The Power of Ten, Book Five: Versatile Wizardry

The Contract zipped into his forehead, and the Mick closed his eyes, gasping as it was Sealed with a surge of lightning all over his and the Runner’s bodies.

“There you go, a Contract,” I Said lightly. “You should be able to bring up the other’s Lightning.”

The Runner’s head came up, and Lightning sizzled all around it once more, the purple-blue streams gathering up to its head, and purple-violet balls of it formed about it in an erratic dance.

The Mick brought up his hands in wonder, and clenched them. A sizzling skin of Lightning washed down from the crown of his head to his feet. With a whoop, he jumped right off his Disk, and started running.

Everyone, including the Bird, watched him as he became a sparking blur of motion. The sheathe of Lightning around him swept back into the vague outline of a large bird, partially obscuring the fact that he was racing along about three feet above the ground, his strides greatly extended on legs of lightning, and he wasn’t even pumping his arms, held out to the side like short wings trailing feathers made of voltage.

The KIA crew whooped immediately, and the scouts took it up a moment later, getting into the spirit of things.

He was only out there for a moment before he hopped back to his Disk, breathing a little hard, but an ear-to-ear grin on his face.

“That is exhilarating!” he managed to say.

“I want a Contracted Beast!” Big John spoke up behind us. “A big Firebird to fly around on, or a Dragon, or something!”

“Make Mage, and maybe you can Contract with one of the smaller Drakes,” I shot back over my shoulder. “You want a Dragon, be an Archmage!”

“Even a young one?” he wheedled.

“Like any Dragon is going to entrust one of her young ones to you,” I sniffed, and everyone laughed at him.

“Were you serious about that?” one of the Scouts, a tall, skinny blonde named Ella, spoke up eagerly.

“Yes,” I told her. “The biggest problems are a friendly meeting, understanding, and compatibility. The creature has to not be hostile, realize you aren’t being hostile, understand the purpose, and the two of you have to be compatible on a spiritual level. If you’re looking down on it, if you think it’s just a dumb slave, and all the ways you can use and abuse it... well, that’s probably not going to end well.

“It’s also why it won’t work often for Servant-class Beasts, as most of them are barely more than animals, and won’t understand what you are trying to do. That means Adepts and Warrior-class Beasts, generally.

“You can Contract with a more powerful Beast, but that restricts the Beast, so it is extremely unlikely to do such a thing. Also, they are attracted to more powerful, special people, so folk with Talents, Tiered Stars, or active Seeds are vastly preferred over normal mages, if they’ve any choice in the matter.”

They all groaned despite themselves. I gathered that was not entirely unexpected.

“That said, that’s only if you’re in competition. A lot of that stuff can be gained in the future, just like everything else. As long as you keep feeding them Mana and treat them like partners, not tools, they can be pretty patient.”

“Can we... get more than one?” Red asked predictably.

“Yes, one per Magery Rank, and one per Element. So, the Mick is an Adept, he could potentially have two Contracted Beasts: one for Earth, and one for Lightning.” I reached out and slugged his arm before he could say anything. “Don’t even THINK about it for at least another month and you’ve built up a rapport with your Runner there, and have started working out how to live with an active Contracted Beast. You have to supply it with active Mana, learn how to wield its Lightning, help it wield yours, learn how to Meditate with it, what it likes to eat and how often, physical limits, personality quirks, and so forth.

“Also, he doesn’t have to rest out here. You can send him into his Contract Space. It’s right there.” I pointed at nothing, everyone looked there, but Mick and the Runner both blinked in tandem.

“Well, holy shit!” the Mick said, glancing at the Runner. The big Bird rose slightly from his crouch, took half a step forward, and was abruptly gone.

“Wow,” Red murmured on seeing that. “Like, who needs the Summoning Element?”

“It still has its uses, and a much, much broader array of stuff you can Contract with is only part of it. Now, if you conjoin them, well...” I wove my fingers together and pulled. “The big benefit for a Contracted Beast is the additional Mana you can send it to help it improve. If you can send both the Summoning Magic AND another Element at the same time, that is very, very good for your Contracted creatures.”

“Do you have a Contracted Beast, Lady Fae?” Big John spoke up curiously.

“I do. I just haven’t Summoned him, as the situations weren’t particularly right.” And, well, I hadn’t been an Adept. Summoning him here without being one would definitely have restricted his power. “He’s a Summoned Fox, not a native creature. I’m not really in a position where I think I can support multiple Contracted Creatures easily yet...”

Plus, I had standards, and hadn’t met something else I’d wanted to recruit, yet.

Everyone blinked as the Runner popped back out of the Contract Space, settling back down on his Disk. His Disk drifted up close to the Mick, who reached out to put a hand on it almost automatically, their touch sparking different Lightnings.

“Definitely gonna get me a Dragon,” Big John promised himself under his breath.

--------

It was very, very obvious to the soldiers along the border that this was not going to be the relatively small Swarm that had skirted around Fort Montgomery. They watched in disbelief as literally hundreds of Beasts ran by in their field of view, heading east, east, east, trying to get out of the way of what was coming.

The return of the scouting unit survivors who had ostensibly set off the whole event also raised an uproar, especially when Colonel Harrison raised harsh criticisms of them... and then, to the amazement of everyone, the Colonel was promptly arrested and hauled off to face some harsh questions about his relationship with one of the local ranchers.

Said rancher was found to be on his way east to Louisiana in his own private prop-job. Said plane was also glowing with bright purple Faerie Fire when the military interceptors drew up alongside it. If their spell-cannons which conducted Cast spells out of the plane were next to useless against many flying Beasts, they were more than capable of shooting down a civilian plane, or tracking any mage with Magic Wings from a safe distance. They escorted Mr. Venkman down to a landing field, where some interested investigators were waiting to question him very closely, indeed.

------

The Horde was coming, and there was no doubt the KIA team was going to be fighting in it again. They were immediately conscripted as Militia to supplement the Army, a nearly universal duty as I understood it. I collected my pay for locating Venkman so quickly and Faerie Fire’ing his plane for easy take-down, but mostly I drove the KIA guys into the Seven Stars Formation so they could finish treating at least one of their Elements to Four Tiers before the Swarm got here.

I had to Temper my new Starfield to Six, so that wasn’t anything I could avoid, either.

Despite the danger, none of the team were anything but eager for the attack to arrive. They knew more attacks meant more Soul Crystals, which meant more powerful Stars for all of them, and suddenly they all had dreams of getting to Mage that didn’t seem so impossible anymore. After all, they were all over twenty-five, far past the optimal time to make Mage, and nobody was going to spend the resources on them to ever try to do so, focusing on younger and more talented Casters with greater potential.

They were on their own, which mean seizing any chance they could with both hands!

I also taught them the other five basic Spells of their Elements. I didn’t have the Adept versions of them, but that was fine. A Tier-Four version of the Novice spells would be plenty useful in the fight to come.

Virtually every Element had a direct attack effect, a defensive effect, some form of neo-Summoning effect, and a movement effect. Their main problem was learning to reconnect the Stars in the new Patterns quickly, which naturally involved memorizing all of them intimately, and lots and lots of rep counts.

That said, they were all smart guys, and took to the challenge with both eagerness and fervor in expectation of the conflict ahead. I was giving all of them another half-score spells to use, which was a crazy expansion of their versatility, and they practiced with great haste as they prepped for the attack.

-------

Lieutenant Jefferson was nominally in charge of us, being active duty and eager to work with ‘militia’ members called in to service. But there was no way he was giving orders to the Mick and his boys, who obviously all had military experience, and all of them were deferring to me. While I obviously had not had such experience, there was no doubt whatsoever that none of them wanted to mess with me, and I had a lot of witnesses to how I’d been shooting down Spiders.

I passed out the wooden Rods to everyone in my team, exactly two dozen people with myself included. The Lieutenant’s scouting platoon had been brought back to full strength for this, so everyone in the party was an Adept, and nobody doubted the KIA squad’s qualifications to do this stuff.

The soldiers were also muttering stuff about the KIA team’s backstory, which seemed to involve their military service and being betrayed and abandoned by their commanding officer. Apparently, they’d been declared dead, and when they’d finally shown up out of nowhere, it had been after their re-up date. Every one of them had taken their pay and mustered out, going into the merc work of being Hunters.

Supposedly their prick of a commanding officer was a gifted Mage in the Georgia military yet, with an up-and-coming reputation.

What Harrison was responsible for had gotten around, too. Given the fighting that was going to occur, the man was also in charge of a militia team right now, one composed of Venkman, his family, and his hirelings, all sitting there on the front lines and going to die ‘to nobly sacrifice of ourselves, and defend human territory against those damn Beasts!’, as he’d so valiantly claimed two days before.

They were all Branded with Runes, and if they ran, they would die. They were going to be ‘valiantly defending humanity’s territory’ for the rest of their lives.

We volunteered for the vanguard teams, as the first mass numbers of creatures were on the way, the later waves having the more powerful ones.

Grimly enough, the Ants were joining this one.

The Shale-Shell Ants wandered everywhere in this territory, prey for everything and cleaning up the remnants of everything else. Even the Rats and Mice and Hares out here preyed on the Ants, but now we were all seeing the results of what happened when all those Ants actually got together and moved.

The Spiders crawled over the landscape, but the Ants just mowed it down. Every stand of brush and cacti was mowed over and disassembled in front of the river of Insects coming our way. Ants of greater and greater size were coming in behind, easily the size of the Spiders, doubtless creatures normally kept in deep caverns to defend the eggs, now marched out and displaying the threat the Ants could actually manifest.

It was basically a given they could reproduce faster than the Spiders, but since everything ate them, that wasn’t out of line. There were just... a lot of them.

But, well, that was what Kickers on Cantrips were for!