“Hey, you can’t just-“

Chemestro walked through the barred door to the ‘Employee Entrance’ before tipping the salt balance of the guard behind it, rendering him unconscious instantly.

He descended the stairs with a measured pace, reaching a dark warehouse filled with the faint scent of blood and cleaning agent, along with an undercurrent of old paper and…hide?

Interesting.

“So apparently anyone can just waltz in nowadays,” A biker-looking thug with a scar on his forehead said, putting down a bowl of ramen and reaching for a pistol beside him.

The pistol fell apart with a nudge from Chemestro’s power.

“Huh,” the leather clad man grunted, peering at his weapon.

With another nudge, the man was floating in midair, buoyed by the razor thin line of low pressure he maintained on the man’s upper half.

“May I speak to your boss…” Chemestro asked, pulling out his business card. “Dave the unicorn?”

“What do you want with him?” the grungy looking fellow asked, his legs dangling in the air.

“I need to purchase magical protection.”

“Modern birth control is actually very safe and effecti-“

“Magical protection from magical attacks.”

“Oh, that’s totally different. I’m sad to say though, you’re not exactly going to make a great impression on Dave, beating on his guards.”

“The men at the door refused to allow me past.” Chemestro shrugged. “No one was injured. Or even harmed. They’ll recover in minutes with no lasting damage. That being said, where is Dave?”

“He’s not taking any clients until High Tide is over.”

“I guess I’ll just keep looking. He has to be down here somewhere.”

Chemestro tipped the man’s salt balance.

Nothing happened.

“Huh.”

“Dave, are you okay?” A goon burst through the bottom door, pausing in shock when he saw Chemestro before stumbling backwards.

“Dave?” Chemestro said, peering up at the dangling human biker.

“What?” A voice asked less than an inch away from his ear as the dangling man dissolved into motes of light.

A minder? No, magic.

A moment later there was a deep inhale and the voice groaned in pleasure as Chemestro turned and stepped to create some distance…definitely not flinching.

“Oh, my god, you smell amazing.” The biker said, his eyes rolling back in his skull.

Chemestro’s skin crawled, and he had no frame of reference for why.

“I’m looking to buy magical –“

“Protection, yeah, I gotcha.” Dave said, waving him off, picking up the bowl of ramen and slurping up some of the noodles.

“So you’re Chemestro? Little Perry Z’s first nemesis…I mean aside from the dynamic duo and they’re garbage, so I don’t count them.

The way Dave said ‘Perry Z’ did not inspire confidence.

“And you came to me to get stuff that will help you defeat my favorite customer!? The nerve! The gall!”

The air around them began to swirl as Chemestro felt some indescribable energy surrounding them…like he’d just dived to the bottom of a whirlpool. It weighed down on him.

Chemestro’s eyes narrowed as he prepared for a fight.

“No, I won’t be betraying my friend’s confidence. If you were anyone else, I would’ve probably killed you and added you to the inventory, but you…you’re lucky you’re a virgin,” Dave said. “I will have to ask you to leave, though.”

“What’s a virgin?” Chemestro asked.

“Someone who’s never had sex.”

“What’s that?” Chemestro asked.

“Wha-“ Dave’s eyes widened, and he dropped his bowl of ramen, spilling it all over the floor as the whirlpool of energy vanished. “You- How-“

“You knew about birth control!” he said accusingly.

“Yes, women can have children.” Chemestro said.

“Do you…know how that works?”

“It was irrelevant to my training.”

“Wow.” Dave said. “Wow! You poor bastard! Now I feel bad for you. Not enough to help you whup Perry’s butt, but, I mean you can come around and purchase other things. How would you like a love charm? I’ll give you one of the good ones on the house.”

“I brought twenty-four million dollars worth of drugs. And I’m not going to trade them for love charms.”

Three blue barrels descended from the ceiling at Chemestro’s nudge.

“I guess…” Dave said, his eyes seemingly drawn magnetically to the barrels. “He’s more of a client than a friend.”

***Paradox***

Perry surveyed his equipment.

He’d grown Saint Natanya’s hair out and condensed Astra’s Healing into cartridges, of which he had six on hand.

They probably wouldn’t cause unholy mutations.

Perry loaded the cartridges into the left underside of the Mk.3’s forearm with a simple tube magazine.

He’d made a new Mk. 3 suit the night before to capitalize on his new Attunement, so he had to move all the ammo and spell-frames from one to the next.

The upper side of the left forearm had the dart launcher, and Perry loaded up four Noob Catchers. He wasn’t planning on catching any rampaging noobs on the wall, but it never hurt to have ‘em.

Besides, what else am I gonna put in the dart launcher? Perry rubbed his chin. What else AM I gonna put in the dart launcher?

He made a note to make a wider variety of darts and continued gearing up.

He loaded the custom printer in the interior of the armor with finely strained mindtaker ichor, and popped magazines of newly minted Big Friendly Swords, hands and blankets in place, along with his cost-saving finger-length blades for more utility.

Perry socketed three Tomward’s Floating Dazzlers in his helmet, locked in Dregor’s Flacidity, then turned to his newest spell-frames.

One was a stack of temporary tattoos that Perry had managed to create by exploiting Bargand the War-God’s lack of specificity between how a ritual had to be performed and when the war-paint had to be applied.

He currently had a machine playing Call of Duty and bathing in the (digital) blood of his enemies, unwitting online enemy players serving as hapless honorary sacrifices, printing out a new temporary tattoo when it had generated enough rage, fear and suffering.

Since it wasn’t real fear and suffering, it took a few hours per temporary tattoo, but that wasn’t bad. He already had a dozen or so of them. More than a real warrior might’ve earned in a normal career.

Was it immoral writing a code to perfectly play the game, utterly and unfairly annihilating the competition while trash-talking them? A little. But it was for a good cause.

Whosoever wore the symbol depicting a stylized axe which was made of ingredients sacred to that war god that had been seeped in the rage, fear and suffering of their enemies, would be protected from attacks so that they might fight wearing next to nothing and spill more blood for Bargand.

Man, he must be pissed at me, Perry thought. Probably not though. Gods were more…ideas and rules given form than actual, thinking people. At least according to Mom.

Perry invented these temporary tattoos largely with Chemestro in mind. If he was pulled out of his armor, he still wanted some backup armor. Preferably something difficult for Chemestro to recognize.

Perry applied the temporary tattoo on his upper shoulder, where Kolusk’s floating Armament printer couldn’t reach. It glowed and left a slight tingling where it rested. Perry felt a surge of adrenaline, along with a desire to crush his enemies, see them driven before him, and hear the lamentations of their women.

He had to take deep breaths and calm down.

Gotta come up with a way to get skin contact on that printer while wearing hyperweave underarmor.

Self-healing materials? Cold-welding? Perry thought, writing the idea down before turning to his other new spell-frame.

It was a summoning spell-frame, about the size and heft of a rocket-launcher. It had a cartridge inside about the size of a coffee-can, albeit twice as long.

When launched it would send out five metal spikes connected by a silver chain. At the end of each of the spikes was a magnesium flare ‘candle’.

In the center of the circle were a bunch of desecrated images of Astra, along with a fair amount of virgin blood (Perry’s).

Considering how valuable virgin blood was, and how often it came up in spells, Perry had been saving up a tank of his own life-juice in his lab. He wasn’t planning on staying one forever, after all.

Having learned his lesson from the summoning of the greed demon, Perry had made the contract offered to the greater corruption demon airtight, and specifying Perry as the contractor, not the summoner.

The launcher also had a banish button that would immediately send the foul creature back from whence it came.

Probably.

The summoning device was the nuclear option.

Worst case scenario it would make things much worse.

Perry hoped he didn’t have to use it…But it could be fun.

Kinda sucks that greater corruption demon eyeball is the key ingredient of the disintegration spell.

The disintegration spell Perry had wanted to make had been untenable, as Dave simply hadn’t had a corruption demon eyeball.

I wonder if the demon would be willing to sell his eyeball.

By all accounts, Greater Demons grew those back. They grew just about everything back.

Eh, it’s probably not worth it. The eyeball was consumed by the spell, after all.

Although the ability to flat out kill something, no questions asked, is a strong selling point.

If Perry got lucky, the demon would get an eye perfectly gouged out during a fight.

You never know.

Still, Perry shouldn’t use that particular spell-frame…It would be a terrible idea to use it in anything but a completely controlled environment with his mother standing by as backup in case it wasn’t absolutely perfect.

Perry attached it to his armor’s back anyway.

I guess I’d rather have a ‘screw it’ button and not need it than need it and not have one. Perry knew that objectively, it was a really, really dangerous idea, but for some reason he didn’t really care.

That should raise alarms. I should probably talk to someone about that.

Perry glanced over at the distant locker that had opened to the void. He got the slightest tinge of the isolated sensation, coming to him on its own.

Meh. He didn’t really care about that either.

Perry’s last piece of new gear was a BFS obsidian blade made from the last of his practice material.

It was about five feet long, with a two-handed handle and a narrow, two inch wide blade that volcanic glass could never logically hope to maintain.

Since he’d gone from an Attunement correction of 2.18 to 3.07 in one level, he could reasonably expect this blade to be ~40% more effective in every respect compared to the original.

And the original had been scary.

Perry wasn’t intending to use it right away, but if his Kolusk’s floating Armanents proved ineffective, he would need something that packed a punch.

Note to self, figure out a way to sharpen a floating armament post-summoning.

Making a tiny object grow into a larger one was inherently dulling and Perry struggled to make them even close to as sharp as nonmagical materials like obsidian.

So the obsidian sword was the sharp finisher, while the BFS brought the raw damage.

Perry secured it to the back of his armor via magnets drilled into the handle.

Anything else? Perry thought, scanning the messy lab.

His experiment with frost and fire magic wasn’t entirely put together yet, as the rituals were difficult to accommodate in the same container, and the container itself struggled to keep up with the temperature extremes, which was the point of the idea.

Aerogel, Perry wrote down on the sheet metal frame with a grease pen as soon as it crossed his mind.

He glanced at his disintegration spell-frame on hiatus, a metal frame of a tube holding a series of lenses made from Death Crystal, arranged like an auto-focus camera.

He still needed to add a belt-feeder for greater corruption demon eyes, and a way to make sure the pupil was facing forward.

None of them were viable just yet.

“Yeah, you like that, don’t you? Daddy’s just gonna take a little off the top,” Perry’s blocky machine ‘warrior’ trash-talked into the mic directly in front of its speaker as another hapless individual was headshot on the screen.

“At what point am I an evil inventor?” Perry asked the machine printing out the temporary tattoos. Naturally it didn’t answer, because actually carrying on a conversation was totally outside the scope of its programming.

He turned his attention back to the Mk. 3, sitting there with malicious intent, a work of art that should have taken him months or years to make, and should never work given the output of the structural batteries.

It was sleeker than Mk. 1, and weighed about a hundred pounds, making it a featherweight and allowing the user to take advantage of slightly more mass.

It had an integrated radio, headlights, and a fully airtight cockpit.

The air to the helmet was fed through a protected filter, which could be shut in the case of a hostile environment and diverted to a small oxygen tank that would keep him alive. Hopefully long enough to get somewhere safer.

Note to self: Design next version with full life-support. Carbon dioxide scrubber, etc.

If Dad’s story about their honeymoon on mars was accurate, Perry might one day be forced to fight in space indefinitely.

Perry cocked his head as he walked around his suit.

Does that mean I have to put an astronaut diaper in my suit? Or should I just get my Body high enough to withstand the vacuum of space so I can hold my breath to take a dump?

Choices, choices…there was no wrong answer, but Perry leaned away from diapers.

He inspected the back of the suit, where his sword and ‘screw it’ bazooka nestled side by side along the slightly distended back, which accommodated most of the spell-discs and printers.

“Alright, I think I’m good to go.” Perry nodded. He was as ready for the wall as he could reasonably make himself in one day.

“You’re good to give me head.” His trash-talk bot responded.

Perry glanced around the empty lab before squinting at the squat printer with an internet connection and an addiction to first person shooters. “Was that aimed at me?”

The bot didn’t respond, instead mowing down a group of three players, shown on the screen directly in front of it.

“Ya’ll are a bunch of noobs that can’t tell the difference between a claymore and your own as-“

Perry stopped listening.

Note to self: Soundproofing around the trash-talk bot would not be amiss.

Perry took off his shirt, put some blood and a fake bandage over the glowing shoulder war-paint, then climbed into his armor.

The sun was going down, and the tide was coming in.

It was time to volunteer on the wall.