Vortex Quest B. 01

== VORTEX QUEST 1-1 ==

== DEMIGODS IN THE MAKING ==

Purple lighting raged over Chay's dorm in a tree-bending tempest.

Walking down the dark staircase in a tank top, tight briefs and slippers, Chay ran into another student with eyes on the violet flashes outside the window.

Marcus, a lithe, broad shouldered Filipino in nothing but gym shorts and slippers was on the tall side, with a boyish face, topped by a bleach blond faux-hawk.

"Hey, my roommate's not waking up," Marcus said.

"Mine won't either," Chay said.

Marcus bounced on his heels, ready to pace. Chay had only met Marcus during a freelance model shoot, but knew the sophomore's difficulties holding still made him a motivated swim team captain, with a body to match.

Chay was of average height, wiry muscles tense under his even bronze skin. A close cropped fade of his own making emphasized his baby face. The Thai man had gotten serious about putting muscle on his arms and pecs to make up for the overdeveloped lower half from semi-professional cycling, but his ass and legs remained his stout body's focal points.

Purple lightning tinted the staircase in eerie light again.

Chay nervously pulled his tank top down, keenly aware of the steps coming from above. Who else was awake?

Xane, a 5'4'' Korean in boxers and slippers, was a passionate bodybuilder with a sharp undercut. Once subject to height-compensation jokes, the senior's physique had grown too beefy and sculpted for ridicule, placing well in several competitions. He was shadowed by his taller, equally shirtless gym buddy.

Their incredible physiques swaggered down the steps.

Xane gave them a nod, punctuated by a purple flash and thunder that made the window vibrate. "Phones dead, too?"

"As dead as the fuse box," Marcus said. "Uncanny as fuck. Did the lighting drains our batteries?"

Xane shrugged his insanely striated shoulders, tinged with unearthly purple. He turned around to his taller friend. "You're the engineering minor. What's happening? Magnetic field fuckery?"

The tallest group member grunted with a deep, monotonous voice.

Chay raised his hand in greeting. "Hello, by the way. I'm Chay, psych major. This is Marcus, swim captain."

Marcus saluted. "We've met," he said. "Double expresso?"

Xane smirked. "Had forgotten my pre-workout."

"Also forgot to tip me," Marcus added.

The Korean hunk raised a middle-finger with a huge grin. "Anyway, I'm Xane, half-natty bodybuilder, art major." His huge biceps flexed as he pointed behind himself. "The quiet guy, Goro. Needs no intro."

Goro grunted a vague "Hey".

Xane leaned in toward Chay and Marcus with a grin. "He's majoring in communications."

Goro was a six foot Japanese powerlifter turned casual physique-builder, with an enviable v-shaped torso rising from his sweatpants. He had a shoulder-long messy mullet with undercut, kept back by a red bandana.

The huge muscleman had achieved infamy after a crazy ex-girlfriend had leaked his nudes, hoping to tarnish his reputation, instead causing half the female student body and every homo on campus to thirst over his thick eight incher.

As soon as the four men formed a lose circle, the storm ceased instantly as if time had been stopped. Frozen lightning shaped itself into a spear of stark, permanent brightness, more white than purple, aiming right at their window.

"What the f-" Xane started.

A deep, drawling voice echoed around them. [Chosen aspirants! The abyss threatens to spill into your world. You must become avatars of our divine energies to save humanity.]

The lightning spear rushed at the dorm. The window burst and blinding light enveloped the men.

Four pairs of slippers stayed behind as glass rained into the staircase.

===***===

A tumble through a cacophony of galaxies, no way to tell how fast he was going.

Chay landed safely on his feet, his momentum cancelled. His strong, naked feet touched white sand.

The massive Japanese guy, Goro, landed five feet next to him, then Xane and Marcus -- all unharmed.

They were at the center of an open arena of bright alabaster and gold, tinted in the hues of a sunrise as wide as the horizon.

Tall, winged beings filled the arena's ranks, made from clouds, rainbows, silent lightning or feathers, clad in bright robes, singing in shifting harmonies.

Four pillars stood at the arena's border, each carrying the face of one of the transported men.

"Holy fuck," Chay said, looking at the stern, oversized replica of his own head.

"Creepy," Marcus said.

"Extremely well done," Xane added, smirking at his own likeness far above.

The voice of the sky spoke again. [Four divine forces will select their avatars now. Demigod-hood awaits!]

Sparks and streaks of light descended on the men.

"Holy sh-" Marcus started. The lean, restless Filipino was the first to be shaken by spasms. He rose a foot into the air.

Chay felt a tingle as the sparks burned away his light body hair as they sank into his skin. The power of Umbra seeped into him with a 'briefing' sliding into his subconscious, granting him understanding of Umbralism, plus a primer on the others' powers.

He dropped into the sand. His briefs slipped down, revealing his now missing pube area. He pulled them up just as Marcus landed with an aerial double-backflip.

Xane's 180 pounds of Korean muscle in boxer shorts crashed into the sand with a few lazy sparks still trailing around him.

Goro landed stone-faced and focused.

Marcus hollered with joy. He launched into a cartwheel and stopped with perfect control in a one-handed handstand. His legs opened him into a t-shape. His lithe brown muscles remained utterly stable.

Animus-power had turned Marcus into a graceful martial arts god.

Chay looked down on his hands and began leaking dense black fog. He could let it drip through his fingers like honey, or shape it into rising tendrils.

Xane's obscenely musclebound body flashed with pure light. He had been given the power of thaumaturgy. "I'm a fucking god!" He created a flame in his hand and made it dance in red, green and blue.

[Training begins now,] the grand voice interrupted. [Prove yourselves against these phantom guardians.]

The tall walls of the arena were adorned with insanely ornate, golden flourishes. A section of them flowed into a ring and a swirling teal portal appeared within it.

Translucent, faceless mannequins stumbled from the dimension gate, moving with purpose toward the four avatars.

Chay had created a dark, five foot cloud. He faded to invisibility by instinct. As long as he touched his smoke blob, he would stay invisible, even while continuing the watch the area.

The first three phantoms rushed toward the group.

Marcus spread his naked arms and flexed. Unnaturally white flames appeared on his fists, burning in slow motion. He effortlessly rose ten foot and soared forward.

He met the attackers halfway, plummeting with his foot right into a ghostly non-face. The animus-fighter used the momentum to bounce off the rebounding enemy and -- backflipping -- rammed his flat palms into a guardian's head each, making them tumble.

The tan man landed elegantly. "Fuck yeah. Eat whitefire, bitches. Uhhh..."

The enemies' broken neck and scorched faces healed as they got back up. More phantoms exited the portal, carrying spectral swords and spears, some wearing helmets.

"Get out of there," Xane yelled. He pushed himself forward in a floating rush and let lightning crackle along his right biceps, collecting it in his hand.

From a raised middle ringer, blinding lighting zoomed at a guardian, who was seared head to toe, translucent flesh exploding.

It dropped a sword. A disembodied hand appeared from nowhere and picked it up, carrying the weapon toward the thaum-mage.

"Don't freak out," Xane yelled. "The mage-hand is *mine*."

Enemies were practically pouring from the portal swirl now.

Goro didn't say anything. He rushed in with a speed that made sand part like water under a motorboat. He took off like superman, one fist forward, roaring.

Every fiber in his body was pulsating, his already massive muscles hardened and enlarged by mania-power - the divine force of furor.

The first phantom head in Goro's way was simply turned to gleaming splatter. Its body followed as the rest of Goro moved through it.

On contact with the creature's minor armor, Goro's sweatpants were torn from his body, slipping down the insanely thick, veiny legs -- which mania-power made even more cut - and falling off his large feet.

His package waved like a flag in the headwind, uncut dick slapping from thigh to thigh.

The powerlifter in bestial rage swung his beefy arm and wiped a second phantom's torso from existence, glassy chunks splattering on the sand.

Goro came to a stop just in front of the portal, his naked physique gleaming in its light, a few wild strands hanging over the red bandana into his face.

He gave an emerging enemy a kick to the face that made it sink back in. Other phantoms exited in its place. The torn apart ones reassembled from their scraps behind the nude violence god as he pummeled the newcomers.

The light clanking of congealing crystal armor was drowned out by the rhythmic humming song of the angelic crowd.

"Behind you," Chay yelled.

The Thai man had little offensive potential, but there was *something* the subconscious briefing had taught him.

Hiding in his still growing smoke plume, Chay manifested umbral power inside the leg of a phantom rising behind Goro. He 'pulled' and made the creature trip. Enough for Goro to notice the danger.

Meanwhile, Xane had imbued the stolen sword with thaum and launched it like a spear, toppling encroaching phantoms. More moved to encircle him. He used the minor levitation their godly powers granted to evade over their heads, charging blue sparks in his fists.

Xane punched the air and a ball of pure frost rammed into the nearest phantom's face. The construct dropped with a frozen brain. For now.

All the latest arrivals wore helmets and more armor. They were adapting.

A lance thrown Xane's way was diverted by a quickly summoned mage-hand. The muscle-wizard charged up another spell.

Marcus spin-kicked his opponents, feet ablaze with whitefire, but each fallen enemy rose again.

They were all getting surrounded. Only Chay's invisibility was keeping him safe. He used his Umbralism to control a limb here and there but making them trip and drop their weapons wasn't going to stop these immortal beings.

Two dozen of the translucent mannequins now loosely circled around the four avatars.

Goro had become isolated. A phantom ran a flail over the mania-demigod's face. Half of Goro's head got *shredded*. One eye gone, skull scraped open to the brain.

With just one stumble, Goro swung around and dropped his fists onto the guardian like a falling truck.

He roared and the bleeding stopped. His skull mended in fast forward. Mania-power came with incredible resilience.

He kicked the phantom away, his dick flopping at the motion.

Spreading his flexed arms, Goro rumbled a final bestial roar before resuming his stone-faced persona. His eye was growing back in.

"Feels good to be a god, huh?" Xane shouted, firing red lightning.

Goro only gave a grunt.

There were twenty enemies now and the newest had their weapons integrated in their gauntlets, impossible to make them drop. Magic reflecting mirror shields made it harder for Xane to land hits.

The three active demigods were mindlessly fighting a losing battle. They had power. But they were lacking *brain*.

"Guys," Chay shouted, parting his dense fog around him and returning to visibility.

Phantoms moved his way, but the other men now paid attention.

"We need a plan."

"Do you *have* one?" Xane asked, his mage-hand struggling to pull a phantom away by the neck.

"Yes!" Chay hopping in superhuman strides toward his companions, his fog lazily trailing after him. "The one Goro pushed into the portal didn't come back out. We push them *all* in."

The music shifted, the angelic beings on the ranks humming deeper and faster, harps and drums and cymbals sounding urgent. Chay took that as a good sign.

Goro's punches and kicks of brute power along with Marcus' graceful swings and flip, drove the enemies back. Xane could summon a wave of piercing shards every few seconds, disabling a whole group of phantoms for the other demigods to toss toward the spiraling gate.

Even Chay played a role now, throwing his weight against disarmed enemies in his first altercation since middle-school karate class.

It wasn't enough. Four men couldn't surround *three dozen* suits of living armor.

The phantoms froze.

"Did... did we do it?" Marcus asked.

"Everybody okay?" Chay asked, calming his breath.

"Fuck yes," Xane said, flipping off the audience. "We're gods, you cunts. Don't fuck with us. Am I right, Big G? Oh shit, you got brained. Are you okay?"

Goro hummed. He tied his impressively sized hairless package to his right thigh with his red bandana.

"How many fingers am I holding up?" the thaum-mage asked, raising his fists and adding illusory fingers all around, changing their number.

Goro grunted with an eye roll. His mane fluttered in a warm breeze.

Xane looked at Chay while thumb-pointing at Goro. "Don't let the chill facade fool you. He's always liked being a raging berserker back when we were still gaming together. He's gotta be loving it."

"I'm still a raging berserker," Goro said with a smirk, "but only the chicks know about that."

[Are they worthy?] the sky voice asked. [Lend power to these brave heroes if they have proven themselves.]

"Restarting," Chay said. "Watch out."

The phantoms came back to life.

"How the fuck did you know that?" Marcus asked.

"Saw them twitch," Chay said. "Enhanced umbra-senses."

He evaded sword strikes and focused. There were many, but one-on-one the enemy was beatable. Individual phantoms had odd weaknesses.

He stepped into his fog, invisible, and shouted information at his allies. Vulnerable joints here, lack of balance there, weakness to fire on this one, sensitive vision on those two.

The phantoms became faster. Goro was the group's only front-liner able to heal from the occasional stab or slash.

Marcus kept his distance, twirling overhead, backflipping from head to head. He punched the air. Whitefire flew from his fist like an ill-fitting glove and added two foot to his reach.

A spear hooked into the leg of Marcus' gym shorts and he front-flipped out of them, his long, cut dick flying free, unharmed.

Xane had followed Chay's advice and disabled some phantoms with a stroboscopic orb flickering in his palm, despite their lack of eyes. The Korean kicked the writhing guardians toward the portal with his beefy legs, loading more thaum into his hand.

It wasn't enough. As new phantoms arrived, the old ones merged together into larger, sturdier ones, towering over the desperate demigods.

A being of churning light and shadow from the audience was climbing onto the alabaster effigy of Goro's head. The angel's robe gleamed in the eternal sunrise as it drew a blob of darkness from its own skin and threw it into the arena.

The ink blob sailed at Goro, who had again enlarged his muscles to punch extra hard, fibers popping, veins pumping. He rammed his fist into the oncoming blob, his bandana flapping to reveal the tip of his semi-hardon.

The ink sank into his skin and shaped itself into a detailed, chaotic, tribal-style tattoo.

A quick briefing about the Mark of Madness entered Chay's mind. It was a piece of a master meditator's essence, and would lead the berserker in battle with focus and experience.

The 'mark' spread up Goro's entire right arm in wild lines. His eyeballs turned as black as the ink.

The frenzied berserker rammed both fists into the nearest phantom hard enough to shatter its head like ice. The recoil sent Goro into the ground, too, but he rammed his feet into the sand to anchor himself, dust geysers around his ultra-muscled legs. The bandana strained to accommodate the muscle growth.

An angel surrounded by dozens of butterflies had ascended Xane's likeness and let a rainbow colored one flutter down toward the mage, who was shooting a fireball at an unarmored phantom crotch.

The 'mote' landed on Xane's outstretched hand -- an ephemeral gift from an artist, a battery of raw power that thaum could turn to anything.

"Sweet," the Korean physique-builder said. "Eat entropy, cunts."

He sent the rainbow-winged insect at the largest enemy, the mote unnaturally dashing with the speed of a swallow.

The mote impacted on the featureless face and detonated in a nearly foot-wide orb of impossible static, so flat as to look like a 2-dimensional disk, yet with infinite depth.

The mannequin collapsed, its head cut off where the sphere had been. It didn't regrow.

"Shit yeah," Xane said. "Chaos magic *fucks*."

With the mote spent, Goro had enough of an opening to drive the horde back a few steps. His eyes pitch black, expression focused but calm, the wild tattoo now across his left leg as he stomped on downed guardians' faces, his dick flapping the bandana aside.

The now nude Marcus was getting trapped. The phantoms had combined into some twenty superhumanly large ones, moving fast enough to clip the broad shouldered swim captains' limbs as he flung himself between them, dick flopping.

A silver humanoid on top of Marcus' head-statue sent a palm sized ring from its jeweled arm.

The mate-silver circle snapped into the animus-fighter's hand -- a metallurgist's angelic handiwork. The athlete grinned and let whitefire creep along its edge in slow motion.

The 'chakram' was a weapon, as dull or sharp as Marcus required, able to move at his mental commands in his vicinity.

The lithe Filipino rammed each foot into a different neck, his ring orbiting him rapidly.

Chay took a deep breath. "Marcus! Go for where the eyes would be."

Suddenly razor sharp, the gleaming chakram was guided just where the animus-fighter wanted it, running across non-eyes and making a whole group of enemies flinch right into his kick.

Marcus danced along the giant phantoms, never touching the ground. His chakram followed him, bouncing from foe to foe.

Chay was getting surrounded. Phantoms wandered into his mist, seeking with outstretched arms.

Why wasn't *he* getting a gift?

An angel fully clad in folded paper, more origami than person, stood on the Chay-head effigy, searching across the arena.

The invisibility was the problem. Chay made the fog part around him and waved. "Here."

A simple, off-white paper fan fluttered his way. A briefing injected itself into his mind. The fan was nearly indestructible, but not particularly strong. Not a weapon. Kind of useless.

And now the Thai cyclist was totally exposed.

The fan snapped onto his wrist as a weightless paper bracelet -- ignored for now.

An enemy was approaching, seven foot tall, faceless, fully armored. Chay analyzed fast, detecting a weakness.

He ripped off his tank-top and ran at the phantom.

Now only on briefs, the wiry man with huge glutes and legs slid on the sand, right between the phantom's grasping gauntlets and speared his shirt on the translucent crystal spikes.

He continued the slide, evading between the creature's legs. This guardian was made for grabbing and so -- like the jaws of a crocodile -- were weak at opening back up, all their power in the closing motion. The mannequin was handcuffed.

Undeniably, the audience-choir's harmonies turned triumphant.

Slipping back into his fog, Chay examined the fan again, letting it unfold in his hand. He made his thickest fog ooze from his fingers, tracing the fan's folds.

He gave it a waft. The little black cloud followed his movement as if blown by a gust of wind. A bigger waft. His *entire* mist cloud followed the motion.