9

Part 9

A complete set of motocross armor including torso, upper arms, upper legs, lower arms, lower legs, gloves but shoes or helmet cost me about sixty bucks. It even already came in a neat shade of blue I liked, though I would have to paint over the decals.

An even half decent helmet on the flipside started at around twice that with change left over.

So... in spite of every safety manual I'd ever read, I found myself doing without. Down to a second hand scarf I bought for a fiver.

That plus one can of purple spray paint for an additional seven bucks, a second can of blue for the same, four dollars for some masking tape, one USD for a stack of paper, and a buck fifty for much different can of Coca-Cola (which was freaking criminal if you ask me) let the first third of my purchases done.

More then I'd wanted to spend. Less then I feared. Not enough to really put to 'use', but there it was. My bare minimal. A costume in the most basic of the basic sense.

All mine.

...This was really happening wasn't it?

After a familiar ride down to the docks on the LT, and a less familiar walk the rest of the way into the graveyard proper... I was ready to get to it.

I started by spraying out the armor, covering up the original logos and then spraying over that with the patterns I wanted.

Runes. Real ones. They didn't have any power in them. I didn't have the skill for that but they were there. Why I did that I wasn't sure. Maybe it was just in hopes of inspiring the placebo effect, maybe it was in hopes that if I made it to the point I could actually start making legitimate magic stuff people wouldn't realise some of my tricks were tied to my kit.

Mostly though I think I just added them because I thought it looked cool. Same with the detailed flame, lighting, and vaguely tribal eldritch patterns I'd dabbled throughout for purely cosmetic reasons.

"Fucking metal man." I grinned.

It was kind of a shame that if all went well most of this would be covered up with chain or plate mail and a layer of Kevlar or two.

After a couple minutes of killing time waiting for the paint to dry with nothing but my mask and scarf on I got bored and started my actual project.

Namely blasting the hell out of the metal hulks with the unspeakable eldritch power I now channeled directly from my otherworldly soul.

Which... was a lot less impressive looking then it actually sounded.

Eldritch Blast. That was the single most basic use of the power I now had humming under my veins. A simple violent discharge of energy. It was an evolving attack, its strength would grow with mine, and it was something I could mold or alter with skill and practice.

But right now here at the most basic levels it wasn't much more then a long range punch.

Well okay, that wasn't doing it fair. More like a punch while wearing an iron gauntlet. Or hitting something with a blacksmith's hammer, but still a long ways away from a proper superhuman energy blast. A guy with a glock would kick my ass.

The range was sort of a meh-ish twenty yards before the small, single target only, bolt it lost coherency. The rate of fire was also limited since I needed to do some sort of directing, typically throwing motion to use it, and like I'd already stated, the damage was crap.

But it was flashy. And unlike a glock I could throw eldritch blasts all day long. The power within me a functionally endless fountain of energy. My arms would literally grow tired before I ran out of mojo. My reserves refilled as easily as I breathed.

And again, like I said, it would grow, and there were tricks to fix a lot of it's issues.

The first of such I would be attempting to master, would be turning it from a semi-stable projectile to a much more stable melee weapon.

Which I would then attempt to use to cut through the hull of these wrecks and fashion some useable armor plates to cover my crappy store-bought armor.

Which was again, something I could actually do. Because the name 'Eldritch' wasn't use for show. Though the damage of my attack was kind of pathetic, it was also... strange. Something between corrosive and explosive. Something that decayed and distorted.

It was a weak attack, but one that could hurt anything it touched without fail.

Maybe even something that people were certain couldn't even be meaningfully hurt.

I spared the ocean a glance, listening to the rocking hulls still waiting out in the bay itself, before my phone beeped at me.

The paint had dried.

I grinned to myself as I rushed over and started getting it on. Wasting only a few moments as I got the scarf part of my 'mask' caught under the torso armor.

Then I went to work carving into cold steel with my bare hands.