Battlemage Redux (Go Ask Your Mother Book 3), page 1
BATTLEMAGE REDUX
GO ASK YOUR MOTHER™ BOOK 3
THEOPHILUS MONROE
MICHAEL ANDERLE
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LMBPN Publishing
PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy
Las Vegas, NV 89109
Version 1.00, April 2023
ebook ISBN: 979-8-88541-363-3
Print ISBN: 979-8-88878-348-1
THE BATTLEMAGE REDUX TEAM
Thanks to our JIT Readers
Christopher Gilliard
Diane L. Smith
Jackey Hankard-Brodie
Jeff Goode
Veronica Stephan-Miller
Paul Westman
Jan Hunnicutt
Editor
The Skyhunter Editing Team
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Author Notes - Theophilus Monroe
Author Notes - Michael Anderle
Also by Theophilus Monroe
Books By Michael Anderle
Connect with The Authors
CHAPTER ONE
Nigel and I faced off in an old training room in the hospital-turned-alliance headquarters in St. Louis. The air was thick with the smell of disinfectant.
It was a new spell I’d been practicing. I’d seen him use it when we fought Hana’s undead mages. He taught me how to do it.
I held my wand in two hands, and a beam of arcane energy flowed from the tip.
Nigel held up his wand and did the same. “Low energy, remember. Our strikes should only give us a little shock.”
I gave a slight nod and a mischievous smirk. I reached out to one of the tables to retrieve my Darth Vader helmet. I put it on over my head. It was a bit tight, but it worked. I’d been waiting for this moment ever since I saw Nigel cast the spell from his wand in the battle.
I waved my wand-slash-arcane saber in front of my face. I dropped my voice as low as I could, which was unnecessary because my helmet had a voice filter that made me sound just like James Earl Jones. “The circle is now complete… Now I am the master!”
Nigel rolled his eyes. “Wanker.”
I widened my stance and prepared to strike. Nigel’s button-up shirt was stuck to his skin with sweat, and his slender black tie dangled from his neck. It was better than the three-piece suit he wore all the time when I first met him. And he called me the wanker? All right. I was a grown-ass man in his forties doing Darth Vader cosplay. Come on, though. What man wouldn’t do that if he could make an arcane saber like mine?
I lunged at Nigel and swung my saber at him. He easily blocked the attack, single-handedly. His other hand was placed confidently on his waist.
I pivoted my hips and struck again, this time from the opposite side. Once again, he effortlessly blocked my sword with his own.
“What was that nonsense about the circle? Who did you say the master was now?”
I huffed. “Nigel, I am your daddy!”
Nigel snorted. His saber blocked two of my swings, and I felt the sharp sting as it caught me around the back of my leg. The energy struck me like an electric shock. My leg went temporarily numb.
“Is that so, mate? Looks like you got it backward.”
I hopped on one leg, trying to jab Nigel with my saber. He laughed and gracefully stepped aside each time as he whisked away my saber with his own.
Nigel casually struck my other leg, and I fell to my knees.
“You won’t stop me that easily!”
Nigel laughed. “I am Arthur, King of the Britons.”
“What are you talking about?”
Nigel tapped me with his saber on one arm. My arm went limp. I dropped my wand and picked it up again with my opposite hand. “’Tis but a scratch, right, mate? Just a flesh wound?”
I grunted. “Dare you mock a Sith Lord?”
Nagel laughed. “You’re a lot less Darth Vader right now and a lot more of Monty Python’s Black Knight. Give it a minute and your feeling will return. You need to learn how to properly handle your weapon. You can’t swing your saber around like some kind of loony and expect to prevail against a trained swordsman.”
“You told me to practice. Look at my saber. It’s pretty badass, right?”
“The sharpest katana in the hand of a samurai is a powerful tool. In the hand of a fool, it is dangerous.”
“Are you saying I’m a fool?”
“Of course not. You have a gift. Wisdom inherited from your grandfather. Still, you do a great job of covering it up with nonsense.”
Feeling returned to my arms and legs, and I removed my Darth Vader helmet. “So I practiced. I can draw my arcane saber from my core. It’s pure and strong.”
“Still, you must learn how to wield it. It’s an effective weapon for a battlemage. Much better in close combat than arcane missiles or even cherry bombs. You shouldn’t try to use it, though, unless you are confident that you can best your opponent.”
“I held my own with that chainsaw before. When Hana attacked us at the store.”
“You were fighting zombies, Thomas. Animated corpses of Entente mages that Hana killed just hours before. They were muscle, a tool she used to try and break through your gates and distract you. They were hardly skilled fighters.”
I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, man. You know how I am. When I’m insecure about something, I cover it up with sarcasm and humor.”
“Why are you insecure?” Nigel asked. “There’s no shame in acknowledging that you still have much to learn. There is great shame in pretending you’re a master when you’re a novice. Recognizing your deficiencies is necessary if you want to improve.”
I cleared my throat. “Growth areas.”
Nigel raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“I’m taking a course on management and leadership online. Working on my management degree. I figured it would help. Both with the tool rental store and for leading the alliance. They call our weaknesses ‘growth areas,’ not ‘deficiencies.’ It’s all about positive self-speak and whatnot.”
“It doesn’t matter what you call your weaknesses—”
I raised my index finger. “Growth areas!”
Nigel cleared his throat. “That sounds like skin cancer. Might want to get your moles checked, mate.”
“It’s called leadership!”
“Positive self-talk isn’t helpful if it gets you killed. You have weaknesses, Thomas. So do I. So does everyone.”
“In my class, they said we shouldn’t use words that motivate from a place of fear. We should focus on a positive vision instead. A place of hope.”
“We’re looking at a war with the new Axis, Thomas. In business, I suppose hope is better than fear. In a battle, you bloody better have a good dose of healthy fear. You need not honor your enemy, but you should respect their skill. Fear can be a powerful motivator if you channel it correctly.”
I scratched the back of my head. “It can also be paralyzing.”
“If you cower in the face of fear, you bet your blimey arse it can be.”
I snorted. “I know what you’re saying. I get it, all right? I need to learn how to fight with a saber.”
Nigel pocketed his wand and placed his hand on my shoulder. “When I was just a lad, I accidentally kicked a football over my neighbor’s fence. I was only nine or ten. About the age of your oldest. When I climbed the fence to get it, a large Doberman took off out of his doghouse after me, growling and snarling. Now, I’ve never been much of a jumper or a climber, but I leaped over the top of that fence and pulled myself to safety in
“Adrenaline, most likely.”
Nigel nodded. “Certainly. But after that, I believed I could do it. Once I did it, it didn’t matter much that it was fear that first pushed me to the next level. What mattered is I knew I could do it. After that, I scaled fences with an ease I never had before.”
I cleared my throat. “I get it. Fear is good. I need to practice more.”
Nigel shook his head. “Sometimes fear challenges us to rise to the occasion. It can happen in a split second, like when that dog came after me, or it can happen over time. This is an occasion when a good fear of Hana and the Axis mages should inspire you to excel beyond what you ever thought possible before. That’s not being negative. It’s using everything and anything to push yourself to be better. It’s a positive thing.”
I put Wand in my back pocket and leaned against the wall. “I am afraid to die.”
“Most people are.”
I pinched my chin. “You know what I fear more than death?”
“Tell me, Thomas.”
“I fear failing to protect my family. I fear something happening to them because of me. Because the enemy knew they could use them against me. Because I wasn’t good enough or strong enough to keep them safe.”
“So you have a healthy long-term fear. There’s nothing stronger than that. What do you say we put that split-second fear to the test?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Nigel retrieved his wand and formed his glowing blue arcane saber at the end. “A little stronger this time. Enough to knock you out cold and leave you with one hell of a headache. I’ve already taught you the basic blocks. Can you block me?”
I gulped. I pulled Wand from my back pocket and formed my saber. “I don’t know. I can try.”
“Not a good enough answer, Thomas. You better be able to, because I will not lower the power. You either block me or you pay for it.”
Nigel came at me with a fury. I raised my wand-saber and blocked his first strike. He pivoted his hips and swung at my legs. I jumped over his saber. He made a full circle with his saber in one arm and brought it down at me from above. My arm reacted and I stopped his saber just before it struck me over the top of my head.
He laughed. “I knew you could do it. Now, let’s go over some basic strikes. It’s one thing to block your enemy. Eventually, no matter how good you are, they’ll get lucky. Unless you know how to counterstrike.”
CHAPTER TWO
I pocketed my wand and twisted my back. Forty-two isn’t the best age to learn how to joust. My back was as unpredictable as any enemy I’d ever faced. I always knew when it happened. I’d feel something move in my back, a sudden but initially tolerable wave of pain, and over the next few hours, all the muscles around the spot would end up in full-on spasm mode.
I was pretty sure I got out of this particular training session with my back intact. That didn’t mean I could let my guard down. When my back went out, it never happened because I was doing something strenuous. It was usually at some point afterward. I could go to the gym and do six sets of deadlifts without a problem. It was when I’d bend over later that night to pick up a sock that the pain wave would strike.
I popped a couple of ibuprofen and did my best to smear a glob of Bengay around my low back and shoulders. The mid-back was still vulnerable. I couldn’t reach it, and I wasn’t about to ask Nigel to rub my back with Bengay.
I grew up in the eighties and nineties, and I was raised to avoid physical contact with other dudes whenever possible. Never use a urinal directly next to another man. Always leave a “buffer” urinal in between. Also, don’t ever rub anything into another man’s skin. I knew it was silly. Nothing about applying muscle relaxer called someone’s sexual orientation into question, and if it did, so what? I believed in acceptance and equality. Still, if you grew up when I did, old habits rooted in archaic phobias died hard.
That I’d rather risk leaving my mid-back vulnerable to seizing up than allow a man to touch my back-skin was patently ridiculous. I knew it. I was well aware that it was dumb and rooted in backward prejudices and insecurities. I also knew I couldn’t help the fact that something about man-to-man contact was more likely to make my back seize up than it was to help me relax.
Nigel and I talked a lot about fear. What he didn’t address was why facing my dumbest and most irrational fears was sometimes harder than confronting a life-threatening force of evil.
He could swing his saber at me with a charge that was going to knock me out, and I rose to the occasion and blocked every strike. Hana Sato could raise the corpses of mages and send them at me, and I’d cut them down with a chainsaw.
It was a different thing to face a fear, no matter how old-school and backward, that represented a wall in my mind erected in my formative years that was supposed to make me more secure in my identity. All the while, I suspected, it was because no one was ever really secure about their identity. We build false walls in our minds, trying to close in on our true selves. All the while, what we’re left with is a shadow of who we are, a caricature and a facade that we use to present to others, and ourselves, because nothing is more terrifying than self-discovery. What if we find out that we aren’t who we want to be? What if we aren’t what other people expect us to be?
Muscle relaxers aside, that was what haunted me more than my fears. Who was I to lead an alliance of mages? Why would anyone follow me, an American mage, when the Entente mages were raised following a strict code that didn’t line up with my worldview? What if my leadership philosophy was bullshit? Maybe everything I learned in class, this new-school philosophy of leading through casting a vision, creating ownership in the vision, and inspiring people to rise to the occasion was little more than sentimental drivel, meant to coddle people rather than challenge them to do better? Nigel thought fear had a place in my training, in leadership, but my teachers in my online business program didn’t think it was worth anything.
That was my biggest fear. That everything I was pretending to be wasn’t real. Despite my history of being headstrong and a little arrogant when I went into battle, at my core, I had my doubts. What if I was one big fat fraud? What if following me got people killed?
While I was training with Nigel, my nine-year-old son, Elijah, was training in portal magery.
When we’d set up the headquarters for the new Mage Alliance, we used an old hospital on Jefferson. Professor Pritchard, who I often referred to as Prof. Poppycock, was running the mage academy. It wasn’t the residential program he ran in the Entente chambers. It was an after-school program. The mages in the alliance sent their children to secular schools for their basic education, and they came to the headquarters three nights a week. Two of those nights were with Poppycock, learning about arcane theory, the history of magery, and whatnot. Those young mages who’d specialized, like my son, spent Wednesday evenings training with their mentors.
Elijah’s mentor was Evander, a young gate mage who’d played a pivotal role in saving the survivors from the Entente chambers during Hana’s attack. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Elijah wasn’t a fan of classroom studies, but he loved training and working on his gate mage skills.
