Warlock Rising

By Nathan Crowder

There is madness spreading on the streets of Cobalt City.

Thankfully the city has superheroes to protect it.

When the Goblin Riders cycle gang and their powerful leader, Oni, begin to push a dangerous new street drug called Warlock, it falls to Gato Loco’s protégé, Caterwaul, to put a stop to it. Because Warlock isn’t like other drugs. It’s a dangerous hallucinogenic that could lead to permanent madness. And if Caterwaul can’t stop it, things could get seriously freaky.

One man cannot stop an entire gang and their superpowered leader by himself, not even the scrappy and reckless Caterwaul. Forced by circumstance to enlist a new partner in the fight, he reaches out to Lionfish, another thrill-seeking cyclist who is fast enough to keep up with the action.

But Lionfish is more than he seems, and Caterwaul might have just put himself and the city in more danger than he planned on. With a big shipment of Warlock about to hit the city, does he have what it takes to stop the Goblin Riders, Oni, and his one-time ally at the same time?

Warlock Rising is a stand-alone novella of gritty, heart-pounding heroics from Cobalt City creator Nathan Crowder that can also be read as a piece of the puzzle in the four-part epic Mad World Cycle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DefCon One Publishing
• Release date: Mar 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224646074

Nathan Crowder

Nathan Crowder is an author, superhero geek, and award-winning karaoke singer living in the great Pacific Northwest. He has been frequently spotted in the rustic wilds southeast of Seattle poking around garden centers, talking to birds, or on the hunt for weird candy. He also once got in a fight with his much larger cousin over whether Green Arrow was a real superhero or not. Online, he resides on Twitter @NateCrowder or at www.NathanCrowder.com.

Book preview

Warlock Rising

Mad World Cycle Book 1

Nathan Crowder

Copyright 2024 Nathan Crowder

All rights reserved.

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Other Cobalt City Universe Stories

By Nathan Crowder

Greetings From Buena Rosa (2006, Timid Pirate Publishing)

Ride Like the Devil (2007, Timid Pirate Publishing; reprinted 2018, DefCon One Publishing)

Chanson Noir: Protectorate Vol. 1 (2009, Timid Pirate Publishing)

Cobalt City Blues: Protectorate Vol. 2 (2010, Timid Pirate Publishing)

Cobalt City: Los Muertos (2014)

Cobalt City: Ties that Bind (2015; reprinted 2018, DefCon One Publishing)

Cobalt City: Resistance (2018)

The Calling: Red Stag & the Wild Hunt Vol. 1 (2020)

By Amanda Cherry

Rites & Desires (2018, Def Con One Publishing)

Time & Again (2024, DefCon One Publishing)

By Erik Scott de Bie

Eye for an Eye (originally published as a part of Cobalt City Double Feature, 2012, Timid Pirate Publishing; reprinted 2018, DefCon One Publishing)

We Are the Champions (2023, DefCon One Publishing)

By Amanda Cherry and Erik Scott de Bie

Femmes Fatale (2022, DefCon One Publishing)

Bad Intentions (Femmes Fatale 2) (2023, DefCon One Publishing)

By Dawn Vogel

Sparx and Arrows (2016, DefCon One Publishing)

Coast to Coast Stars (2020, DefCon One Publishing)

Sure Shot in Las Capas: The Case of the Absent Star (2021, DefCon One Publishing)

Avatar of Freya (2022, DefCon One Publishing)

Brother's Keeper (2023, DefCon One Publishing)

By Jeremy Zimmerman

Kensei (originally published as a part of Cobalt City Rookies, 2012, Timid Pirate Publishing; reprinted 2014, DefCon One Publishing)

The Love of Danger (2015, DefCon One Publishing)

The Devil, You Say (2015, DefCon One Publishing)

Snowflake War Journal (2016, DefCon One Publishing)

Kensei Tales: Offensive Driving (2016, DefCon One Publishing)

Kensei Tales: It's the Great Yule Cat, Jamie Hattori (2016, DefCon One Publishing)

Kensei Tales: Live and In Concert (2017, DefCon One Publishing)

Kensei Tales: Unorthodoxy (2017, Def Con One Publishing)

Cobalt City Anthologies

Cobalt City Christmas (2009, Timid Pirate Publishing)

Cobalt City Timeslip (2010, Timid Pirate Publishing)

Cobalt City Dark Carnival (2011, Timid Pirate Publishing)

Cobalt City Double Feature (2012, Timid Pirate Publishing, featuring Eye for an Eye by Erik Scott de Bie and The Place Between by Minerva Zimmerman)

Cobalt City Rookies (2012, Timid Pirate Publishing, featuring Tatterdemalion by Nikki Burns, Wrecker of Engines by Rosemary Jones, and Kensei by Jeremy Zimmerman)

Cobalt City Christmas: Christmas Harder (2016)

Cobalt City Dragonstorm (2021)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Warlock Rising

About the Author

Acknowledgements

I would like to sincerely thank family and friends who have helped keep me relatively sane and alive in a world gone mad.

I would like to thank the other authors of the Cobalt City collective who have made this a rich and vibrant world in which to tell stories.

I would also like to thank the wide range of talented musicians who provided a playlist while writing this and all other projects. I could not have done it without all of you.

If anything can save us, it's art.

Warlock Rising

There was madness on the streets of Cobalt City.

I mean, I'd only lived in the city for a few years, and it always seemed a bit crazy to me. But the old timers like my friend and mentor Manny insisted that even by usual standards, things were bananapants lately.

In a city as flush with superheroes and vigilantes as Cobalt City, criminal gangs learned one of two tactics. Either figure out how to punch above your weight class with higher grade weapons and equipment or learn to stay mobile to evade capture. The first option was arguably more dangerous, not only for the public in general but also for the criminals. If you hauled out a military-grade plasma cannon in a public square, there wasn't a self-respecting hero in the city who would hesitate to put you down hard and fast. But that kind of tech was expensive and difficult to come by, and the magical or alien equivalent was even more so. It was the kind of thing you had to luck into and then build your gang around.

But staying mobile, that was easy. Gangs had been doing that for ages. It was hard to shut down a group of determined criminals without an established base of operations who could rocket the fuck out of there when a caper went south. It wasn't without its own risks. For every Jackrabbits Crew who fitted their members with black-market leggings that let them run faster than Usain Bolt and jump twenty feet or so in a single bound, there were three Regency Rocketeers who cobbled together rocket packs with a fifteen percent chance of exploding in a ball of flame when used or, in one memorable instance, shot an unfortunate Rocketeer headfirst into the side of a train car, reducing him to a pulp of meat and machine parts in three seconds flat. But with growing incidents of Sky Pirates on flying jet bikes hijacking industrial shipments to Skyhook Island out in the bay, it was only a matter of time before that tech became more mainstream.

When the Prather administration clamped down on superheroes and vigilantes in 2017, it disrupted the ecosystem. It allowed the lower rank criminal enterprises to flourish. Now, five years later, the Prather-era Hero Hunter squads were gone, and the city was again full of low to mid-level heroes like me. But it was also full of gangs and low to mid-level villains looking to carve out a piece of Cobalt City for themselves.

I'd been trying to grow the Caterwaul brand in Cobalt for over four years, and now when I stopped a hijacking or armed robbery or something, the press was likely to get my name right.

Not that I minded my early efforts being credited to Gato Loco. He was my mentor, after all. But ...

Okay. I minded.

It really got under my skin. Mostly in that first year or two.

Maybe I needed a goddamned sky cycle instead of my mean and lean street bike.

I'd been there the night Gato Loco's synthetic muscles and kinetic force-dampening field experienced a catastrophic malfunction. I'd seen his mangled, twisted legs as he lay screaming in the dirt of an Arizona concentration camp turned battlefield. I'd stood at his side in the cobbled-together med-suite in China we'd been teleported to while they cut his leather body suit off and used unregulated nanite bio-repair techniques just to keep him alive. I knew that not only would Manuel de la Vega never walk again, but he also never wanted to do the vigilante gig again.

But still, he had a legendary