“You look like a dork,” Nema said, from the side of where Tom was poring over Crypt Vocabulary, and Material Spell Synthesis, looking for some trump card to save his ass.

“I told you, I’m getting used to the weight.” Tom said, flipping the page. He was currently wearing a breastplate scavenged from the previous defenders, along with a simple helmet that covered his noggin. His brains and his heart were the two parts that could kill him faster than he could heal.

He might be able to use the crypt to heal a heart wound before he passed out, but Tom didn’t wanna test that.

He was also wearing thick leather pants to protect his junk and femoral arteries.

His gangly arms on the other hand were bare, sticking out of the metal breastplate like a snowman’s twiggy limbs.

Tom was aware what a silly figure he cut, but Nema didn’t have to point it out.

“I regret teaching you that word.” He muttered as he read the book looking for a spell phrase he could etch on a makeshift wand and juice up with his Soul pulses.

Maybe I can make some kind of flamethrower out of a charred piece of wood?...at one hundred and thirteen thousand dollars a blast.

Tom held his temple.

He really wished that Luz hadn’t enlightened him to the secular value of soul pulses. It made the poor person inside him scream in pain every time he used a pulse on anything.

Despite the fact that he was literally making it inside his body, and in an amount that meant he never even needed to worry about money ever again…

It still hurt. It was just the way he grew up, watching his grandparents constantly scrimping and saving. Wearing a leather greaser jacket from the sixties to high school. Not because he thought it was cool, but because it was a hand-me-down from his Grandpa.

At some point, spending large amounts of money had become painful, and now he could only see dollar signs attached to every soul pulse. It had been monopoly money until recently.

Tom took a deep breath and reassured himself.

No matter what happens. You’re never gonna be poor again. You might be dead, you might be enslaved, crippled or banished…but you’re never gonna be poor. Learn to let go.

Tom refocused on his work. He needed a weapon to keep pace with the Vith, and his forty-four wasn’t going to cut it. He was going to make a wand.

Wands degraded. They were subjected to advanced decomposition for each use. The best wands were made of platinum and gold. Crypts were essentially a clever fusion of a wand and a soul engine.

Wands imparted properties of the substance they were made of to the spell inscribed on them.

Case in point, Tom’s rusty repair ratchet-wand, made of rubber and stainless steel, boosting the effectiveness of the repairing spell phrase he’d carved into it, the materials also lasting against the degradation of putting Soul pulses through it, as rubber and stainless steel weather well.

I don’t need something that lasts forever. Tom thought. While a platinum and gold wand would last effectively forever, all Tom really needed was to last one battle. In which case, bone, ivory, wood, all would work, and probably better than gold for the purpose he had in mind.

Come to think of it, Tom reached over to his shelf and grabbed one of his duped bullets for the forty-four.

Surprisingly, a single .44 bullet from Jacob’s gun was almost exactly 2 percent of a kilogram, making it an ideal weight for duping, as it only took a single soul pulse to copy.

That is way too much money for a bullet. I should buy them from the Outsiders from now on. I’ll bet they can make them. Who on God’s green earth could justify paying a hundred thousand dollars for a single-

Focus.

Inside the bullet was a chemical designed to literally explode and produce a massive amount of force.

What If I applied that to the theoretical fireball wand? Tom thought, frowning. He did have to carve out the spell phrase, then backfill it with the primary ingredient that would effect the spell’s behavior. Gunpowder would probably add a lot of zip.

Gunpowder was also highly degradeable, Tom thought. They stored it in heavy duty plastic tubs with airtight seals, after all. Maybe a stabilizing agent? One that was also highly flammable but a bit more weather resistant…

“Do we have any pitch?” Tom asked, glancing over his shoulder.

Nema shrugged.

Tom sighed and stood up from his workbench, the extra weight of the armor throwing him off balance for a moment.

Raid’s tomorrow morning. Gotta get used to this.

Tom ignored the looks and chuckling as he explored the castle’s storage rooms, looking for that magical ye-olde binding agent.

“You know you’re gonna stand out like a Buk’jell in heat in that outfit tomorrow, right?” Brama asked as Tom walked by him.

“And I suppose my lily white skin would have blended in seamlessly.” Tom retorted as he walked past the Vith warrior.

“Fair point. It’s more like baked clay at this point, though.”

Tom rolled his eyes and entered the next storage room, prying open barrels until he found what he was looking for.

Hello, tree sap.

It wasn’t processed yet, so it was just a barrel full of dry clumps of sap. Tom chipped a bowlful out and brought it back to his workshop.

Let’s see. gunpowder, check. What else do we need?

Tom skimmed through the text, re-reading it for any hints he might have forgotten.

Ah! Tom’s finger landed on an important paragraph.

Blood, byproducts, and body parts also have their place in a soul monger’s toolkit. Because it is rather difficult for most creatures to commit self-harm, using a creature’s blood as the medium for a spell phrase make the creature resistant to effects that might have otherwise been lethal.

Many soul mongers getting their start practice with their own blood first so unintended mistakes are not lethal. More on this later.

So if I bleed into this, Tom thought, rubbing his chin. Then the spell will be much less likely to hurt me or blow up in my face. Add a vial of blood to the list of ingredients, I guess.

Now Tom needed a spell phrase. He inspected the flamethrower combination he’d written down in the margins of the book.

Fire lightsilver rust-air liquid forward push push

That’s proven to work, but what if we did…

Fire-air, life-air compress, forward push, compress, push, ignite.

If tom was reading this properly - Which he might not be – Fire air was either methane or hydrogen, while life-air was oxygen.

If the spell compressed them tightly enough, the explosion would be fantastic, regardless of whether it was methane or hydrogen.

Tom did some math.

Going through my notes on the ‘create water’ spell phrase, 1 soul pulse creates about eighteen gallons of water.

The book implies that the energy is split between the parts of the spell phrase.

Create water container-bound limit reserve energy feedback.

Six symbols in the ‘create water spell phrase ‘create water, and Container-bound both being a single symbol.

Being that the other symbols are essentially to regulate energy and feed it back to the ‘create water’ symbol as needed, I should assume the amount of energy that goes into the ‘create water is pretty high.

Let’s estimate a total of half.

Fire-air, life-air compress, forward-push, compress, forward-push, ignite.

7 symbols.

Fire-air and life-air each receive 1/7th of the soul pulse.

½ (estimated) of a soul pulse makes 66 lbs of mass (water)

2/7 (estimated) = thirty-seven pounds of oxygen/accelerant mixture.

Tom chewed on the end of his pen.

That seems like a lot.

An explosion did not take a lot of mass to do a lot of damage, and thirty seven pounds seemed like it would be…maybe too much? A grenade only weighed a couple pounds.

You know what, lets add another forward-push symbol.

Accelerating the package further away, and making it smaller. Safer for Tom in every respect.

2/8= 33 lbs.

That’s still a lot, but at least it’ll be further away.

Finally Tom settled on a spell phrase design that he was comfortable with, and got to work chiseling it into a wooden stick.

Then came the fun part of bleeding himself, and – very carefully – mixing it in with heated, purified resin and gunpowder, until the mixture reached a clay-like consistency.

After that, Tom just needed to press it firmly into the empty carved spell-phrase in the wand, and polish down any parts that might be sticking out.

In the end, Tom had a greyish brown spell phrase inlaid in a brownish grey wooden stick.

In short, it looked singularly unimpressive.

“That’s a lot of effort for a stick.” Nema said, looking over Tom’s shoulder as he marveled at his handiwork.

“Hopefully it was worth it.” Tom said, setting the stick aside for the resin to fully harden before tomorrow.

He really wished there was a way he could test it, but there was no place inside the castle that was conducive to explosions of indeterminate strength, and outside the castle were a bunch of people that wanted to kill him.

“I guess we’ll see.” He turned to face Nema and handed her his will. “Can you summon Luz and give this to her if I’m dead tomorrow night?”

Nema of course couldn’t read English, so she gave it a quick once over and shrugged. “Of course. I would rather you didn’t die though.”

Tom chuckled, his guts twisting into knots.

“Me too.”

“You look like you’re afraid of dying. Want me to take the edge off before bed?” she asked.

“I dunno,” Tom said, sagging in his chair and looking at the floor. “I can’t stop thinking about –” Tom glanced back up and saw a flash of the lithe girl disappearing under his bed’s pelts, her garments still settling on the floor “–… nevermind.”

***The next day***

Tom stared forward at the gate as he wiped the sweat off his palms again. It was making the stick slippery.

I should’ve made a grip last night. I knew there was something more I could’ve done!

“Are you okay?” the Vith warrior standing next to him asked.

“Probably not,” Tom muttered. He stood head and shoulders above the next tallest Vith, and was wearing a shiny-ass helmet that said: ‘Look at me!’

There was no way they wouldn’t notice him.

Tom checked his pockets for the healing crypt and the ghostwalk crypt for the millionth time, his heart slamming in his chest a mile a minute.

Gun walked in front of the warriors and gave them the plan for what felt like the seventeenth time.

“Alright, listen up. We’re going to go poke the Haja nest. We’re going to charge out at a jog. A normal jog. We need our resident giant to be able to keep up.”

There was some scattered laughter.

“We’re going to hang left and approach the Scarred line. Their ranged attacks aren’t as strong as the Bloodied or Aflame, and we will be able to get in close.”

“As a bonus, they assembled their lines beside the Honnuken encampment. Due to our recent night raid, they’ll assume we’re after the Honnuken again. All their attention will be focused on getting their healers out of harm’s way.”

“We’re going to hit the Scarred hard and fast, drop a handful of them, then pull back out before they can blink. Ironically, without Honnuken, they’re easier to kill than Bloodied and Aflame Alia. On the way back to the gate, we go full Vith warrior speed. Leave them wondering what just hit them.

“Brama. You’re carrying metalhead over here on the way back.”

Brama groaned.

“If Brama’s indisposed, and by that I mean dead, the closest warrior is responsible for getting our shaman back to the gate with the rest of the group.”

Gunn repeated himself again, more succinctly.

“Approach slow, hang left, throw our spears, then blaze out. Is that understood?”

The Vith warriors stomped the ground as one, shuddering the ground under Tom’s feet.

“Alright, let’s do this.”

Tom’s heart leapt into his throat as the gate clattered open, He nearly missed his mark when Gunn began jogging forward before the gate was even high enough to walk through.

The old man ducked low under as he ran, and the rest of the Vith assault team followed suit, clearing the gate before it had even risen more than five feet or so.

Tom’s legs felt like jelly and the armor had gained a couple hundred pounds. His whole body felt weak, sweating and jittery.

The he saw the rows upon row of human beings facing them in perfect formation, their weapons planted in the ground beside them.

From this distance, Tom couldn’t make out their expressions. They just looked like a wall of sharpened steel.

An animalistic part of him wanted to be anywhere but here, a single cog in the machine charging headlong into an enemy formation, where life and death was a matter of the cruel whims of chance.

But he was surrounded on either side by Vith warriors, packed in like sardines and somehow moving at a trot. At this point he could either keep up or be trampled.

“Left!” Gunn bellowed from the front and motioned with his single arm as they gradually found their target.

The Scarred.

“When you see the whites of their eyes, prepare for some hail!” Gun shouted back at them.

What does that mea – oh god!

Tom flinched as something richoceted off his helmet, nearly staggering him backwards.

Arrows, burst of flame, water, ice, the phantom fangs of predatory animals, and all manner of damaging elements manifested in front of them, slamming into the Vith attackers.

They shrugged it off like so much precipitation.

“~!” Gunn shouted something Tom couldn’t make out over the blood pounding in his ears, and the ringing as another projectile bounced of his helmet, which made an excellent target swaying above all the other Vith heads as it did.

He didn’t hear Gunn’s words but he saw the effect. The first row of Vith warriors stopped and threw their spears, launching the heavy steel poles with inhuman strength.

Then the next row. And the next.

Oh shit, it’s me!

Tom fumbled his ‘fireball’ wand out, the smooth wood nearly slipping out of his palm as he drew it from his belt. It felt like he was a bumbling idiot, every snag of cloth against wood magnified a thousandfold as he drew the wand and pointed the trembling end towards The Enemy.

Tom’s row threw their spears.

His breath hitched in his lungs as he momentarily forgot how to breathe, let alone move soul pulses. In an instant that seemed to last forever, Tom drew a small dollop of the power sitting in his chest and forced it through the wand and the spell phrase inside it.

A clear, beach-ball sized sphere formed in front of the wand, glowing cherry hot as it shot forward, rapidly shrinking in size as it grew hotter and brighter, until it was a pinprick of blinding light streaking through the air.

“Oh-“

BOOOOOOM!

A shockwave tore through the battlefield, picking up and flinging everything, including the battlefield itself.

The wall of mangled steel, soldiers, and dirt rushed toward Tom before he could blink, parting around him almost politely as it lifted up the Vith soldiers and flung them backwards.

The sky went dark, and Tom glanced up, spotting a mushroom cloud of dust blocking out the sun itself. Mixed in with the dust, Tom could faintly make out humanoid shapes, ragdolling and spinning in a way that almost looked slow as they continued their pirouette into the stratosphere.

Tom gaped.

He felt a grip on his shoulder, and spotted Brama. The warrior with skin of steel had blood rolling down his ears and nose.

“What did you do!?” Brama shouted, unable to hear himself.

“I’m not sure!”