But Death is Not Forbidden Read online

  “Not like Highlander. Spooky, what should we do?” Joe asked, not wanting to have to face a reassembled fully functional combined Rock Elemental.

  “I don't know. We need to destroy the head, but I have no idea how to do that. Here, move away. I'll try shooting another angel at it,” Spooky said. Joe moved out of the way as the head pulled itself together with increasing speed. Lying on the ground, the head was now fully assembled. The rest of the body would not be far behind. This time, the angel came down directly on the head. Even with the heat and force of the direct hit, it only resulted in scattering the rocks. Like a depressing horror movie that ends in tragedy, the rocks of the head began to pull together again. Spooky raised her hands in defeat; she had given it her best shot.

  Joe knew there had to be a way to defeat the Rock Elemental. He just wasn't looking at it from the right angle. His magic was not effective. Physically breaking apart the rocks was not effective. What could he do? There had to be a way to win. This was a game. Unless this was like the classic Star Trek Kobayashi Maru. No, he couldn't believe that. This genre simply didn't allow for no-win scenarios. He decided to mind-click himself again and see what he had available. Joe looked through everything, trying to figure out something that would work. He didn't think the penetrating claws would do anything, and he hadn't figured out how to extend them anyway. Then, he saw it. A skill that had saved him once before. He knew what he had to do.

  He ran over and stomped on the pieces of the head that had already assembled. He scanned the ground and caught sight of what he was looking for. One of the rocks was different. It looked like some sort of metallic crystal. Joe reached down and grabbed it, popping it in his mouth.

  “Joe, be careful! What if it begins to assemble itself around you? You could be ripped apart,” Spooky said.

  “I got this, Spook,” Joe spoke in a garble, as his mouth was full.

  He tried to chew it, but it would not break, so he just swallowed it down into the furnace of his gut. If you can’t beat ‘em, eat ‘em. He felt the rock slide all the way down his esophagus and land in his stomach. Still, the rock did not break down, but the heat placed it in some sort of stasis. A third of the rocks that had been reassembling fell to the ground lifeless.

  Ding

  That wonderful ding confirmed for Joe that he was on the right track. Joe realized there must be two more. He began searching through the rubble to find another metallic crystal. Because of all the shattered ivory stone, the dust in the air made it difficult for Joe to see. As he fumbled around, searching without any success, something miraculous occurred. One of the many moons orbiting the nearby gas giant reflected just enough extra light from the distant sun to make the two crystals glint for the briefest of seconds. Joe caught hold of the crystals and threw them in his mouth. The rocks, at this point, had reassembled enough to form an arm. It grabbed onto Joe's neck and squeezed. He couldn't swallow, but he could feel that he had the two rocks that really mattered in his mouth. With his one good arm, he began hitting at the rock hand around his throat. He saw dark spots in his vision. His brain needed more blood. This elemental would simply not give up. Spooky's last angel arrived and joined Joe in punching the rock hand. Rock after rock broke free. Joe grabbed the hand and pulled back what served as its fingers. It gave him the little space he needed to swallow. The hand around his throat lost cohesion. The now unanimated stones tumbled to the ground.

  Ding

  Joe looked around the battlefield. All was still, save for a mist of stone dust in the air. There was no sign that a fight had just occurred. It simply looked like a mound of rocks. Joe, on the other hand, looked like he'd been put on the spin cycle in an industrial washing machine containing bricks and razor blades. His right arm hung limp and his uniform was, once again, beyond repair.

  “Moes is in the basket now, being flown here. The basket slows them down, so it'll be about fifteen minutes,” Spooky said gently. She was looking over his injuries and lightly touching the open wounds. Though she spoke of logistics, concern was evident on her face.

  “How many of those angels do you have? And did you really put Moes in that basket again? I can walk back,” Joe said as he began to stand, only to fall back down again. His eyes rolled back in his head and he passed out. Falling back, he landed haphazardly on the rocks he had just defeated.

  Once more, Spooky experienced something for the first time, a feeling of déjà vu. Only this time, there was less screaming. She quickly used her ivory stone angel to help her begin applying cloth to bind Joe's wounds. As long as Joe didn't die before Moes arrived, Spooky believed he could be stabilized. No living being should lose as much blood as Joe’s body had. It would be close.

  As she worked to make sure Joe survived, the strategic part of her looked down at Joe's belly. Something about those metallic crystals resonated with her. They could be useful to her. In the split second before Joe had put them in his mouth, she had analyzed them. Their crystal structure held a pattern written with magic. If she could find a way to reset that pattern and write her own commands on it, perhaps she could have her autonomous soldier. Once she got Joe back to the castle, she would get those stones out and store them in a furnace until she found a way to use them. Hopefully it was heat that kept them in stasis; otherwise, she might be in trouble.

  Chapter 3 - Dangerous Resolve

  Joe's hand felt a cold metallic surface. He opened his eyes to see the transparent geodesic dome ceiling of his castle's top floor. He was lying on his place of power. It appeared he had an IV attached to his uninjured arm, with some clear fluid, probably saline. His head felt clouded, maybe there was a sedative in the IV?

  “Don't sit up, just stay still,” came a muffled voice, “I am still working on you.” Spooky was calling from inside Joe's injured shoulder. Joe felt sick to his stomach. Spooky was inside of his shoulder. He kept telling himself, it's just a game, it's just a game, in an attempt to calm his gag reflex. He couldn't get over how real this game felt. He hoped the developers were winning awards. It appeared there was no detail too small to be given a master's attention. Everything was flawless, but at this point, it felt a little too perfect. Right now, Joe would have been grateful for a little uncanny valley.

  “How did I get back, what happened?” Joe asked.

  “When I got there, you were unconscious. You were almost dead from blood loss. I did what I could there. Then those evil ivory automaton angels ran you back,” Moes explained.

  “Did you run out of mana? Why is Spooky digging around in my shoulder with metal tools? Why didn't you just heal me there?” Joe asked. Moes’ mouth dropped open.

  “Heal you there? Joe, you know my magic is mind and spirit right? Don’t get me wrong, there is a certain amount of healing that can be done with those magics, but, Joe, you completely severed the muscles and tendons in your shoulder. Dark stars, there were even three stones she had to extract from your gut. With my magic, I can encourage the mind and the spirit to quickly heal any wound that’s possible for them to heal. But, neither the mind nor the spirit can pull a completely torn muscle back together and heal it. Your severed shoulder muscle had contracted. It looked like a big ball under the skin of your elbow joint. It was really gross. Muscles should not be cut. There are those with Healing Magic that could fix that with no problem. I did encourage your body to quickly produce more blood and seal up the countless micro-tears throughout your whole torso. It was as if you had been pounded for days with a meat tenderizer. I did what I could. I'm proud to say I stopped you from dying, but my magic is not primarily for healing. That's why Spooky is using what she’s called, ‘precise surgical instruments,’ to reattach all of the severed muscles and tendons. She apparently believes that you can treat a body just like you treat a torn cloth,” Moes said.

  Then, from inside of Joe's shoulder, Spooky spoke. “When people treat their body with as little respect as they treat a canvas sack, then sometimes their fairy assistant is forced to sew them up like one!” Spoo
ky shouted. Joe looked down at the shoulder and realized that Spooky was deep under the skin pulling his severed triceps back up to the shoulder joint.

  “How do you not feel that?” Moes asked. Again, from inside the shoulder, Spooky cut Joe off.

  “He can't feel it because this knucklehead decided it would be a good idea to completely turn off his pain receptors. You know, the signals that tell you that you should stop touching the fire or you might die. The silly little signals that might help you realize you shouldn't fight THREE Rock Elementals alone!” Spooky said. Though she had not originally been programmed for medical procedures, she had quickly assimilated the relevant data, gaining superior surgical knowledge. Focusing on the complex procedure was helping her ignore the unfamiliar feelings of frustration, fear, and worry that threatened to overwhelm her binary thought processes.

  “You turned off your ability to feel pain? That's a crazy skill. But, like Spooky’s suggesting, that's not necessarily a good idea. Without the ability to feel pain, your body's reactions are not going to get faster. Also, I have read, you apparently forget about natural consequences when you don’t experience pain,” Moes said.

  “It just felt so nice not to have constant pain signals. For me, it's been the better part of a century since I felt this good. I guess I did get a little carried away. I'll turn them back on, at least a little bit,” Joe said and closed his eyes. Instantly, he felt hot burning pain in his shoulder.

  “Knucklehead! Turn them on later, not while I'm performing surgery! You're squishing my air tube,” Spooky shouted from the now contracting shoulder muscles.

  “Good call. My bad,” Joe screeched.

  “Want to talk? That's fine. Talk, but don't move. Even for someone with mechanical precision, like me, sewing up muscles and tendons is difficult. I'm sure you don't want me to cross my wires. You don't want me to accidentally attach your triceps to your biceps. Stay still, this is going to take a while,” Spooky said, though it sounded muffled.

  Joe obeyed, though he looked toward Moes and began puffing up his cheeks, indicating he was going to throw up.

  “You're saying that to me? When she opened up your shoulder and dove in with her instruments, I did throw up,” Moes said.

  “It was incredibly unprofessional! First time my six-inch angels had to clean up something so disgusting,” Spooky said, this time popping her head out of one of the shoulder wounds to talk. Moes began dry heaving again.

  “Pull it together, Moes! This might not be a sterile environment, but neither is it a vomitorium,” Spooky said then went back to work.

  Moes collected himself, then spoke. “It wouldn't have been so bad, it's just a person went into a person… it’s not natural,” Moes said.

  “Let's change the subject, I'm making myself sick. Did you see we killed a Rock Elemental! Wait, shoot, I never looted it,” Joe said.

  “Oh, you mean the Rock Elementals that you should have left alone like anyone in their right mind would do? As far as I knew, that was the type of enemy you couldn't defeat. One just had to run away from them until they forgot about you. I can see you're getting worried that no one picked up your spoils of war... Spooky did so before we left, but you can't look at it right now anyway, as you can't move. So, I will ask you the question I wanted to ask. I didn't see you this morning, but last night you only had three seeds of magic. Now, you have four. What is this new magic?” Moes asked.

  “Oh yeah, I struck gold. Portal Magic,” Joe said.

  “Maybe you were right. Maybe you aren't going to fail. How did you get it?” Moes asked.

  “I think it was from Rook. Not a gift or anything, but I must have understood him enough for Empathetic Learning to engage. It's not the only magic available to me either. There was a long list of available options after I encountered him. I barely scanned the list before finding the magic I had been searching for. I remember that many of them did not translate, in that, the symbols used to describe them were incomprehensible to me. When I spend my points acquired from killing the rock monsters, I'll select more. The detail and scope of this reality is astounding. Even as large as it is, I can't help but want it all. I want to master every magic there is,” Joe said.

  “Joe, I'm glad that you're advancing, but you know that you can't master every magic there is, right? Some magics just can’t survive together,” Moes said.

  “What are you talking about? Survive together?” Joe asked.

  Moes took a deep breath, “Some time ago, there was a girl born in my community who had fifteen different seeds of magic in her. You might not be aware of this, considering you can apparently get a new seed of magic whenever you want, but that's not normal. Fifteen seeds is extraordinary. We were all overjoyed for her. She was going to be a prodigy, an incredible asset to our people. There are some individuals who have such potential that, if it's realized, they can change everything,” Moes said. He looked away, pausing to collect himself. He seemed to want to tell the story with a clinical distance. Joe let him continue, but he couldn't help but consider the parallels on Earth, like Einstein, Aristotle, even Kalashnikov.

  “Though it might seem chaotic at times, our world actually has many strict limiters that seem to help keep order and balance. Not all of these limits are well understood nor, I imagine, even known. In the case of this young girl, she ran up against one of those limits. There are combinations of magic that, when combined together in one body, become unstable. We were able to discover what most of her seeds were, except for one. Because of the unknown magic seed, I believed we shouldn’t awaken her magic. At that time, I was not the senior mage, and I was overruled. She studied and prepared herself for the awakening. She was as ready as we could make her and the process seemed to go well. Aside from that fact that it was for fifteen seeds, the awakening was largely unremarkable.

  “She became a novice in fifteen different magical disciplines. The fourteen magics we understood were not the problem, it was the fifteenth. She tried to describe it to us. She said that it felt like a reverse magic. She said that the building blocks of all life, both matter and energy, moved in the same directional spin, but the fifteenth magic was the opposite. She described how one could bring this reverse matter here and that the energy potential would be unbelievable. It felt wrong to me, but again, I was not in charge. Fortunately, I had enough influence over the girl to persuade her not to test out the fifteenth magic in our community. Instead, some of the elders, the girl, and I traveled a distance away to a remote desert. We were made to watch from a distance because that was the only way she felt comfortable attempting the spell. Even from a distance, what we saw was terrible,” Moes said.

  “There was a violent burst of energy and then she was completely gone?” Joe asked, cautiously.

  “How?” Moes broke his countenance for the briefest of moments as a tear welled in his eye. He just as quickly regained his composure and continued, “How could you possibly guess that? You're right, but it wasn't just her that disappeared. The energy wave that hit us was incredible, even from a distance, but there was no mass in it. When we went to the point where she should have been, it was a huge crater, well over a hundred feet wide, and it looked to be about half as deep. It was a perfect half sphere and the dirt that should have been there had completely disappeared. I don't know if she and the dirt vaporized, but they were all… just gone. She didn't possess Portal Magic or any other type of transportation magic that could have taken her away so abruptly, so we had to assume she was dead. We never understood what happened,” Moes said.

  “I can't be sure, but it sounds like antimatter. I'm sure that is not a term ever coined here. Where I'm from, we've been able to create antimatter, but it’s only safe in incredibly tight and controlled environments. What you described is what happens when matter and antimatter come into contact with each other. The two cannot exist together. There's a violent molecular reaction and they annihilate each other. In the process, an enormous amount of energy is released. It sounds like she
created it in her hands. That's awful. I'm sorry that you had to see something like that, Moes. Having known the girl, I can't imagine what you went through,” Joe said.

  Moes was looking away. His jaw was set. Joe considered, once again, how Moes must be a real player. Though, why would a real person feel so strongly about an NPC dying? And why would he insist on denying the gaming reality?

  “So, this is one of the things studied where you're from?” Moes asked, after some time.

  “Yes. As I said before, our scientists attempt to study everything, but just because you have access to a wealth of knowledge does not mean you follow it with wisdom. Our planet was lucky we didn't destroy it. We came close many times. One of those times was when they attempted to weaponize antimatter. We already had weapons that could destroy our planet a hundred times over. From what I've read, the reason they were attempting to weaponize antimatter was because, at that time, they thought it could be used to destroy an enemy without making the land completely uninhabitable,” Joe said.

  “I thought you said you didn't come from a magical world? We don't have magic that could destroy a whole moon, let alone a planet,” Moes said. They began approaching subjects that Spooky would rather they stay off of, so she chimed in.

  “Okay, I was wrong. Your talking is making it difficult for me to complete my work. Moes, do you have a spell that could put Joe in a deep sleep for about an hour?” Spooky asked.

  “I do, as long as he's willing,” Moes replied.

  “Wait, one more question. Is Life Magic the one that heals?” Joe asked.

  “Yes, that is one of the best healing magics. Wait, do you have the option of learning that? You should have chosen that. Especially considering you've been knocked out and beaten up so much and only been here a day. Can we talk more about antimatter? We weren't done with that conversation,” Moes continued.