to continue without rest. Now that he'd offered hospitality he was committed to it. Best be on with it then, maybe this day would set without the Twins witnessing strife, Ulric thought, and knelt to stir the coals of his near-dead fire back to life.
"Alright then, make yourselves comfortable. I'll have a tea brewed in short order. Have any of you the stomach for camp bread and dried meat?" Ulric ventured.
"I'm athinkin I could eat." "Ye'll not find the bottom of my stomach." "Got any beer?" Came the replies.
The leader gave Ulric a warmer appraisal now that food was on the table.
"Since these louts have forgotten their manners, thank you for the hospitality. It is good to meet men who know how to practice Guest Right out in the wilds." He told Ulric with a disapproving stare at his men.
"Aye, it is appreciated." "Many thanks for your fire." "Is that a no on the beer?" chorused the travelers.
