The next moment had me back in my body staring at the prone ape, his will bound to mine, his body still. “Let go boy,” I said to Spot, “It’s ok.” Spot stepped back gingerly, not trusting the former attacker of his master. His lips were peeled back from his teeth, a low growl rumbling out. His muscles were bunched, still ready to pounce just in case the gorilla made the wrong move. Gungnir crackled with lightning, floating around my head while I put my hand on the gorilla’s head and pushed my flesh sorcery in, taking command of his body and mind. “You will not harm me or mine. You will obey the language and spirit of my commands, you will do everything to help me with whatever context I clarify at the time. Your main job is to serve as my guard. Your priority is that my enemies never get close to me. Treat well with me and I will do the same for you. I will do my best to make sure you are healthy and well taken care of.” My flesh sorcery imprinted every emotion and intent of my words into the gorilla’s cells, binding him to me and creating a master/slave mental link.

I stepped back and let him up. That big body rolled over surprisingly quick for its size. “All right, I need a name for you. I’m not too good with names, I mean, I called the dog ‘Spot’, but ‘Kong’ is overrated anyways even though it fits,” I rambled, “but it could be short for ‘Wukong’ instead of ‘King Kong’, so that may work. Nerds could make a good case for a roided out skyscraper climbing gorilla versus the mystical martial arts master monkey. Eh, this requires too much work, Kong it is!” Being a little drunk on my own power felt great, good enough to let the lameness of the naming slide. I reached out with my flesh sorcery and healed the newly dubbed Kong, then I put a conditional trigger enchantment in his spine near the base of his skull. If I ever needed to, I could trigger it through a code word or a touch of sorcery and it would instantly paralyze him. Paranoia isn’t paranoia if it might actually happen, so instead, I’m going to prepare.

“Listen up Kong,” I looked up at him, “I have a job for you. I want you to patrol this forest and chase away anything considered a threat to deer. If it’s too dangerous for you to take on, watch it and learn about it and report back to me. Be back at this tree by tonight, got it?” Kong nodded his head, chuffed and then looked himself over, slightly amazed that his wounds were all gone. Then he walked into the bushes and vanished with scary silence. “Fuckin sleuthy snake monkey,” I muttered, turning back to Spot, “That’s your new friend. You both are my guards now, got it?” Agreement came in the form of enthusiastic barking that nearly made me deaf. Using Spot’s muscle, I had him drag the huge deer Gungnir iced back to the river-bottom cavern. It took forever as he kept trying to eat it the whole time. Gungnir was oddly silent the whole time, staying two feet away from my shoulder, floating smoothly but erratically crackling with sparks and breaking ice. I conjured a large stone box near my makeshift magical kitchen to be my meat freezer and put in runes of cold and freshness up and down the sides of it. As I was butchering the humongous deer and using a conjured sharp stone knife to do it, I asked Gungnir while evaluating it with my magical senses, “What’s going on with you?” A verifiable sun of magical power was contained within Gungnir, beating at the inner edges of the crystal half, “Dude, what in the world is going on?”

The matter to mana power generator that I had placed inside of Gungnir had been altered somehow. It looked like the power governor and conditional shutoff had been removed and now it was just pumping out insane amounts of raw mana and being condensed inside of the Chaos crystal that was Gungnir. I grabbed it with my mind and forcibly wrenched it into spear form, then sprinted to the far side of my cavern where my magical senses showed me the river’s ley line of power flowed. It showed up blue to me as my nature and water sorcery outlined the exact location. Gripping Gungnir, I stabbed it into the wall and forcibly lengthened the crystal tip until it was in the ley line and created a channel for the excess energy to flow out from the spear to the ley line. It was the right idea, but the smart thing to do would have been to let go just before making the channel and let the magical energies do their own thing. I let go half a second too late and it was as if I was connected to an electrical socket the size of a mountain, blowing me back forty feet. My shield protected me from the inertia and my armor absorbed the bleed off of the spear, completely charging every bit of it to full.

The sight of this process was amazing to watch. The sun of power contained in the spear being injected into the river of natural mana was just awesome, magnificent reds and yellows swirling with purples and greens meeting the blue of the ley line and dissipating. As it became safe-ish to approach, I grabbed the handle of Gungnir and reaching in with my magic and felt the power generator, and replaced the conditional triggers and safety governors on it. “That, was, AWESOME!” Gungnir’s voice squeaked out, “We need to do that shit again!”

“You did this?” my temper rising as I clarified.

“Well duh,” the weapon replied, “I wanted to see how much power I could hold.”

Seeing the lack of responsibility and intelligence from my spear, I began to weave an enchantment of restriction and confinement and placed it inside the crystal, surrounding the generator. “Oh come on!” Gungnir whined, “That’s no fair! What if we need the power?”

“Then I’ll take it off,” I replied, “but you do that again and I take it out, completely. You get a set amount of mana, a constant low stream. I can’t have you going nuclear here.”

“But, but, POWER!” it started,

“Is outweighed by intelligence.” I finished. “Now, we need to do something about this. I have to finish with that deer and then craft another weapon. If you’re going to be floating around as my Rod of God satellite and power source, then I need something to hold and focus here.”

“I vote ax! Or a humongous sword, ladies love a big sword!” Gungnir chirped. Crap. It was back. Already miss the silence.

It took two hours to fully dress that deer and clean up the mess, I was tired but had enough meat to last a whole year. Now it was time to create a new weapon. I had Gungnir for killing or stunning huge monsters like Kong, but I did need something for many small targets, like a swarm of goblins or pack of dogs. A gun would be perfect, but I didn’t have those anymore and finding them would be hard to do, especially if the entire world got changed to what I saw just a few hours ago. I wanted to go find my test materials, but I really had no confidence that I would be able to in that wild mess. Conjuring a large stone plate, circular in shape and about two feet across, I placed it on top of the generator in the center of the room. Then I ran down my tunnel to where it came out near the World Tree and began pumping mana into the root, making it grow a small disk of wood which I then separated with nature sorcery and put in my pocket.

Running back to my experiment plate, I put a rune of joining/combining on there and framed it within a rune of will and concentration. Focusing on the symbology and intent of what I was trying to accomplish, I placed the piece of the World Tree on the plate and conjured a disk of bone the same size next to it. Taking a bar of gold from the pile, I placed that on the plate and put the bone and World Tree fragment on top of it so that all three touched, and then gently placed a small, smooth riverstone on top of that. Looked like a pyramid a child would make. I grabbed Gungnir and focused on sending my thoughts to it, as it was going to help me with this process. My plan was to craft something that would be a complement to my sorceries, a sort of focus for the magics I have since Gungnir left my hands to morph into an incredibly powerful security satellite, which was not my original intention, but useful nonetheless. Wizards need a staff, but sorcerers need something else, and I need something more than that.