Ugly Man Chronicles Reignition Book 2 Chapter 4: Break Down
Yep, still doing it. The magic system is sorta explained.
Evan didn’t feel good. Not physically--at least, that wasn’t what was bothering him. He was still a little sore from the end result of his fight with Moreno, which was new, though he put it down to being the hardest he’d ‘died’ so far. In the two days since he’d broken nearly every bone in his body, the pain had steadily receded; in a day, he estimated, it would be nothing but an unpleasant memory.
An unpleasant memory was the source of his unease, actually. While he’d been lying on the pavement, groan-screaming as his spinal cord knitted itself back together, he’d watched Titus cut an ear off Moreno’s mangled corpse, sprinkle the body with a blue substance he’d called “barghest powder”, and with a muttered word, set the whole thing alight with an eerily silent, heatless gray flame. In less than a minute, the body was reduced to a pile of ash and blackened bones, which Titus brushed and stomped down a nearby sewer drain, respectively.
He’d killed Moreno and Titus had literally thrown him away. Over the two days since then, Titus had made a concerted effort to assure Evan that Moreno had deserved worse than he’d got. And Evan was trying to make peace with the idea that he was going to run into people who there wouldn’t be any ‘normal’ way of dealing with; even if he’d somehow subdued Moreno and handed him over to the authorities (and convinced them to arrest him, though that probably wouldn’t have been too hard; his search for information on Moreno had turned up a laundry list of warrants), it would be child’s play for Moreno to break out of captivity once he’d recovered his strength. As it stood, probably the only way to mitigate the harm someone like Moreno could cause was to take him off the board permanently.
Evan accepted that, as things stood, the only way he could effectively neutralize a sadistic sociopath with supernatural capabilities was to kill them. He just wasn’t particularly happy about it.
To that end of “making it easier to kill things/people with superpowers”, he’d tried to recreate the huge punch he’d used to mangle Moreno, but nothing had come of it. Evan figured that it had to be tied to the memory of his boxing match, but no matter how hard he concentrated on that day, he couldn’t pull it off. Maybe it had to do with the source of the pain? Maybe he wasn’t getting close enough to death? Maybe it had to be used against the source of the pain, as opposed to random trees that happened nearby? There were too many variables, and Titus had started to complain about the amount of bullets the experiment was wasting, so Evan had decided to move on to Plan B: better weapons.
To that end, he’d decided to rebuilt the MANUS and give it an upgrade; to that end, they had made a detour to a salvage yard. And now Evan was covered in mud up to his knees, crawling and climbing around piles of barely-useful scrap metal and discarded appliances, searching for... well, he had ideas, and he was pretty sure he’d know when he saw something that was useful to him. Those mechanical engineering classes weren’t that long ago, after all.
Unfortunately, such an intuition-based method of searching didn’t lend itself well to collaboration, which meant Evan was wading through (and, with frustrating regularity, falling into) the mud in the baking sun while Titus sat in a rented UTV, flipping through sheaves of Evan’s notes and sipping from a water bottle that Evan was pretty sure contained Colt 45.
The suspension squeaked and protested as Evan dropped what felt like a hundred pounds of scrap onto the back.
“Find anything?”
“Jinx!”
“...”
“Oka--“
“Fuck!” Laughing, Titus finally broke the linguistic stalemate. “You first.”
“Eh, some half-decent sheet metal I can make the frame for a new Ma--gauntlet out of,” Evan said, stopping himself from saying ‘MANUS’. Titus had given him shit for “the most contrived acronym I’ve heard outside of Marvel comics” and he didn’t really feel like putting up with that right now. “A couple small motors I might be able to make work, a couple sawblades I’ve got some ideas for... you?”
Titus grimaced. “Maybe? Like... I can recognize some of this, but... the structure makes no sense to me. There’s these symbols I’ve never seen before and they’re sprinkled all over the place. If I could read magic--like, the actual spell--it’d be no problem, but...”
“Those aren’t magic,” Evan said, taking a sheet of paper from Titus’s hand. Among the arcane glyphs and half-coherent, borderline-microscopic notes were symbols that looked like a small grid of sixteen-by-sixteen squares. Dots, Xes, and other simple symbols not much bigger than a comma filled the grids. Evan laughed to himself in disbelief.
“Then what the hell is it?”
“It’s my personal reference system. Did I tell you I was on, like, a lot of drugs when I was in college? And grad school? And when I was working on my doctoral thesis? I came up with this... pattern that made sense to me, telling me where I might find connections between different pieces of information. We’re talking like, research chemical drugs, by the way. Shit that doesn’t have names yet. Hah. I can’t believe I... well, the previous me still remembered it!”
“Can the current you remember it? ”
“I think so.” Evan took more pages from Titus’s hands. “Okay, so...” He walked around to the front of the UAV and spread the pages out on its small hood. “Look, this means it’s related to this...”
A few minutes later, Evan had arranged the pages and connected various passages with pencil lines, forming an intricate grid of reference that he was enthusiastically trying to explain to a befuddled Titus.
“Man, you’re, like, a special kind of autistic, aren’t you?”
“The most special. Now don’t be an ass. Does this make any sense to you?”
“It’s... starting to, I guess,” Titus said, running his fingers along some of the connecting lines. “I think... huh. Huh.” He turned to look at Evan again, peering at him with what almost looked like suspicion.
“What?”
“You’re sure you don’t know anything about magic? Really?”
“If I did, I forgot it when I cored out my own brain. Why? What’s wrong?”
Titus exhaled loudly through his nose and pursed his lips, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet as he looked back at the pages.
“This isn’t just instructions. It’s... well, I think it is the spell.”
“What, like... it’s already been cast?”
“Not quite, but... it’s primed, I guess you could say?” Titus picked up the pages and looked around. “We need to spread these out. Find me something to set them on that’s not the ground.”
“So why’s that weird?” Evan asked, grunting as he rock-walked a gutted washing machine off of a nearby scrap pile.
“Well, it’s not just a matter of writing things down--No, we’re gonna need to put each of these on their own separate thing, I’m gonna need like thirty feet--to make a spell work. Just the directions themselves are a starting point. Look, grab that big cable-coil thing and turn it on its side. From this point you’d need to either gather the reagents and go through a whole ritual and cast it right then and there, or, if you’re good, you could do that whole thing and store that spell so it could be cast immediately later.”
“And this one’s the latter?”
Titus absently tugged at his goatee. “Yeah... and that’s what’s weird about this. You didn’t have any experience in magic before, and if you only learned about it within the last year...” He inhaled deeply through his nose and stood very still for a moment, then exhaled sharply and clapped his hands. “Fuck it. Let’s see what this does!”
“Wait, you’re gonna just do it? Isn’t that dangerous?”
Titus sighed and rolled his eye. “Look, okay, let me explain why this isn’t likely to kill us or rip a hole in reality. This spell is what you’d call fundamental magic.”
“So, what, like, really beginner stuff?”
“Oh no, far from it,” Titus said, giving another chuckle that sounded like it was halfway between wonder and worry. “I mean fundamental as in ‘the fundamental laws of reality’. Magic that lets you ignore one of the big rules. Like gravity, friction, things like that. This is some serious shit you’ve got here, buddy.”
Evan went very still and very quiet. He was staring, eyes open just a little wider than normal, at the ground in the middle of the impromptu magic circle. “Which law does this one work on?” he said, barely above a whisper.
“You’ll see.”
“Dude, you can’t do that. Don’t fucking blueball me.”
“Didn’t you say that’s your ground state of being?”
“Stop fucking doing that. Stop dodging my every question with a lame one-liner.”
Titus put his hand to his chest in a gesture of mock offense, as if the very idea that his one-liners were lame was deeply wounding. “Look, alright, trust me, this is going to be worth the surprise! Just find me something that... okay, find me a machine that works. Something that you can observe working.”
Evan exhaled through his teeth. “Dude, we’re in a junkyard. The whole point of this place is it’s full of things that don’t work.”
“You got that wrist-wrecker on you?”
Evan slowly reached around to the small of his back, his hand coming back holding his revolver. “Whatever you’re going to do, it’s not going to break it or anything, is it?”
“Naaaahhh. If anything, it’s gonna make it way better. I think. C’mon, put it there in the middle!” Titus was clearly getting impatient, rocking from foot to foot like a kid on Christmas morning waiting to be told he could open his presents.
Evan brushed some dirt away before setting the gun down, an ultimately pointless gesture, but one he felt was owed; he’d never been a ‘gun guy’, but the massive revolver was one of the first things he’d encountered when he first ‘woke up’ and he’d sort of imprinted on it as a sort of security blanket. The fact that he’d fired it too few times to even require reloading--and that Titus had used it to punch a hole the size of a silver dollar through him--didn’t matter much. It wasn’t about utility; it was all sentiment. That overcompensating hunk of metal was a very real thing in a world that felt increasingly unreal.
So it was with trepidation that he stepped back outside the circle. He turned to ask Titus something, but his question caught in his throat when he saw Titus.
The smaller man’s unpatched eye had rolled back in his head and a faint pale-green light was seeping from both the socket and beneath the eyepatch. His hair fluttered and flitted upward, as if he was standing over an exhaust vent. He was muttering under his breath and his hands, held out at waist height, twitched and spasmed. As Evan watched, Titus’s fingers began making more deliberate movements, tracing out bizarre patterns that hung half-visible in the air like the after-image of a camera flash. Evan thought could hear his joints cracking as his fingers twisted themselves in ways that taxed even Titus’s freakish flexibility.
Evan stared, mouth half-open. He heard himself mutter, “...and all who heard should see them there, and all should cry, beware, beware...”
Titus’s chanting was only slightly louder than it started, but it seemed to be reverberating. Evan whirled around, swearing to himself that he heard whispering right behind his shoulder. Whatever language Titus was speaking, it wasn’t one he knew, but it felt old. As the chanting grew more intense, Evan felt like he was getting tunnel vision. He knew that it wasn’t actually getting darker, but his peripheral vision was shrinking. Was he imagining the way the air was bending? He was getting a sense of vertigo, like his perception of everything was getting infinitely taller without actually moving. That tattoo on his arm felt like it was coursing with frozen electricity.
Titus suddenly shouted a word that Evan could recognize and clapped his hands. Reality lurched. Evan stumbled forward and bent double with nausea.
“Hooo!” Titus clapped again, dancing a formless jig as Evan noisily wretched and spit stomach acid.
“Does that usually... did it work?” Evan squinted through watery eyes at the space where, just a moment ago, his gun had lain. “Hey! Where’d it go?”
“Go look closer,” Titus said, a grin threatening to split his head in half.
Evan walked carefully towards the spot at the center of the circle. The air felt somehow greasy and smelled like a thunderstorm was rolling in. There was an unpleasant buzzing on the edge of hearing, like a fly trapped between the panes of a closed window. His teeth itched.
Evan squatted down and picked up something a little over an inch long and held it between his fingers, holding it up to the light.
“No. Fucking. Way.”
It was his gun, reduced down to 1/20th scale. He gingerly reached a finger out and turned the cylinder, grinning and laughing at the tiny click. He very delicately pushed the hammer back, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a mechanical pencil, clicking it a couple of times to extend the lead.
Titus, who had been turning his own hands back and forth, staring at them quizzically, looked up. “Hey, wait! Don’t--“
Evan stuck the lead into the trigger guard and pushed the trigger back.
The sound was odd. It started out a quiet crack that seemed to experience the Doppler effect in a different direction, its pitch stretching as it roared to full volume. A very regular-sized bullet split the wood of the impromptu table.
“Holy fuck! What was that?”
“The spell only affects the gun and things inside it! The bullet left it, so it stopped affecting it!” Titus yelled, wiggling a finger in his ear. “Be careful! It still functions just the same way it did at full size!”
“Yeah, I can see that,” Evan said, distractedly. The barrel of the gun even felt hot in the palm of his hand. “So that spell ignores... conservation of mass. Jesus Christ.”
“Yep. I know you were, like, studying to be a scientist, but don’t think about it too hard. You’ll give yourself a migraine.”
“What do you mean, ‘studying to be’? The only reason you’re not referring to me as Doctor Abrams is--wait. How do I get it back to normal?”
“You remember that last word I said before I finished casting?”
Evan’s brow furrowed. “It sounded like... ‘stanza’?”
He yelped as he suddenly found himself holding a full-sized S&W 500. “Ha-HAAAA! A gen-u-ine, bona-fide fuckin’ magic weapon!” he yelled, jumping to his feet. “Stanza!” The gun was suddenly fun-sized again. “Stanza!” Gun-sized. “St--”
“Shutup! It only works a few times a day!” Titus hissed.
Evan looked up at him with an exaggerated pout. “Fiiiiine. Why do you keep looking at your hands like that?”
“Okay, so... you know how I said this spell had all the juice needed to cast it wrapped up in it? It had... more than that. A lot more.”
“So what’s that mean? Are you, like, more powerful now?”
Titus tilted his head and waggled his hand. “Not... generally. But there’s like a... separate pool designated for that spell of... well, I guess calling it ‘mana’ is the easiest explanation.”
“That makes sense, I guess. So that’s separate from your, uh, normal pool?”
“Yeah, and... it’s big, man. That was a hungry spell and I think I could do it three or four more times before having to recharge.”
“Oh, Jesus, man, if... God, think of... I’ve got so many ideas!” Evan said, unable to keep the excitement from his voice. “Do you have any idea how big of a deal this is? Being able to fit a full-sized computer in an inch of space is--“
Titus held up his hand, cutting him off. “Wait.”
“Wha--” Evan started, then realized his tattoo was itching again. “What’s going--“
“Something’s coming!”
It wasn’t like a bolt of lightning. Not quite. It looked more like a several streams of fire the color of a raincloud pouring out of thin air, earthing themselves in a pile of broken appliances and scrap metal. The ping and clunk of cooling metal was all Evan and Titus could hear as they crept closer.
“What do you think it--fuck!” Evan reached out to shove Titus aside, but he’d already blinked several feet away, throwing himself to the ground. So it was only Evan who got hit by the tendril of debris that suddenly snaked out of the junk pile. It was nearly as wide as his torso and hit like a truck, scooping him off his feet and pinning him to the ground with force that broke at least a couple of his ribs.
Titus had gotten to one knee and was firing at the tendril with one of the pistols he always seemed to pull out of nowhere, but all that seemed to accomplish besides a couple of ricochets was to provoke the mass to extend another arm and swipe down at him from above. He blinked out again but lost his footing as he leapt, crashing to the ground and losing his grip on the gun.
“Disjunct it!”
“I’m trying! It’s got like a... shell or something! I can’t get through!”
Desperately trying to keep the thing from crushing him further, Evan raised his own gun and fired point-blank into the mass of the tendril. Aside from nearly breaking his wrist from the recoil, there seemed to be no effect; the bullets either bounced punched through sheet metal or simply slid between the gaps in the junk that floated in the strange light as though bobbing just below the surface of water.
“Don’t know what I expected,” Evan grumbled, tossing his gun away. Time for another approach, then.
It was hard to concentrate while the thing was steadily pushing him deeper into the mud, but Evan summoned up his will and concentrated on the idea of his Cables wrapping around his left forearm. He wound them tight, compressed them, and then swung his fist upward and let the tension unwind.
The impact drove enough of the junk into the air to allow him to scramble to his feet, but it didn’t even leave the cohesion of the gray light. It hung in the air for a moment, then rebounded as if on elastic, slamming back into a tree-trunk-sized tendril once again.
“Well, that seemed to do something,” Titus said as they both jumped backward, trying to get out of the thing’s thrashing reach. “Maybe a few more of those’ll soften it up and...”
“Probably not a real tenable strategy,” Evan hissed through clenched teeth. Titus saw that the punch had probably done more damage to Evan than the monster--his forearm hung at an angle that made it look as though he’d grown a second elbow between the first and his wrist, and none of his fingers were pointing close to the right direction. Over the strange din of the animate debris scraping together, the crickle-crack of tendons snapping bone back into place was audible.
“No chance you figured out how to that big pain-punch again?”
“None! And I don’t think just hitting it is gonna work! We’re just gonna be breaking what it’s made of! Do you have anything that can actually damage magic?”
“Nothing that works anywhere near as quick as we need!”
They both dove behind another heap of scrap. “I think I might have an idea, but I honestly don’t know what this’ll do, or if it’ll even work at all,” Evan said. “I don’t want to have to run away from this thing and leave it here, but if this doesn’t work...”
“Yeah, I got it. What’s your plan?”
Evan clenched his right fist, his misshapen jaw popping as he gritted his teeth together with effort. “Instead of a coiled spring that just makes my punch stronger,” he hissed through his teeth, “what about if I hit it with the Cables instead?”
Titus squinted at Evan’s fist, then blanched. “Oh no, dude, don’t do that. If that’s really your soul you’re working with--”
Evan suddenly sprung to his feet and sprinted around the heap, screaming wordless defiance. Titus swore and slipped out of time briefly so he could stand up and pull another handgun from his jacket in time to provide Evan with covering fire, for whatever that was worth.
Evan juked another swing from a tendril, then planted his foot on it and used it a springboard to launch himself into the air. His right arm swung overhead in a long, sweeping arc, and he brought his hand down like a hammer on top of the scrap pile and let the Cables wrapped in a ball around his fist unwind.
The scrap pile buckled like an anthill sprayed with a hose. Though no sound aside from pulverizing scrap could be heard by the human ear, a psychic wail of pain and rage seemed to scrape across both men’s minds as the gray light rippled and dimmed at the point of Evan’s hammerblow. Barely keeping his footing on the shifting rubble, Evan drove his left hand down into the mass, forcing what remaining will he could muster into the idea of his arm.
He met surprisingly little resistance. Unlike when he’d shut off Titus’s powers, there was next to nothing to sense here. It seemed to be barely a being at all. When his ethereal arm touched something cold and writhing amongst the half-sensed notions of metal and creeping lightning, he closed his thought-fingers around it and yanked.
The was no more fanfare. The light completely vanished, and with it, the remainder of the force holding the pile of junk together. Evan felt a familiar sensation of something sliding from his grip into the core of his being before he toppled backwards and was buried in the shifting scrap.
“Come on, I know that couldn’t’ve hurt you that much,” Titus said, tossing aside a rust-eaten sink and uncovering Evan’s face. Evan hadn’t seemed to be able to free himself from the rubble, and Titus was forced to follow the sound of muffled sobbing to figure out where to dig. Evan crying was such a strange sound that it made the hair on the back on Titus’s neck stand up; it started with a drawn-out, warbling moan, leading to wheezing sobs that were accompanied by high-pitched hitching gasps and a strange whistling noise that Titus put down to the bridge of Evan’s nose resembling a stretched-out letter Z. “Did that shut off your healing or something? Come on, get up.”
Evan didn’t move for a moment, then sniffed loudly and listlessly reached up and took Titus’s hand. “What’s the point?” he muttered, letting himself be pulled upwards.
“Huh?”
“What’s the point of this? What am I even doing this for?” Evan said morosely, sluggishly following Titus across the pile of debris. “What difference can I actually make?!”
Titus turned as he walked, eyeing Evan with something that might have been concern. “What’re you talking about? You beat that thing! Hell, Moreno gave you more trouble! Why would you have a crisis of confidence over this?”
“It’s not about that,” Evan spat, sulkily, “I mean this whole hero thing! Did I seriously think I could save the fucking world? Jesus Christ, I’m a murderer!”
“How man times am I gonna—”
“Stop telling me he deserved it! That doesn’t matter! What about all the people who’ll wonder what happened to him, the people who’ll miss him? What about his parents?”
“They’re both dead,” Titus said, flatly.
“Oh, sure, that’s real convenient, you—”
“I can show you both of their obituaries. They were both dead before w—he was out of high school.”
Evan sniffed. “Do you… do you think that’s why he—”
“Look, man, I’m not a psychiatrist! But speaking of, what’s wrong with you? I know you’ve got a big heart and all, but why now?”
“I-I-I don’t know!” Evan stammered, choking back a sob. “Everything just feels so… so… hopeless and pointless and… sad!”
Titus’s frown deepened. “What, did you get rapid-onset depression somehow?”
“Is this what that feels like? How do people live like this?”
Titus muttered something Evan couldn’t hear and walked up to him, grabbing his left wrist. “Circle,” he commanded, lifting Evan’s hand to his face. Evan obediently touched the tip of his thumb and forefinger together and Titus peered through the hole, scanning Evan up and down.
“Oh.”
“What? What?!”
“Okay, don’t freak out about this, but—”
“You’ve just made sure I do! What is it?”
“Look at your right hand.”
Evan raised his fingers to his eye, then looked down at his right hand. He began to shake.
The Cables near his right hand had unraveled, spreading out into the surrounding air like drifting cornsilk, barely anchored to the rest of the mass.
“Ohhhhh fuck oh fuck oh fuck ooooohhhhh God what is that what did I—”
“Evan!” Titus grabbed the side of Evan’s head and forced him to look at him. “Look at me! Listen! I don’t know but it’s probably not permanent! This sort of thing can heal like your body does! You’ll probably be fine!”
“Probably?!” Evan shrieked, his voice surprisingly high and shrill. “I think I broke my soul!”
“You didn’t break anything! Look at me!” Titus yelled. “You might have injured it, but it will probably heal!”
“You don’t know that!” Evan wailed.
“And you don’t know it won’t! Listen! Astral bodies, or however you wanna categorize all this shit, are living things! They have analogies to physical processes! You may have just, I don’t know, sprained something! Nothing’s gone, it just needs to come back together!”
“Are you saying depressed people have, what, bruised souls? That seems kind of insulting!”
“Don’t get fucking combative with me!” Titus snapped. “That is not what I’m saying! I’m saying that you did something reckless and banged up what we’re assuming is the physical manifestation of your immortal soul, and you’re experiencing what I’d describe as common symptoms of depression, and it’s not hard to put two and two together! You gave yourself actual psychic damage, if that’s how you want to think about it!”
“So you’re saying it’s all my fault…”
“God dammit, man!” Titus threw his hands up in the air. “Look, think about this logically. You’re obvious not yourself right now, right?”
Evan sighed. “I dunno… maybe this is—”
“Aha!” Titus thrust a finger at Evan. “See? I know we haven’t known each other long, but in that whole time, you’ve never doubted yourself! Wondered if you made the wrong decision or were doing the right thing, sure, but never were unsure of who you are, right?”
Evan blinked bleary eyes at him. “I… I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.”
“Come on, come on,” Titus wrapped an arm around Evan’s shoulder and guided him back to the UTV. “Let’s get you back home and to bed. I bet you’ll feel better after a nap.”
“I need a drink.”
“No alcohol! Straight to bed with you, mister!”
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“Ugh. God, that was awful. And embarrassing,” Evan muttered, rubbing his eyes. “Thanks for looking out for me, Titus.”
“Yeah, no problem,” Titus said from the driver’s seat. “Had me freaking out there for a bit, I gotta admit. I really had no idea if what I was saying was right or not. You feeling better?”
“Not all the way, but I think I’ll get there. Enough to realize that what I was saying and feeling wasn’t really me. Now I just feel mentally exhausted. Probably gonna go back to bed soon.”
“How’s your, uh, soul lookin’?”
Evan peered through his fingers at his hand. “Coming back together. Not wound tight yet, but it looks like you were right. It’s getting there.” He patted Titus on the shoulder. “Seriously, man. Thank you. I was in a real bad place there for a bit. I don’t know what I’d’ve done it you weren’t there.”
“Aw, don’t get all sappy on me, you big fugly lug,” Titus tried to sound grumpy, but couldn’t help but manage a smile. “Why don’t you go lay back down? We’ll be crossing the state line in a couple hours. After that I’ll find a rest stop to park for a few hours.”
“Yeah, sounds good,” Evan yawned. “Thanks again. Man, I am so glad that was temporary…”
After the door shut, Titus muttered to himself, “At least you can sleep it off.”