Nightmare Realm Summoner

Alex rose to his feet, nearly tripping over himself in the process as he suddenly found himself upright far faster than he’d intended to be. He stumbled and caught himself on the wall of the log cabin he sat within.

Whoops. I should probably wait a moment to make my body can adapt to the changes before I charge headfirst into something.

He paused for a few seconds, letting his brain re-adjust. There were no screams or other sounds of battle coming from outside, which was a good thing. It meant nothing had gone too wrong yet.

The room around him was, however, empty. Claire had already finished meditating. Unless she’d suddenly gotten a whole lot faster at it, that probably meant Alex had taken longer than normal. That wasn’t really much of a surprise to him given Berith’s surprise appearance.

Alex blew out a small sigh and adjusted his shirt. His hands moved as he wanted them to. Control of his body had been returned to him. And so, without further ado, he strode out from the cabin to check on how the rest of the town were doing.

Campers scurried along the edges of the clearing, reinforcing the shoddy battlements in preparation for the upcoming fight. Jagged spikes of wood jutted up from the ground at angles in rings around the camp, their tips sharpened to what would hopefully be deadly points.

The fact that there weren’t any monsters already knocking on their non-existent doors was definitely a good thing. There was no reason to tempt fate, though. Alex set off at a brisk pace to find Claire and the others.

Fortunately, that wasn’t a difficult task. Most everyone he was looking for had already gathered around a large, open space a few dozen feet away from the Warp Relay. A large square roughly the size of an average dining room had been drawn into the dirt.

Mite and his puppet stood at its center, surrounded by what could only be described as a pile of trash. Teeth, bones, scales, hair — and just about everything else that could come from a monster — were all strewn about them.

If someone had taken a week old trash bin and smashed it to pieces on the ground, it probably would have strongly resembled the scene before Alex. It certainly would have smelled similar. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise, but corpses pieces did not have a particularly enticing odor.

Orchid and Claire stood several paces away from the square. The two of them were watching the odd scene through squinted eyes. Neither of them had actually moved to stop anything Mite was doing, but they certainly didn’t seem happy about any of it.

Rhyss floated alongside them. As usual, his expression was impossible to read. His lone eye observed Mite unblinkingly. Not a single muscle on his body so much as twitched. If Alex hadn’t known better, he might have thought the powerful Advisor was a sculpture frozen in the air.

”…it’ll be fine soon enough,” Mite was saying. He crossed his arms in front of his chest. ”And this wouldn’t smell half bad if you’d let me get started the moment I was ready. Things only start smelling when you leave them out for a few hours.”

”Perhaps you should have considered the possibility of a delay before you started scattering organs across the ground,” Orchid said. ”If you are going to be using necromancy within the town, you need to at least inform us of what it is you are doing. You can’t just start slinging magic around. Especially this magic.”

Mite blew out an explosive sigh. ”This is why I don’t tell people what I’m doing. I always get the same damn reaction, you know. Everyone’s happy to hire me right up until I actually start doing what they want. Didn’t you ask for a portal? I’m making a portal. What’s the issue?”

”There isn’t an issue, actually,” Orchid said. ”Not with the building, at least. It’s with the approval of the building.”

”I — wait, what?” Mite’s brow furrowed. ”What do you mean?”

”You need approval for the building location from the town owner before you begin creating anything,” Rhyss said. ”You have been approved to create a building, but the location in which it is made has not yet been approved.”

”You mean you don’t have an issue with the necromancer stuff?” Mite asked, blinking. ”It’s just that I’m trying to start it too early?”

”My personal tastes for necromancy are irrelevant. Alex indicated that you be allowed to work,” Orchid said in a stiff tone. ”Which is why I did not interfere while you were preparing your work. If I had known you were working with… fresh materials, I would have. Most necromancers properly treat their belongings before erecting something. But, regardless, you are not being prohibited from building anything. You just need Alex’s permission first. Creating a building that smells like rotted cheese in the middle of the town seems like a remarkably poor idea.”

Alex had a pretty good idea of what was going on by the time he came to a stop alongside the group. Claire glanced at him, then gave him a slight nod.

”Good timing,” she said. ”Did you hear the gist of things?”

”Pretty much,” Alex confirmed. ”And I can’t help but agree. Mite, I really don’t care how you make the building… but I don’t want my town to smell like literal death. People are meant to live here.”

”You’re really more concerned with the location than the… uh, materials?”

”I don’t really see why we should care,” Alex said with a frown. As nitpicky as the situation was, it was actually good to see that Rhyss was keeping an eye on people building things on his town. It set a good precedent. Alex really didn’t want to wake up to find someone had built a house outside of his. ”But we really can’t have the town smelling like death. This is seriously rancid.”

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”It only smells because I’ve had the stuff sitting out here for a while. The building won’t have any smell once its finished. It gets purified.” Mite hesitated for a moment before clearing his throat. ”I would have told you earlier, but I thought you would fire me. And I’m not a Necromancer. I’m a Bioengineer. There’s a difference. The things I make aren’t technically dead. Well, they are, but they aren’t. You know.”

Alex did not.

He also didn’t particularly care. If Mite could make him his teleporter and it wasn’t going to smell anymore, then the boy could call his class whatever the hell he wanted to.

”Great,” Alex said. ”This location should be fine then. I really don’t care about anything other than having a functional portal, and it should be toward the center of town. This is as good a spot as any.”

”Acknowledged,” Rhyss said. He inclined his head to Mite. ”You are cleared to complete construction.”

”Great,” Mite said with a grin. He rubbed his hands together. ”You might want to stand back. I’m not used to doing this with an audience.”

”How long will it take?” Alex asked as everyone other than Rhyss backed up several feet.

Given the absolute mess he’s got here, it’s probably going to be a while. Even with the System backing him up and the existence of magic… I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a day or more.

”Oh, Rhyss already let me set everything out. That was the hard part. Can’t accidentally mess up any of the patterns or everything goes to shit. Found that out the hard way a few times.” Mite rolled up his sleeves. ”This won’t take long at all.”

”Patterns?” Alex repeated, his brow furrowing.

Mite didn’t respond. He knelt and pressed his hands against the ground, concentration creasing his features. The back of Alex’s neck prickled as the air pressure suddenly popped and changed. A dull hum rose up from the garbage surrounding mite. It begun to tremble as sparks of flitting black energy arced throughout it.

The strands of magic hissed, racing throughout the monster parts and forming into a buzzing net. It undulated and wavered like seaweed on the ocean floor, snapping with the changing currents.

Pieces of bone begun to lift into the air.

Mites hands rose as well. He flicked and plucked at the air like it were the strings of a harp. More materials rose up around him and the energy cut into them, shearing away fragments of bone and flesh away.

Pieces snapped together like Legos, as if they’d been machined to fit each other perfectly. Individual parts became segments and segments became chunks as parts of a building begun to assemble themselves in real time.

The twisting strands of black energy sliced through the components around mite with such precision that it should have been impossible. There was a veritable storm of monster flesh around him. Dozens of different altercations and connections were happening simultaneously. Wholly separate actions, some to create, some to destroy.

Doing all of it at once should have been impossible. The human mind simply couldn’t split itself in that many directions at once.

It didn’t look like anybody had told Mite that.

His hands danced through the air like an orchestra conductor, surrounded by a storm of his own making. It wasn’t long before all sight of him was completely lost. Walls formed of bleached bone rose up around the boy and blocked him from sight.

Arcs of black energy raced over their surface, burning away the outer layers with a magic so intense that not even smoke managed to escape.

And then it was done.

Before them rose a dome, approximately eight feet tall and equally as wide in diameter. Its surface was craggy and bumpy from the mixture of scale, bone, and hard material that made it up. The building’s door was one flat sheet of melted bone that almost seemed to ripple like a wavy sea.

And, possibly most notably of all, no scent remained in the air. It had been completely burned away.

”Holy shit,” Alex said. Claire nodded mutely in agreement, though the motion was so small that he nearly missed it.

The door swung open soundlessly and Mite stepped out, revealing a plain room behind him. The dome’s floor was made of the same material as the rest of it, and in its center rested a large pillar. Throbbing veins of purple energy ran throughout the pillar, fading as they traveled farther until they were lost in the sea of bone around it.

Mite swallowed and cleared his throat. ”There you go. One building. Teleporter. Not really that pretty or anything. I kind of messed up on some of the treating and cutting. I wanted it to be more spherical. But it’s a teleporter. It works. Right? I still get paid.”

The nervousness in his voice pulled Alex’s eyes away from the building behind him. Mite’s earlier words rung in Alex’s head. This wasn’t the first time he’d made a building in the apocalypse — but his previous employers clearly hadn’t much liked the results.

”Mite, I don’t give a shit what you make buildings out of. If anything, recycling is good. No reason to just go wasting monster parts,” Alex said through a bark of laughter. ”As long as this thing connects to the Astral Map—”

”It does.”

”Then consider yourself hired. Again. Already kind of did that, but the point still stands.”

”Really?” Mite asked, his eyes lighting up. He caught himself, then coughed into his fist. ”Of course. Who wouldn’t appreciate something like this? It’s a great building.”

”Fascinating,” Orchid said, studying the teleporter intently. ”I’ve… never heard of something like this before. What class do you have?”

”Oh, now you like me?” Mite squinted at her. ”You aren’t in the Org Chart. I don’t answer to you.”

Alex bit back a snort of laughter. That probably wouldn’t have looked too great for his image as a supposed member of the Starfallen Family.

Though I don’t think we can realistically keep that up much longer. I’m certain Orchid is starting to suspect things already… if she hasn’t already figured them out. Should probably talk to Claire about what to do there. I don’t to want to blow our cover, but there’s a certain point where hiding shit isn’t going to help us anymore. Orchid is pretty stuck with us right now. Might as well try to get more use of her knowledge.

Alex shook his head. ”Don’t start arguments right now. This is great stuff, Mite. You have no idea how useful this is going to be.”

”I was going to ask, actually. Why do you need a teleporter so bad for a fight? For a way to run away?”

The spatial ring on Alex’s finger felt heavier than it ever had before. There was a small fortune of credits in it just waiting for him to cash them in. He’d saved the Credits ever since the first visit to Valley Ford… and now he could finally cash them in with someone who was about to owe him quite the large favor.

”No. I didn’t need it so we could run away. More the opposite, actually. We needed this so we can bring somebody here.” Alex grinned. ”Someone who’s been waiting quite some time.”

It was time to retrieve Finley from Towntown — and then he was going to go on a shopping spree.