The World at War: Chapter 4

Okay, maybe not Heaven, but this place absolutely rocked. If you
could think of something you wanted enchanted, Hong already had three
of them. I whistled in appreciation and asked,"This isn't 'all' for
the Alliance, is it?" The items I'd stolen that was meant as payment
for Hong's work wasn't possibly enough to trade for the entire
collection.

"Not even close. Most of this is just stuff I decided to make when I
got bored. I'm not a skilled spell caster in the traditional sense,
so I never know when one of my creations will come in handy." Mantal
note: Hong will be getting damned near anything he wants in the future
to keep me on his good side. Really, I could fully equip an army with
all the enchanted crap in here.

I did a mass dump of my spatial pocket, only keeping my personal
effects, my athame, and a few priceless magical objects, the jewels
included."You just want to barter or do you have some sort of monetary
system set up?" I've run into some strange characters before, a couple
of which had their own magical money system, so it didn't hurt to ask.

Hong shrugged his thin shoulders and said,"I'd rather trade, really,
but the athame that was supposed to be brought to me by the Alliance
will get you more by itself than most of this stuff." How'd I forgot
that? Why did he want the thing so badly? I reached into the pocket
and searched around for a few moments. Finally, I found the ancient
blade and retrieved it.

"Here it is. In the interest of fairness, I should warn you that it
isn't very stable." Honor among thieves, or in this case, honor among
sorcerers.

"Ah, yes, I suspected as much, but I don't intend to employ it in my
work. It once belonged to another Artificer like myself. I'm hoping
to glean some lost knowledge from it." It went into the pile."Why
don't you just have a look around wile I inventory your collection?"

I nodded gratefully and went over to a section of wall that I believed
to be the Alliance order. It was separated slightly from the other
items and there were several sets of the enchanted steel feathers used
by some of the Phoenix People. Most of the shipment consisted of
enchanted weapons capable of producing varying effects and an almost
equal number of different types of armour. Mixed into the weapons and
armour, there were a few scrying mirrors, a single chi void held
within a worked gold amulet(a kind of chi battery when charged), and a
portable teleportation circle made from intricately woven silk. That
circle alone must have taken weeks to craft. I shook my head in
wonder. I'd never have the patience to work on something so delicate
for such an extended period of time.

I ended up passing on most of the Alliance stuff. I didn't want to
limit myself to such a small choice when there was so much more to be
seen and had. I did get a sack of shuriken that could be programmed
with most low-to-midgrade offensive spells, the chi void, and a
wickedly bladed glaive that stabilized temporal irregularities. I
have no idea why the Alliance needed such a weapon, but it would be
quite useful if Setsuna ever got sane enough to somehow access her
power and come after me.

I'm not really a big weapons user, but some things are just too good
to pass up. That, or they look so damned cool that you just have to
have them. The item that caught my attention almost immediately was a
combination of those two factors. It was a hovering blob of liquid
metal mixed with raw energy. I could make small ones that didn't do
much, but this was about as complicated as they get. What in Hell am
I talking about? They're kinda like those Ditto pokemon back on
PokeWorld. In principle, if you have the power, you can take one of
these amorphous constructs and apply an object to it. The construct
absorbs the object and uses its extra mass to become a larger version
of the object.

And how could this be remotely useful to me? You people don't think
very far ahead, do you? Okay, this construct(I have no idea what
they're actually called) is so large that if I decided to meld
Setsuna's gender bending ring to it, the ring would come out looking
more like a hula(can't believe I don't know how to spell this) hoop,
while still retaining it's original properties. Still don't get it?
You will.

Grabbing hold of the blob, I moved on into the armor section. Ryu'd
been getting uppity ever since he'd gotten that upgrade thing from his
helicopter and if I showed up with some armor of my own, it might just
knock him down a peg or three. Even with the large selection, I
didn't really find anything that I particularly liked or needed.
Wonder if Hong would mind doing a custom job?

I trekked back across the vault and found Hong. He had all the crap
I'd stolen from the Amazons when I'd left their village arranged on a
trio of folding card tables and was in the process of labelling the
items."That all you want?" he asked. He sounded suprised, even a bit
hurt.

"Not that you don't do excellant work, but I just don't need most of
what you've got." I laid out what I had decided to get on one of the
tables and floated the blob to rest near me."Is it enough to cover
these?" I asked.

Hong looked at me and blinked a couple times, then blinked some
more."You're not kidding, are you?" He chuckled."Kid, you want to set
up a credit account with me or something? What you've chosen barely
begins to make a dent in just what the athame is worth to me."

I must be building up good karma somehow."Well...there may be some
other things now that I think about it. I'll be back in a few
minutes." I wouldn't have gotten anything else if it weren't for the
blob, but I may not be coming back by here for a while, so I should
make the most of the visit.

I found a small alcove that held gems enchanted with various spells,
most ones I'd heard of or knew, but some completely new to me. I
pulled a pre-spelled crystal from a bracket in the wall. It was
designed to bind a person's soul to something, not unlike the way
Ami's was intertwined with that infernal poison. Hmm, next came a
spot teleportation retrieval enchantment desinged to recall the
effected item. Finally, after finding nothing else of interest, I
grabbed a handful of unprogrammed illusion generating pearls(just
something to keep encase I ever learned to actually make a decent
illusion).

(Note: Ranma is gonna make something that I'd really like to have and
will be very powerful. I got the idea from one of the characters
submitted to me that I'm not gonna use.)

With my pile of miscellaneous magical equipment, I found a quiet
corner to work in and laid it all out on the floor before me. I also
brought my athame from the spatial pocket and removed the crystals
from my body. To work with these things, intent and will have as
important role as power. The blob, now a stationary puddle on the
smooth metal floor, rippled as I dropped in all the crystals I'd
gotten from Hong. Then I began to bend my will and power upon the
construct, giving it instructions on how to handle what it had so far
recieved.

Hoping Xochial wouldn't mind, I dropped the athame he'd given to me
into the puddle. The vorpal bladed knife disappeared into the puddle.
Once again I gave the blob instructions. I repeated the process with
both the Silver Imperium Crystal and my own lens crystal. When
nothing but the blob remained, I broke my constraining bands of energy
from it and let it take its new form.

Slowly, the puddle lengthened, rising from the floor as it did so.
Over the next few minutes it grew sharper in detail and the features
became recognizable. When ten minutes or so had passed I had to
snatch the newly forged sword from the air as the blob lost all of it
power and truly became the sword.

The evil looking vorpal bladed sword and the plain hilt looked exactly
the same as before(except larger), and there were no signs of the
numerous crystals that it now contained. Sword isn't really a
descriptive enough term for what I now had. First, from the athame
itself, it had complete indestructibility, the ability to summon and
control demons from Xochial's realm, and a thoroughly ingrained
network of channels that would properly energize complex spell
patterns. Thanks to Hong's crystal's, the sword/tool was now
irrevocably linked with my soul and I could find it wherever it may
be, and with the spot 'portation spell, I could retrieve it from
anywhere in the multiverse with a simple thought or transport myself
to its location. The lens crystal and Silver Imperium Crystal were no
more. They were now part of a greater whole.

I'd been reflexively accessing the pair of crystals to perform magic
and that could have eventually caused problems, but now, I would have
to consciously use the sword to get their effects

...And a really shitty thought just popped into my mind, reminding me
that I shouldn't do this kind of thing without planning it out a
little bit more thoroughly. We of Talent only die of one natural
cause. That is our soul becomes to frayed and weak to stay within our
body. This process normally takes thousands of years and very, very
few of us ever live for this to happen. Now(I pulled a real Usagi
this time), my soul wouldn't fray and weaken because it couldn't fray
and weaken, not bound to an indestructible sword. So? Immortality is
nice, I suppose, but NEVER dying can start to suck after a while. Oh,
of course I could die of an accident or something more nefarious, but
then my soul would still be bound to the sword. Damnit, that means no
reincarnation for me, no Demon Lord Ranma, nothing but an endless
existance as a ghost.

I began beating myself in the head with my newest curse/sword/tool.
The kind of ghost I would come back as would still be me, magic power
fully intact, but there would be no sensation beyond sight and sound,
forever. Forever....

Hong, drawn by the metallic ringing as I pummelled myself, found me
leaning into the corner. I was cursing my stupidity when he
interrupted with a slight cough.

"You know, that's gonna leave a mark," he said cheerfully, oblivious
to how much I felt like disembowelling him. Hong must have either
psyhic empathy or the chi/magic equivalent to it because he took a
step back almost as soon as I stopped hitting myself.

"I really need to be alone right now, Hong. I'm going to go out and
destroy something. Could you find a friend of mine, he's about two
kilometers east of here," I managed to grate out from between clenched
teeth. I calmed myself enough to explain Ryu's condition before
grasping my new sword and teleporting to a random location. I
probably set off a good number of Hongs's wards doing so, but I can't
say I really care.

****

Look at the pretty islands go boom. Alright, I'm not that far gone,
not yet. I can't help that I vaporized Hawaii. I wasn't thinking
clearly. What good is the place anyway? I doubt many people were
still alive there, what with there not actually being actual sources
of food, and without operational ships or aircraft, the state wasn't
much a vacation spot.

Fuck it, I probably earned Hell three times over for that one. Well,
I wouldn't ever be condemned to Hell, so like I said, fuck it. I
should probably go back to Siberia now and see if Ryu and Hong are
getting along with each other. Ryu's mystic battery should be about
dead now, too, so he would be needing a recharge.

Smashing through the fabric of space can be a great stress reliever,
and I didn't hold back on the stress relief as I teleported back to
Hong's little hideaway. Poor Katya, with her Space affinity, she'll
be getting about the worst headache imaginable in a few seconds.

Appearing in the air above Hong's place, I saw Ryu demonstarting all
his weapons(there are A LOT of them) to Hong on the long unused firing
range at the north end of the abandoned base. If he was cutting loose
with that much power, Hong must have taken care of the energy supply.
Heh, the old guy'd probaby set Ryu up with a lifetime charge.

This area wasn't warded and I set down behind the two. Hong held a
polished wooden staff in his right hand and before I could call
attention to myself, he pointed the staff at a decomissioned tank
resting at the end of the range. From the end of the staff a white
beam of chi erupted. The beam slammed into the tank and did a
combination job of melting it down while turning it into little
pieces.

I hadn't really checked before, but now that it was brought to my
attention, I could see that Hong had an impressive chi force. To have
not noticed any of it earlier meant that he not only had excellent
control, but that he kept it bottled tightly within. Good. It's
always a pleasant suprise to find a sorcerer who doesn't view himself
as 'above' such a crude Art as chi manipulation.

****

"This has got to be Ranma's fault," Ryoga muttered darkly as he
crushed yet another zombie with the light pole he'd appropriated
earlier in the day. Ever since he'd recovered from his injuries to
find the world in the shitter, the eternally lost was no longer lost.
Whatever had happened, definitely not Ranma's fault, had fixed his
directional problems instantly. He even knew everywhere he'd ever
been(if only anyone was still around who cared about the Bermuda
Triangle).

Besides making sure to avoid Japan, just encase he should once again
run into the Tendo's, Ryoga didn't really have much to keep him
occupied. He'd wandered around, though he could now use a map to
determine where he was wandering, and eventually, after helping a few
people with monster or bandit problem, he'd stumbled into this place.

The town was once known as New York, a place the no longer lost boy
had accidentally visited a few times during his youth, but now its
only inhabitants were zombies, mutant rats, and really big monsters
that wanted to kill him and none of them cared what the city was
called. Somehow, Ranma and his foul magic had contrived to dump Ryoga
in this hell hole. He just knew it.

Using strength far above the human norm, Ryoga swung his giant club,
easily liquifying a horde of shuffelling zombies. There had to be
millions of the damned things. From around the corner, smashing and
overturning cars as it approached, one of the twelve foot high, thirty
foot long super rats charged. By now well versed in monster rat
extermination, and knowing just how tough the bastards were, Ryoga
didn't attempt to beat the rat to death. Instead, he lashed out with
a powerful vacuum blade, cleaving the top portion of the rat's skull
from its body. Convulsing and emitting a squeaking roar, the monster
rat collapsed to the ground, its python-like tail flailing about.

His senses honed by years of surviving in the wild, Ryoga turned
around to see a zombie not two feet from attempting to sink its
rotting teeth into his flesh(like that would ever happen). Before the
boy could react, though, a baseball sized sphere of blue fire flew
from across the street and burnt the creature's torso into ash. Ryoga
spun on his heel, light pole at the ready, and was confronted by a
pair of attractive girls. This immediately set him on internal red
alert. Girls could lead to being a sex slave. He'd learnt that
lesson with the Tendo's.

One had red hair, and she glowed with the force of magic, a totally
different sensation than that created by chi. The auburn haired girl
possessed a powerful, if completely unfocussed chi force that Ryoga
could see bubbling beneath the surface, just waiting for the proper
training to unleash. Slowly, cautiously, the pair made their way over
to Ryoga.

When they were within a dozen meters of one another, the auburn haired
girl said,"Hi, I'm Buffy."

****

"Status report?" Bill asked. He'd had to stop watching the one-sided
space battle to attend to other matters with B.A.S.C. and when he'd
returned to the command room, the H.V.E.s were returning to base.

"Atomics have been placed at the indicated coordinates. We are
currently waiting for the celestial body to aquire the desired
position to detonate the devices," replied the technician on duty.


"Very well. Also, I would like the data from the H.V.E. combat
recorders sent directly to my quarters for review.

****

Author's Notes: Another short chapter, I know, but for reasons I don't
feel like explaining, reading or writing is about the only way I can
keep my mind focussed on something long enough to really think about
it. So, I wrote this. Not much happened, and I sorta screwed Ranma
over, though it's as much a blessing as a curse, IMO. I've begun to
think about the future chapters and I'm may be changing the direction
of where I had planned for this fic to go. Not gonna mention that
yet. Send C&C to dark_phoneix@hotmail.com

P.S.- I'm posting this without prereading it for any errors, sorry.