Jerome worked through the rest of the human forms, going deep into the night. The timer was a hard limit and he didn’t want to risk sleeping in and missing it.

He tried to remember which of the humans had died from the giant ockdine so that he could preserve their skills preferentially, but it wasn’t to be. They were just faceless corpses to him. A horrifying small-scale statistic. The only one he could remember was the Afghan girl.

When he got to her he started crying. The Mood Enhancement effect had worn off somewhat, so he could do that. He remembered her screams as he cut into her. Her strength as she stood up from the table despite her injuries. Her joy at seeing her family again. Her dangling from the ockdine’s tentacle. Her hitting the wall, soul and body separating with one sickening crunch.

But crying wouldn’t help, so he stopped as soon as he could. He had to move on and do what he could to save the living.

Her ability was useless for combat, so he ditched it and turned into another form.

In the end he settled on Magic Pulse and Blast Off as the two new skills he would keep. He had hoped to get to level 4 Transform and get another slot for unique skills, but it was not to be; this was a difficult skill to level, and by the end of his transformations he was less than halfway there.

Blast Off (unique)

Effect: Extraordinarily powerful jump can take the user high in the air. Can be used against walls or angled surfaces to launch outward. Some protection against fall damage.

Cost: 15 SP for max power.

Scaling: Max power gets greater with higher skill levels. Cost for max power stays the same, but cost for the same power launch decreases with higher skill levels. Cost for any launch never goes below 5 SP.

Limit: Less powerful when against soft surfaces. Protection against fall damage scales slightly slower than ability to jump, and is predicated on the user’s ability to pay attention and maneuver freely when hitting the ground.

Blast Off would gain him a huge amount of maneuverability. He could extricate himself from groups of gnolls, jump over walls, and maybe even catch some ptau off guard. The protection against fall damage wasn’t bad either.

There were some other skills that did tempt him.

Death Defy, for obvious reasons. It wasn’t immortality, but it would have let him go to -100 HP before actually dying. The catch was that he would have had to lay there paralyzed until his HP crawled back to 1. Lay there, vulnerable to any cruel gnoll that decided to ‘make sure’. Lay there while he was buried and suffocation took him past -100 HP. Lay there while his allies got killed one by one. He saw Rayi’s body hitting the ground. He saw the people smashed against the wall. He imagined Krystyna falling to a gnoll blade.

No, Death Defy was not the skill for him. Much better to avoid death altogether so he could keep fighting.

The others were mostly non-combat skills (like the ability to cut through non-living material) or skills that wouldn’t pair well with the arsenal he was developing.

Finally he was able to collapse onto the soggy ground, ten feet away from Krystyna. When he did that he was glad he’d ditched the Stormcalling ability; it only made him uncomfortable. He considered himself lucky that his stormcalling was stopped by the thunder before the effects became even stronger.

He slept fitfully and awoke in the early light.

Krystyna was up and practicing. She was going on a rampage, using Recoil Burst against anything she could find: trees, rocks, whatever she could find. Experimenting with angles. Experimenting with differential power when using two hands. Then, when she was exhausted, she used Refill SP and kept going — that ability alone would likely double or triple the rate at which she leveled her skills.

It was an amazing sight. The way the sweat ran down her body, coating her clothes and making them hang heavy off of…. He made himself think of his mission; he had to train, not gawk at others who were training.

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Or he could do both.

“Let’s spar.”

She jumped a bit, his voice catching her off guard and making her latest Recoil Burst sending a rock in a completely different direction than the others she’d shot. Not anywhere close to his head, thankfully.

“You’re up.”

“You’re observant.”

“That’s right I’m observant. I can see that you’re wearing someone else’s body. A different one than when I went to bed last night. Want to tell me what happened?”

“I ran into some humans.” He really didn’t want to talk about it right now. He wanted to train.

“Did you kill them?” Was that an accusation? It should have been an accusation, but it didn’t seem to be.

“Might as well have.”

“You’re going to have to be a lot more specific than that. If there were bad humans between here and the gnoll city then I should know. And if you went evil I want to know now, while I can still kill you.” Her eyes darted to the side as if she wasn’t quite sure she could do it. Or was it a joke? He couldn’t tell. Emotions were… complicated.

He told her about the infiltration, the ockdine attack, and the rescue attempt with as little animation as possible, although some emotion broke through despite his best efforts.

“You’re an idiot,” she said harshly. “Trying to do all that by yourself? Such an idiot. You could have been killed!”

“Weren’t you just threatening to kill me?”

“That was before I knew what happened! Don’t you know you can die here?”

He looked into her eyes, trying to understand what she was thinking. “Of course I know. And I’d do it again. I will do it again. I’ll succeed this time.”

Her eyes quivered and she bit her lip. “You’re a complete and total idiot.” She smiled affectionately. “But you’re a different kind of idiot than when you left.”

“Does that mean you’ll help?”

She laughed. “Of course I’ll help. It’s better than trying to survive out here alone, forever. And I’ve… started to like you not being dead.”

That was progress. “Okay then. Let’s spar.”

“Don’t you want to practice your new moves?” She asked. “I saw you learning them last night.”

“If I don’t learn the basics, I lose. The fanciest moves in the world can’t replace being able to dodge a punch.”

“Well, there are some damage-absorbing spells I’ve heard of… but your point is taken. Let’s go.”

She threw a slow punch towards his face and he handily moved his head to the side.

“Right,” she said. “Your agility and dodge have both gone up. This might be an actual fight now.”

It wasn’t an actual fight, at least not at first.

She let loose a flurry of blows, only half of which Jerome was able to dodge. He responded in kind, but his strikes were slower and she was able to dodge each one. It was close, though.

Then he decided to cheat.

He jumped back, causing her to circle him carefully. A natural pause in the fighting, which she used to channel Refill SP. He interrupted that with a punch delivered via Portal Hand.

“What the hell was that?” she demanded.

“I’ve got some new tricks,” Jerome said with a smirk.

He held out his arm to the side and then used Portal Hand to tap her on the opposite shoulder. She turned to look, but he had pulled his hand back to its normal place. A juvenile trick, but it was still funny. And effective. He used Portal Hand to put his palm on the other side of her stomach — it was pretty accurate at this range — and use Recoil Burst.

She flew five feet to the side, arms flailing, before hitting the ground and rolling into a defensive crouch.

“Oh that is definitely not fair.” She scowled at him.

“You better call an Equality Enforcement Officer.”

She laughed at that and her face broke into a wide grin. “I think I’m liking this new Jerome.” She sighed happily, letting herself fall back on the ground. “God, it feels good not having to be the adult here anymore. And I’m happy you have those abilities. You’re going to use all that unfairness against our enemies, and even in training, when it’s frustrating, it will help me up my game.”

Not being the adult anymore? Jerome panicked. “You should still be an adult,” he said hurriedly. “The more adults the better.”

She laughed again. “Yeah, yeah. The parent, I should say. I don’t have to be a parent. Now we’re two adults, each of which can take care of themselves… but helping each other out because we’re better that way.”

Jerome let the silence that followed hang for a while. She seemed to be chewing on some meaty problem and he didn’t want to interrupt. He even let himself stare off into the sky, mind wandering.

That stopped when he felt a fist slam into his stomach.

“You’re not the only one who can fight dirty,” she said with a wink.

It was on.