“No.”
“But it’s noble! Anyone who hears it will know he’s the strongest!”
We were trudging through the forest. Again. I had turned my magic off within a few moments of judging myself safe, and immediately found solace in the knowledge that yes - all the extra appendages did vanish when I stopped burning mana. There were a few notable side effects though. For one, the extra body parts didn’t just… vanish. When I had ceased using my magic, and choked back the Damned Thing, the extra limbs had sort of sloughed off, as though they had started to suffer from rapid necrosis. It didn’t really hurt, but there is something distinctly unpleasant about watching bits of yourself shrivel up and fall off. For another, something about the magic ending caused me to heal rapidly. My missing leg and chest wound had reformed pretty much immediately - which was good because we had to beat feet.
“Hey! Focus!” Nadeen snipped at me. From pretty much the moment we had left the camp she had begun making her pitch for Thing Two’s name. She was also looking drastically healthier, with her skin regaining much of its lost color. I would have been happy with that if she didn’t seem to use her newfound energy to argue with me like a nagging daughter trying to get the car keys for the night.
“I’m trying to keep a lookout for danger.” The face on my right shoulder - the one facing Nadeen - said in an older womans voice. I wasn’t in full on shambling horror mode, because I wasn’t really sure how much Mana I had or if I could run out. But I had found the inability to talk intolerable, and the ability to look in four directions at once extremely comforting. Ofcourse, I would never admit it out loud, but the primary reason I had chosen to experiment with my new magic - which I had chosen to call Gore Terminal because I’m technically a year old and need to take my enjoyment where I can find it - was because;
“Nothing in the outskirts is going to attack us. Humans pass through and cull the area too often Will.” Nadeen chided me, switching between watching the path ahead of us and looking my… shoulder… in the eyes like she thought it was rude to have a conversation with someone and not look at them.
Yeah I was using precious, possibly finite, extremely dangerous, magic in order to argue with a teenager. It wasn’t so much that I objected to the name William in general. I was just sure that William wasn’t my name. Not that I could remember my actual name. But it definitely wasn’t fucking William.
“First, you are human. Second, you and your master got completely fucked by two gremlins with a pointy stick. Your opinion on what counts as safe is literally worthless.” Nadeen’s head whipped around to stare me in the shoulder and her hands went to her hips in that special way someone does when they’re about to lean into an argument instead of accept being wrong. It might be petty, but seeing it made the two hours I had to spend figuring out how grow just the extra faces completely worth it.
“And my names not William, Will, Bill, or any combination thereof.” I added after another moment of silence. Thing Two was loping along behind us, a jury rigged backpack the size of a fully grown man hanging from his back, though it didn’t seem to burden him in any noticeable way. We had scavenged everything we could from the camp before leaving. Bedrolls, a big ass tent, and as many tools and materials as we could manage in the time we had before fleeing. He seemed to notice the tension and came to a stop, quietly shuffling away from me and Nadeen. The bastard was dumb as hell but he’d pretty easily grasped the concept of minding his own business where Nadeen and I were concerned.
“No. I’m not.” Nadeen said in a somber tone that replaced her weirdly gung ho attitude from just a few moments before. She snapped her teeth at me once just to make her point, the click clack of too many teeth grinding together ringing out and forcing me to stop and face her.
I had no idea how to address that just yet. In the first place, I didn’t really fucking understand how it had happened, even if I could take a guess as to why. I also wasn’t sure how the human population of her home village would take to her new condition. Probably not well. Medieval populations are not well known for their tolerance and love of diversity.
So I did what all great men have done when a woman has said something they can’t deny. I turned around and walked the fuck away like she hadn’t said shit. After a few moments of silence, Nadeen and Thing Two continued after me as though nothing had happened.
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“So what’s wrong with Tiber?” Nadeen asked, her cheerful teenager demeanor returning in record time.
Shit. She was learning. I actually didn’t have a good reason to dislike Tiber except I just didn’t like her naming him. He was my brother after all. Okay, when in doubt, say something nebulously sage sounding and pray.
“Be-because it’s better if your opponents underestimate you?” Shit. Gotta work on the delivery.
‘tEll HeR tHaT-’
‘Shuuuuuuuut the fuuuuuck uuuuuuup’ I thought with more exasperation than I would have expected was possible. Nadeen didn’t know it but the Damned Thing had taken the worst kind of interest in her. It had alternated between the idea of feeding her humans to fatten her like a cow before we ate her, and using her like a lure to bait yet more unsuspecting humans into the forest. Either way it basically considered her to be our stuff, and therefore not worth actually listening to or arguing with.
“It isn’t as though I’m going to yell his name every time I summon him to battle.” Nadeen pointed out, unaware of the other half of the conversation happening in my head.
Shit. Fuck. Were not actually pokemon. Back pedal.
“You can’t summon him at all.” I griped, realizing I had to make a real effort not to whine.
“Tiber, smash.” Nadeen said, pointing at a nearby tree. She didn’t turn away from the path ahead of us when she did it. Didn’t even look in the direction of the tree. But when Thing Two hurtled over us and into the tree like a furry black wrecking ball I swear to god her face twisted into a smirk. I could physically feel just a single one of her eyebrows raise in mocking question. Tib- THING TWO picked up his pace to return to his position behind me, blissfully unaware of why that had happened.
“See Will, the way I see it this can go one of two ways.” Her tone of voice was still chipper and playful, but there was a new, harder edge to the words. A subtle hunger that sent a chill down my spine as she spoke.
“You are obviously something special. Something big. But you have no idea how to deal with people. You don’t know what we are capable of, and you definitely won’t see it coming when your eventually either killed or captured by a hunting party from the capital.” The eyebrows on all three of my available human faces shot up at once and Nadeen glanced back at me with a hollow look in her eyes as she continued.
“So you need me. I’m only an apprentice true, but I understand the workings of the kingdom. However I also need you. Obviously I can’t go home like this, and I won’t survive a day in this forest alone - not without at least one crystal to bind a monster with.” She sent me a dirty look at this last statement, no doubt still somewhat bitter at her missing arm.
“Ofcourse if you find me impertinent you could also just eat me. But you seem smart enough to know that far too many soldiers escaped that camp alive for you to ever be safe here alone.”
Okay what the fuck is going on? This is a teenage girl right? Right!? I mean, she’s absolutely right, I’ve been thinking about how fucked I am for a while now. But she seems to be adapting to being completely fucked way better than I did.
“...If you stay with me people - maybe even ones from your village - will die.” I said in three voices at once, the harmony both beautiful and creepy. Nadeen rolled her eyes at me like I was being stupid for saying something so obvious.
“Will. You aren’t stupid, so you should already know. The only thing that has made me feel better in the days of slowly dying in Tiber’s arms was dear sweet Erwin. I - I really don’t want to die.” Nadeen grew quiet, a cold determination straightening her posture and putting a predatory glint in her eyes. She had made her decision. Before this moment, it might have weighed on her, an intangible, unspoken question she had no choice but to answer. But now the die was cast.
And what a fucking decision. I only came to terms with killing people like yesterday, but here’s this thirteen year old girl casually deciding she was going to live the rest of her life in the woods eating other human beings.
I made a mental note to never give Nadeen ample reason to want to kill me. She probably wouldn’t succeed, but I was getting the sense that she had lived a lot of her life doing unto others much more than she had been done.
We kept going, silence falling on our group as the day wore on. The forest path we were treading had begun to tilt upward, and the forest was beginning to thin. Finally, we came to a halt when a sheer cliff wall loomed out of the horizon ahead of us.
“Shit.” I said, not overly interested in scaling anything more taxing than the stairs to my bedroom.
“We walk along the cliff base until we find a cave to set up in.” Nadeen chimed in, clearly amused by my lack of a plan. It would figure that even the children here new more about navigating the wilderness than me. Before I ended up here I was more likely to know how many pixels were in an old television screen than to know a damn thing about plants and animals.
It was a hard to life choice to regret given how frequently said animals had tried to kill me recently.
“Why?” I asked out of genuine curiosity. I didn’t really have much of a reason to argue.
“Shardshire is at the top of this cliff somewhere. We want to be close enough to pick off humans, but far enough to be able to retreat into the forest.” Nadeen said. She shrugged as though this token bit of murderous wisdom was the easy conclusion to reach.
“Also, we should hurry.” she continued, eyeing me strangely.
“Why?”
“I’m getting hungry.”
Every. Fucking. Time.