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

Refocusing on the caiman who looked to be having a bad day he restarted his attack on its little pea brain, cooking it from the inside out.

A cruel smile grew on his face as he lifted himself shakily from the ground and walked over to the still river monster.

Stopping next to the now still lizard, Cade pried its dead jaws apart and retrieved his missing limb and eyes clenched shut slammed it to his shoulder, praying to himself, "it's only a flesh wound it's only a flesh wound its only a flesh wound".

Feeling a tingling in his shoulder he peeked out of his right eye expecting to see raw flesh and a lifetime of leaning to the left for all the wrong reasons.

He instead saw red skin joining his body back to his arm.

Blowing out a sigh of relief he yelped as his shoulder was forced painfully back into its socked.

Groaning at the quickly fading pain Cade looked down at his newly reattached arm, "glad you and Palmela are back bud".

Flexing his tingling fingers he looked down on the 7 foot home wrecker, "well I was hoping for some fish but since you volunteered I guess we can cook up some gator for dinner tonight".

Cade looked around for some way of moving the 400-pound lizard away from the river to keep from having to deal with any predators who would try to steal his hard-earned dinner.

Failing to see anything that might help he focused on the dead animal before him scanning it from snout to tail like had his hand the day before.

He suddenly had a weird x-ray visual of the giant lizard including all its innards, skin, and scales.

Swaying slightly on his feet Cade as the disorientation of the caiman's body overcame him he instead tried to fix in his mind the whole animal instead of thinking of its disparate parts.

That helped and when he opened his eyes all he saw was the dead dick head in front of him.

Yes, he was still pissed, no killing it hadn't helped as much as he thought it would.

With his vision cleared and his mind less dazed by the shifting images Cade tried lifting the lizard with his mind.

That was a mistake, immediately he felt exhaustion hit him as the carcass rose two maybe three inches not even enough to get the feet off the ground.

Dropping his dinner to the ground he fell to his knees gasping for breath.

"Let us try something different," he said before grabbing a small rock.

Tying the same power knot that he had devised last night for his home battery onto the river rock Cade smiled as the rock's energy poured into him, as a few microscopic dust particles falling off of it.

The spell which is what he chose to call it, took a few hours of his late evening into his morning to figure out.

He had focused for hours on a small sliver of rock trying to find a way to make a small infentessimle fission reaction happen on one of its points.

After hours of trial and error, he made one happen, and thank God he had tried it outside.

The tiny piece Cade had been working on had gone critical and the only reason he and most of this jungle we still living and breathing was the size of the test piece had only been a few millimeters long.

Still when he tossed it and ran Cade still had 2nd and 3rd-degree burns on his back and legs.

A divot in the ground and a few minutes later with a new regulator spell tied to the fission spell he had applied the resulting workable spell to another small piece of rock.

Cade had then proceeded to beat the ever-living piss out of it with no boom.

He was still awed by his new abilities, it was earth science that gave him the ideas for how to apply the magic that made those ideas work.

So equipped with his little battery slash grenade and a full bucket of river water Cade proceeded to lift his dinner up and move it to his new home.

He counted the whole experience as a win, his right shoulder looking none the less for wear and his stomach growling at the prospect of a full meal.

Call me DR Cade

Cade drug his kill back home, thinking about what he should do with the carcass after he got the meat out of it.

Making it home he looked at his ragged clothes, his right shirt shoulder hung off his elbow torn from the rest of his shirt by the asshole sitting on the gravel and dirt beside him.

Glancing down past the patchwork mess of his shirt his pants looked no better.

"Gonna make some gator skin pants out of this fucker" he growled out.

"But first I'd rather not be making holes in the ground every time I have a near-death experience."

After he placed the gator in his makeshift fridge he looked at the little battery.

The little stone he had found after his little adventure at the river bank would do nicely as the power source for the healing spell.

During his home renovation last night Cade found his new abilities were driven by his intent and had a range of around ten feet.

He assumed that the emergency healing he had been getting had the same range due to the nice sized divots he was leaving everywhere.

He was going to have to find a way to tie the energy trickling out of the stone in his hand to his healing power.