The steep incline into the pit full of food - er people, ended a fair distance away from the strange little underground ghetto. When I made it to the bottom I glanced around, making sure no one had noticed my decent. I quickly retracted all the flailing limbs of my scorpion form and scurried behind Thing Two for cover. I did this mostly so I would have cover for what I was doing next, but I would be lying if I said the fear of being discovered and exploded with some kind of bullshit magic wasn't also a consideration. 

Sorry Thing Two, your brothers a prick. And also way less sturdy than you. 

Satisfied, I set to work. I had given significant consideration to my next meeting with other human beings. Assuming these guys were human and not one very large ruse - a whole city of fake people just like the woman Nadeen had chased off. 

I had decided, after much deliberation, that I was going to use Thanes as a cover. It was going to be stupidly uncomfortable, and probably hurt if I made a mistake but it was better than being a kill on sight target for every meal I - 

'Stop it.' I thought flatly. The Damned Thing didn't bother to answer me, but I could sense the psychic equivalent of a grunt. Definitely getting smarter. Noooot good. 

Shaking off the momentary irritation, I set to work. My magic, or mana, or whatever the hell it was colloquially known as ignited, and I brought all my focus to bear. The trick with this ability wasn't that it required focus, or attention to use. Quite the opposite. If I just let the magic burn and paid zero attention to it, every available body part I had stored in my magical stomach pocket dimension would come exploding out of me, all at complete random, all flailing and struggling to free themselves from me - largely under the control of the people I had previously devoured. It was purely by luck that my first useage of the ability against Thane had been when I was so razor focused on not dying. Or maybe the idea that there was the possibility of freedom had been enough for my inadvertent prisoners to give me their temporary aid. I'll probably never know, since I'd had a pretty shitty time trying to communicate with my first two victims.

So all the focus, and practice I'd been using was less to use the magic, and more to limit it. To maintain control, to enforce obedience, to dictate order. In that respect, my current undertaking was pretty much the most difficult thing I had ever tried.

Slowly but surely, hands formed at the base of my neck, followed quickly by the rest of each arm. It took an incredible effort of will, but a fleshy tether full of spinal fluid and nerve endings extended from one wrist back to me. After that the rest was fairly trivial - shoulders, head, chest arms etc. In just a bit under half an hour of time, I had pushed out a fully formed replica of Thane - tethered to me by a 'leash' of skin and muscle that served as a spinal cord. The body had its own faculties, but given what I was about to do next I felt it wise to have some... insurance.

The body - Thane's body - lay motionless on the ground, and I could feel the hunk of mindless flesh drawing its oxygen from me through the physical link between us. It was like the worst asthma ever, and I quickly moved to remedy the situation. Just like in the caves prior to this, I shunted the vague presence I had come to think of Thane's soul into the immobile body. All at once it began spasming on the ground, grasping futilely at the air and kicking its legs as though having a seizure, before subsiding into a sort of twitchy resting state and heaving a giant breath of air into its lungs.

A little short of breath myself, I shuffled over to Thane and gingerly slapped the shit out of him. I know it makes me a bad person, and that he really probably wasn't a bad man - but he'd tried to fucking kill me, and I felt that was more than enough justification for some idle revenge.

It was satisfying for a whole five seconds, and then Thane lurched up, eyes going wide. With practically no time to acclimate to his surroundings he lunged at me, bowling me over and dragging me a few feet across the ground in his rush towards the sword I'd left on the ground when I had initiated this entire experiment.

Okay so, maybe waking up from death to a bitch slap from a gremlin wasn't a very calming experience.

"Stop." I called after him, sending the impulse to freeze up the tether between us. At the end of the day, even if it seemed like a whole human body, what was before me was just a giant vestigial organ that looked like the dead guy. It was still part of me, part of my power - and that made it mine. It made Thane mine.

Frozen half way through his upward motion, I allowed Thane to rise and come to a bastardized parade rest, with my sword loosely in the hand not tethered to me.

"Talk to me buddy. Whats the plan here?" I asked him, genuinely curious what his end goal was - besides killing me of course. He stared at me with a mixture of rage and disbelief on his face. Under more calm circumstances I would have considered it priceless.

"I... live?" he asked sourly, not at all sounding pleased at the prospect.

"Honestly I don't really know. On the one hand - it'd be really cool if I could do that. On the other it's - "

"An abomination!" Thane cried. I mean literally cried. Tears started to stream down his face as he gazed down at the tether between us in abject horror.

"Well... fuck you too I guess. Look I'm not a bad person I just - " I tried again, ignoring the interruption the first time because contrary to popular opinion I'm not a totally emotionless killing machine.

"You... are any of my warriors even still alive? Is this to be my life? Stuck in this limbo and forced to assist you as you terrorize your way across the land?!" he wailed at me.

Mk. I guess that's a reasonable fear from his point of view too.

"I - "

"Is that what this is to be?! You will have me fall upon those unsuspecting men and women to feed your belly? Am I to be your Murderous Chef? Never to be redeemed or ascend?" He cried out, and an annoyed part of me recognized that he was probably going to draw attention to us if he kept yelling.

Also that he interrupted me again.

"Jesus shut up would you?" I finally said, more exasperated than mad. Just for added effect I paralyzed him again, precluding his ability to interrupt me anymore.

"Look man. I don't wanna kill those people. So far, I've only actually killed and or eaten people who tried to kill me first." I explained, giving him a pointed look that had far less effect when I allowed myself to remember that I actually had tried to eat him within seconds of meeting him. I just failed.

"...Mostly. Look I've got urges okay? I'm like an alcoholic but only for you know... human flesh." Geeze. Now I felt bad again.

"Anyway, right now I just need a cover so I can go over yonder - " I pointed at the shanty town " - and find Nadeen. All you have to do is pretend your my Binder or Owner or whatever you people call it while we traipse about. Cool?" I released his paralysis when I finished, hoping we could get this moving. This had taken longer that I was expecting, so there was no telling where Nadeen had gotten off to while I explained the birds and the bees to Thane.

"...Why do you care?" Thane finally asked after taking a few moments to master himself and wipe away a manly tear.

"Because she's a freaking kid in a world full of psycho cannibal monsters and kid touching rapists like Erwin?" I shot back, confused by how stupid that question was. I understood on a base level that I was a 'monster' and therefore not expected to behave following socially acceptable norms but still.

"And... you will not force me to slay an innocent?"

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

"Define innocent. If someone attacks me I'm not going to cry myself to sleep after I kill them." I explained, with much more casual bravado than I actually felt on the topic. Obviously if I wasn't feeling particularly hungry I wouldn't go out of my way to kill anyone if I didn't have to. But that seemed like kind of a hard sell to a guy who's camp I'd liberally killed my way across when last he had a body - so I didn't bother try and convince him.

"...There is a problem with your 'plan' little demon." He said, and there was a mix of defiance and mirth in his voice when he said it that instantly annoyed me.

"I am naked."

I blinked once allowing myself to actually look at him to acknowledge to point before my eyes ticked back up to his.

"It'll have to do. Unless you wanna stab yourself a few times and pretend you lost your rags in battle." I added, not thinking he would actually take me up on the offer - because it was fucking insane. To my great chagrin, Thane immediately began slashing and stabbing at himself. All in non lethal areas, but definitely enough that he quickly started to look like the victim of a really bad mugging.

"What the fuck!?" I yelped, momentarily too stunned to stop him with our link.

"If... If someone see's the ruse... hah... they will attack you..." he said through gritted teeth. "And then... guh... you will make me kill them."

Jesus what was this guy some kind of Paladin? Actually -

"What are you, some kind of Paladin?" I asked. I wasn't really that bothered by the bleeding because really this body was replaceable, and being made of my own flesh and blood, insanely unappetizing.

"No." Thane said firmly, a whistful tone faintly ghosting through his voice. Okay, ask about that later. For now, Nadeen.

"Come on. We need to get you some pants and a patch job. I don't want to have to regrow a body for you." I said, dismissing the mouth I was using to speak to him and turning around, only to be yanked backwards when Thane didn't move from his position.

When I turned an annoyed look on him - or as annoyed as something without eyebrows can look anyway - he was staring at me aghast. Suddenly I understood - he was hoping if he died here I wouldn't have his soul anymore. He figured this was a one time thing. Cute.

I tried to roll my eyes at him, but gave up and just snapped my jaw in his direction, nudging him forward with an electrical impulse through the leash that I hoped would look more like a furry rope than an umbilical cord.

Begrudgingly - he followed, Thing Two falling into step behind us.

***

We hobbled into town trailing blood liberally. It worried me how little I really cared about the wreck Thane had made of himself, but I consoled myself by remembering that he couldn't really die like this... probably. Magic powers didn't exactly come with a manual.

As we approached the edge of the line of shoddily constructed huts, people began to notice us. Men, women, and even some children stared with bleak, dead eyes at Thane as though a dying naked dude trailing two monsters was the least of their concerns. Every single one of them seemed to be headed in the same direction - towards the center of the town.

We tried at first to get someones attention so we could ask what was going on, or for directions, or help, but to a man every single person we tried to interact with just slouched away faster than Thane could reasonably move. After several minutes of travel and many frustrating encounters, we finally made it to the center of the shoddy little village. A number of adhoc rail lines seemed to converge at this point, creating a looping circular terminal area that would allow the few empty carts we had seen as we approached to come and go to the locations they were needed with relative ease. From all the mining picks and soot I was seeing laying around, I had to assume this was a mining town. I also had a pretty good guess of what they were mining.

Not that that explained how ramshackle the place looked.

People swarmed the towns center, blocking any and all rail traffic as they pressed together to surround a raised podium that looked like it was hastily constructed from upturned mine carts and loose wood.

"...be held in contempt for the sins of our ancestors!" a voice shouted as we reached the back of the group.

"Theres no food! No one to protect us from the monsters! We're born here, and we'll die here! Thats not the future I want for my children! And neither should you!" howled the aspiring politician.

"But those fools above us have made a grave mistake. They thought we would remain complacent, here, surrounded by more Magic Stones than anyone could possibly know what to do with! Well no more!" A hand and a pale bald head peaked up above the crowd where I could actually see it, and Thane watched in mute curiosity. I had already used my power to close up the worst of his wounds so he wasn't in any immediate danger.

The hand of the pontificating man was holding a purple crystal, with a length of cooper painstakingly bent around it. I couldn't quite see it that well, but if I was a betting man, I'd guess little runes would be hand carved into that copper band.

Then there was a whirl of energy I feel more than I could see, and suddenly a huge grotesque creature was seated behind the old man. It looked like the bastard hybrid of a Venus Fly Trap and an Angler Fish. The center of the thing was just one gigantic toothy maw, with tendrils of flesh already extending from it to burrow into the ground and hold it stable. from the top of the eyeless head several arching antennae stuck out of the thing, each one ending in what looked like a naked person who hung limply from the appendage a few feet in the air.

Every single one of those people looked identical to the one that Nadeen had chased into the caves, and the people at the front of the group seemed torn between getting a closer look at the naked women, and pressing backward into the safety of the group from the obvious monster.

Fuuuuuuuuuck.

"I have bound the greatest beast in these caves! The monster that has lured our children away for generations! And-!" he yelled, as excitement seemed to flicker through the crowd, the first real emotional response I'd seen in these people since getting here.

"I have found a spy in the caves! No doubt here to thwart the uprising!"

Fuck Fuckity Fuck Fuck.

And shit was going so well too.