Atomic Mage by Garrett Carter (short books for teens txt) 📕

after a successful raid on a trading caravan, the cruel torture of one of the guards of the raided caravan for no other reason than boredom and to test the edge on the twin blades still trapped in his grip.

A serial killing streak in his old village for the same reason of boredom and blood rounded out the charges.

"Your definitely right about that." Cade said into the mindscape.

"Let's have a little experiment, now if I am talking directly into your mind and I have no mind-reading powers that I know of we are going to poke around in your brain and find out where you are hearing me from ok."

Silence met his declaration as a heavy fog of fear started to build in the lizard man's mindscape.

"Well, let us begin why don't we."

Your a wizard Cade...well kinda

Cade spent the better part of an hour poking and prodding in the lizard man's brain.

The soon to be dead man's name was Oren though he couldn't be bothered to commit it to memory.

He was slightly disappointed to find out he wasn't telepathic, well not in the standard sense.

He was manipulating the signals in the brains of whoever he was having a mind to mind chat with.

He was blown away at the unknown utility of his abilities as it somehow transposed his speech directly onto Oren's brain, forcing the neurons of the speech center of the lizard man's brain to fire.

He was shoving the information into him as he caused the requisite neurons to fire.

The mind space that he had found himself in as he traveled from mind to mind he assumed was his own brain's way of integrating the information he was receiving from the slaver's minds.

The only downside to the miraculous mental communication was that it only worked while he was present in their mental space.

While useful, the failure to communicate in the physical world with his first visitors had him anxious to find a workaround to that problem.

As he had held Oren's brain scan in his mind's eye during the experimentation he had slowly built up a fuzzy map of the different sections of the lizard man's mind.

Cade had been overjoyed at his success, aside from the speech centers he had found the centers for motor functions and higher brain functions.

While the intuitive ability was amazing to his geeky side Cade hoped he wouldn't always have to be present in a person's mind to communicate with them.

It was either that or spend years learning all the different languages he was sure he was going to run into.

An idea had struck him an hour after he had begun his tinkering with Oren's mind but he had held off implementing it, anxious as to how or if it would change him.

Returning to the speech center of Oren's brain he performed some mental gymnastics and pulled what he could of the languages the lizard man was knowledgeable of, adjusting his own neural pathways to match his test subjects, gaining a splitting headache in the process.

Wincing at the pain Cade cautiously reviewed his thoughts and emotions.

He was relieved to find no new tendencies toward rape and unwarranted killing.

As he took a few minutes from experimenting on the slaver's mind to let the pain pass he chuckled as the area he believed was the creativity center of Oren's mind had been lit up constantly as the Oren kept looking for a way out of the dire situation he found himself in.

He gave the lizard man's mind a little squeeze to remind him who was in charge.

Suddenly fissures exploded all around him in Oren's dark mental landscape as a few blood vessels burst in his brain.

Cade repaired the damage quickly with a thoughtful look at the repaired landscape around him.

Finding that the damage to the lizard man's brain reflected in the reptile's mindscape was new.

Cade had one more experiment to finish before he would follow that conclusion to its finish.

Driven by his curiosity, he excited the neurons in the motor centers of the slavers mind as he tried to puppet the lizard man around.

The results were lackluster at the least and unmanageable at best, depending on how complex the action.

Anything more than a run pushed his control to the breaking point, the dichotomy of his motionless body and that of his running lizard puppet too much of his mind to manage at the moment.

If he used his body as a representation of the movements he wanted to complete he could force the lizard man puppet to follow his every move within its unmodified range.

Anything he tried to make his Oren puppet do that exceeded its body's limits resulted in broken bones and ruptured organs.

"He wouldn't be a bad running partner."

Cade brought the newly healed Oren back to him to find out what happened to the lizard man if his mind was damaged irreparably.

His experiments had the slaver crying for mercy at his feet in Oren's mental space, the fight long ago going out of him.

Every attack he had received from the slaver in the shadowy plane during the lengthy testing of his powers had connected with Cade's mental self but not caused any lasting damage.

He had found out that the damage he received in another's mindscape was easier to heal than a simple scrape was on his physical body.

Ready to begin his last experiment with the lizard man Cade began to slowly separate the cells in the man's brain from each other.

Oren's mental body suddenly fell limp at Cade's feet as the