Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 13

**************** CHAPTER THIRTEEN

They say that in the nanosecond or so before death, your entire life flashes before your eyes, probably so that you can panic and be seriously concerned right from the start of your journey into the afterlife that you've fucked up royally from start to finish and shouldn't be trusted with another rebirth into life, let alone be granted white robes, a halo and harp for the rest of eternity. Well it didn't happen to me... probably because I was so already so brain dizzy with all of my internal emergency alarm circuits blinking red that it couldn't spare the time to dissect thirty years of screw ups into a one or two second summary.

I thought for sure that the ten foot creature was going to just merely squash me with a foot, or maybe just jump up and down on top of me for awhile, but Chuckles was still in fine humor and now her thought he was probably letting me off much too easy by killing me right away. In our less than five minute duel I hadn't shown that I couldn't even momentarily inconvenience it, let alone actually hurt it! If this had been a professional boxing match, the referee would have rung the bell on me long ago. The bastard seemed to be completely immune to anything I could cast at it and my desperation physical attack on its sort-of rubbery skin had pretty much ignored that magically enhanced force too. His own physical assault had in return left me rather mangled and had knocked my my eyes quite out of focus. Even the notion of trying to crawl away was well beyond my my currently capabilities. Under the circumstances, I was willing to declare the bout a tie.

Now the giant walking turd was standing over me laughing. No, he wasn't going to finish me off quickly. He was enjoying himself far too much, and he was going to make Aunt Millie's favorite (and only) nephew plead for death long before it would ever finally come. I might be a righteous asshole sometimes, but I just fight to win and never draw out a fight for my personal amusement or any sadistic notion of prolonging my opponent's agony, but then again I do have some principles. This nasty huge dark skinned visitor apparently didn't... but then again, almost none of them did.

That's why the wizards of virtually all of the civilized worlds don't like any visitors much, and really stomp down upon renegade bastards that summon these assholes. Deseret has never given a shit about playing by the rules anyway, and if breeding pits like this one turned out to be common-place around here, some GWA wizards back home were going to go postal upon reading my report... assuming I lived long enough to write it.

Chuckles was just winding down his laughing exercise for the day, and was now pondering what to do to me next when Sean finally decided to make a reappearance. The best I could tell, the little traitor had taken off with Miranda when my jolly huge playmate first appeared. Frankly, it was a bit late for advice now -- I really would have preferred having his help earlier. At the moment I was pretty much out for the count and I didn't think I could even find even a thimbleful of magic now, let alone channel even a drop of it. I'd already hit this guy with my best stuff and it didn't even singe his crotch hair.

"Aye, lad. This is one of their masters, a dark lord of darkness he is from that terrible realm that you sealed the other portal to earlier. This body is not his own but a hybrid construct made of matter from both his world and yet ours. No, your powers were not great enough or of the right sort to defeat him, but now you've still got one last chance... but only for a moment! Hurry! Reach for the silver ammo balls in your pocket and focus upon them; be swift, lad!"

But I couldn't. For the moment I could only feely the power around me smirking, and dancing like a butterfly just out of my reach, evading my feeble attempts to channel and use it.

"No, not that way, feel inside yourself... focus on your arm. Upon the bracer that melded to your arm during the fire in the theater. Yes, there! Let that power flow of its own now around your fingers and the silver and manipulate it -- let it flow through them and melt, not molten or hot but soft and cool, flowing like quicksilver, lad... let them flow!"

Manipulation. It's a tricky skill that not a lot of magicians have much aptitude for, but I had just enough of a knack for it that I mention it upon my business card. Yeah... that's me showing off again. It's flashy, but a really functionally limited sort of magic that's better for parlor tricks than 'save-your-ass' techniques. I only learned it because it nicely complimented Arc-Tec fabrication, to more easily mold or sculpt the design of an artifice -- helping to turn form into a more aesthetically pleasing design... and thus improved function. In a nutshell, this is the art of manipulating or subtly altering a non-organic material's form or appearance. A wizard with a genius for manipulation can turn a rock into a coffee cup (the manipulated item must always retain an equal mass) but no one can do the same trick with organics, such as to turn a prince into a frog. As far as I know it can't be done.

In this case I think I understood what Sean wanted me to do... and like an idiot, I should have thought of it earlier. Note to self, I was going to make myself one heck of a set of silver brass knuckles the next time I had a quiet week or two!

I should have figured this out earlier! The skin of this hybrid creature was largely immune to the magic of this world but silver, being the innately magical substance it was, should be able to penetrate it. Probably the Thompson gun loaded with silver bullets wouldn't have hurt it much either, but it might have been distracting and I might have gotten lucky with a well coordinated attack. With the silver now beginning to coat my hand like a cooly flexible glove I could now almost feel the golden bracer below the skin of my right arm 'click' and connect to it and I could feel its internal power flow now up into the metal. Weird... very tingly and peculiar, but it would do.

The bracer, an unknown, unidentified piece of pre-Columbia Inca magical art had melted into my arm, or rather it had grafted itself onto me internally in the great searing heat of my battle against the fire god. It was stuck on for good, fused underneath the skin of my arm. I'd pretty much ignored the thing, really assuming that it was just a big stupid hunk of 'Hamburger Helper', or Artifact-level magic that helped to boost your own inate abilities, and nothing more. Now I wasn't quite so sure. Even looking at the bare skin it was hard to tell that the bigger looking freckles were really just sub-dermal traces of the Greater Arcana Stones that powered it, or other parts of the Arc-Tec circuitry. I'd traded a lot of labor time for just a couple of the stones and these were definitely factory seconds, right out of the scratch and dent surplus pile. Buying a single 'good' one would have cost me more than I could make in a year, and then I'd have to stand in line to find anyone to sell me one. Somehow, this 'flawed' device had now merged with me and probably contributed to my augmented powers. I wondered now if Sean had tweaked or helped to arrange this accident in some way, but that was a question for later.

"That's the way!" Sean whispered inside my head. "Now wait to strike... he'll want to hold you close, to watch your eyes at the moment when he kills you slowly, to savor it. You'll only have one chance to strike first, so you must wait to take it. Keep your hand in your pocket until then, to hide it and focus every ounce of magic you can muster to flow into the silver when you strike."

Actually, I had no trouble restraining my attack for another moment or two. When Chuckles grabbed the mangled front of my suit to pick me up, my body suddenly wanted to report a rather long listing of broken and shattered bones, twisted and torn muscles and more back problems than a convention hall full of chiropractors could have handled. I nearly blacked out with the pain as he used two hands to pick me up off of the floor and hold me up for a final bit of taunting.

Once the double and triple vision cleared, the pain dulled again for a moment and my focus became a bit sharper and I thought I could channel magic once again. Not a lot at the moment, but some... and for what I needed to do next, some would probably be enough.

Another moment later, some started to turn into a bit, and right as Chuckles decided he pull me towards him so that he could bite off my head like a chicken, the internal power faucet began to turn itself more wide open and by the time I heard Sean yelling at me to strike, I had an adequate bunch of power stored up in my hand. Glowing bright, my hand quite burned its way out of my pocket and it didn't have far to reach, to thrust right into the center of the creature's chest.

"Hard!" Sean yelled, and rather audibly. "Deep! Deeper! Keep the palm flat and thrust hard straight into its heart!"

I supposed I shouldn't have been surprised at all when my liquid silver covered fingers and hand quite penetrated and burst through the creature's tough rubbery skin. The silver alone nearly did the trick but the extra magical force helped immeasurably. Inside, the creature' flesh was quite soft and almost more like a gelatinous soft mass rather than solid meat and bone. My silver hand glowed strong as it continued to enter, turning the soft gelatinous flesh black, destroying it to smoke and ash powder as I touched it. He thrashed for a moment trying to claw me off of him, but the agony made his arms randomly spasm and his long powerful claws could no longer grasp or hold me. But when my fingers touched its pulsing and burning heart, I knew I'd won.

Chuckles had been caught quite by surprise by my silver handed desperate assault and howled with insurmountable agony the moment my fingers pierced through his rubbery outer skin. He'd never known this sort of pain before and seemed helpless to resist me. The second my index finger touched his heart he collapsed to the floor quite boneless, alive but inanimate, no longer in control of his hybrid body or able to resist me at all.

Now it would be his eyes that powerlessly watched mine in terror!

With my hands upon the prize, I grabbed the black pulsing heart and in triumph I ripped it out from his chest. What I did next would probably disturb my dreams for the rest of my life. Slowly, as if in a trance, my silver brightly glowing hand lifted that black smoking daemonic heart up to my mouth and I bit into it.

"Yes..." Sean gleefully chirped with intense excitement. "Do it! Bite into it! Now! Hurry, while it still has the full power of the hybrid inside it! Eat it all... all of it! You must... especially if you want to have the strength to stand, let alone find the strength to fight the rest of the wizards and close that portal! You have to! That is our task!"

Our task? Suddenly I had a very terrible feeling that nothing that had happened to me lately had been at all random. When I could stand and walk again... my little buddy and I were going to have a rather long important conversation!

Actually, from the moment my teeth bit into that huge grapefruit sized black heart, I began to fill with power... and lots of it! After I took few bites I suddenly realized that I was standing up without a bit of physical pain as my body burned, inside and out. The burning pain was like the worst flu sickness I'd ever had, with my limbs all crackling and shaking, but I was healing too! Broken and shattered bones were now merging back together and my torn muscles were knitted themselves and tingled with strength that they'd never known!

I'd never been athletic, sucking in most school sports back in the day, but now I felt ready to rip out the limbs from every Deseret soldier or magician I faced and bludgeon them to death with their own arms and legs... and then go run a marathon!

The worst part about absorbing a demi-god level of the dark magical energy that had been filtered into Chuckle's semi-mortal body, and now into to mine... is that you feel like somehow someone has managed to pour a full keg of beer into a one-pint glass without spilling it. I was now hyper-alert and surging with an adrenaline or hyper-caffeinated buzz and wanted to go kill some Deseret folks.

No, not just kill... I wanted... needed, to make them all pay. They needed to burn! And the Zyphyr was coming to give it to them! I was going to be their burninator and punish them all for everything that they had done to me, to Janice and of course to Bel!

I wasn't 'me' anymore, or rather 'Zac the pyromaniac screwup' had escaped from the internal prison I had been trying to confine him into and now he seemed to be the one back in charge of my hyper-stimulated body once again. I surged with aggressive malevolent power and wanted everyone and everything around to pay for the anger and rage that I now felt. This was the 'old Zac', who acted before thinking... and now he was back, angry, and filled with the stolen powers of one of the mightiest aliens I could even imagine!

The smallest remaining bit of the new smarter and wiser Zak was helplessly screaming inside of my head, watching helplessly as my immortally powered body turned and momentarily considered the nearby figure of Miranda, and then unable to distinguish friend from foe in its madness, began to summon fire to obliterate her!

***************

I'll never know how much of the last part of that battle that Miranda saw. I'd assumed she'd run in terror back to the front guard area, but when I finally looked up in my utter initial madness I saw her standing there with a blank face next to me. Her eyes were steady and focused and she wasn't looking at me in horror and screaming her lungs out. In fact she was way calmer than I would have been under the exact same circumstance.

I was more than crazy enough at that moment to burn her up too, until she smiled and took my non-glowing left hand. I wouldn't say I became completely sane again... but I now remembered that the people I loved and cared about were around me and my anger became a little better focused from that moment on. Not much granted, but just enough so that my mind once again had a bit of regulatory oversight over my body again.

"Bel needs us now! We need to rescue the other women too, and fast, I think company is already starting to beat on the main door." She quietly and calmly stated. Too calmly for all the horrors she must have witnessed. Perhaps Sean was mentally holding her hand as well... no teen girl was capable of keeping their emotions under that much control after seeing what had occurred in the breeding pit.

She squeezed my left hand again tighter and I tried to relax and let out a long exhale, and with it I purged another fractional bit of my irrational rage and anger. I needed to be able to think, to plan... to handle the next battle that I knew would be coming soon and then get the women out of this hell pit and to safety.

******************

Bel, other than being naked, scared half out of her mind and utterly powerless from some potent cocktail of drugs she'd been given, looked to be alright and was ecstatic that we'd found her and come to rescue her. She'd seen most of the battle with Chuckles from a distance and had been quite positive that I'd been killed, so despite seeing me again alive and healthy (far too healthy actually), her nerves were quite a wreck.

Miranda found her a blanket but otherwise there were no other clothes to be found. The other five women rescued from their transparent cells weren't quite in as good mental shape but they were all relatively herd-able and mobile, if done firmly and slowly. Bel started to have her long overdue mental collapse, now that she'd been rescued, but Miranda, once again unusually emotionally anchored, was having none of it. She slapped her adult friend and mentor twice, and fairly hard, and then looked her hard into the eyes.

"Look! It's been a rough night for everyone... but get over it, as Zak would say!" The girl sharply announced to Bel and to the small collection of blanket wrapped rescuees. We got down here safely enough but we're all going to have to now fight our way out against a lot of very angry people. There is no time to complain or go 'Boo-hoo', so please postpone your nervous breakdowns until we're all out of here, alive and safe. Bel, they may have drained your powers but not your brains... stay with me and help get the others upstairs to safety. Zak has things that he needs to do now and he needs to know that we're out of the way and safe. Can you do this for us?"

Bel nodded with a few tears in her eyes and Miranda gave her a quick comforting hug. We weren't out of the woods by a long shot yet, but I had two of my best helpers by my side and ready to rally round me any way that they could. For now, I needed them safe and out of semi-insane 'burnination' range, in case I lost mental control once again.

I think I started to try and explain what I'd need to do next but Sean beat me to it. Both women suddenly nodded their heads and said 'Ok' and then they immediately began to herd everyone off to the furthest-most prisoner cell in the room. Those crystalline clear cell walls and ceilings seemed to be extremely magic resistant and my power level 11 fireballs hadn't even singed them earlier. Now, my power knob went up to at least twelve, if not twenty-two, and taking out the generator down at the other end of the pit was going to cause an awful lot of collateral damage.

Since Sean seemed to be choreographing this particular part of the enterprise, I waited a few moments for the girls to give him the notice that they were as safe and secure as was possible for the moment and then let him give me the starting bell for this next round of the mayhem. I could hear loud sounds and indication of magicians on the other side of the big steel security door leading here to the pit, but I didn't feel particularly creative at the moment. Five, ten or even twenty mid-level wizards were outside now trying to force their way in, and I was glad the paranoid dweebs who built this place had protected their dungeons against exactly that sort of thing, but sooner or later they'd break their way in.

Instead, I thought it would be a lot more fun I just blew my way out. Sure I could have opened it easily from this end, but I hadn't destroyed anything in several minutes now and I was still steaming mad that Chuckles had kicked my ass. The magical overload from eating that atomic-heart snack chockfull of a dozen blends of native, alien and just plain weird magic also was making me a little over-excited and trigger happy. When dark alien magic turns you into a near god-sized hammer, every little problem in the world just becomes another nail, and it was definitely hammer time now!

***************

From my angle of view, the huge magically protected steel door didn't so much go flying off of the hinges as just completely disintegrate into a couple of thousand red-hot bits of metal and super-heated magical plasma and this burning cloud just evaporated most of the Deseret magicians and soldiers that were trying to force their way into find me. I never even managed to catch a glimpse of them so I don't know if the vaporized door toasted ten or twenty of them in total. A few smoking and twitching corpses towards the back about thirty to forty feet further behind the doorway hinted that the front ranks might have been a bit crowded.

This was just the emergency response team. The big boys would be along soon but I was not particularly inclined to have a seat and wait for them. If they were late for the big dance that wasn't my problem! Besides, smashing up a few more things and shutting down that dark energy generation portal would help me take some more of the edge off my anger for a bit, while I waited for them.