Ulric had plenty of time left in the day so he decided that it was a good opportunity to make a committed investigation of magic. He called up his status briefly, just to confirm his current condition for reference.
Taking a deep breath, Ulric reached into himself for that core of power. He let his mind relive the fight with the Forest Lord, the emotions, the violent motion, the moment when his will had solidified into adamant desire for the death of the monster.
[Voltaic Grip]
Holding his hands out like he was holding a soccer ball between them he felt the rush of heat through his body from chest through shoulders and violet light poured out from his palms like dense glowing steam before it snapped into focused light and lightning began to surge between his finger-tips. It danced wildly, a loud buzzing filling the clearing. Blue white, flickers of flame rising from the surging arcs, it was impressive as hell. He could definitely feel his energy draining, the reserves in his body rapidly depleting as the magic flowed. Ulric felt a pulling now, a sense of strain, like gravity had increased, and the rising arcs began to flicker. A rush of dizzy-ness hit him and he staggered, hands dropping as the power ceased its flow, a tap abruptly closed.
Ulric caught himself, breathing hard. He'd nearly passed out. Gone was that oddly persistent mental high. He felt tired now, but not body tired, more like the tired you got when you'd tried to work math problems beyond your understanding.
"Status", he said aloud, briefly examining the sum total of his existence at a whim of thought. He chuckled briefly at the absurdity before considering what this experiment had revealed.
His status showed his mana at zero. Ok, that made sense, he'd deliberately pushed himself as far as he could. He'd felt the strain of it too, like dragging an enormous rock uphill. Easy at the very first but rapidly more difficult. It would seem that it was stressful to his core to run himself down that much, though he had to wonder if the practice might not result in a net gain of magical strength if he repeated the process, sort of like weight lifting required damage to muscle tissue to promote growth. He didn’t think he’d damaged his core by depleting it, but he knew it didn’t feel great to be running on empty. He was whipped.
“Worth it.” Ulric told the glade. He had found his limit, under controlled circumstances. He had also proven that he could do magic on demand, dispelling that nagging fear from his nightmare: that, when the moment came, his magic would fail him, leaving him at the mercy of his enemy.
The spell worked a little like a computer algorithm or well-practiced mathematical problem-solving. It required effort to concentrate his mana and gather it to the form of his intent but it wasn’t particularly hard to do, other than the drain of using up his mana. He felt like he could probably use this or any known spell pretty much on demand, without having to reinvent the magical wheel every time. Ulric had a feeling that the seven or eight seconds of casting that spell was a rather large expenditure of magical potential. The energy required to arc like that had to be huge.
Humming to himself Ulric thought of the applications of brief pulses of high-powered electrical currents. He was probably good for two, maybe three sustained pulses and then he’d be back to the old mundane form of dealing with threats. Maybe not just completely go to zero mana though, a little gas in the tank might come in handy in an emergency.
Not to mention that he wouldn’t care to face anything in the shape he was in right now. Ulric could feel a headache coming on and all the energy he'd had after eating was completely gone. Mana exhaustion was no joke. Nothing for it then, he decided, clearing the status from his mind, it was time for a mid-morning nap.
The suns had dipped below the sky window by the time Ulric rose from his leaf bed. He had to piss furiously and went out to do so with gusto, he also needed to donate solid mass to the forest floor which he also did, taking a quick bath with his strigil afterward. It was a cold bath, even for him, although the afternoon sun helped.
Now that the necessaries were done Ulric was hungry and thirsty. But the headache had cleared and he didn't have that feeling of brain fog. Neither did he feel the odd almost runner's high he'd been running on the previous night. A quick status revealed his mana exhaustion to be gone, he was sitting at twenty-three percent mana. Then he'd been asleep for a good couple of hours and, it would appear, his mana regeneration was higher asleep than awake. If his previous measurement had been correct, he gained around five percent an hour. That he was at over twenty now, about two hours after depleting himself and nearly all of it asleep indicated that the regen rate was doubled asleep. He was half tempted to immediately repeat the experiment to confirm his suppositions but there were other things to do, he'd killed half his day.
Ulric rekindled the smoldering smoke hut fire and his cookfire. He gathered more tubers, a process that went quickly now that he was getting better at identifying them from a distance, and cooked another slab of meat. While the meal was cooling he drank deeply from his water supply and briefly stirred the tanning pit. The wind reminded him that, a whole week into his journey, he'd been naked as a jaybird for all but a few hours of it. If there were any hidden watchers around they'd think he had some kind of fetish. But processing hides takes time damnit!
It was fine, he grinned, let them look. His ass was a thing of beauty. Sculpted and only slightly hairy beauty. Resisting a brief urge to strike a pose for the imagined voyeurs Ulric returned to the matters at hand.
The remains of the Forest lord held a bounty in sinew he'd cut from the meat during the butchering. If he soaked it, the material should return to its pliable state and he could then twist and braid it into cord. If he did it correctly, he should be able to make a bowstring that would withstand the force of a powerful draw. So long as it didn't degrade substantially, he was pretty sure he couldn't pull a bow enough to break that stuff. It had resisted incredible stresses in the muscles of that monster during its charge. Worst-case scenario he'd simply have a large supply of cordage, which was still a huge win. This half-aloud rambling accompanied one more rich meal of monster.
As the daylight bled out on the end of the first week since he'd been reforged, Ulric rendered what felt like kilometers of the long, golden strips of dry tendon into thin strips and set them in water. Tomorrow, he'd finally stretch the preserved hide for drying. He'd also be able to braid cordage. Smoke meat. Gather Vegetables. Secure wood. Something almost resembling a routine.
It was a thought that didn't displease him. For all he'd hated the routines of his old life, there was a comfort in knowing what you needed to do. And he had doings for days.
Sleep found Ulric buried in leaves on his bed, a contented smile on his face.
Ulric looked up from the last tuber he’d just finished settling into its place within his garden bed. He brushed the sweat from his brow, streaking loamy soil across his forehead. He didn’t worry about it; dirt was as much a part of life out here as air and water. More or less, as long as it wasn’t feces, he didn’t worry about having it on him anymore. It would appear that he’d made it just in time. The weather had been unbelievably mild. Cool, but mild. He’d seen so little rain that he’d wondered if his rock pool might deplete, its source in the water table running dry. His worries were unfounded, there, in the window of his green sky, the hole in the canopy which had allowed the twinned stars to bless his glade with lifegiving light were storm clouds. The wind, ever-present here on the plateau, had a damp cast to it. His senses, refined by orders of magnitude compared to the Before, could actually detect the change in pressure. He’d had that superpower before, courtesy of a ruined knee and broken bones that picked up low pressure as surely as a barometer. Just with pain, instead of a gauge. Ah well, he was pretty ready for a break, hand-tilling garden beds was some rough work. A little rain would do him some good. The first droplets scattered across him as he retreated to his shelter a few minutes later.
What do you do when you have no electricity, no books, no entertainment at all, and it has been raining a steady downpour for the last three days without pause? That is a trick question. You don’t do anything. At all. Nothing, all day, unless you want to burn excessive calories on staving off exposure. Ulric estimated that what he was being treated to now was a Twenty-degree Centigrade rain that, partnered with its companion wind, would kill a guy in a couple of hours by hypothermia. People died all the time in weather like this. The foolish, the overconfident, the ill-prepared. All synonyms, he mused. Ulric Einar was not going to play the fool, daring the weather to do what the animals had not. He went out for a few minutes, cut up firewood, harvested a few lovely bits of herbs or roots, and got his ass back under shelter. Problem was, what to do in the meantime? He had projects. Crafts. Ideas to explore. Even those had limits to keep him occupied. Ulric had woken this morning with a hankering to explore magic, given that he’d reached something of a stopping point in several projects and it was time to stop running from impossible nonsense, which was what he still subconsciously regarded magic to be.
Sitting cross-legged, Ulric stared into the fireplace, watching the wood char, flare, and generally transform before his eyes. Combustion, the chemical process of converting complex carbohydrates into water vapor and carbon dioxide, plus a few odds and ends gases, depending on the composition of the wood. It was a form of magic, was fire. Put him in the right mind state to investigate the phenomenal.
His attention fell inwards, towards that organ that drew mana into his form, holding a type of energy with which he was not versed, had not any form of education with which to understand its processes. The Watcher had plunged a metaphorical dagger into his brain to impart him some basic knowledge regarding types of mana and that was basically all he had to go on. Ulric knew what these basic types of mana “sounded” like, and how they were perceived to his core. He was, more or less, trying to figure out what magic was on the fly. He started with the thing that had come first, by instinct. Ceraun, lightning, electromagnetic discharge, whatever the hell you wanted to call it. He’d called it to slay his enemy, there at the cusp of being destroyed. It had come, drinking his core’s reserves to become an arc of surpassing violence. Lesser arcs could Ulric make, by throttling the flow of mana through the mental construct that had patterned itself on his brain, the spell. Built on core principles regarding charge separation, Ulric was pretty sure he'd done it on accident. Even so, he had control of it now. He could tell that the mana inside his core before he’d used it to do magic was different than the how it felt when it became lightning. They had different feels, a different harmony. The mana in his core felt like some kind of base note. The lightning magic was distinctly jumpier, wanted to move, to cycle, to separate and come back together. It danced. He could make a bigger arc, visible between his hands so long as he envisioned the poles of charge being concentrated on his hands and concentrated on keeping the energy contained between them. Lapses in concentration made weird shit happen like random arcs to nearby objects, and odd pops of sound that were accompanied by a metallic taste in his mouth.
Now though, he wanted to try something different. Ulric concentrated again on the flame and felt that base note of his core’s energy, holding both of them in his mind. As he stared into the flickering tongues of fire it slowly dawned on him that the burning wood held a sense of mana, new and wholly different from the lightning or his native mana. He got excited and lost the sensation.
“Focus, fucknuts. You aren’t playing around here, you need this.” Ulric scolded himself, before resuming his meditative concentration.
There. He found it again, that vibrant feeling that surrounded the fireplace. It sounded like it had before, when the Watcher had introduced him to it. Hungry, eager, transformative. Incindere, the essence of flame. Smiling to himself, Ulric, with the utmost caution, began to push at his core to gather mana into the space above the fireplace, imagining a sphere, like a balloon, that he slowly filled. Wonder of wonders, his core actually did it, moving according to his desire. Licking his lips he carefully tried to, shift, that mana, to tune it towards the harmonic of fire.
Using his natural flame as a guide, and the feeling granted by the Impossible, he succeeded, the magic suddenly took form and he observed with a distinct sensation of glee the floating ball of fire. He almost laughed, until the thing started wobbling in place. Firming his will, he kept his shit together and watched the ball begin to shrink, the mana consuming itself and burning out, slowly. When, after a few seconds, it vanished with a final flicker of cinders and smoke, he sat back on his hands and breathed out a disbelieving, “Holy magical horseshit, Batman. I’m a wizard.”
Three days of similar experimentation continued until he was comfortable creating, maintaining, and moving the fireball. He wasn’t tired, that little fireball hadn’t taken much out of him. Today, he was going to try for something a little more aggressive. Sitting beside his bed he tried again, still cautious, but ready for the hovering ball of flame to form to his command. Now that he knew what he was looking for, it came much easier. Ulric could visualize what he wanted to happen and that mental image accelerated things exponentially. Soon the fireball hovered. He pushed it around with his mind, sort of like pulling a balloon around by a string, it followed his will. Ulric Einar was a man of quiet dignity. He did not giggle like a schoolgirl looking at her birthday pony. At all. Holding onto the fire and feeding it a steady trickle from his core to maintain it he slowly walked to the door to his shelter, pulling it open while keeping the drifting little fireball in place over his fireplace. He didn’t want to consider the consequences of a fireball exploding within his shelter. Basically, everything in this joint was flammable. Maybe he should have considered that before playing with literal fire.
“No time to regret, Ulric,” he whispered, trying to remain calm in the face of the giddy joy that burbled beneath the surface.
Steady rain continued to fall, of course. He drew the little fireball out with him, guiding it with his imagination, saw it moving away from him into the rain in his mind and the little flame mirrored the mental image. Now it sat, sputtering and hissing as droplets hit it to turn into steam. Ulric knew what he had to do. Wizards cast fireball. It’s what they did. Now he just had to, figure out how to do that. Fire is the plasma of air, superheated by the excess energy of a runaway combustion reaction, a rapid oxidation of hydrocarbon bonds that exothermically release stored chemical energy, Ulric recited to himself. By itself it has little to no destructive potential outside of proximity to high-intensity heat. To be dangerous, fire requires explosive potential, the ability to create a pressure wave, a blast front. High explosives rapidly displace gaseous byproducts during the detonation and this combination of heat and pressure creates the destructive potential, he continued to chant rote knowledge, a hint of an idea coming to him.
Instead of just lobbing a ball of fire, he’d create a cavity inside it that would collapse, pulling the flame inwards, an implosion. That would superheat and compress the air in the cavity, which would generate an outwards pressure wave when energy met and reflected at the center of the fireball. That would create an explosion, carrying the fire along its wave front. Should be relatively unpleasant for anything nearby too, he mused.
Okay Ulric. Here goes nothing. Keeping the physical principles solidly in his mind, Ulric envisioned the ball shifting, emptying its core to create a hollowed sphere the size of a beach ball. The little ball swelled alongside his projected image. So far so good. Now for the touchy part. He had to concentrate to keep the ball from collapsing, or from expanding away from the air heating inside it. It was definitely becoming unstable.
With an effort, he drove hard against the fireball with his will, hurling it as hard as he could towards the stones near his rock pool, and the flame shot towards them, as if tossed by a major league pitcher from the olden days. Roiling flame hit stone and the thing flared brighter before a wave of fire, like a liquid tide crashed outwards, rolling over stones and rising into the air. A blast of heat washed over him from the explosion.
*PING*
“You’re goddamn right, it’s a Flame Crash!” Ulric laughed aloud.
Wowee. Magic. He was using fucking magic! And, this time, he knew exactly what the bizarre pinging sound in his brain was. A notification of some kind, an update to his connection with the world. Or, you know, some shit like that, he was still figuring it out. Who cares? I’m a damned Wizard! Behold!
Ulric reached out his hand and cast another [Flame Crash] this time the spell came together in a matter of a few seconds and launched outwards slightly faster than before. Like a program, once written it executed far more efficiently. Not quite without effort though, he felt the pull from his mana distinctly this time. The result was similarly powerful, stones blackened and cracked from heat as his fireball washed over them and he was pretty sure some of his hairs singed, like a good old boy starting a bonfire with a rigorous application of gasoline, jug still in hand as he guaranteed his place as last of his line, Darwin Award pending.
Lowering the arms that had covered his face at the unexpected force of the spell, Ulric conducted a mad dance in the rain hands waving as he screamed all manner of nonsense at the sky. Dark soon fell, and the exultant mage headed to bed satisfied that magic was pretty nifty.
The next morning, riding momentum from the previous day’s discovery, Ulric had finally been able to ramp up his experiments with magic. He ran several more exhaustion tests, confirming his initial guess that running his core completely empty was highly stressful on his body, although it seemed to yield a rapid improvement in his overall capacity and skill at manipulating mana. Even so, he had to rest for hours between exhausts; going all the way to empty gave him a savage headache. He spent the rest of the day, between exhaustion protocols, working on his crafts, weaving baskets, working out a somewhat experimental method for creating bone and glue and wood laminate for a composite bowstave, and other inventions of more or less use in the life of a woodland subsistence native.
Monsoon season continued with its beating downpours, interspersed with a merely miserable drizzle or a cold mist driven along the winds. Now that he had a better feel for changing forms of mana between fire and lighning, Incendere and Ceraun, he decided to dive into all the basic forms shown him so long ago by the Impossible. It was as well this testing was conducted outside, where he had better exposure to the elements, literally, in the case of this strange, fae world. The rain made it almost trivial for him to feel his core and match its energies towards the flowing, resilience of Aquae, water. Ulric immediately set to work gathering precipitation into a dense orb of water, noting that it was almost trivially easy to manipulate this “free mana” compared to generating the energy himself as he’d done with the fire spell and his lightning magic. He also knew exactly how he wanted to use it. He lacked precision tooling but a high pressure stream of water could carve tool steel with ease. Compared to a big ass explosion, how hard could a little water jet be?
His lip was a chewed up mess by the time, twenty seven hours later, he finally breathed a sigh of relief, looking at the gouged line, as if someone had used a straightedge and a quickie saw, to cut cleanly through stone. He had not reckoned with exactly how much pressure was required to make water behave in this manner. He’d had to sit over a meat stew and pounded tuber flour cakes roasted as a kind of flatbread until it hit him that he needed to take advantage of water’s incompressibility.
Rather than mentally trying to “crush” the spellform down, it was more efficient to just “push” the water through a narrow aperture. Reforming the matrix of his spell, Ulric wove a kind of reservoir, filled with falling rain, and directing with all the oomph he could muster through a very small opening in the architecture of his Aquae spellform. The result was a beam of water that pulverized anything in its path, cutting stone like a hot knife through butter. Even better, if he dialed down the aperture, he could control the size and pressure of the water cutting spell. It was an entire day to master that kind of control, though he regretted it not with Ulric held a [Steelwood] gear, cut to machine tolerances, viewing the immaculately pristine edges with the joy only an engineer with a precision machining schematic could possess.
Ulric’s initial results had proven promising. Now he was well and truly begun with experimentation with different elemental forms of magic, leaning heavily on the gifted knowledge of the Watcher, alongside his growing store of personal applied knowledge. While it took nearly three days of continuous experimentation to get his fire spell to work, it only took two days to get his water spell functional, there were, perhaps unsurprisingly enough, parallels to between the method to control a flow of electrons and a flow of water, though generating high enough pressures was a bit of a trick. After that, it took a mere six hours to figure out the earth spell. Terra’s mana impression was so low key it was hard to recognize, even with the Watcher’s hint. Once he finally had it down though, actually manipulating it was little trouble.
Instilling the mana of Terra from Ulric’s core into the stones allowed him to shift them, pulling them around with his will into a simple shape. Visualization was the key here, rock didn’t like to do anything that wasn’t explicitly well-defined. It was a bit more akin to the function-based programming of manaforms: explicit input in, function does function things, explicit output and if you didn’t like the results, it was your own damned fault.
Air magic, Caelum was even easier, he was surrounded by the stuff and that was why he’d never noticed the almost ephemeral note of that particular manaform before now. You naturally tend to tune out constant background noises and air was sort of everywhere, all the time. He’d just been ignoring it this whole time. That isn’t to say that just because it was all around that he could use it to actually do stuff. Nobody was around to see him embarrassed at himself so it was fine. Ulric's air spell took a whole day but only because he wouldn't stop until he'd figured out how to make it fly as fast as it did. Turns out that a magical air flow around the blade that created a low-pressure zone in front and a high-pressure zone in the back helped to actually accelerate it while it flew. To the point it shattered itself under the strain about fifty meters away. If a moron falls to the ground in frustration in a forest primeval, does he make a sound? A mystery says I.
Magic was weird. It was definitely based on an understanding of the natural order of the world. Knowing how the flow of electrons manifested in currents and magnetic fields was almost definitely helping him amplify the strength of the Voltaic grip spell beyond what he should be able to do, given his lack of training. The knowledge translated into vastly improved control of mana, by knowing what he wanted, specifically, he could move the mana precisely to enact his will.
The ice spell he figured out after half day of trial and error. It was difficult to get the balance of cold and water. He needed it cold enough to do what it did, but without enormous mana control to reinforce its structure the crystal would shatter. He'd not forgotten the glassresin lesson on brittle blades. Soon though, he was able to create a sword of compressed ice along his arm. He’d decided that he needed a way to have an improvised melee weapon and what better option than a razor sharp blade of ice that not only cut, but froze whatever it came into contact with? Even short durations of interaction with that meter long sliver of living ice could put out a campfire, its heat pulled away to leave it a smoking patch of cooled char. Ulric could imagine that the wounds it created would be exacerbated by frostbitten regions around the places touched. It would also leave metal brittle, perhaps making this spell useful for contesting enemy weapons, which was a potent defensive capability lacking in his other spells.
Ulric swung a frigid blade into a sapling and was rewarded with a clean bisection, the crystalline [Iceblade] cleaving easily through soft wood, edges of the cut were encrusted with dense frost and the tree stood as if it remained in one piece, a state that persisted several minutes, until the wind pushed the top half over, frozen wound breaking open with a loud crackle. The cold of his spell was trapped in the matrix of his spell and affected his own flesh not at all, beside an uncomfortable chill against his skin, like holding a snowball too long. The inversion of the weave kept the freezing energies contained by the blade’s structure though, a nifty trick, if Ulric didn’t say so himself. He did though. He’d have told the chipmunks about his glory and genius if any had made themselves available. Unfortunately small mammals were still not to be found, though the wolves and deer were becoming more abundant.
There, under the fall of steady rain, with droplets feezing solid to his Infrig blade, forming icicles as he relished this last success, mastery of all the basic elemental mana forms, he jumped when a sudden sound pulsed in his head.
*PING*
****CLASS LINKING….AKASHIC CONNECTION COMPLETE****
Ulric’s brain shortcircuited for a few seconds while this information washed through him. It was…vague? Yeah, pretty vague. He’d been going through the process, trying to familiarize himself with the rules of this strange world’s magic. It made sense to explore the basics before he tried to do anything crazy with any particular manaform, to have a deeper understanding of the interplay between magic and reality. That inclination, followed by his determined investigation and disciplined study in application of magic to the elements had unlocked some kind of…repository of knowledge, was the only way Ulric had to describe it. Compared to the vagueness of the Akashic information, Ulric felt a rush of knowledge that he had no damned business having. All at once, he felt a kind of familiarity, a comfort, with mana’s forms that he hadn’t had just a few minutes ago. Granted, he’d probably have come to a similar level of command within a few months of practice, but he’d seemingly fast forwarded past some of that bumbling awkward phase. Intuitively, he knew more now about the strengths and limitations of each manaform than he had before and, in exceedingly spooky fashion, it seemed like he remembered more of his studies from the before with regards to these elements. Combustion rates, heat flow equations, detonation pressures, things even tangentially related to fire were clearer in his mind than before. Likewise for the other elements. Ulric was now a walking library for mineral classifications and geology. He could look at a rock and tell you what metamorphic properties it had, what its shear pattern would be, and whether it was reactive towards acids or inert. Subtle chemical composition knowledge that required, sans the gifted class knowledge, extensive testing. This Akashic magical link was interacting with his past life’s memories, building bridges in his brain, tying together neurons to create an elemental reference database. Watcher’s tits. This was more than magic, this was some reality altering divine level fuckery.
Equal parts enthralled by the burgeoning awareness of elemental magic’s interplay with the world and a budding horror that his brain was being played with by forces outside his understanding, Ulric responded the only way he knew how: he went to bed early and slept for twelve hours. When he woke, he put the concerns about gods level nonsense behind him. Firstly, there was nothing he could do about it. Secondly, he had an ace in the hole now regarding magic. Suddenly, the fumbling around he’d been doing to generate his elemental spells sharpened. Already, he was certain he could rework those spellforms, could tighten up the architecture to make them more efficient, more potent. Secondly, the class imparted a skill that allowed him to actively parse out the types of mana around him using his core. He didn’t know how that was going to be useful but the former scientist had faith that it would prove a boon. Think of it like having a mana based mass spectrometer, Ulric told himself. Knowing the composition of the world is all kinds of relevant. You just need to figure out how to take advantage of it.
Now that he had the fundamentals of sorcery sort of nailed down, Ulric spent the upcoming days working out his core’s meta magic abilities. Rapidly, it became clear that the Watcher’s reforging had been next level. [Core Capacitor] was undoubtedly the reason he'd killed the Forest Lord. It allowed him to turbocharge his Voltaic Grip. He'd held a branch in his hands and tested the combination. The branch immediately burned in a Lichtenberg, the electricity forcing its way through the material. It then burst into flame briefly before exploding into shards. A few splinters was a small price to pay to learn not to try it on glassresin or anything he didn't want dead. The caveat to [Core Capacitor] was that it was truly all or nothing. It wouldn't activate unless his core was saturated. He'd sat looking at his status for an hour waiting for the notification. He'd been at 100% mana the entire time and hadn't been able to initiate the discharge. Saturation status ticked and in the same moment vanished as all the mana in his core pulsed, that incredible flow of heat and power every bit as much of a rush as the first time. [Water Jet] bored a hole a meter deep through solid rock in half a second. A later test obliterated a chunk of Forest Lord bone glassresin'd to a boulder face. Ulric could have killed the [Forest Lord] with that spell, if he'd hit the skull directly. Magic was awesome.
Continuous mana-channeling experiments had led to Ulric's discovery that he could stream mana from his core while condensing it with his will, all the while channeling a spell. It felt like holding your breath and tightening all your muscles at the same time but inside your nerves. The supercharged flame crash had vaporized a sizable pool of rain water and nearly inflicted third degree steam burns on both his hands. Being slow on the uptake he'd immediately tried using the overcharge on his voltaic grip. Still recovering from the previous attempt, his concentration slipped and the charge rebounded. It felt like a sledgehammer to the heart.
Ulric immediately vomited and passed out and woke up a quarter hour later in a pool of his own fluids. His status had not indicated that the overcharge had a backlash. In yet another interesting fact, he hadn’t known it would and, therefore, the Akashic record hadn’t reflected it. After his accident, it had added the line about backlash. Another lesson learned. This world was full of lessons. Ulric was determined to be an excellent student.
See? He’d already learned not to try a Core Capacitor discharge alongside an Overcharge as the resulting backlash would scatter him across the clearing. Such a smart lad, he was.
While he nursed his bruised feeling core, he sat in the shelter. It was still raining, because why wouldn’t it be? Over a week without pause, and he had to at least consider the possibility of relocating to the tree tops to escape being drowned. Surely not, the Plateau would shed the water off its sides. Shaking off the oddly negative thought he resumed his magery. With a slight effort of will, Ulric experimented by concentrating on the fireplace, activating the [Core Pulse]. The pulse of mana from his own core, still indeed tender, into the fire, had produced an interaction not unlike striking a tuning fork. He’d detected a signal from that fire that he could interpret to be the mana signature of fire. Which didn’t seem important, at first, until Ulric had put that mana signature into his thoughts while channeling a [Flame Crash] and nearly doubled the efficiency of that spell, amplifying its power substantially.
Further experimentation confirmed his suspicions and revealed a heavy synergy between Ulric’s own knowledge of the physical nature of fire and the metaphysical truth of fire mana. It was as if there were two completely divergent aspects to magic, what was and what could be. Ulric didn’t have any better way to think about it but the results spoke for themselves. Most of his spells had benefited from a [Core Pulsed] image of the magical signature from each element. He’d also gotten substantially more efficient at casting thanks to the [Elemental Refinement] skill, which meant he could practice more than previously, wasting less of his own mana and mental effort.
These experiments, alongside his other projects, had consumed the waking hours of Ulric's life. Time fell away, losing most of its meaning. Daylight, Dark, and the needs of the moment or the moment's inbred cousin tomorrow, were all that existed. Ulric's old friend anxiety was gone. This world was one of action and reaction. You did or did not. Worrying was calories spent not figuring out how to mold mana into a hammer of light with which to crush a viper that could melt concrete with its breath. Or make hollow arrowheads out of a Giga-bear's tooth to deliver a neurotoxic plant juice so potent grinding it required a two-meter long stick to avoid getting a paralyzing dose while you did so. Ahh well. The devils in the details, he told himself. Days rattled onwards, the man lost track of them.
************_________Two Vardan Months Later ____________________*************
*PING*
Ulric's head rose at the unexpected sound. His grip on the bowstring relaxed and the powerful stave flexed back to its original two-meter length.
The deer-like animal he'd been about to impale with an arrow noticed the motion and leapt from its head-down posture, an incredible burst of strength carrying it eight meters in a single bound, which then lengthened into a flash of speed, carrying it away through the trees, bleeting its warning call to the rest of the herd. Eleven more of the creatures similarly bolted, flashing green and yellow pelts vanishing in mere moments.
He was annoyed but it mattered little. They would return soon enough and he had plenty of stores to last until his next kill. He'd slipped to within a scant five or six meters of this one, close enough to have impaled it with his spear had he wanted to try.
It was the first time he'd managed to close the distance without so much as a warning snort from the herd. Which was, he smirked, what feat that had triggered the Akashic notification that broke his concentration and cost him the hunt.
It now took a mere thought to summon his status and he did so presently
[Status]
Ulric had grown in the time lost weeks since his arrival. He'd gained two ranks in the title associated with mastery of this forest ecosystem, the most recent one just now.
It was a noticeable difference from when he'd first arrived, with significant boosts to his stats and reflected his relative comfort with life in the wild clearing in which he’d cultivated a home.
In his prior life, Ulric had spent considerable time in the wilderness in his younger days, hiking, camping, fishing, hunting, etc. He had oft imagined lost himself in fantasy, as if he were in the place of the pioneers of the pre-collapse, before ruinous consumption had wrought its heinous work on the world, instead of roaming the crippled scrub that passed for his world’s wilds. But never had he had to live in it. There had proven to be an incredible gap between theory and experience, especially without technology to make up the difference. The basic skills he had were lacking, practiced but never mastered. The instinctive understanding for the flow of nature and the movements of its creatures had never been developed well enough to compete with those creatures for the bounty of the land. Things had changed.
Weeks of living and surviving in this forest had shown him which things he'd been doing that were wrong. The wildlife, which had flocked to the land with the absence of the monster that had depleted it of life, had been able instructors in his deficiencies. Failure after failure, like a whetstone across his mind, had brought those skills up to a fine polish.
He returned to his camp, now fortified with a circumference of low interwoven branch walls called hurdles. Sharpened stakes driven at forty-five degrees jutted from the hurdles to discourage passers-through.
Ulric’s eyes grew distant as he saw the barrier.
**evening, some time ago**
The beam of magically focused water he’d been using to carve a gear in the bizarrely hardwood he called [Steelwood] fell away to mist and disappeared, along with his concentration. Something had ticked in his brain, had disrupted his concentration. Irritated he stood up and stretched, body slightly stiff from an extended crouch. He’d had aspirations to a hand drill but that meant making gears. Carving the wood to produce them would take ages so he was trying to cheat and practice magic at the same time. After a few failed tries he had gotten the hang of limiting his magic output to a low, steady, supply that turned the surprisingly destructive [Water Jet] into a precise cutting tool.
It was slow, exacting work. A single maladjustment would turn the cutting stream to ruin the piece, as a half dozen failures could attest. Eventually, he’d settled on a round blank with a slightly smaller diameter inner blank to serve as a template, both of these scribed onto the [Steelwood] plank, then he’d use magic for cutting the teeth. The half-finished gear at his feet was coming along nicely, the product of a half hour’s care and a third of his mana.
A glance around camp revealed nothing untoward. He shrugged to himself. Sometimes he got a little jumpy for no reason, being alone in the wild did that to a man. Wolves were moving into the forest floor, along with many other creatures. Knee-high monitor lizards with a chameleon camouflage and razor-bladed tongue, a variety of deer-like monsters, rabbitish creatures, some type of weasel, and a host of others.
The glade was starting to come alive with life. It gladdened Ulric’s heart, the Gigabear had been what made the divine forest around him into a green desert. Its absence was starting to be noticed and, as a wise man had once said, life was finding a way.
He shuddered when he recalled the savage wilderness he had witnessed far above in the canopy. He had made that climb yesterday as a physical challenge and to scout but had been wildly unprepared for the panoply of wyrd monsters. He wasn’t ready to challenge that place, but he was growing almost comfortable in his glade and the surrounding wood.
He bent down, ready to resume his work. A series of howls, not so distant, sent ice up his spine and he jerked upright again. Eyes scanning towards the sound he became aware of another sound, like low thunder. The piece of wood at his feet was vibrating.
“Oh shit, Oh fuck, Oh Sweet Watcher’s Tits may they hang in glory, not this.” He prayed aloud.
It came. Faster than all reason. A rush of green and yellow bodies, antlered like pronghorns and similar in shape, if a bit larger, poured over the nearest hill and down into the glade. They were insanely fast. He had only a minute, no more. Ulric scrambled to get to his spear, no time for anything else, his half-completed bow, tied and clamped while glues dried, would have been useless against this horde anyway.
Cursing himself for a half-wit he started concentrating on his mana, pulling towards the strength of the stone beneath himself, mana wavered and then snapped to Terra and he dragged the rock upwards to form a barrier. He was struggling desperately not to lose the spell as the rush of green monster antelope bore down on him. Knee-high came the semicircular wall, thunderous sound roaring now in his ears from the approaching hoofbeats. Thigh high and he knew he wasn’t going to make it, he was too slow, the rock was rising too fucking slow. Waist high and they were upon him.
Thirty bodies moving fast as a car hurtled into his camp, heads lowered, driven by panic. Ulric got his spear up as they came on. Maybe the wall saved him. Maybe the threat of the spear did. Certainly, the [Forest Lord] hide he’d made into a jerkin played a critical part, even if only for its smell, the odor being that of death itself to the creatures who got whiff. The tide parted around him so fast he could barely follow, he heard destruction as they trampled his camp. Barely a second into the stampede and, as he was glancing to the side at the devastation, one of the fuckers jumped the wall.
Ulric had just enough time to curse before a glancing impact threw him viciously to the ground. Searing pain lanced along his side. He heard a loud series of cracks and was present enough to be afraid his ribs had been broken, a death sentence. He had no idea where his spear had gone. Thundering beats of hooves pounded down around him for a mere moment and then were passed, retreating to fade rapidly into the distance. Mixed into those bodies Ulric had seen some type of black wolf-like beasts, snapping at the heels of the antelope creatures, driving them.
It was over, as suddenly as it had begun.
Ulric lay curled up around his side, his hand over warm, wet heat. Moaning softly as he rolled over onto his back he brought his hand up to confirm the blood running down his arm from his painted hand. Terrified but determined to know he looked down at his body to see his jerkin was slashed from a place horrifyingly close to his liver to under his right nipple and on around to beneath his armpit. Shaking hands pulled up the hide clothing to reveal already bruising flesh and a weeping red hooking wound, a thin line scored through the [Forest Lord] leather to print itself in blood on his side. Glancing, a shallow flesh wound, not fatal.
Panting from fear, relief, adrenaline, and nearly in tears Ulric simply lay there breathing and grateful to be alive. Nothing stopped to eat him, the smell of ancient terror sufficient to deter anything from inspecting the wreckage of what had been his camp. It was shattered. One small mercy, over next to the scattered contents of his root bin lay the corpse of one of the green and yellow bastards, obviously dead, its leg kicking in twitches.
Turning his head to the side he saw his half-finished gear lying just outside the impromptu spellwoven wall of rock. It was bent, chipped, and broken by beating hooves.
“YOU HAVE GOT TO BE JOKING!!” Ulric screamed into the evening air of the glade. The forest answered him with silence.
**back in the present**
Ulric came back to himself from reliving the ruin of his old camp. Lessons learned, he thought, looking at the spiked wooden barrier.
It had been a bare two weeks after the death of the Forest Lord. His shelter had been smashed, his bed turned into splinters. He'd been nearly killed when one of the things had tried to gore him on its way through, ripping a wound across his ribs that had only fully healed a few weeks ago, a wound only kept from killing him by the durability of the hide he’d worn. Both the smokers were ruined and had to be rebuilt, likewise his root bin. The only saving grace there was that the animal that had stepped through his root bin had broken both its front legs and smashed its head into the ground hard enough to snap its own neck.
He'd moved his camp back to the torn roots then, to protect his water supply. The animals would have their own known water sources, springs abounded in the rocky highland terrain and a rainy season a month-long had shown him where the watersheds ran. Trailing animals and birds, predators and prey alike, he'd learned a great deal about how this forest hid its secrets.
The answer, as he had suspected early but dared not confirm, lay in the canopy. It was dense. An ecosystem all unto its own. The trees started to limb out about two-thirds of their height from the ground, the lower branches as massive as the largest redwoods of his world. From these arboreal highways sprang a verdant world completely unlike the shaded ground. Interconnected branches ran between trees, oak-sized paths from one level of the canopy to the next. He'd climbed up once his wounds had healed sufficiently to avoid opening them or greatly aggravating the sprained rib muscles. It hadn't been especially difficult, with the large crevices in the bark of those giants and the rough texture providing hand and foot holds aplenty. Once up in the canopy, he'd been able to observe the myriad species of plants and animals that made the true forest home.
There were giant birds, with beaks similar to toucans. They didn't eat fruit though they ate what looked like a badger sized squirrel with webbed arms that glided from tree to tree. The squirrel badgers ate a giant bean that grew from a massive wrapping vine. The bean proved to be excellent once boiled, fruity and packed with oils. There were several species of snake, ranging from the constrictor type to a venom spitter whose streams left smoking bark where they touched. He'd seen a hawk-like bird the size of a German shepherd get hit by that venom and break up in mid-flight like styrofoam in gasoline, just liquifying. It didn't take Ulric long to figure out that he was ill prepared to face the environment on high and he returned to the relatively barren, but vastly safer, forest floor, and his own rich glade.
His Giga-bear meat proved life-saving. It was rich with fats, marbled to perfection. Even smoked and dry it was packed with nutrition. He had enough to weather the first months of his stay, long enough to learn. The Autumn season progressed steadily, air turning cooler. Those cold rains had forced him to completely rethink his shelter. He'd dug into the roots, using fire to weaken and char and an axe with a head made of split bear pelvis bone to chop. Work proceeded quickly. Why it took three weeks for him to figure out that, if the hardest thing he had on hand was bear bones, then he should be shaping bear bone tools using bear bone hammers/chisels, Ulric had no idea, other than he was a moron. Teeth made awls, sail needles, and even some fish hooks, although he hadn't seen any bodies of water that would support fish. Claws he made into a set of spiked leather caestus. Coupled with the Forest Lord's hide clothes he probably appeared to be a junior Forest Lord to much of the animal life. The predators avoided him at all cost, so far. He'd seen a pack of wolf like creatures chasing a gigantic stag with fractal leaf shaped horns, like recurving ferns, skid to a halt at the sight of him and run howling away. Made hunting things harder, but he'd accept that over having to fight off more predators for territory. That all the predators would fear him was a failure of imagination on his part, as he learned soon after.
Days passed quickly. Ulric was kept busy by his assorted tasks. The first few of these was spent in preservation and camp tasks, with some foraging around the immediate viscinity of the glade. Various plants proved edible and Ulric had finally achieved some semblance of a normal diet. Other herbs and roots proved to be either noxious to the point of inedibility or highly toxic and only the rigor of his testing methodology saved him from a rather uncomfortable death in the wilds. It was with great relief that Ulric discovered analogues to Earthly spices, most especially the presence of a grassy plant that tasted of cilantro, a broad-leafed flowering plant whose fleshy seed pods carried a distinct flavor that was tangy like garlic, and long green stalked herb that he found to be nearly identical in form and flavor to onion. There was another, a deathly spicy herbaceous plant that he still wasn’t convinced wasn’t toxic, so potent was its fiery burn.
Small animals were returning to the glade, their signs becoming evident on the local plant life. Once, as Ulric picked some of his favorite tubers, the pale starchy things being remarkably close to potatoes when boiled, he was attacked by a small horned rabbit with enlarged hind claws. It had shot from cover at incredible speed. Ulric had had his knife out already and the [Forest Lord] bone, sharpened to razor edge, parted the thing’s head and left shoulder cleanly down its body, so aggressively had it thrown itself at him, horn lowered to spike his chest. The hide, of course, was ruined. It’s horn was inferior to his current tool and, at least on this specimen, too small to spark a use to Ulric’s mind. It roasted up just fine though. Other things were showing themselves on his foraging trips, though he only ran into them once he began to practice proper stalking technique and learned attentiveness to the wind direction. His hide clothes smelled of the old super predator and everything ran immediately when they caught whiff of him.
So it was that Ulric found himself losing his caution. Varda, of course, obliged him with a lesson.
Ulric was stalking a [Bladefern Elk]. He’d sighted it in the predawn light, as it had crested a small rise on the southern end of the glade. Keeping the strong Westerly wind in his face, Ulric angled around where he’d seen the thing alternately grazing and browsing. He still had plenty of Gigabear meat but he didn’t want to pass up any opportunities to expand his larder. Never can tell when hard times might come a calling.
As he crested a small rise, in a crouch so low he’d have never managed it in the Before, he saw that the magnificent beast was turned away from him, its flexible lips pulling away at the lowest succulent leaves of a sapling of one of the trees he called [Steelwood] for its incredibly hard, dense, material. Slowly, to avoid alerting the dark brown and mottled silver-grey buck, at least thirteen hands high at the shoulder, Ulric took up a throwing spear in his right hand, it’s glassresin blade immaculately sharp. These half-length spears had proven ideal to take game at medium to short ranges, powered by his strong shoulders. He could hit his target seven in ten throws, good enough to be worth the effort. He couldn’t wait until his bow was finished, the work-in-progress laminated recurve stave sat only half finished in his camp.
Slowly, ever so slowly, his arm drew back.
A deep, throaty growl, distantly to his left, sent the [Bladefern Elk]’s head up and it swiftly darted ahead, a tremendous four-meter leap carrying it into its incredible flight. At the same time, Ulric’s turning head caught the source of the sound. Some kind of wolf, broad shoulders, shaggy fur, a head too large compared to most wolves he’d seen in documentary, the things were nearly extinct in his old world. This one was alive and well. It was big, its shoulderblades cresting Ulric’s chest and it looked to have at least fifty kilos on top of his own solid eighty.
Baleful yellow-green eyes stared into his, feral. Its growl deepened, and it snarled, sharp pointed teeth flashing. It would attack, Ulric was sure. The beast wanted his territory, his life, he could feel it. Ulric’s hackles rose, and he felt a deep anger as his hand tightened on the throwing spear. Want wasn’t going to mean shit, Ulric decided. This critter had cost him a fresh meat dinner and nominated itself as nexties.
Ulric let fly, just as the large animal gathered itself and the spear buried halfway along its haft in the matted fur, just behind its front left shoulder. A roar of pain preceded its retaliatory charge, fangs bared. A scant fourteen meters separated the two and, claws digging deeply into the soft litter below, the animal was almost upon him.
Ulric had not been idle, had not wasted the dark evenings spent in his shelter. He drew on his core, forcing the latent energy to his command, his mind already forging it under his will to the shape he had practiced nightly for the last three days, a beam of concentrated water propelled at a pressure sufficient to carve even [Forest Lord] bone. As the beast’s body left the earth, propelled like a living missile toward him, Ulric’s hands pushed forwards, cupped together as if giving CPR, and a beam of water intercepted the [Fellwolf].
High-pressure water could cut metal. This spell, powered by Ulric’s core, pierced the beast’s head and exited the back side, blowing red and grey matter out behind it. Momentum carried the corpse past Ulric, to crash into the dirt and roll to a stop.
The breath he’d been holding he released in a slow hiss, his tightened body relaxing. His heart jackhammered inside his chest at the close call. He raised his estimation of the power of magic. His best throw had proven insufficient to land a killing blow, even with good placement. This working of Aquae though? Complete destruction of the creature’s head. Ulric’s mouth dropped open as his eyes took in the large trunk, well large unless you compared it to one of the Elder trees in the surrounding forest, of a tree behind where the wolf had been when he’d struck it. There was a large rough tear in the wood. Ulric walked slowly and put his finger into the bore, it went in, all the way to the second knuckle. All that from a mere half-second’s flow of power. His power. He had willed this destruction and, lo and behold, commanded the elements to smite his enemy.
He had to admit, magic was pretty fucking amazing.
Ulric’s budding smile died a swift death when he examined the [Fellwolf] corpse. A mouthful of jagged, ripping teeth, head as big as Ulric’s torso. Oversized claws that looked like a badger’s. The spear had torn a clean hole in the furry hid and penetrated deep into its innards. One lung had been torn and Ulric thought it probably had destroyed what looked like a liver. And that had slowed it barely at all. It sure as hell hadn’t stopped the thing from leaping at him hard enough to knock his ass to the ground where those teeth could get at his head. And it had gotten to within an easy stone’s throw to him without his having any clue. If it hadn’t growled he might never have known it was there. Fuck.
Arrogance. Pure and simple. He’d thought himself the only predator of note now that the old monster was gone. How wrong he was. That was the kind of mistake you make once, Ulric resolved to himself. A second time and it was likely Varda would see the end of Ulric Einar’s adventure. Ulric resolved himself with the mantra that had come to dominate his days: Get better, get stronger, learn more. A mantra of success that the man chanted to himself.
Ulric had discovered that his glade, this pocket of verdancy buried beneath that staggering canopy, runneth over with bounty. He'd found a cat-tail like tall water reed whose stalks were every bit good as celery, with crisp and nutritious. Others, a woody stem with thin needlelike leaves, had strong flavor reminiscent of thyme. Still another, with thin stalks and short fernlike leaves taste almost identical to parsley. Anything that could be harvested and planted near his shelter was, cultivated in small beds dug with a carved shovel. That backbreaking work took him three days, only viable because of his vigor.
For every botanical gift, however, was a reciprocal curse. Most were simply too bitter or acidic to eat. Some were marginal but too much of which would induce diarrhea, or, as one that had elicited little to no immediate response but taught him to wait far longer before ingesting larger quantities, induced a nausea and diarrhea, unlike anything he'd ever experienced. He avoided that one furthermore. Three he strongly suspected induced cardiac symptoms, although he'd not ever eaten enough to confirm it. Two he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, contained a potent paralytic. He'd been unable to walk following those tests and had struggled to breathe deeply the rest of the day. It was mildly terrifying, testing these things. But it was the only way he could secure enough food to last through what was sure to be a soon-to-arrive winter season.
What Ulric had not experienced, outside of a few initial bouts of neurosis and near meltdowns there at the beginning, was loneliness. Ulric had never been a great people person. Not that he was some kind of nonfunctionally introverted psycho who hated everyone. He was calm, easygoing, witty, and demonstrated a rare interest in listening to the people to which he talked, instead of just waiting for his turn to talk. To the point that he sometimes felt that they were unnerved by the fact that he was intently listening to them, and felt self-conscious about it.
It wasn't that he was bad at being around people. He just didn't enjoy being around people. Ulric had what might be the smallest social battery of any functional adult he'd ever met. It had always been like that, even with family. He'd be good for around half an hour and then he wanted to be alone for a few hours. Eight continuous hours of social exposure was like Kryptonite, he felt drained and exhausted. Out here, isolated for what had to be more than two months according to his old reckoning of things, he'd never felt the lack of human contact. If someone showed up he'd probably be excited at the change but, without a doubt, if they hung around for long he'd find a reason to slip off into the wood for a few hours. Not for the first time, Ulric considered the high likelihood that he was somewhere on the spectrum. Eh. The trees weren't complaining.
Ulric had plenty of time left in the day so he decided that it was a good opportunity to make a committed investigation of magic. He called up his status briefly, just to confirm his current condition for reference.
Taking a deep breath, Ulric reached into himself for that core of power. He let his mind relive the fight with the Forest Lord, the emotions, the violent motion, the moment when his will had solidified into adamant desire for the death of the monster.
[Voltaic Grip]
Holding his hands out like he was holding a soccer ball between them he felt the rush of heat through his body from chest through shoulders and violet light poured out from his palms like dense glowing steam before it snapped into focused light and lightning began to surge between his finger-tips. It danced wildly, a loud buzzing filling the clearing. Blue white, flickers of flame rising from the surging arcs, it was impressive as hell. He could definitely feel his energy draining, the reserves in his body rapidly depleting as the magic flowed. Ulric felt a pulling now, a sense of strain, like gravity had increased, and the rising arcs began to flicker. A rush of dizzy-ness hit him and he staggered, hands dropping as the power ceased its flow, a tap abruptly closed.
Ulric caught himself, breathing hard. He'd nearly passed out. Gone was that oddly persistent mental high. He felt tired now, but not body tired, more like the tired you got when you'd tried to work math problems beyond your understanding.
"Status", he said aloud, briefly examining the sum total of his existence at a whim of thought. He chuckled briefly at the absurdity before considering what this experiment had revealed.
His status showed his mana at zero. Ok, that made sense, he'd deliberately pushed himself as far as he could. He'd felt the strain of it too, like dragging an enormous rock uphill. Easy at the very first but rapidly more difficult. It would seem that it was stressful to his core to run himself down that much, though he had to wonder if the practice might not result in a net gain of magical strength if he repeated the process, sort of like weight lifting required damage to muscle tissue to promote growth. He didn’t think he’d damaged his core by depleting it, but he knew it didn’t feel great to be running on empty. He was whipped.
“Worth it.” Ulric told the glade. He had found his limit, under controlled circumstances. He had also proven that he could do magic on demand, dispelling that nagging fear from his nightmare: that, when the moment came, his magic would fail him, leaving him at the mercy of his enemy.
The spell worked a little like a computer algorithm or well-practiced mathematical problem-solving. It required effort to concentrate his mana and gather it to the form of his intent but it wasn’t particularly hard to do, other than the drain of using up his mana. He felt like he could probably use this or any known spell pretty much on demand, without having to reinvent the magical wheel every time. Ulric had a feeling that the seven or eight seconds of casting that spell was a rather large expenditure of magical potential. The energy required to arc like that had to be huge.
Humming to himself Ulric thought of the applications of brief pulses of high-powered electrical currents. He was probably good for two, maybe three sustained pulses and then he’d be back to the old mundane form of dealing with threats. Maybe not just completely go to zero mana though, a little gas in the tank might come in handy in an emergency.
Not to mention that he wouldn’t care to face anything in the shape he was in right now. Ulric could feel a headache coming on and all the energy he'd had after eating was completely gone. Mana exhaustion was no joke. Nothing for it then, he decided, clearing the status from his mind, it was time for a mid-morning nap.
The suns had dipped below the sky window by the time Ulric rose from his leaf bed. He had to piss furiously and went out to do so with gusto, he also needed to donate solid mass to the forest floor which he also did, taking a quick bath with his strigil afterward. It was a cold bath, even for him, although the afternoon sun helped.
Now that the necessaries were done Ulric was hungry and thirsty. But the headache had cleared and he didn't have that feeling of brain fog. Neither did he feel the odd almost runner's high he'd been running on the previous night. A quick status revealed his mana exhaustion to be gone, he was sitting at twenty-three percent mana. Then he'd been asleep for a good couple of hours and, it would appear, his mana regeneration was higher asleep than awake. If his previous measurement had been correct, he gained around five percent an hour. That he was at over twenty now, about two hours after depleting himself and nearly all of it asleep indicated that the regen rate was doubled asleep. He was half tempted to immediately repeat the experiment to confirm his suppositions but there were other things to do, he'd killed half his day.
Ulric rekindled the smoldering smoke hut fire and his cookfire. He gathered more tubers, a process that went quickly now that he was getting better at identifying them from a distance, and cooked another slab of meat. While the meal was cooling he drank deeply from his water supply and briefly stirred the tanning pit. The wind reminded him that, a whole week into his journey, he'd been naked as a jaybird for all but a few hours of it. If there were any hidden watchers around they'd think he had some kind of fetish. But processing hides takes time damnit!
It was fine, he grinned, let them look. His ass was a thing of beauty. Sculpted and only slightly hairy beauty. Resisting a brief urge to strike a pose for the imagined voyeurs Ulric returned to the matters at hand.
The remains of the Forest lord held a bounty in sinew he'd cut from the meat during the butchering. If he soaked it, the material should return to its pliable state and he could then twist and braid it into cord. If he did it correctly, he should be able to make a bowstring that would withstand the force of a powerful draw. So long as it didn't degrade substantially, he was pretty sure he couldn't pull a bow enough to break that stuff. It had resisted incredible stresses in the muscles of that monster during its charge. Worst-case scenario he'd simply have a large supply of cordage, which was still a huge win. This half-aloud rambling accompanied one more rich meal of monster.
As the daylight bled out on the end of the first week since he'd been reforged, Ulric rendered what felt like kilometers of the long, golden strips of dry tendon into thin strips and set them in water. Tomorrow, he'd finally stretch the preserved hide for drying. He'd also be able to braid cordage. Smoke meat. Gather Vegetables. Secure wood. Something almost resembling a routine.
It was a thought that didn't displease him. For all he'd hated the routines of his old life, there was a comfort in knowing what you needed to do. And he had doings for days.
Sleep found Ulric buried in leaves on his bed, a contented smile on his face.
Ulric looked up from the last tuber he’d just finished settling into its place within his garden bed. He brushed the sweat from his brow, streaking loamy soil across his forehead. He didn’t worry about it; dirt was as much a part of life out here as air and water. More or less, as long as it wasn’t feces, he didn’t worry about having it on him anymore. It would appear that he’d made it just in time. The weather had been unbelievably mild. Cool, but mild. He’d seen so little rain that he’d wondered if his rock pool might deplete, its source in the water table running dry. His worries were unfounded, there, in the window of his green sky, the hole in the canopy which had allowed the twinned stars to bless his glade with lifegiving light were storm clouds. The wind, ever-present here on the plateau, had a damp cast to it. His senses, refined by orders of magnitude compared to the Before, could actually detect the change in pressure. He’d had that superpower before, courtesy of a ruined knee and broken bones that picked up low pressure as surely as a barometer. Just with pain, instead of a gauge. Ah well, he was pretty ready for a break, hand-tilling garden beds was some rough work. A little rain would do him some good. The first droplets scattered across him as he retreated to his shelter a few minutes later.
What do you do when you have no electricity, no books, no entertainment at all, and it has been raining a steady downpour for the last three days without pause? That is a trick question. You don’t do anything. At all. Nothing, all day, unless you want to burn excessive calories on staving off exposure. Ulric estimated that what he was being treated to now was a Twenty-degree Centigrade rain that, partnered with its companion wind, would kill a guy in a couple of hours by hypothermia. People died all the time in weather like this. The foolish, the overconfident, the ill-prepared. All synonyms, he mused. Ulric Einar was not going to play the fool, daring the weather to do what the animals had not. He went out for a few minutes, cut up firewood, harvested a few lovely bits of herbs or roots, and got his ass back under shelter. Problem was, what to do in the meantime? He had projects. Crafts. Ideas to explore. Even those had limits to keep him occupied. Ulric had woken this morning with a hankering to explore magic, given that he’d reached something of a stopping point in several projects and it was time to stop running from impossible nonsense, which was what he still subconsciously regarded magic to be.
Sitting cross-legged, Ulric stared into the fireplace, watching the wood char, flare, and generally transform before his eyes. Combustion, the chemical process of converting complex carbohydrates into water vapor and carbon dioxide, plus a few odds and ends gases, depending on the composition of the wood. It was a form of magic, was fire. Put him in the right mind state to investigate the phenomenal.
His attention fell inwards, towards that organ that drew mana into his form, holding a type of energy with which he was not versed, had not any form of education with which to understand its processes. The Watcher had plunged a metaphorical dagger into his brain to impart him some basic knowledge regarding types of mana and that was basically all he had to go on. Ulric knew what these basic types of mana “sounded” like, and how they were perceived to his core. He was, more or less, trying to figure out what magic was on the fly. He started with the thing that had come first, by instinct. Ceraun, lightning, electromagnetic discharge, whatever the hell you wanted to call it. He’d called it to slay his enemy, there at the cusp of being destroyed. It had come, drinking his core’s reserves to become an arc of surpassing violence. Lesser arcs could Ulric make, by throttling the flow of mana through the mental construct that had patterned itself on his brain, the spell. Built on core principles regarding charge separation, Ulric was pretty sure he'd done it on accident. Even so, he had control of it now. He could tell that the mana inside his core before he’d used it to do magic was different than the how it felt when it became lightning. They had different feels, a different harmony. The mana in his core felt like some kind of base note. The lightning magic was distinctly jumpier, wanted to move, to cycle, to separate and come back together. It danced. He could make a bigger arc, visible between his hands so long as he envisioned the poles of charge being concentrated on his hands and concentrated on keeping the energy contained between them. Lapses in concentration made weird shit happen like random arcs to nearby objects, and odd pops of sound that were accompanied by a metallic taste in his mouth.
Now though, he wanted to try something different. Ulric concentrated again on the flame and felt that base note of his core’s energy, holding both of them in his mind. As he stared into the flickering tongues of fire it slowly dawned on him that the burning wood held a sense of mana, new and wholly different from the lightning or his native mana. He got excited and lost the sensation.
“Focus, fucknuts. You aren’t playing around here, you need this.” Ulric scolded himself, before resuming his meditative concentration.
There. He found it again, that vibrant feeling that surrounded the fireplace. It sounded like it had before, when the Watcher had introduced him to it. Hungry, eager, transformative. Incindere, the essence of flame. Smiling to himself, Ulric, with the utmost caution, began to push at his core to gather mana into the space above the fireplace, imagining a sphere, like a balloon, that he slowly filled. Wonder of wonders, his core actually did it, moving according to his desire. Licking his lips he carefully tried to, shift, that mana, to tune it towards the harmonic of fire.
Using his natural flame as a guide, and the feeling granted by the Impossible, he succeeded, the magic suddenly took form and he observed with a distinct sensation of glee the floating ball of fire. He almost laughed, until the thing started wobbling in place. Firming his will, he kept his shit together and watched the ball begin to shrink, the mana consuming itself and burning out, slowly. When, after a few seconds, it vanished with a final flicker of cinders and smoke, he sat back on his hands and breathed out a disbelieving, “Holy magical horseshit, Batman. I’m a wizard.”
Three days of similar experimentation continued until he was comfortable creating, maintaining, and moving the fireball. He wasn’t tired, that little fireball hadn’t taken much out of him. Today, he was going to try for something a little more aggressive. Sitting beside his bed he tried again, still cautious, but ready for the hovering ball of flame to form to his command. Now that he knew what he was looking for, it came much easier. Ulric could visualize what he wanted to happen and that mental image accelerated things exponentially. Soon the fireball hovered. He pushed it around with his mind, sort of like pulling a balloon around by a string, it followed his will. Ulric Einar was a man of quiet dignity. He did not giggle like a schoolgirl looking at her birthday pony. At all. Holding onto the fire and feeding it a steady trickle from his core to maintain it he slowly walked to the door to his shelter, pulling it open while keeping the drifting little fireball in place over his fireplace. He didn’t want to consider the consequences of a fireball exploding within his shelter. Basically, everything in this joint was flammable. Maybe he should have considered that before playing with literal fire.
“No time to regret, Ulric,” he whispered, trying to remain calm in the face of the giddy joy that burbled beneath the surface.
Steady rain continued to fall, of course. He drew the little fireball out with him, guiding it with his imagination, saw it moving away from him into the rain in his mind and the little flame mirrored the mental image. Now it sat, sputtering and hissing as droplets hit it to turn into steam. Ulric knew what he had to do. Wizards cast fireball. It’s what they did. Now he just had to, figure out how to do that. Fire is the plasma of air, superheated by the excess energy of a runaway combustion reaction, a rapid oxidation of hydrocarbon bonds that exothermically release stored chemical energy, Ulric recited to himself. By itself it has little to no destructive potential outside of proximity to high-intensity heat. To be dangerous, fire requires explosive potential, the ability to create a pressure wave, a blast front. High explosives rapidly displace gaseous byproducts during the detonation and this combination of heat and pressure creates the destructive potential, he continued to chant rote knowledge, a hint of an idea coming to him.
Instead of just lobbing a ball of fire, he’d create a cavity inside it that would collapse, pulling the flame inwards, an implosion. That would superheat and compress the air in the cavity, which would generate an outwards pressure wave when energy met and reflected at the center of the fireball. That would create an explosion, carrying the fire along its wave front. Should be relatively unpleasant for anything nearby too, he mused.
Okay Ulric. Here goes nothing. Keeping the physical principles solidly in his mind, Ulric envisioned the ball shifting, emptying its core to create a hollowed sphere the size of a beach ball. The little ball swelled alongside his projected image. So far so good. Now for the touchy part. He had to concentrate to keep the ball from collapsing, or from expanding away from the air heating inside it. It was definitely becoming unstable.
With an effort, he drove hard against the fireball with his will, hurling it as hard as he could towards the stones near his rock pool, and the flame shot towards them, as if tossed by a major league pitcher from the olden days. Roiling flame hit stone and the thing flared brighter before a wave of fire, like a liquid tide crashed outwards, rolling over stones and rising into the air. A blast of heat washed over him from the explosion.
*PING*
“You’re goddamn right, it’s a Flame Crash!” Ulric laughed aloud.
Wowee. Magic. He was using fucking magic! And, this time, he knew exactly what the bizarre pinging sound in his brain was. A notification of some kind, an update to his connection with the world. Or, you know, some shit like that, he was still figuring it out. Who cares? I’m a damned Wizard! Behold!
Ulric reached out his hand and cast another [Flame Crash] this time the spell came together in a matter of a few seconds and launched outwards slightly faster than before. Like a program, once written it executed far more efficiently. Not quite without effort though, he felt the pull from his mana distinctly this time. The result was similarly powerful, stones blackened and cracked from heat as his fireball washed over them and he was pretty sure some of his hairs singed, like a good old boy starting a bonfire with a rigorous application of gasoline, jug still in hand as he guaranteed his place as last of his line, Darwin Award pending.
Lowering the arms that had covered his face at the unexpected force of the spell, Ulric conducted a mad dance in the rain hands waving as he screamed all manner of nonsense at the sky. Dark soon fell, and the exultant mage headed to bed satisfied that magic was pretty nifty.
The next morning, riding momentum from the previous day’s discovery, Ulric had finally been able to ramp up his experiments with magic. He ran several more exhaustion tests, confirming his initial guess that running his core completely empty was highly stressful on his body, although it seemed to yield a rapid improvement in his overall capacity and skill at manipulating mana. Even so, he had to rest for hours between exhausts; going all the way to empty gave him a savage headache. He spent the rest of the day, between exhaustion protocols, working on his crafts, weaving baskets, working out a somewhat experimental method for creating bone and glue and wood laminate for a composite bowstave, and other inventions of more or less use in the life of a woodland subsistence native.
Monsoon season continued with its beating downpours, interspersed with a merely miserable drizzle or a cold mist driven along the winds. Now that he had a better feel for changing forms of mana between fire and lighning, Incendere and Ceraun, he decided to dive into all the basic forms shown him so long ago by the Impossible. It was as well this testing was conducted outside, where he had better exposure to the elements, literally, in the case of this strange, fae world. The rain made it almost trivial for him to feel his core and match its energies towards the flowing, resilience of Aquae, water. Ulric immediately set to work gathering precipitation into a dense orb of water, noting that it was almost trivially easy to manipulate this “free mana” compared to generating the energy himself as he’d done with the fire spell and his lightning magic. He also knew exactly how he wanted to use it. He lacked precision tooling but a high pressure stream of water could carve tool steel with ease. Compared to a big ass explosion, how hard could a little water jet be?
His lip was a chewed up mess by the time, twenty seven hours later, he finally breathed a sigh of relief, looking at the gouged line, as if someone had used a straightedge and a quickie saw, to cut cleanly through stone. He had not reckoned with exactly how much pressure was required to make water behave in this manner. He’d had to sit over a meat stew and pounded tuber flour cakes roasted as a kind of flatbread until it hit him that he needed to take advantage of water’s incompressibility.
Rather than mentally trying to “crush” the spellform down, it was more efficient to just “push” the water through a narrow aperture. Reforming the matrix of his spell, Ulric wove a kind of reservoir, filled with falling rain, and directing with all the oomph he could muster through a very small opening in the architecture of his Aquae spellform. The result was a beam of water that pulverized anything in its path, cutting stone like a hot knife through butter. Even better, if he dialed down the aperture, he could control the size and pressure of the water cutting spell. It was an entire day to master that kind of control, though he regretted it not with Ulric held a [Steelwood] gear, cut to machine tolerances, viewing the immaculately pristine edges with the joy only an engineer with a precision machining schematic could possess.
Ulric’s initial results had proven promising. Now he was well and truly begun with experimentation with different elemental forms of magic, leaning heavily on the gifted knowledge of the Watcher, alongside his growing store of personal applied knowledge. While it took nearly three days of continuous experimentation to get his fire spell to work, it only took two days to get his water spell functional, there were, perhaps unsurprisingly enough, parallels to between the method to control a flow of electrons and a flow of water, though generating high enough pressures was a bit of a trick. After that, it took a mere six hours to figure out the earth spell. Terra’s mana impression was so low key it was hard to recognize, even with the Watcher’s hint. Once he finally had it down though, actually manipulating it was little trouble.
Instilling the mana of Terra from Ulric’s core into the stones allowed him to shift them, pulling them around with his will into a simple shape. Visualization was the key here, rock didn’t like to do anything that wasn’t explicitly well-defined. It was a bit more akin to the function-based programming of manaforms: explicit input in, function does function things, explicit output and if you didn’t like the results, it was your own damned fault.
Air magic, Caelum was even easier, he was surrounded by the stuff and that was why he’d never noticed the almost ephemeral note of that particular manaform before now. You naturally tend to tune out constant background noises and air was sort of everywhere, all the time. He’d just been ignoring it this whole time. That isn’t to say that just because it was all around that he could use it to actually do stuff. Nobody was around to see him embarrassed at himself so it was fine. Ulric's air spell took a whole day but only because he wouldn't stop until he'd figured out how to make it fly as fast as it did. Turns out that a magical air flow around the blade that created a low-pressure zone in front and a high-pressure zone in the back helped to actually accelerate it while it flew. To the point it shattered itself under the strain about fifty meters away. If a moron falls to the ground in frustration in a forest primeval, does he make a sound? A mystery says I.
Magic was weird. It was definitely based on an understanding of the natural order of the world. Knowing how the flow of electrons manifested in currents and magnetic fields was almost definitely helping him amplify the strength of the Voltaic grip spell beyond what he should be able to do, given his lack of training. The knowledge translated into vastly improved control of mana, by knowing what he wanted, specifically, he could move the mana precisely to enact his will.
The ice spell he figured out after half day of trial and error. It was difficult to get the balance of cold and water. He needed it cold enough to do what it did, but without enormous mana control to reinforce its structure the crystal would shatter. He'd not forgotten the glassresin lesson on brittle blades. Soon though, he was able to create a sword of compressed ice along his arm. He’d decided that he needed a way to have an improvised melee weapon and what better option than a razor sharp blade of ice that not only cut, but froze whatever it came into contact with? Even short durations of interaction with that meter long sliver of living ice could put out a campfire, its heat pulled away to leave it a smoking patch of cooled char. Ulric could imagine that the wounds it created would be exacerbated by frostbitten regions around the places touched. It would also leave metal brittle, perhaps making this spell useful for contesting enemy weapons, which was a potent defensive capability lacking in his other spells.
Ulric swung a frigid blade into a sapling and was rewarded with a clean bisection, the crystalline [Iceblade] cleaving easily through soft wood, edges of the cut were encrusted with dense frost and the tree stood as if it remained in one piece, a state that persisted several minutes, until the wind pushed the top half over, frozen wound breaking open with a loud crackle. The cold of his spell was trapped in the matrix of his spell and affected his own flesh not at all, beside an uncomfortable chill against his skin, like holding a snowball too long. The inversion of the weave kept the freezing energies contained by the blade’s structure though, a nifty trick, if Ulric didn’t say so himself. He did though. He’d have told the chipmunks about his glory and genius if any had made themselves available. Unfortunately small mammals were still not to be found, though the wolves and deer were becoming more abundant.
There, under the fall of steady rain, with droplets feezing solid to his Infrig blade, forming icicles as he relished this last success, mastery of all the basic elemental mana forms, he jumped when a sudden sound pulsed in his head.
*PING*
****CLASS LINKING….AKASHIC CONNECTION COMPLETE****
Ulric’s brain shortcircuited for a few seconds while this information washed through him. It was…vague? Yeah, pretty vague. He’d been going through the process, trying to familiarize himself with the rules of this strange world’s magic. It made sense to explore the basics before he tried to do anything crazy with any particular manaform, to have a deeper understanding of the interplay between magic and reality. That inclination, followed by his determined investigation and disciplined study in application of magic to the elements had unlocked some kind of…repository of knowledge, was the only way Ulric had to describe it. Compared to the vagueness of the Akashic information, Ulric felt a rush of knowledge that he had no damned business having. All at once, he felt a kind of familiarity, a comfort, with mana’s forms that he hadn’t had just a few minutes ago. Granted, he’d probably have come to a similar level of command within a few months of practice, but he’d seemingly fast forwarded past some of that bumbling awkward phase. Intuitively, he knew more now about the strengths and limitations of each manaform than he had before and, in exceedingly spooky fashion, it seemed like he remembered more of his studies from the before with regards to these elements. Combustion rates, heat flow equations, detonation pressures, things even tangentially related to fire were clearer in his mind than before. Likewise for the other elements. Ulric was now a walking library for mineral classifications and geology. He could look at a rock and tell you what metamorphic properties it had, what its shear pattern would be, and whether it was reactive towards acids or inert. Subtle chemical composition knowledge that required, sans the gifted class knowledge, extensive testing. This Akashic magical link was interacting with his past life’s memories, building bridges in his brain, tying together neurons to create an elemental reference database. Watcher’s tits. This was more than magic, this was some reality altering divine level fuckery.
Equal parts enthralled by the burgeoning awareness of elemental magic’s interplay with the world and a budding horror that his brain was being played with by forces outside his understanding, Ulric responded the only way he knew how: he went to bed early and slept for twelve hours. When he woke, he put the concerns about gods level nonsense behind him. Firstly, there was nothing he could do about it. Secondly, he had an ace in the hole now regarding magic. Suddenly, the fumbling around he’d been doing to generate his elemental spells sharpened. Already, he was certain he could rework those spellforms, could tighten up the architecture to make them more efficient, more potent. Secondly, the class imparted a skill that allowed him to actively parse out the types of mana around him using his core. He didn’t know how that was going to be useful but the former scientist had faith that it would prove a boon. Think of it like having a mana based mass spectrometer, Ulric told himself. Knowing the composition of the world is all kinds of relevant. You just need to figure out how to take advantage of it.
Now that he had the fundamentals of sorcery sort of nailed down, Ulric spent the upcoming days working out his core’s meta magic abilities. Rapidly, it became clear that the Watcher’s reforging had been next level. [Core Capacitor] was undoubtedly the reason he'd killed the Forest Lord. It allowed him to turbocharge his Voltaic Grip. He'd held a branch in his hands and tested the combination. The branch immediately burned in a Lichtenberg, the electricity forcing its way through the material. It then burst into flame briefly before exploding into shards. A few splinters was a small price to pay to learn not to try it on glassresin or anything he didn't want dead. The caveat to [Core Capacitor] was that it was truly all or nothing. It wouldn't activate unless his core was saturated. He'd sat looking at his status for an hour waiting for the notification. He'd been at 100% mana the entire time and hadn't been able to initiate the discharge. Saturation status ticked and in the same moment vanished as all the mana in his core pulsed, that incredible flow of heat and power every bit as much of a rush as the first time. [Water Jet] bored a hole a meter deep through solid rock in half a second. A later test obliterated a chunk of Forest Lord bone glassresin'd to a boulder face. Ulric could have killed the [Forest Lord] with that spell, if he'd hit the skull directly. Magic was awesome.
Continuous mana-channeling experiments had led to Ulric's discovery that he could stream mana from his core while condensing it with his will, all the while channeling a spell. It felt like holding your breath and tightening all your muscles at the same time but inside your nerves. The supercharged flame crash had vaporized a sizable pool of rain water and nearly inflicted third degree steam burns on both his hands. Being slow on the uptake he'd immediately tried using the overcharge on his voltaic grip. Still recovering from the previous attempt, his concentration slipped and the charge rebounded. It felt like a sledgehammer to the heart.
Ulric immediately vomited and passed out and woke up a quarter hour later in a pool of his own fluids. His status had not indicated that the overcharge had a backlash. In yet another interesting fact, he hadn’t known it would and, therefore, the Akashic record hadn’t reflected it. After his accident, it had added the line about backlash. Another lesson learned. This world was full of lessons. Ulric was determined to be an excellent student.
See? He’d already learned not to try a Core Capacitor discharge alongside an Overcharge as the resulting backlash would scatter him across the clearing. Such a smart lad, he was.
While he nursed his bruised feeling core, he sat in the shelter. It was still raining, because why wouldn’t it be? Over a week without pause, and he had to at least consider the possibility of relocating to the tree tops to escape being drowned. Surely not, the Plateau would shed the water off its sides. Shaking off the oddly negative thought he resumed his magery. With a slight effort of will, Ulric experimented by concentrating on the fireplace, activating the [Core Pulse]. The pulse of mana from his own core, still indeed tender, into the fire, had produced an interaction not unlike striking a tuning fork. He’d detected a signal from that fire that he could interpret to be the mana signature of fire. Which didn’t seem important, at first, until Ulric had put that mana signature into his thoughts while channeling a [Flame Crash] and nearly doubled the efficiency of that spell, amplifying its power substantially.
Further experimentation confirmed his suspicions and revealed a heavy synergy between Ulric’s own knowledge of the physical nature of fire and the metaphysical truth of fire mana. It was as if there were two completely divergent aspects to magic, what was and what could be. Ulric didn’t have any better way to think about it but the results spoke for themselves. Most of his spells had benefited from a [Core Pulsed] image of the magical signature from each element. He’d also gotten substantially more efficient at casting thanks to the [Elemental Refinement] skill, which meant he could practice more than previously, wasting less of his own mana and mental effort.
These experiments, alongside his other projects, had consumed the waking hours of Ulric's life. Time fell away, losing most of its meaning. Daylight, Dark, and the needs of the moment or the moment's inbred cousin tomorrow, were all that existed. Ulric's old friend anxiety was gone. This world was one of action and reaction. You did or did not. Worrying was calories spent not figuring out how to mold mana into a hammer of light with which to crush a viper that could melt concrete with its breath. Or make hollow arrowheads out of a Giga-bear's tooth to deliver a neurotoxic plant juice so potent grinding it required a two-meter long stick to avoid getting a paralyzing dose while you did so. Ahh well. The devils in the details, he told himself. Days rattled onwards, the man lost track of them.
************_________Two Vardan Months Later ____________________*************
*PING*
Ulric's head rose at the unexpected sound. His grip on the bowstring relaxed and the powerful stave flexed back to its original two-meter length.
The deer-like animal he'd been about to impale with an arrow noticed the motion and leapt from its head-down posture, an incredible burst of strength carrying it eight meters in a single bound, which then lengthened into a flash of speed, carrying it away through the trees, bleeting its warning call to the rest of the herd. Eleven more of the creatures similarly bolted, flashing green and yellow pelts vanishing in mere moments.
He was annoyed but it mattered little. They would return soon enough and he had plenty of stores to last until his next kill. He'd slipped to within a scant five or six meters of this one, close enough to have impaled it with his spear had he wanted to try.
It was the first time he'd managed to close the distance without so much as a warning snort from the herd. Which was, he smirked, what feat that had triggered the Akashic notification that broke his concentration and cost him the hunt.
It now took a mere thought to summon his status and he did so presently
[Status]
Ulric had grown in the time lost weeks since his arrival. He'd gained two ranks in the title associated with mastery of this forest ecosystem, the most recent one just now.
It was a noticeable difference from when he'd first arrived, with significant boosts to his stats and reflected his relative comfort with life in the wild clearing in which he’d cultivated a home.
In his prior life, Ulric had spent considerable time in the wilderness in his younger days, hiking, camping, fishing, hunting, etc. He had oft imagined lost himself in fantasy, as if he were in the place of the pioneers of the pre-collapse, before ruinous consumption had wrought its heinous work on the world, instead of roaming the crippled scrub that passed for his world’s wilds. But never had he had to live in it. There had proven to be an incredible gap between theory and experience, especially without technology to make up the difference. The basic skills he had were lacking, practiced but never mastered. The instinctive understanding for the flow of nature and the movements of its creatures had never been developed well enough to compete with those creatures for the bounty of the land. Things had changed.
Weeks of living and surviving in this forest had shown him which things he'd been doing that were wrong. The wildlife, which had flocked to the land with the absence of the monster that had depleted it of life, had been able instructors in his deficiencies. Failure after failure, like a whetstone across his mind, had brought those skills up to a fine polish.
He returned to his camp, now fortified with a circumference of low interwoven branch walls called hurdles. Sharpened stakes driven at forty-five degrees jutted from the hurdles to discourage passers-through.
Ulric’s eyes grew distant as he saw the barrier.
**evening, some time ago**
The beam of magically focused water he’d been using to carve a gear in the bizarrely hardwood he called [Steelwood] fell away to mist and disappeared, along with his concentration. Something had ticked in his brain, had disrupted his concentration. Irritated he stood up and stretched, body slightly stiff from an extended crouch. He’d had aspirations to a hand drill but that meant making gears. Carving the wood to produce them would take ages so he was trying to cheat and practice magic at the same time. After a few failed tries he had gotten the hang of limiting his magic output to a low, steady, supply that turned the surprisingly destructive [Water Jet] into a precise cutting tool.
It was slow, exacting work. A single maladjustment would turn the cutting stream to ruin the piece, as a half dozen failures could attest. Eventually, he’d settled on a round blank with a slightly smaller diameter inner blank to serve as a template, both of these scribed onto the [Steelwood] plank, then he’d use magic for cutting the teeth. The half-finished gear at his feet was coming along nicely, the product of a half hour’s care and a third of his mana.
A glance around camp revealed nothing untoward. He shrugged to himself. Sometimes he got a little jumpy for no reason, being alone in the wild did that to a man. Wolves were moving into the forest floor, along with many other creatures. Knee-high monitor lizards with a chameleon camouflage and razor-bladed tongue, a variety of deer-like monsters, rabbitish creatures, some type of weasel, and a host of others.
The glade was starting to come alive with life. It gladdened Ulric’s heart, the Gigabear had been what made the divine forest around him into a green desert. Its absence was starting to be noticed and, as a wise man had once said, life was finding a way.
He shuddered when he recalled the savage wilderness he had witnessed far above in the canopy. He had made that climb yesterday as a physical challenge and to scout but had been wildly unprepared for the panoply of wyrd monsters. He wasn’t ready to challenge that place, but he was growing almost comfortable in his glade and the surrounding wood.
He bent down, ready to resume his work. A series of howls, not so distant, sent ice up his spine and he jerked upright again. Eyes scanning towards the sound he became aware of another sound, like low thunder. The piece of wood at his feet was vibrating.
“Oh shit, Oh fuck, Oh Sweet Watcher’s Tits may they hang in glory, not this.” He prayed aloud.
It came. Faster than all reason. A rush of green and yellow bodies, antlered like pronghorns and similar in shape, if a bit larger, poured over the nearest hill and down into the glade. They were insanely fast. He had only a minute, no more. Ulric scrambled to get to his spear, no time for anything else, his half-completed bow, tied and clamped while glues dried, would have been useless against this horde anyway.
Cursing himself for a half-wit he started concentrating on his mana, pulling towards the strength of the stone beneath himself, mana wavered and then snapped to Terra and he dragged the rock upwards to form a barrier. He was struggling desperately not to lose the spell as the rush of green monster antelope bore down on him. Knee-high came the semicircular wall, thunderous sound roaring now in his ears from the approaching hoofbeats. Thigh high and he knew he wasn’t going to make it, he was too slow, the rock was rising too fucking slow. Waist high and they were upon him.
Thirty bodies moving fast as a car hurtled into his camp, heads lowered, driven by panic. Ulric got his spear up as they came on. Maybe the wall saved him. Maybe the threat of the spear did. Certainly, the [Forest Lord] hide he’d made into a jerkin played a critical part, even if only for its smell, the odor being that of death itself to the creatures who got whiff. The tide parted around him so fast he could barely follow, he heard destruction as they trampled his camp. Barely a second into the stampede and, as he was glancing to the side at the devastation, one of the fuckers jumped the wall.
Ulric had just enough time to curse before a glancing impact threw him viciously to the ground. Searing pain lanced along his side. He heard a loud series of cracks and was present enough to be afraid his ribs had been broken, a death sentence. He had no idea where his spear had gone. Thundering beats of hooves pounded down around him for a mere moment and then were passed, retreating to fade rapidly into the distance. Mixed into those bodies Ulric had seen some type of black wolf-like beasts, snapping at the heels of the antelope creatures, driving them.
It was over, as suddenly as it had begun.
Ulric lay curled up around his side, his hand over warm, wet heat. Moaning softly as he rolled over onto his back he brought his hand up to confirm the blood running down his arm from his painted hand. Terrified but determined to know he looked down at his body to see his jerkin was slashed from a place horrifyingly close to his liver to under his right nipple and on around to beneath his armpit. Shaking hands pulled up the hide clothing to reveal already bruising flesh and a weeping red hooking wound, a thin line scored through the [Forest Lord] leather to print itself in blood on his side. Glancing, a shallow flesh wound, not fatal.
Panting from fear, relief, adrenaline, and nearly in tears Ulric simply lay there breathing and grateful to be alive. Nothing stopped to eat him, the smell of ancient terror sufficient to deter anything from inspecting the wreckage of what had been his camp. It was shattered. One small mercy, over next to the scattered contents of his root bin lay the corpse of one of the green and yellow bastards, obviously dead, its leg kicking in twitches.
Turning his head to the side he saw his half-finished gear lying just outside the impromptu spellwoven wall of rock. It was bent, chipped, and broken by beating hooves.
“YOU HAVE GOT TO BE JOKING!!” Ulric screamed into the evening air of the glade. The forest answered him with silence.
**back in the present**
Ulric came back to himself from reliving the ruin of his old camp. Lessons learned, he thought, looking at the spiked wooden barrier.
It had been a bare two weeks after the death of the Forest Lord. His shelter had been smashed, his bed turned into splinters. He'd been nearly killed when one of the things had tried to gore him on its way through, ripping a wound across his ribs that had only fully healed a few weeks ago, a wound only kept from killing him by the durability of the hide he’d worn. Both the smokers were ruined and had to be rebuilt, likewise his root bin. The only saving grace there was that the animal that had stepped through his root bin had broken both its front legs and smashed its head into the ground hard enough to snap its own neck.
He'd moved his camp back to the torn roots then, to protect his water supply. The animals would have their own known water sources, springs abounded in the rocky highland terrain and a rainy season a month-long had shown him where the watersheds ran. Trailing animals and birds, predators and prey alike, he'd learned a great deal about how this forest hid its secrets.
The answer, as he had suspected early but dared not confirm, lay in the canopy. It was dense. An ecosystem all unto its own. The trees started to limb out about two-thirds of their height from the ground, the lower branches as massive as the largest redwoods of his world. From these arboreal highways sprang a verdant world completely unlike the shaded ground. Interconnected branches ran between trees, oak-sized paths from one level of the canopy to the next. He'd climbed up once his wounds had healed sufficiently to avoid opening them or greatly aggravating the sprained rib muscles. It hadn't been especially difficult, with the large crevices in the bark of those giants and the rough texture providing hand and foot holds aplenty. Once up in the canopy, he'd been able to observe the myriad species of plants and animals that made the true forest home.
There were giant birds, with beaks similar to toucans. They didn't eat fruit though they ate what looked like a badger sized squirrel with webbed arms that glided from tree to tree. The squirrel badgers ate a giant bean that grew from a massive wrapping vine. The bean proved to be excellent once boiled, fruity and packed with oils. There were several species of snake, ranging from the constrictor type to a venom spitter whose streams left smoking bark where they touched. He'd seen a hawk-like bird the size of a German shepherd get hit by that venom and break up in mid-flight like styrofoam in gasoline, just liquifying. It didn't take Ulric long to figure out that he was ill prepared to face the environment on high and he returned to the relatively barren, but vastly safer, forest floor, and his own rich glade.
His Giga-bear meat proved life-saving. It was rich with fats, marbled to perfection. Even smoked and dry it was packed with nutrition. He had enough to weather the first months of his stay, long enough to learn. The Autumn season progressed steadily, air turning cooler. Those cold rains had forced him to completely rethink his shelter. He'd dug into the roots, using fire to weaken and char and an axe with a head made of split bear pelvis bone to chop. Work proceeded quickly. Why it took three weeks for him to figure out that, if the hardest thing he had on hand was bear bones, then he should be shaping bear bone tools using bear bone hammers/chisels, Ulric had no idea, other than he was a moron. Teeth made awls, sail needles, and even some fish hooks, although he hadn't seen any bodies of water that would support fish. Claws he made into a set of spiked leather caestus. Coupled with the Forest Lord's hide clothes he probably appeared to be a junior Forest Lord to much of the animal life. The predators avoided him at all cost, so far. He'd seen a pack of wolf like creatures chasing a gigantic stag with fractal leaf shaped horns, like recurving ferns, skid to a halt at the sight of him and run howling away. Made hunting things harder, but he'd accept that over having to fight off more predators for territory. That all the predators would fear him was a failure of imagination on his part, as he learned soon after.
Days passed quickly. Ulric was kept busy by his assorted tasks. The first few of these was spent in preservation and camp tasks, with some foraging around the immediate viscinity of the glade. Various plants proved edible and Ulric had finally achieved some semblance of a normal diet. Other herbs and roots proved to be either noxious to the point of inedibility or highly toxic and only the rigor of his testing methodology saved him from a rather uncomfortable death in the wilds. It was with great relief that Ulric discovered analogues to Earthly spices, most especially the presence of a grassy plant that tasted of cilantro, a broad-leafed flowering plant whose fleshy seed pods carried a distinct flavor that was tangy like garlic, and long green stalked herb that he found to be nearly identical in form and flavor to onion. There was another, a deathly spicy herbaceous plant that he still wasn’t convinced wasn’t toxic, so potent was its fiery burn.
Small animals were returning to the glade, their signs becoming evident on the local plant life. Once, as Ulric picked some of his favorite tubers, the pale starchy things being remarkably close to potatoes when boiled, he was attacked by a small horned rabbit with enlarged hind claws. It had shot from cover at incredible speed. Ulric had had his knife out already and the [Forest Lord] bone, sharpened to razor edge, parted the thing’s head and left shoulder cleanly down its body, so aggressively had it thrown itself at him, horn lowered to spike his chest. The hide, of course, was ruined. It’s horn was inferior to his current tool and, at least on this specimen, too small to spark a use to Ulric’s mind. It roasted up just fine though. Other things were showing themselves on his foraging trips, though he only ran into them once he began to practice proper stalking technique and learned attentiveness to the wind direction. His hide clothes smelled of the old super predator and everything ran immediately when they caught whiff of him.
So it was that Ulric found himself losing his caution. Varda, of course, obliged him with a lesson.
Ulric was stalking a [Bladefern Elk]. He’d sighted it in the predawn light, as it had crested a small rise on the southern end of the glade. Keeping the strong Westerly wind in his face, Ulric angled around where he’d seen the thing alternately grazing and browsing. He still had plenty of Gigabear meat but he didn’t want to pass up any opportunities to expand his larder. Never can tell when hard times might come a calling.
As he crested a small rise, in a crouch so low he’d have never managed it in the Before, he saw that the magnificent beast was turned away from him, its flexible lips pulling away at the lowest succulent leaves of a sapling of one of the trees he called [Steelwood] for its incredibly hard, dense, material. Slowly, to avoid alerting the dark brown and mottled silver-grey buck, at least thirteen hands high at the shoulder, Ulric took up a throwing spear in his right hand, it’s glassresin blade immaculately sharp. These half-length spears had proven ideal to take game at medium to short ranges, powered by his strong shoulders. He could hit his target seven in ten throws, good enough to be worth the effort. He couldn’t wait until his bow was finished, the work-in-progress laminated recurve stave sat only half finished in his camp.
Slowly, ever so slowly, his arm drew back.
A deep, throaty growl, distantly to his left, sent the [Bladefern Elk]’s head up and it swiftly darted ahead, a tremendous four-meter leap carrying it into its incredible flight. At the same time, Ulric’s turning head caught the source of the sound. Some kind of wolf, broad shoulders, shaggy fur, a head too large compared to most wolves he’d seen in documentary, the things were nearly extinct in his old world. This one was alive and well. It was big, its shoulderblades cresting Ulric’s chest and it looked to have at least fifty kilos on top of his own solid eighty.
Baleful yellow-green eyes stared into his, feral. Its growl deepened, and it snarled, sharp pointed teeth flashing. It would attack, Ulric was sure. The beast wanted his territory, his life, he could feel it. Ulric’s hackles rose, and he felt a deep anger as his hand tightened on the throwing spear. Want wasn’t going to mean shit, Ulric decided. This critter had cost him a fresh meat dinner and nominated itself as nexties.
Ulric let fly, just as the large animal gathered itself and the spear buried halfway along its haft in the matted fur, just behind its front left shoulder. A roar of pain preceded its retaliatory charge, fangs bared. A scant fourteen meters separated the two and, claws digging deeply into the soft litter below, the animal was almost upon him.
Ulric had not been idle, had not wasted the dark evenings spent in his shelter. He drew on his core, forcing the latent energy to his command, his mind already forging it under his will to the shape he had practiced nightly for the last three days, a beam of concentrated water propelled at a pressure sufficient to carve even [Forest Lord] bone. As the beast’s body left the earth, propelled like a living missile toward him, Ulric’s hands pushed forwards, cupped together as if giving CPR, and a beam of water intercepted the [Fellwolf].
High-pressure water could cut metal. This spell, powered by Ulric’s core, pierced the beast’s head and exited the back side, blowing red and grey matter out behind it. Momentum carried the corpse past Ulric, to crash into the dirt and roll to a stop.
The breath he’d been holding he released in a slow hiss, his tightened body relaxing. His heart jackhammered inside his chest at the close call. He raised his estimation of the power of magic. His best throw had proven insufficient to land a killing blow, even with good placement. This working of Aquae though? Complete destruction of the creature’s head. Ulric’s mouth dropped open as his eyes took in the large trunk, well large unless you compared it to one of the Elder trees in the surrounding forest, of a tree behind where the wolf had been when he’d struck it. There was a large rough tear in the wood. Ulric walked slowly and put his finger into the bore, it went in, all the way to the second knuckle. All that from a mere half-second’s flow of power. His power. He had willed this destruction and, lo and behold, commanded the elements to smite his enemy.
He had to admit, magic was pretty fucking amazing.
Ulric’s budding smile died a swift death when he examined the [Fellwolf] corpse. A mouthful of jagged, ripping teeth, head as big as Ulric’s torso. Oversized claws that looked like a badger’s. The spear had torn a clean hole in the furry hid and penetrated deep into its innards. One lung had been torn and Ulric thought it probably had destroyed what looked like a liver. And that had slowed it barely at all. It sure as hell hadn’t stopped the thing from leaping at him hard enough to knock his ass to the ground where those teeth could get at his head. And it had gotten to within an easy stone’s throw to him without his having any clue. If it hadn’t growled he might never have known it was there. Fuck.
Arrogance. Pure and simple. He’d thought himself the only predator of note now that the old monster was gone. How wrong he was. That was the kind of mistake you make once, Ulric resolved to himself. A second time and it was likely Varda would see the end of Ulric Einar’s adventure. Ulric resolved himself with the mantra that had come to dominate his days: Get better, get stronger, learn more. A mantra of success that the man chanted to himself.
Ulric had discovered that his glade, this pocket of verdancy buried beneath that staggering canopy, runneth over with bounty. He'd found a cat-tail like tall water reed whose stalks were every bit good as celery, with crisp and nutritious. Others, a woody stem with thin needlelike leaves, had strong flavor reminiscent of thyme. Still another, with thin stalks and short fernlike leaves taste almost identical to parsley. Anything that could be harvested and planted near his shelter was, cultivated in small beds dug with a carved shovel. That backbreaking work took him three days, only viable because of his vigor.
For every botanical gift, however, was a reciprocal curse. Most were simply too bitter or acidic to eat. Some were marginal but too much of which would induce diarrhea, or, as one that had elicited little to no immediate response but taught him to wait far longer before ingesting larger quantities, induced a nausea and diarrhea, unlike anything he'd ever experienced. He avoided that one furthermore. Three he strongly suspected induced cardiac symptoms, although he'd not ever eaten enough to confirm it. Two he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, contained a potent paralytic. He'd been unable to walk following those tests and had struggled to breathe deeply the rest of the day. It was mildly terrifying, testing these things. But it was the only way he could secure enough food to last through what was sure to be a soon-to-arrive winter season.
What Ulric had not experienced, outside of a few initial bouts of neurosis and near meltdowns there at the beginning, was loneliness. Ulric had never been a great people person. Not that he was some kind of nonfunctionally introverted psycho who hated everyone. He was calm, easygoing, witty, and demonstrated a rare interest in listening to the people to which he talked, instead of just waiting for his turn to talk. To the point that he sometimes felt that they were unnerved by the fact that he was intently listening to them, and felt self-conscious about it.
It wasn't that he was bad at being around people. He just didn't enjoy being around people. Ulric had what might be the smallest social battery of any functional adult he'd ever met. It had always been like that, even with family. He'd be good for around half an hour and then he wanted to be alone for a few hours. Eight continuous hours of social exposure was like Kryptonite, he felt drained and exhausted. Out here, isolated for what had to be more than two months according to his old reckoning of things, he'd never felt the lack of human contact. If someone showed up he'd probably be excited at the change but, without a doubt, if they hung around for long he'd find a reason to slip off into the wood for a few hours. Not for the first time, Ulric considered the high likelihood that he was somewhere on the spectrum. Eh. The trees weren't complaining.
