NOVEL NEXT Chapter 29
Up. Up high above the city Kyle could feel the static electricity of nature in the atmosphere. There wasn’t enough infrastructure functioning in the city for him to draw from the grid. Normally he wouldn’t have even bothered trying to do this. But with so much magic saturating the city, he could.
He reached to the sky with his wand and gathered the awesome power of nature stored there. He was burning arcanes like mad, channeling magic through himself at higher levels than he’d ever done before. It was terrifying, and exhilarating. Honestly, a once in a lifetime opportunity for a wizard really. After all, when else would he have unlimited access to raw magic without having to become one of those crazy loons roughing it out in high magic zones of the wild for the sake of magic.
He far preferred the comforts of a city. Plumbing, cell phone reception, the internet…doughnuts. Kyle was exceptionally fond of roads and vehicles. Sure, he walked or took public transportation most of the time, but he loved the convenience of being able to hop in a vehicle and go when he needed to. Buildings and roads were pretty important to Kyle, too.
The buildings and roads were crawling with monsters. Distant screams, intermittent crashes and wailing of sirens were interspersed with the howls and growls of newly manifested monsters. The very infrastructure of modern society that Kyle cherished and had forsaken his wizard training and became a warlock instead for, were turning on the city he loved. It wasn’t just vehicles that were turning.
Yet the power in the air, it called to Kyle in the way that magic called to all those with the proclivity toward wizardry. A craving that he dared not feed. The heavy taste of the arcanes in the air was sweet and savory on his tongue. He licked his lip then bit it in pleasure as he drank in all the power he could ever want. Arcanes flooded Kyle’s body, coursing through his veins and making him feel like he’d grown a hundred times larger without changing at all.
He was going to regret this later.
But he watched the monsters noticing him. The bright fall sunlight was glinting off so many metallic hides making random wild blinding reflections of light playing across the shadowed areas on the street and up the sides of buildings. More magic than most wizards ever saw in their lifetimes.
Kyle grinned. Fixing his targets in his mind.
Though no one could see it, his eyes were glowing. Static electricity arced in little crackles over his body. The scent of ozone wafted from him as flashes of miniature lightning bolts played between the rising hairs of his head.
“Jones?” Kyle felt the weird metallic taste on his tongue that he always found when he tried to speak while casting this type of magic. It mingled deliciously with the flavor of the arcanes. “Stay at least thirty feet back from me so you don’t get hit by a bolt grounding on you.”
“Yes, Sir!” The specialist called to Kyle’s back. Then Kyle started walking forward. Maybe the class three metallic wolf-form monsters sensed the growing danger that Kyle represented because they hesitated to attack, instead growling menacing as they backed away. The class one and two incomplete manifestations of the vehicle form monsters only saw him as a source of delectable edible magic. Emboldened by the retreat of the class threes, the class ones and twos began lumping and huffling their way towards him.
His steps were slow at first, but Kyle grew more confident with every arcane he absorbed. His pace gradually increased until he was walking briskly through the chaos while less evolved forms of monster hurried toward him. Before those beasts could get within attack range, Kyle acted.
“Lightning bolt!” Though his words were spoken at normal volume, they seemed louder, echoing with the dangerous levels of arcanes reverberating in his being. A bolt of lightning split the heavens, momentarily striking down to ground on Kyle with a crash of thunder. He held the thousands of joules on his wand for a split second, before discharging the electricity in dozens of arcs simultaneously onto the monstrous targets he’d chosen.
The creatures were killed in their tracks or maimed enough that their forward movement was halted. The sound of electricity crackled and hissed as the unfortunate creatures were cooked inside their metal hides. It was quiet for a second, then Kyle, wand still raised to the heavens spoke again.
“Lightning bolt.” Again, a flash of electricity cracked down from the heavens to race through Kyle’s wand then out to the milling monster herd. A thunderclap deafened him then rolled off into the distance as sound does. More monsters fell, screaming and roaring their defiance, some just going silent when the electricity he’d pumped through them had dissipated. Others didn’t fall. They just started charging if they hadn’t already been converging on this new source of sustenance.
Jones stayed well behind what Kyle had deemed the safe radius. The soldier was glad he had because Kyle was arcing bolts of lightning and conducting electricity for dozens or even as many as a hundred feet away. The bolts of plasma heated air were directed forward and to the sides and never backwards toward the anxious specialist. That didn’t make him feel any safer about it.
Absolute shock had frozen Jones after the first volley of lightning that the nerdy-history-buff-museum-employee, Kyle, had held in his hand, and then used to drop over a dozen monsters ranging in size from two-door hatchbacks to extended cab pickup trucks. It wasn’t until the second spell had triggered most of the monsters in the next two blocks to charge, that he pulled himself from his temporary stupor. There wasn’t time to be surprised after that. The monsters were coming, and Jones and Kyle had a three-block gauntlet to run of class one, class two, and class three manifestations with no backup coming.
