A great sense of relief floods through me as the notifications continue to rain down. In the end, my overwhelming gravitic magic, empowered by my Altar, was able to be the difference maker, just like I hoped it would.
Honestly, the power I get from the Altar, and the unbelievable strength of the gravity spells, feels a little like cheating, especially when combined. It feels like it wasn’t that long ago I was just a little, midget hatchling, scraping out a living hiding on ...
2023-05-05 11:32:12 +0000 UTC
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Honestly, even I’m impressed by the spell I’ve created. The Gravity Well is as dense and packed full of mana as I can make it, emptying out what was left in my gravity mana gland, as well as whatever I could gather and push through the construct.
Every drop of energy that had gathered in the Altar was also sucked into it the moment I opted to empower it. The new mutation gives even more power to gravity spells, really kicking the effect up a notch.
The end result is...
2023-05-04 08:57:30 +0000 UTC
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Against the jostling crowd, Tyron stood firm as he gazed upward, a pocket of stillness amidst the flowing current of people. He ignored them, and they ignored him, which was often the way of it in Kenmor, he’d come to learn.
Towering thirty metres tall in front of him, the faces of his mother and father looked down, stern yet kind. He had to give it to the sculptors the Baron had commissioned from the central province, they’d done well to capture the likeness of the famou...
2023-05-03 10:42:55 +0000 UTC
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I don’t even need to look to know where we’ve landed. Before sight returns to my eyes, I heave a sigh of relief.
Through my Vestibule, a torrent of energy floods in. The Nave hums with power and soon enough, the Altar begins to rapidly fill. That’s not all. My fatigue washes away, my acid and regeneration gland replenish at absurd speed, allowing me to trigger another wave of healing and my body thrums with vigour.
That crazy little ant actually pulled it off. She...
2023-05-02 12:37:05 +0000 UTC
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Hunkered down in my little bunker, I can’t see much, or even sense much, with the surroundings filled with ash, so it’s no surprise that Torrifex’s fireball takes me by surprise.
A brief flash of powerful fire mana, followed by my stone barrier glowing cherry red then melting away is all the warning I get. Even my antennae don’t give me enough of a heads up to do anything about it. All I can do is curl over like a pill-bug and hope for the best as the devastating fire...
2023-05-02 08:55:13 +0000 UTC
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Somonax’s face is twisted into a permanent grin, her needle-pointed teeth as long as a man’s arm flashing in the red light. From her back, the thousand wires spring, each connected to one of a thousand blades.
I’ve used almost all of my Altar energy to tie down Torrifex and Pyrixan for the moment, but I’m doubtful those two bombs will be strong enough to kill them, which means I need to make the most of this two-on-one time I have with this demon of endless slaughter....
2023-04-29 05:45:17 +0000 UTC
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As it turns out, Al is not doing all that great. The amount of fire mana the eyeball can bring to bear is absurd, and the concentrated beams he produces would punch a hole in just about any monster I’ve ever seen.
But Somonax just doesn’t seem to care. Whatever the hell those wires on her back are, she can work up some serious momentum as she whips her thousand blades about. As far as I can see, those sword-like appendages have a few effects built into them.
<...
2023-04-28 11:20:46 +0000 UTC
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Here endeth the prelude!
“Are you sure about this, Lukas? Don’t you think Willhem’s favoured apprentice should be looking somewhere a little more… upmarket?”
Victor’s voice dripped with derision and he looked at the people who crammed the busy streets around them with open contempt. Lukas rolled his eyes. In some ways, he understood Victor’s attitude, he’d been born rich and had barely set a foot outside the walls of Kenmor his entire life.
T...
2023-04-28 11:06:51 +0000 UTC
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I skitter out of the way just before the ball of roiling flames detonates in a furious roar, scorching me on the back-zone rather badly. Despite sensing it coming, and despite using my empowered dash to basically teleport a hundred metres, I still got burned. That was one big kaboom.
Using the dextrous aim of my nozel, I keep firing acid at Pyrixan to keep the pressure on her as I size up against Torrifex who looks like he’s positively boiling beneath his skin.
...
2023-04-27 08:46:42 +0000 UTC
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The little chap got his first cast off last week and has resumed his normal learning activities over the last few days.
Still one cast to go, coming off next week!
We are slowly getting back to normal routine around here... :D
2023-04-27 07:28:34 +0000 UTC
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When the black hole finally flickers and fades away, I release my death-grip on the rock with a sigh of relief.
The basin as it had been is pretty much gone. What remains is a twisted, blasted landscape, ripped and torn apart by the strength of the gravity bomb. It doesn’t look like I cast a spell, it looks like a natural disaster took place. This is on the same sort of scale as the mountain exploding eruption magic I hit the termites with.
In fact… if I’d cast th...
2023-04-27 07:26:10 +0000 UTC
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Just to be clear, this status won't be part of the book. I figured you'd all either die of anticipation or murder me if I made you wait until the first status of book three.
So here is a glimpse of what Tyron's status looks like in the final chapter of book 2.
(I know I'm still missing some Necromancer abilities. Still thinking on them but didn't want to delay any more.)
You have interacted with others and formed meaning...
2023-04-25 10:31:38 +0000 UTC
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Willhem stuttered awake, his dream overlapping reality for a dizzying moment until the pounding anvil resolved itself into a knocking on his door. A quick glance at his shutters revealed a distinct lack of light flowing through the cracks.
What time was it?
Muttering to himself, he threw back the sheets and forced his feet into his slippers before he stood, fetching his robe from the stand beside the bed and tying it around his waist.
“This had better be good,...
2023-04-24 07:40:16 +0000 UTC
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It’s not easy to create and conceal something like a gravity bomb. The raw mana I pour into the damn thing, and its generally unstructured form, don’t exactly lead to a stable, easily hidden spell.
The gravity bomb has always been a weird bit of magic. I first discovered this technique, and mana compression, when I blasted a croca beast directly in the face with a ball of pure mana. It’s probably possible to do something similar to a gravity bomb with any sort of mana, ...
2023-04-24 07:08:52 +0000 UTC
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In the centre of the basin stand the three biggest, ugliest, most vicious looking demons I’ve ever clapped my thousands of lenses on. Torrifex looks much as I remember him. A brutal, gigantic monster who towers over the rest of us, even Tiny, smoke billowing from his back and curling around his feet.
Now that he isn’t moving around as much, I can see a little more detail of the big guy. His skin kind of looks cracked, with burning light shining through, as if he’s got l...
2023-04-21 07:46:21 +0000 UTC
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After further hours of roaming back and forth, trying to get a sniff of our prey whilst fending on the endless tide of demons, we finally get another hint.
It’s Al who manages to catch a glimpse, and he lets us know with his usual even demeanour.
[I found something,] he says.
[Oh yeah? Like what?]
[I believe I have detected a trace of almost pure ash mana. It is… unusual.]
[Get at the point man, enough of your waffling!]
[What are… ...
2023-04-20 10:44:25 +0000 UTC
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Hours passed and still, the young Necromancer sat, unbelieving, as he stared at the rapidly cooling corpses of his parents. It didn’t seem real. It couldn’t be real.
Magnin and Beory Steelarm were invincible, immovable presences in his life. The thought that they might die had never even entered his head. To his mind, they were functionally immortal, regularly entering the most dangerous places imaginable and leaving with hardly a scratch.
The sight of their still and...
2023-04-19 05:37:48 +0000 UTC
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Rip and tear. Rip and tear. Rip and tear.
Holy moly, I’m getting sick of all this ripping and tearing!
The stupid demons are endless! I’d go so far as to say that the demons start coming and they don’t stop coming! It’s not even that there’s just an endless sea of demons swirling around us, it’s the percentage of those that are overwhelmed by the big daddy demon and come wading through their kind to get at us. And maybe that’s only one percent of ...
2023-04-17 10:11:46 +0000 UTC
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Resource distribution amongst the young in the Colony is far more generous than one might expect from ants. Of course, grubs are given high priority for food, ensuring they grow into their full potential in the proper time. Hatchlings always form a core before evolving to tier two, and they always do so with maxed mutations.
Of course, this requires a tremendous amount of Biomass. That phrasing doesn’t really do justice to the reality…. The Colony requires an...
2023-04-17 00:53:25 +0000 UTC
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All in all, there is much we can learn from the Colony’s approach to training and teaching their members. I’m aware that many dismiss the studies and examination of the ant’s methods as inapplicable to any other, non-monstrous race, but that simply isn’t the case.
Because the ants don’t only teach themselves, they welcome and teach their allies also.
The ant-riders, the devastating cavalry unit formed of human, golgari, folk and even one ...
2023-04-16 00:28:07 +0000 UTC
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Postgraduate, or postgrantuate, education was another concept the Colony adopted in a manner very differently to most other societies. While it is normal for their to be scholarly communities, such as the Tower, who accept only the finest minds and greatest learners into their ranks, those who are able to make the most of these opportunities are very few in number.
It has been noted many times that only the wealthy can afford to tutor their children to the exacti...
2023-04-14 08:50:09 +0000 UTC
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Given the nature of the ants as a social insect, one with a particular obsession toward the care and rearing of their young, it may be understandable, even expected, that they would focus so intently on education. However, the depth and complexity of their methods is astounding, no matter how one thinks about it.
Even among monsters, not all are born with the same interests and passions, this is especially true for those above a certain threshold of intelligence....
2023-04-13 09:06:37 +0000 UTC
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The ants of the Colony didn’t invent universal education on Pangera, but they were, perhaps, the first to pursue it with such rigour. The citizens of the Silver City, for example, are entitled to learning until they turn ten. For the Colony, things are obviously very different due to their monstrous nature. It doesn’t take years to elevate a monster, as they are effectively born ready to fight and as intelligent as they are going to get until they evolve.
But the ants a...
2023-04-12 07:18:21 +0000 UTC
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Need to catch up on Chrysalis this week! If all goes well, should be 7 posts minimum.
Look, I don’t know what they expect me to say. You’d think I’d get better at this, since I’ve left messages for a few of the other castes, but it really isn’t the case.
You’re Soldiers. You Soldier. You get it, I get it, we all get it. In many ways, this was the easiest of all of the evolutions I designed for our species, all you had to do was get bigger ...
2023-04-10 06:36:59 +0000 UTC
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Not a new chapter!
I just wanted to put my thoughts down and remind people that there is no BoD this week! You got double the BoD content in that last post, don't forget!
Next week I will post the epilogue and then we go on to book 3! Whoo!
I was very gratified to see that most people enjoyed the end of book 2. From the very beginning, I had intended for it to end that way, though I was supposed to reach that point in one book, not two. Superior pacing!
Lots to l...
2023-04-10 06:09:11 +0000 UTC
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Quick author note. There won't be any BoD next week, but this is four chapters worth of words, so it's fair!
Was very difficult to write this. Hope you enjoy!
B2C55 - The Edge
The heavy mace knocked Tyron aside as his arm bent into his body and absorbed the force of the blow. Once he had his balance back, he tried to execute a counter-slash as he commanded his minions to support him.
The armoured slayer had ...
2023-04-07 08:08:04 +0000 UTC
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Ah, to be back on the road again, my good friends by my side, such a wonderful feeling. I’ve got the breeze blowing through my antennae, a wide open plain before me, and fresh, crisp air in my lungs.
Except the breeze is in fact filled with smoke, ash and death, the wide open plain is in fact choked with demon monsters in a fighting frenzy, and I don’t have lungs.
Who needs ‘em anyway?! What have lungs ever done for anyone?
Even the friends aren’t quite ...
2023-04-05 10:13:00 +0000 UTC
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Granin paced up and down in his chambers, mind buzzing. He’d thought that after centuries of living, nothing would surprise him anymore, yet here he was. Something glinted in the corner of his eye, and he caught himself in the mirror.
His second skin was as rough as ever, granite, plain and solid, covering his huge frame as well as ever, though he thought he may have detected some crumbling in places. A closer inspection confirmed it was all in his mind.
“Not that o...
2023-04-05 05:48:25 +0000 UTC
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Little treat for you all!
edit: Quick update on the lad for those who've been messaging me. He's doing very well! Still at home, still with both arms in casts, obviously, but he has less pain and more mobility in his fingers, so he can do a bit more for himself now.
Specialist is happy with the way his bones were set and is content to monitor his progress over the next few weeks. More x-rays tomorrow, but so far everything is looking good!...
2023-04-05 02:30:30 +0000 UTC
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Obviously the title is a placeholder. Whaddaya think?
2023-04-04 03:04:16 +0000 UTC
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