Titan Mage Ruin: A Harem Fantasy Adventure, page 1
Titan Mage Ruin
Edie Skye
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Cover Art by Jackson Tjota
Cover Design by Edie Skye
eBook Design by Edie Skye
Copyright © 2022 by Spice Rack Press
Kindle Edition.
All rights reserved.
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Also by Edie Skye
The Titan Mage Series
Titan Mage (#1)
Titan Mage Ruin (#2)
Titan Mage Dragon (#3)
Writing as H.P. Holo
The Wizard’s Way (with Jacob Holo)
The Monster Punk Horizon Series
Monster Punk Horizon (#1)
Isekai Skies (#2)
Excess (with Jacob Holo) (#3)
Dedication
To my husband, again—
there’s no way I can top the last dedication,
so I guess I’ll just have to bottom.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Epilogue
About the Author
Prologue
It was the biggest slimeball Locke had seen since the last election.
Well, technically not.
He’d seen and fought plenty of slime since his strange and fortuitous arrival on the world of Haven. It seemed to be one of the more common forms of monster on this alternative, magical companion to his home world of Earth. (Or, more specifically Grassroots, Kentucky.)
How he’d come to be here wasn’t a long story, but it was a weird one. He’d recently suffered a car crash that left him paralyzed from the waist down and lost his job in quick (though unrelated) succession. He’d been trudging home in his wheelchair when he met a strange woman on the street—a headhunter, he soon learned, who was looking to hire someone with his qualifications. It was an unbelievable stroke of luck, so he’d signed the contract she’d offered.
Then he’d died.
Then he’d woken up inside the cockpit of the giant robot he was presently piloting. Inside a brand-new body that was the exact opposite of the skinny, paralyzed, wheelchair-bound body he’d left behind. On an airship crewed by three gorgeous women, who wanted that body.
There was more to it than that, of course, but considering where he’d started, his current situation was awesome.
Even if he was presently staring down a giant slime monster.
Most slimes he’d fought before had come in the form of what his crewmates called shadow dregs—a parasitic goo that fell in meteors from the Crystal Moon, which hung full in the sky over their heads even this far into the daytime. Locke hadn’t quite figured out the Crystal Moon yet or why it dropped parasite-laden meteors so frequently that meteorfall bounties were the Harper’s Harriers’ main source of income. But then, his crewmates hadn’t figured that out yet, either, and they were native to Haven. All they knew was that shadow dregs took over beings living and non- and bent them to their will, to destructive ends, and so they had to be obliterated the moment they touched down.
But in some ways, those were better than whatever creature was writhing below the airship.
This goo wasn’t trying to control anything. It was just eating everything in its path.
“Found the source of the distress call,” Captain Alyssa Harper radioed from the control room of the Blue Heron. “Get ready to disembark.”
“Way ahead of you,” a voice Locke recognized as Ember Q’Van radioed from the inside of her titan, Long Shot. “Titan” was the name Havenites gave to their most powerful type of mobile weapon. There was as much magic involved in their running as there was technology, but basically they were two-story-tall robots, and Havenites had fun with their designs. Titan Long Shot was a sleek blue and silver mech with almost athletic-looking lines and a subtle, but decidedly female aspect to the chest and hip areas. It was built for speed, mostly so it could fire the magical cannon positioned over its left shoulder and then reposition itself with ease.
“Same,” Locke replied from inside his own titan, Chimera. Chimera was the opposite of Long Shot in many ways. Where Long Shot was the obvious product of some refinement, Chimera was—as its name implied—a mess of disparate parts they’d had to scrounge from other titans. (The Harriers frequently operated on a shoestring budget, and it wasn’t even a particularly good shoestring.) He’d at least been able to use his matter magic to turn all the pieces the same shade of red—oh yeah, he had magic here, too!—but in general it looked like a weird, gracefully asymmetrical hodgepodge of pieces from different armor suits. Still, it was bulky, manly, built for power and smashing stuff, and that was all he needed it to do.
Locke—and Titan Chimera—crouched for a better view through the square opening in the hangar floor, while Ember—and Titan Long Shot—crouched beside him.
In fact, the two had been in their titans since the captain had first picked up the panicked radio signal and spotted the weird shape on the horizon, and now they peered through the open door to get a better look at what they’d be fighting.
The Blue Heron’s engineer, Bexley, looked down through the opening in the floor, too, as casually as if it didn’t open to a thousand-foot drop.
“Whoo,” she whistled. “That’s the biggest slimeball I’ve seen since the last time Locke and I f—”
“Now’s not the time, Bexley,” Ember groaned, adjusting her cannon.
“What is that thing?” Locke asked. “It’s not acting like shadow dregs.”
“It’s a gluttony phantom,” Alyssa replied. “Concentrations of void essence sometimes cause them to manifest. No one knows why.”
Peering down through his titan’s visual sensors, Locke could easily see why they were called “gluttony phantoms.” Beneath their airship lay an expansive farm, or what used to be one. The resident farmers ran about either shooting ineffectually at the monster or trying to corral livestock away from its flailing, grasping pseudopods, but projectile weapons could only do so much against slime. Locke saw the remains of some poor souls who’d tried to get close enough to torch it—they were currently disintegrating in its gelatinous guts—and there was nothing they could do to save the crops in its path. Wherever it traveled, it left a wide swath of vegetation devoured down to the dirt, and the phantom grew wider as it progressed. Locke could see the point where it had started, too—from this distance, a pinprick in a field of corn-like stalks, perhaps no bigger than a tennis ball. Now, growing ever closer to the cluster of barns, silos, and farmhouses, it was easily the size of a modest building.
Half the size of a titan.
“It grows as it eats,” Locke observed.
“It does,” Alyssa replied. “Fortunately, phantoms only feed on organic matter.”
“Oh! So I can punch it!” Locke said. That was a small relief. He couldn’t punch shadow dregs; Bexley kept his titan well-maintained and sealed, but there was always the risk of the shadow dregs finding a crack and slipping in, and while there were ways to purge them, those same purges would gradually compromise the integrity of the titan’s internal systems. Generally, it was better not to touch them at all.
“Any chance of the phantom reaching me in the cockpit?” Locke asked.
“There’s always a chance,” Alyssa replied. “Gluttony phantoms aren’t nearly as persistent as shadow dregs, though. If they encounter something inedible, they ignore it, so they’re unlikely to make it that far inside your titan.”
“But if it does get inside the cockpit?”
“Make sure it eats something less important than your dick,” Bexley advised.
“I see Bexley has her priorities in order,” Ember groaned from inside her titan.
“I do have my priorities in order!” Bexley snapped back. “Locke’s a void mage! His is an important dick!”
“Can we focus on the task at hand, please?” Alyssa radioed in her most Captainly voice.
“Wait,” Bexley chimed, “by task at hand, do you mean Locke’s dick or the—”
“The gluttony phantom!” Alyssa shouted.
“I’ll snipe from here,” she said as Bexley skittered out of the way. “I can keep the pseudopods from grabbing things, but you’ll need to expose its core.”
“Core?” Locke asked.
“I can’t see it from here, but it’ll be a little glowing ball of void condensate somewhere in all that slime. Destroy the core, and the phantom will disintegrate.”
“Gotcha,” Locke replied.
“We’re low enough for you to avoid fall damage. Ready to jump?” Alyssa radioed.
“Ready!” Locke replied, and then flung himself and his titan feet-first through the hangar opening.
Titan Chimera flashed brilliantly red in the morning sun as it plummeted from the airship toward the ground. In this world, titans looked like giant suits of fantastical armor, but they were more than that. Their insides brimmed with magical technologies that even this society didn’t fully understand, but Locke didn’t care much about those details. The details he cared about were the ones that turned titans into ass-kicking war machines, and those were the details he was about to put to use.
As he approached the ground, he activated the gravity catalysts in his legs to control his fall. Mages in this world couldn’t wield their magic with the effortless, unaided flick of a hand; they had to channel it through crystalline rods known as catalysts, and the catalysts had to be built specifically for each type of magic. There were four magical elements in this world—matter, energy, gravity, and time—and as a void mage, the rarest of all mage types, he had access to all of them.
Presently his titan was kitted out with a tier one energy catalyst in its left arm, a tier three matter catalyst in its right, and two tier one gravity catalysts, one in each leg. He’d considered having Bexley add at least one time catalyst, but frankly it would take him some … time to figure out how to use it effectively, and he was still getting used to his new powers, anyway, especially the gravity catalysts.
As he fell, the clear crystalline rods implanted in the metal of his titan’s calves glowed purple, and his velocity slowed until he landed on the ground with a dramatic but not incredibly damaging smash. At this level, the most he could do with his gravity catalysts was power super jumps and slow down falls.
The immense vibration of his landing caught the gluttony phantom’s attention. It began to ease slothfully toward him, smart enough to recognize the potential of a promising new food source, but too dumb to think it could possibly be anything else.
Which was fine with Locke.
He had a plan for creatures like this, and he’d practiced it often.
“Just remember,” Alyssa reminded him before he started, “this isn’t a contract from the Arcane Index or the Endpoint City Constabulary, so we’re only going to get open bounty pay. Which is to say, don’t take any expensive damage.”
“That’s part of the plan!” Locke replied, and then fired up the energy catalyst in his left arm and pointed it straight at the encroaching blob. A pleasant burnt wood and ozone smell—the smell of magic—wafted into his cockpit as the catalyst charged. A shimmering blue plume of excess magic billowed from the louvers on his titan’s shoulders, and a bright, solid beam of cooling energy shot from the palm of its hand.
The beam blasted into the transparent azure-colored creature, freezing the bulk of its body into an immobile chunk of ice, stuck in place in the middle of a field of strange blue cabbages. Its unfrozen pseudopods still flailed, grasping at whatever organic material they could reach, but Ember took advantage of the phantom’s immobility to send her own bolts of ice raining down.
Concentrated bullets of frigid magic punched into the bases of several tentacles, freezing them and blasting them off into the field. Disconnected from the main body, the slimy pseudopods lost their agency and splattered, inert, onto the cabbages, before dissolving into the air like smoke.
Good, Locke thought. That’s one less thing to worry about.
Shadow dregs weren’t nearly so relaxed as that. They moved like a single-minded swarm and were stopped only by complete obliteration. This monster might be a cakewalk compared to those! And he could even use the same strategy against it.
His standard shadow dreg strategy was to freeze them in place as he’d just done here and then burn them to ash with the fire magic of his energy catalyst, and so he sprinted for the frozen monster, eyes darting over its form to spot the void condensate core as his catalyst shifted toward heat energy.
Unfortunately, the opaque texture of the frozen slime obscured anything that might be hidden inside it, but that wasn’t as big a problem as it seemed. With any luck, his swathe of fire blasts would just burn the core out and that would be that.
He skidded to a stop in front of the monster. Ember shot off its last pseudopod while he blasted an inferno’s worth of flames across the slime monster’s body. Immobilized beyond resistance, the monster stayed disarmingly still as its body rose into the air in the form of rancid blue-black smoke.
As he fought, it occurred to Locke that this smoke looked vaguely different from the smoke he’d seen before—thicker and oilier, somehow. Less final.
And even as he burned the frozen body to its last, he had a feeling that something was very wrong.
“Heads up, Locke,” Ember reported. “Something’s weird down there. In the cabbages a few strides in front of you.”
As the oily smoke cleared, Locke saw exactly what she meant. It was too small for her to spot from her vantage, but a bright, clear, crystalline ball of wriggling, throbbing magic shot through the field before him, devouring an ever widening line of cabbages as it fled—straight for one of the barns.
“Oh, damn!” Locke shouted and pointed with his titan. “What’s in that barn?”
Ember looked, then echoed, “Oh, damn! That’s where the farmers hid the livestock!”
At once, Locke began to sprint after the increasingly widening goo ball.
“It must have spat out its core to protect itself!” he shouted. “And now it’s looking for a quick power-up.”
As he ran, he heard Alyssa warn the farmers over the Blue Heron’s external speakers; Ember tried to snipe the increasingly-visible ball; and Locke funneled power into his gravity catalysts for a super jump to catch up with the thing—but at its diminished size, the monster was too fast.
And when the farmers closed the barn door to act on Alyssa’s warning, the gluttony phantom’s core slipped straight in.
There were a few awful, short, infinite seconds of panicked mooing, and then nothing.
That was when the barn doors exploded off, blasted out by a gluttony phantom restored to its previous size—and then some. Half-digested turquoise cows floated in its goo as it gushed out like blueberry jam from a dropped jar, but it didn’t go for Locke.
No, it went for the massive grain silo right next to the barn, twice as tall as that barn, and very likely full at this point in the season.
“Oh, shit! Locke, slow it down!” Ember shouted, sniping ice shots at the beast. Locke joined her icy fire, but it took time to freeze a creature that big, and the silo was too close.
The gluttony phantom found an opening in the structure, slipped its entire slimy body inside—and then the silo exploded, blasted apart by a monster that was now twice as tall as it was before.
Exactly the size of a titan.
Moreover, with its increased size and power, the monster had begun to advance beyond the shape of a mere blob. It had begun to take on form. Thick, corpulent arms sprouted from its front, sinking into the crops beneath its hands and absorbing the vegetation with no effort at all. An equally girthy neck began to bulge from its trunk, its lengthening, slimy shape sending an uncomfortable jolt of familiarity through Locke’s midparts, even as the end opened into a ragged mouth studded with teeth made from half-decomposed bones.
