Of course the world ended while I was in the middle of nowhere, with only a blunt sword for defense.
Specifically, a hunk of metal that resembled a sword enough to look good in a movie, but would decidedly not be able to fulfill the same task as an actual, well, weapon.
And while I wasn’t alone, my twin sister, Mia, wasn’t exactly in any better shape ...
2024-08-26 14:05:08 +0000 UTC View PostHill of Allen, Ireland
There were few thi
2024-08-26 14:04:15 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey, so Museum Core 1 is fully edited and formatted, if you're interested in getting your hands on a copy, here's the link.
And if you were to leave a review on Amazon on August 20th when it releases, that'd be really great, thank you.
2024-08-06 13:15:51 +0000 UTC View PostThe second chapter of the day, brought to you by: the bloody thunderstorm that is making it impossible to sleep.
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Yesterday had been a bloodbath. Half the people she’d been training up had died.
And the public had celebrated. Because they didn’t know.
Oh, sure, the fact ...
2024-07-31 21:01:49 +0000 UTC View Post“THIEF!”
Alaxia’s furious roar shook her sanctuary all the way down to its very foundations.
She’d been lounging sideways on her gold-and-emerald throne, back resting on one armrest, legs dangling off the other one, a platter of crystalfruit grapes resting on her stomach. Someone should have been feeding her, but her old servants were either dead or traitors and no one in th...
2024-07-31 16:03:24 +0000 UTC View PostJaclyn hadn’t really been too present for Granger’s training, while she’d been dueling dinosaurs, he’d been blowing stuff up in the panacea area, but she’d heard it. All the way on the other end of the Museum. A constant barrage of explosions and the crackle of electricity, with the occasional organic tearing sound of a magic missile ripping through individual foes that stood too far ...
2024-07-30 18:46:36 +0000 UTC View PostOh, this was going to be fun. Twenty early F-Ranks, and by early, Thomas meant that they were standing at the very beginning of having any powers, but they weren’t nervous at all. Or at least not in any way he could recognize.
They were experienced in whatever they normally did, but new to magic, if his reading of the situation was correct. And hopefully, that would lead t...
2024-07-29 18:31:22 +0000 UTC View PostJaclyn woke up in a puddle of her own drool, head resting on her desk, thankfully clear of any papers that might be damaged. She sighed as she pushed herself back into a sitting position, brushing the wrinkles out of her suit as best she could.
Wow, falling asleep at her desk. She hadn’t done that in years. A decade, if she didn’t count the few times she’d done so voluntarily when s...
2024-07-27 23:11:14 +0000 UTC View PostThey hadn’t come back yet. That was … not great. Sure, there’d always been a chance that they’d stay overnight due to the nighttime jungle being dangerous.
But there was also the option that the thing that was keeping them was a lot more … final.
Signing the treaty with the Worldstrider Tribe had been a matter of minutes, the press conference afterward had been longer by a...
2024-07-24 17:22:57 +0000 UTC View PostIt was a calm evening, all things considered. Something had spooked the ever-loving fuck out of the animals earlier, but things had calmed down over the course of several hours.
But while Thomas was watching the sun fall below the horizon, a lesser version of the earlier unrest returned. Unseen creatures screeching, the crunch of breaking wood, the roar of an engine, and some very human c...
2024-07-19 13:07:10 +0000 UTC View PostLevels were all well and good, but they really didn’t matter in the here and now.
What mattered was, well, the fact that her insides felt like they were made of broken glass and ground meat.
And beyond that, her self-created martial Skill came with a hefty dose of self-diagnosing power when it came to combat injuries, and it was telling her that she had internal bleeding from seve...
2024-07-18 16:40:57 +0000 UTC View PostThese people were all cowards. At least to the eyes of a dragon, however human their current shell might have been.
Alaxia Mystscale had finally managed to track down that damnable thief who’d dared pilfer the treasures she’d prepared in anticipation of having to make use of her bolthole.
Yet she couldn’t just go ahead and murder the bastard, no that would be too easy...
2024-07-17 21:52:57 +0000 UTC View PostCambridge’s campus looked much like how she’d seen it last time. A mess. Consequences of stuffing every conference room with all the people required to do all the minutia required to run a modern government.
Seriously, why hadn’t they moved everything straight to Bristol, which was becoming the new center of government? It wasn’t that much further. Then again, maybe there hadn’t...
2024-07-15 15:17:29 +0000 UTC View Post“I think your schedule should be clear enough to work on making magical items,” Elias said after the sabertooth that served as the “queen” on their chessboard chased off Thomas’ king. “I know you told me to wait until you brought it up again, but I’m pretty sure you forgot I ever offered in the first place.”
“When did I say that?” Thomas asked. He didn’t remember...
2024-07-10 19:57:20 +0000 UTC View PostAs natural as having two Dungeons at once felt, Thomas was rapidly starting to figure out some of the limitations of that process.
Firstly, being able to freely control either dungeon wasn’t the same as the ability to control both, so his theoretical workload for Dungeon upkeep had doubled. Currently, neither Dungeon was in constant use, so he was mostly fine on that front. More bored t...
2024-07-10 11:55:23 +0000 UTC View PostFor what felt like the millionth time since leaving the Museum, Jaclyn reached under her jacket and felt for the vial of healing potion, making sure it was still there.
She hadn’t been able to identify it, of course, but Gula had also struck out by quite a lot. She could tell it was a regular healing potion, but one made for someone at such a high rank that for normal people, a few drop...
2024-07-08 19:39:28 +0000 UTC View PostThis was going to be an absolute masterpiece when Thomas was done with it. Or so he hoped.
The first step was simple. All he had to do was maximize the distance between the entrance and the core, a process that obviously involved ensuring that it wasn’t going to be as easy to access the museum as taking advantage of the broken skylight. So Thomas replaced it with meters-thick diamond, t...
2024-07-07 16:34:38 +0000 UTC View PostYou have used your ability to create a Subcore in [British Museum].
Number of uses at current rank remaining: 0
Subcore Type has been determined as [History’s Guardians]
A domain has been automatically established and now covers the entirety of the building, and the archives below it. A Subcore’s domain will only increase when the Main Core increases in Rank.
Would y...
2024-07-06 22:21:58 +0000 UTC View PostHonestly, Elias had been right. And Thomas would never, ever, tell him that.
He couldn’t, not after how he’d reacted to the advice he’d gotten. Sure, it had been an absolutely assholish piece of advice, but “stop worrying your pretty little head about it” had been the only thing he could do.
Even if using denial as a coping strategy was just about the worst strate...
2024-07-05 15:36:01 +0000 UTC View PostThe world was a weird place. It had always been odd, with unexplained phenomena up to wazoo, but with most of those, people with the necessary knowledge just hadn’t bothered to investigate. There was an explanation, it just hadn’t been found. Unexplained, not unexplainable.
Unfortunately, Thomas was pretty sure he’d figured out what was wrong with him, though....
2024-07-02 16:05:23 +0000 UTC View PostFinally. They were out of that damn jungle. Between having a vanguard immune to toxins and access to a method of healing that specialized against toxins, Jaclyn’s group had been an effective counter against this place and yet it had utterly kicked their ass.
In fact, other than the fact that they’d all come out the other side alive, the only good thing about the whole situation was th...
2024-06-30 21:55:38 +0000 UTC View Post“That’s a creepy sign,” Jaclyn commented as she stepped up to the start of the muddy pool with a narrow metal walkway in its middle and two mesh fences on either end that acted as the next challenge.
“BEWARE THE TATZELWYRM’S LEGACY!”
It was like something straight out of a movie, or maybe one of those stupid lawn ornaments people with average incomes but a complete lack ...
2024-06-29 21:05:26 +0000 UTC View PostEveryone was looking at her. Even Gula. Though the orc seemed to be less expectant, more curious.
“We’re going for the panacea,” she finally decided. “If things get too dangerous, we can always retreat.”
Jaclyn didn’t currently have any relatives in dire need of healing, and judging by the fact that no one had even tried to push toward the potion, no one else currently n...
2024-06-27 19:29:04 +0000 UTC View PostThe whole affair had shifted from a ritual to a celebration in an instant. Or at least that was what it felt like.
Jaclyn had been to plenty of formal events in the past, both as an attendee and as security, and she was more than familiar with how those normally went. Even once the scripted, “ritualistic” portion was over and done with, things remained stiff and rigid for a long time,...
2024-06-25 20:07:25 +0000 UTC View PostPower leveling a specific creature pattern was difficult when Thomas wasn’t getting any visitors, but there were ways to get around the issue. Throwing money at the proverbial wall. Well, in this case, the money was also proverbial, but the principle was the same.
He made sure to fill ninety percent of his command limit with proper defenders, using only the smallest fraction of his avai...
2024-06-23 15:53:07 +0000 UTC View PostIt was great that Owens was delegating, it really was, but unfortunately, that meant that Jaclyn had even more paperwork to do than normal.
Not to mention that even if she did not join Frye’s as-of-yet unnamed agency, she was going to be working with it enough that there was already a boatload of paperwork related to that on her desk as well.
Granted, very little of that had come ...
2024-06-21 22:16:39 +0000 UTC View PostHow did the saying go … if you pay in peanuts, you get monkeys?
And Thomas wasn’t paying his critters anything, so how could he be surprised that his new area was turning into a literal monkey house?
These damn monkeys were a mess. Most of Thomas’s creatures had some kind of aggressive instinct, being big animals ill-suited for retreating, who had to confront predators head-on...
2024-06-18 21:45:44 +0000 UTC View PostCambridge Campus was far different than Jaclyn had imagined. Sure, the architecture was there, buildings that had become the backdrop for much of the Harry Potter movies, the wide open fields of grass that any modern campus would doubtlessly have dismissed as a waste of space.
But it was empty and felt desolate in a way that seriously put her hackles up. Her mental image of what a place l...
2024-06-15 16:14:54 +0000 UTC View PostThere was nothing like letting oneself get hit by a car to make you question your life choices.
But honestly, it was a little too late to worry about that right now.
So Jaclyn held up her arms as though she were trying to block a punch instead of a one-ton block of metal hurtling at her, and threw herself back in a split second before impact.
A pale-blue force field shimmered ...
2024-06-12 16:54:25 +0000 UTC View PostThe anti-dragon redesign of his Dungeon wound up coming out rather simplistic.
Vines became a more common design element, covering a lot of ceilings, designed to be easy to break free via the boomslangs’ vine control ability.
Dragons might be too tough for almost any nets he could create, but the goal of the vine-nets wasn’t to entangle them, not at first. They were simply meant...
2024-06-10 18:56:36 +0000 UTC View Post