I could say it a thousand times and no one would listen.

It was unfair. So much of life was determined by the beast soul one was gifted, and that had trapped me in the role of fisherman, not town guard. I knew I could fight off the spike feeders, if they would only let me train with them, but no. That job was forbidden to me. I was only allowed to use my senses for my job and I couldn’t even figure out how they were appropriate. At times like those, I wished I was born in one of the cities instead of our little hamlet.

“Hey Perry, do you want to practice again?” a voice said behind me. I turned to see Levin’s grinning face and rose to meet his form, putting down my fishing rod. He stood half a head above me, hair the color and texture of straw, cheeks lightly ruddy and covered in peach fuzz. No matter how much he tried to grow out his facial hair, it failed to thicken to his unending dismay.

“I’ll try, although for what it’s worth it feels like I’m making no progress.”

“That’s what it always feels like to me, but I’m definitely getting a hang of it. Once you know what you’re looking for, you’ll be sailing smoothly,” he said, his chubby cheeks pushed out in a smile. He was looking stronger with each passing day. There were only subtle changes to his physique, but something about them stood out to my eye.

It wasn’t guaranteed that a child would have a soul similar to their parents, but the odds were higher based on the records we had. Given his parents were a pig soul and a squirrel soul, they hadn’t expected Levin to be joining the guard, letting him be lax and not exercise enough.

That had been fine until the ceremony last year where he was imbued with a fox soul, and clearly things had to change fast if he was to fight off the spike feeders. He had joined me in my daily running routine, but it would still take some time for the last of the fat to burn away and leave just lean muscle instead. Not that I minded. It made me feel less bad to still be on a similar level to him, if one could consider it that. I had trained more before the ceremony, but that didn’t matter.  Levin got a fox soul while all I got was a platypus… whatever that was. It hadn’t even been covered in our town’s records, nor did any of the merchants have any information on them and the information I got in the boxes was anything but sufficient.

I didn’t know why anyone’s beast souls came with these little ‘boxes’ of descriptive information, but they covered everything that was relevant. Well, relevant was a loose and mostly inaccurate way to describe the boxes. They only covered a select subset of information, and the rest was only available when called upon or discovered. My senses were one of those things that were bereft of further information.

Enhanced senses: Double-coned eyes, Electroreception

If those terms had made sense to anyone else, perhaps an argument could have been made for my training, but I couldn’t see how my eye had one cone, let alone double cones, and electroreception was even more arcane to my ears. I tried pushing them to their utmost limit when fishing, but when one wasn’t sure what they were pushing for, it was hard to practice it further.

I imagined the senses were something like gaining an extra limb, except it was one foreign in appearance let alone function. You wouldn’t know how to flex the muscles if you didn’t have the instinct to do so, and beast souls famously came with a dearth of instinct. Ergo the problem of the impotent training feedback loop: have a sense that requires training due to not knowing how to use it while simultaneously not knowing how to use the sense as to train it more. That’s what made Levin’s offer all the sweeter.

We stepped away from the edge of the water, standing in the wheat-dusted field amongst the rows of grain. My eyes shut, trying to work on my electroreception, whatever that was. It certainly wasn’t my vision. At times I thought I felt something going on, but without knowing what it was I wasn’t registering any proficiency in understanding the sense. Today though, I had a theory on what I could do to help make it easier for me to test.

“Levin, do you mind moving one of your limbs on the count of three? Don’t tell me which one. I want to see if I can sense it.”

“Sure thing, Perry. Three… two… one…” The wind rippled through the area, and I reached out with my mind, trying to discern if the blip of activity was sense or just a fabrication of my struggling hopes.

“I think… that was your left leg?” I said, opening my eyes to stare at Levin for confirmation of my success or failure.

He clapped and nodded, face covered with cheer. “You got it. Want to try again? We have to confirm it wasn’t a fluke, after all. You did have about one in four chance of guessing that right.”

Levin wasn’t wrong. Once was a stroke of luck. If I could repeat it, well, I didn’t know what I’d be able to do with my sense but at least I would be able to define it and utilize it so that I could enhance my soul to the next stage. I didn’t care if the town guard wouldn’t let me train with them. I’d train myself, if just so that I could defend myself.

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I closed my eyes again, trying to feel for that same spark I had noted before, the proof of Levin’s movement. “On three again, Levin.”

“You got it!” He quietly counted as I focused, noticing three of the motions this time.

“Both of your legs?” I asked, opening my eyes to him pointing in the other direction. I turned to see one of the guards running down towards us. It was Mast, inheritor of the dog  soul.

“Take shelter, Perry. Spike feeders are attacking the village. Levin, you’re with us.”

Spike feeders attacking now? Where were the bells? This was a ruse to take Levin away from practicing with me, wasn’t it? The guards did whatever they could to prohibit me from practicing when they saw me, with Levin being the notable exception. The boons of a childhood friend, one might say.

“Is this for real? Why do you need Levin, anyway. He’s only in training,” I replied, glaring at Mast.

“We need all guards—” his tone pierced me, pointedly noting that I was not a guard, just a regular townsfolk who was indebted to our village’s protectors “— there’s a strange few spike feeders attacking the front gate, and we need as many able bodied fighters as we can get to safely repel the attackers with as little losses as possible. When it comes to the unusual ones, the more able-bodied souls available, the more options we have.”

It made sense, as much as I hated it. I was starting to hear the bells ringing throughout the area, signaling the attack on our land was real and not a fabrication, as much as I had just hoped it was an act of bullying. Even with all of our guards, an attack by the spike feeders usually indicated injury for someone at the very least. The more combat experience they could get Levin, no matter how indirectly, the more the village was protected in the future. The only thing I hated more than the logic supporting Mast’s request was that I was denied the option to help them. I was an able bodied fighter. I could help, if they let me.

But my concerns died away as I heard a squeal in the other direction, back towards the water. I turned back to Levin, when I saw the bone-studded creature dragging him into the water, his eyes filled with fear. “Levin,” I shouted, running after him, hands outstretched for his form. I was an idiot. That was the third signal. One was Levin, the other the guard and the third the spike feeder sneaking through the water.

This was my first time seeing a spike feeder up close. They were vaguely humanoid in shape, with bony keratin spires protruding randomly out of their body. The spires were spiraled, grooves meant to gouge and harm even further on exiting the body. Its mouth was filled with needle-thin teeth, from what little I could see as it screeched an awful wail, causing Mast to fall to his knees. It must have hurt all the further for those fixated on their hearing senses, of which I wasn’t blessed with.

There were grooves on the side of its gray neck, like cuts from a knife. The beast’s skin was gray and smooth, speckled with little moments of black warts nestled around the various spikes. Its eyes were very small, black little things peeping around the area for any other fighters disturbing its conquest of my friend. At the end of its form was a long tail, covered in more of those spikes, summing up to be a horrific threat. This was what a spike feeder was. A creature coated in danger, with no way to speak but for the shrieks of agony that escaped from its form. And having now seen it, it horrified me.

This was what the guard said I wasn’t good enough to fight. One of the spikes had gouged out some of Levin’s flesh, knocking him into the realm of unconscious. The spike that had speared him was covered in the patch of skin atop it like a prize. He had been captured in a flash by this monstrous creature, caught unaware to be scuttled into the depths of the waters. 

No one had noticed its approach even with our enhanced senses— no, I couldn’t consider my failed attempt noticing it, because if I had noticed it, maybe Levin would have been able to respond in time. Just one was enough to overwhelm Levin. I could only hope the guards at the gate were faring better than we were over here, because things were falling apart. I felt my strength drain out of me the more I appraised its existence. Understanding the spike feeder increased my fear, bile threatening to leave my mouth but I had to push it down. I couldn’t expose any weakness to it. For Levin’s sake.

The creature’s body was drenched, eyes dull black orbs fixated on the prey it had caught in its arms, falling back into the water it had emerged from moments before. I didn’t know that it contained a channel to a greater body of water— the spiked walls had blocked off the other side of the land, but it made sense in hindsight. The fish we farmed had to come from somewhere, lest we over-fished them. Even with our limited controls of the fish, it didn’t explain the population booms we saw each spring, but a channel for the fish to spill into did.

But it wasn’t the time to fixate on the pond. I had to try and rescue Levin before the spike feeder escaped with him, and I knew that Mast didn’t have what it took to go after him, so I dove in, plunging into the cold water, hoping to keep pace with the spike feeder.

The cool liquid seeped into my clothes, billowing them with swollen waste while the beast continued deeper into the water. I couldn’t let it go too far— I fished out my gutting knife and cut off my shirt and shorts, leaving only my braies on underneath. I couldn’t risk anything further, and I most certainly didn’t want the spike feeder to have easy access to that part of my person.

Thankfully, or perhaps not for Levin’s sake, Levin had been leaking blood, leaving a trail for me to follow in the depths of the water. It spread thinly through the liquid, a diffuse stream crawling up from his unconscious form. His water logged body wasn’t the most graceful thing to carry through the water, slowing down the spike feeder’s otherwise hasty retreat.

I kicked my legs, churning water behind me as I clawed forward, knife in my hand ready to strike at the beast. It was foolhardy, no, suicidal, but I had to try for Levin’s sake. I knew he would do the same for me. This was what being part of the village guard meant, and for all that I wanted to be part of it, I had to live up to what I believed in, or else it would always be a distant dream.