Chapter 188: Teaching Fear

Paradox’s Spine Tingler (troll variant) (Intermediate-advanced Difficulty)

3 decigrams of troll spine, 1 bat ear, preserved Thunder Heart, Seeker’s mummified brain. Magma Fish eye lens, 1 Cm^3 Lunt bone, Ultimate adhesive.

Carve a depression into the lunt bone as depicted below, allowing the magma fish eye lens to slot in nicely. Cut tiny crescents out of the bat ear as shown in the picture below. Scale added to the picture because ancient wizard were hilariously bad at measuring accurately. Use tiny dots of Ultimate Adhesive to adhere the bat ear to the back of the Lunt Bone at the cut points, as depicted in #3. Ensure that the Ultimate adhesive has re-filled in the ear with more bat ear, and that the entire thing is as close to it’s original shape as possible. The crescent technique resulted in a more perfect end result than not using it, or stitching, or Elmer’s glue.

Rehydrate and then re-dehydrate the Seeker brain in a solution of water and liquified troll spine, allowing it to soak up the entire thing like a sponge before re-dehydrating. Using a vacuum chamber will speed up the process and prevent decay from the rehydrated brain.

(note, the brain may need to be enhanced with Annor’s Fortification in order to prevent damage during the infusion. The author passively fortifies his own materials and this may be a sticking point for future wizards)

Take the re-dehydrated brain and carve a tiny dimple out of the base before attaching it to the bat ear with ultimate adhesive as shown in the pictures below, scale included, because we’re not goddamn savages.

Carefully widen the superior vena cava, before gently inserting the fused items into the right ventricle. Use ultimate adhesive to close and lock the ingredients in place, as shown below.

Apply 60 volts to the heart for one tenth of a second to trigger the spell.

Author’s note. I deliberately chose non-consumable materials for this spell, which created something more akin to a fetish than anything else, making it slightly more complex and significantly more expensive than it might’ve otherwise been, but the number of trolls I need to exterminate necessitates a wholesale approach.

The targeting system is the bat ear, seeker brain, and troll spine. To make the resulting fetish target any other species, simply infuse the seeker brain with a different liquified spine.

While the spell seems to be powerful, there may be complications and workarounds. A few I can think of off the top of my head:

1: The spell targets using soundwaves, so an ability or spell that nullifies sound would make the spell fizzle. Also won’t work in space, unlike Gor’s Disintegration.

2: certain species may prove troublesome. Getting a spine from something powerful like an arch demon, or something exceedingly rare like a moon fairy to use in the spell might be more effort than its worth.

3: Not everything has a spine.

Even with those limitations, Perry was pretty confident it would work as intended on the trolls. They may be smarter than your standard trolls on account of a demonic bargain, but they sure as hell didn’t have the scientific background to understand sound waves.

The fetish was about the size of his fist, with a handle jutting out of the back which supplied the juice, along with a cluster of Terry the Magical Octopus’s nerve cells, and a Stenciled ‘TROLL’ on the front and handle, to make sure it never got mixed up with another gun with…a faintly beating heart sticking out of the front..

Well, time to go test it out.

In a matter of hours, Perry had faced down Karth again, and had managed to subdue him, draining his life force to the point where he was barely conscious.

“Do you not understand the words coming out of my mouth?” Perry asked in Manitian. “Sur Ren Der.”

“I have never heard that word before in my life,” Karth said with a shrug, wrapped up in a cocoon of black tar.

“It means to give up.”

“Eh?”

“Retreat?”

Karth shook his head.

“Avoid the fight because you know you can’t win?”

“Is that...Sorry, not getting it.”

“Run really fast AWAY from the enemy.”

“I thought that was just what Meat does,” Karth said, cocking his giant head to the side. “Never understood why.”

“Let me give you an example,” Perry said, hefting the Spine Tingler and pointing it at one of Karth’s subordinates.

THUMP

The heart at the end of the pistol grip thumped, sending a cone-shaped shockwave of sound through the troll. An instant later, a jet of flame burst out of the troll’s eye-sockets, and it fell to the ground dead.

“If you stop fighting and leave…he would still be alive.”

“I don’t get it.” Karth said. “You’re the one that killed him.”

“I have fed a thousand of your troops to Lake Michigan over the last week. I have decimated you twice over. I have a weapon that can kill your kind instantly, and I can do it without allowing the ability of counterattack. This is when smart commanders would retreat or surrender. The commander is responsible for the lives of his troops.”

“Meat morale breaks around that level of attrition, making them easier prey, trolls do not have morale, only hunger.” Karth said with a shrug.

The troll raised his voice to his troops.

“WHO’S HUNGRY!?”

A roar of primal hunger shook the earth from the hundreds of restrained giants, squirming against the hooked netting that Perry had made obscenely strong. Each 1/8 inch thick piece of steel cable was roughly fifty times stronger than it had any right to be.

Perry dragged his free hand down his face.

“Should we just kill them all?” Mark asked. Perry could tell his captains found that idea appealing. The humans watching the restrained trolls seemed to be itching to give ‘em ‘the dunk’.

“I’m trying to reach some kind of deal with the trolls, because if we don’t, the remnants of their army are gonna linger around Chicago forever, flaring up every now and then…like herpes.”

Perry might be able to commit genocide successfully, and it was probably the right solution to the trolley problem that was troll existence. But still, genocide was genocide, and generally frowned upon regardless of the situation. And if he was unsuccessful…troll herpes.

Perry was hoping he could come to some kind of arrangement with them like they did with whoever gave them Gna’kis’s demon phone-number on their foreheads.

“Okay, intellectually, you know that, if you do the math, it will only take me about three days to kill every single troll inside city limits with my new weapon.” Perry said. “What happens then?”

“Then the strongest troll goes home and makes new litters, who come back and eat the humans?” Karth said with a shrug.

“No, you’re ALL going to die. One hundred percent. All the warriors who came with you. What happens then?”

“Strongest troll teenager becomes next warrior, makes new litters, who come back and eat the humans?” Karth said.

“Oh, you mean the dozen stick, mud and leather villages out in the plains to the west filled with troll females and children that I’ve been aware since before you even arrived?” Perry asked. “Population twelve thousand one hundred and six? The ones that would take me approximately two days to scour off the face of the earth? Those ones?”

Karth’s expression changed, all mirth lost.

“Ah,” Perry pointed at Karth. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

Perry leaned in, probably close than was strictly safe.

“You see, humans are nasty things. If we as a species become aware of another species that preys on ours, we get together and hunt it to extinction. There are three million humans in Chicago, nine million in Franklin City, and twelve in Washington. And they’re all aware of your meager sixteen thousand…We will hunt and hunt and hunt until there are no trolls, anywhere. EVER.”

“What is…” Karth tasted the word. “Million?”

“Do you know a thousand?” Perry asked.

Karth shook his head.

Perry heaved a huge sigh and stood up.

“SOMEBODY GET ME A GODDAMN BLACKBOARD AND SOME CHALK!” he shouted. “I gotta teach this fucker math to explain how screwed he is!”

two hours later.

“So when a number is ten times more than the original number, you tuck a zero behind it, like so.” Perry said, adding a zero behind the one.

“This,” Perry said, pointing to the number ‘10’ on the board. “Represents ten ones, or this many marks.”

Perry quickly jotted down ten little marks on the board.

“This is ten marks,” Perry said. “And this represents that number.” Perry said, motioning between the number ‘10’ and the tight cluster of chalk marks on the board.

“I see.” Karth said, stroking his chin. “And if they are four more?”

“Replace the zero with the number four we covered earlier,” Perry said, adding four more dashes to the cluster and then replacing the zero with a four, making ‘14’.

Once Karth got that, Perry erased the four and replaced the zero before adding another. “Now this number is one hundred, how many do you think that is?”

Karth frowned, his tongue unconsciously hanging out of his muzzle.

“Ten tens?”

“EXACTLY!” Perry said with a grin, his arm turning into a blur as he added nine more groups of ten marks underneath the math symbols, smudging off the extra four on the original with his thumb.

‘This,” Perry said, pointing at ‘100’ “Represents this many dots: One hundred.”

“This can scale up infinitely,” Perry said, adding another zero. “This number represents ten of these blackboards filled with these marks, - a thousand – and with another zero, there are the same number of blackboards with this many marks as there are marks on this blackboard, One hundred hundreds, or ten thousand.”

“So you said trolls were sixteen thousand.”n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

“Yep.”

“That looks like…” Karth scowled in intense thought for a moment before correctly writing ‘16000’ on the board.

“Exactly.”

“One hundred…boards worth of trolls, plus six tens of boards worth of trolls.” Karth said, scanning the blackboard filled with marks, seemingly straining his imagination to picture each and every one as an individual of his species.

“Sixty,” Perry supplied. “On hundred and sixty boards worth of trolls. We haven’t quite covered multiplication yet, but you’re doing it right now.”

“This is a big number.” Karth said after some consideration, looking down at Perry. “I don’t see how you intend to survive.”

“Okay,” Perry said, “Three million,” Perry said, writing down a three, an eight, and a twelve. “Plus eight million, plus twelve million, equals?”

“Twenty, and four million.” Karth said, writing down ‘24’ under Perry’s three numbers.

“twenty-four,” Perry supplied.

“How many zeroes after the number mean ‘million’?” Karth said, beginning to pick up math quickly.

Perry added six zeroes.

24,000,000

Karth was quiet for some time.

“How many is this?” he asked.

“We can do some simple math tricks to make this problem easier,” Perry said, erasing the last three zeroes off both numbers.

“There are two thousand and four hundred humans for every sixteen trolls,” Perry said. “Both numbers are divisible by eight, so we can take it down to…

Perry jotted out the math.

“Three hundred humans for every two trolls, then it’s an easy divide by two, which results in one hundred and fifty humans, or one and a half boards worth of humans, for every troll.” Perry said, tapping the hundred check marks. “On the east coast of America, anyway. There’s probably another hundred million or so scattered around the other continents, but we don’t visit each other much.”

“Continents?” Karth asked.

Perry sighed and ran his finger through his hair.

“Mark! GET ME A WORLD MAP!”

Twenty minutes later.

“So you see, there’s presumably hundreds of millions of humans living in these areas,” Perry said, highlighting the coastal regions. “Where they can get fresh water and fertile farmland in large supply. They’re on the coast because the interior is often desert. A few places might have more population centers, near very large rivers, like the amazon, and the runoff from the Himalayas, like the Indus river, here.” Perry pointed them out.

“Your people are right here.” Perry drew a tiny circle beside Chicago.

“How do know all these terrains?” Karth asked.

“Cuz I have a map?” Perry said, frowning.

“How does the map know these lands?” Karth asked, seemingly trying to clarify.

“Well, these maps are a bit out of date,” Perry said, eyeballing the globe. “They were made back in the seventies when most of the cartography was done by hand using planes and surveyors. Nowadays, satellite imagery is how we do it, and the accuracy is much better.”

“What is a ‘satellite’?” Karth asked.

“It’s a computer that we launch into the sky with a rocket, a bit like an arrow launched so hard it never comes down. it takes pictures of things and beams them back down using coded electromagnetic waves, which we decode back into information and pictures and such. It’s basically a way of seeing the entire planet at once.”

He looked at Karth.

Karth looked at him.

“…I surrender.” The giant said, holding up his palms.