From one of my many vantages I was dimly aware that Bryan had pulled out his squirt gun and was taking down the Sand Witches that had begun to crawl in behind the monster man, but he was apparently ignoring the high-ranker. My guess was that he just didn’t have any way to stop him. So why didn’t he run?

Because of me, I realized. He wasn’t going to run and abandon me. I was his mission, for whatever reason.

So it was all up to me.

Huh, I thought. Guess I really am Harry Potter.

Subclass: Spirit Beastmaster

Spirit beasts can be subjugated and controlled via Cosmic Qi

through Spirit and Wisdom. Spirit beasts may in rare instances be

formed and nurtured.

Subclass Traits: Spirit servant (Sand Witch)

You have subjugated a spirit beast, Sand Witch, level 3. You may spend

cultivated Qi as Spirit to summon and control this beast. You may share

some traits and powers with the Witch.

You have shared trait: incorporeal sandstorm with Spirit servant (Sand Witch).

Trait: Incorporeal Sandstorm

You are able to disincorporate your physical body, transforming into a storm of sand particles, immune to blade damage and with greatly reduced vulnerability to bite damage and magic damage. Not immune to force damage.

Limitations: unable to carry passengers in unevolved state.

Duration: up to five minutes in unevolved state.

Trait may evolve through use or infusion of additional Raw Cosmic Qi or refined Cosmic Qi as spirit.

Holy shit. That’s what happened before, then, and I could do it on command? I could become a literal sandstorm. No, fuck that; a magical sandstorm. Holy fuck!

Did I take a moment to flex and swirl in my newly magicked-up state? Maybe. Did I also take a moment to mentally bump the 2000 Darude track and try to flex and swirl to the early aughts eurotrash kick, four-on-the-floor?

Absofuckinglutely. I’m not a millennial for nothing.

It was difficult to pull my focus together, spread out as it was across pretty much the entire dining space. A few grains escaped my swirl and even found their way outside the building, but it seemed like I lost connection to them if they got too far away from the center of my incohesive mass. That’s ok, I realized; I’d pull myself together just enough to transform Bryan and Sam and get us out of there.

Evolve trait, I thought from my scattered sand-brain. I sensed a question, as if the system were asking for input on the proposed evolution. I pictured myself taking my companions and transforming them into sand as well so we could get the hell out of here before this at-least-level-30 Shayathar vessel ripped their throats out.

You are attempting to evolve trait: Incorporeal Sandstorm to allow the inclusion of passengers.

ERROR: Unable to evolve trait while in use.

It’s never easy, is it?

With a mental sigh I deactivated my use of the trait as I would a skill, feeling the spirit cycle back into my channels as my body reformed. I was careful to re-incorporate back a ways from our approaching enemies, but I neglected to take proper care of my elevation.

“Woah!” I reappeared up against the ceiling, arms and legs splayed out like a spider, before flopping down to the floor. Long cedar boards slapped my face and stomach and I convulsed in a fit, not so much from the impact (my body was at least twice the usual strength and resilience now, and while the impact shocked me a bit, I wouldn’t say it hurt all that much) but from something else I hadn’t yet admitted was happening in my body. I’d been losing control in little fits here and there throughout the day, and if I cared to be honest with myself, I knew exactly what that meant.

But who the fuck dreams about withdrawal symptoms?

Staying on the floor, I sent spirit back into my stat interface, targeting the trait.

You are attempting to evolve trait: Incorporeal Sandstorm to allow the inclusion of passengers. Evolve? Y/N

“Yes!” I called aloud, earning a little increased attention from the Sand Witches pouring in from behind the others. I glanced at Hot-Topic reject man, fearfully expecting to draw his gaze, but he continued with a singular purpose, and he wasn’t approaching me at all.

He was heading for Sam.

Congratulations, you have evolved trait: Incorporeal Sandstorm! You may now carry one passenger with you, allowing them to also disincorporate and transform into a storm of sand particles.

Limitations: only one passenger allowed; passenger has no control over the storm.

Duration: up to five minutes without further evolution.

Trait may evolve through use or infusion of additional Raw Cosmic Qi or refined Cosmic Qi as spirit.

“Fuck!” I growled. I immediately began pouring spirit into the skill, willing it toward a secondary evolution to allow me to carry more than one passenger, but I was cock-blocked.

You are attempting to evolve trait: Incorporeal Sandstorm to increase duration from 5 to 8 minutes. Evolve? Y/N

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“No, not that, stupid fucking thing!”

There was no more time to mess around. I shook my interface out of my vision and took stock of the situation as fast as I could, but I already had the measure of it.

Get out or die.

My gut twisted at the thought of leaving Bryan alone even for a moment, but I knew Sam was about to get legitimately fucked up. So I chose.

With nothing more than a thought I was sand again, swirling, spreading. It took a little more concentration to gather my disunified mass enough to move in a direction, and when I did, I sensed that it was sloppy, untrained. Huh, training, I thought. How the hell does one train in the middle of the end of the world? It wasn’t like I had a magical inheritance temple or time-dilated private dimensional island to escape to, like in all the stories. But now that I’d had the thought, I idly wondered if my brain would somehow make that happen.

It didn’t. At least, not in the moment.

So I pushed forward until I reached Sam.

For the first time since he’d locked eyes on us, the corporate trash man paused.

Not just that he stopped walking, you know? But like, something gave him pause. I felt a check in him, a moment of “oh shit” that at first I thought was me but it was foreign, alien to my mind. Maybe the tell was that I’m more of an “oh fuck” guy. Nah, that was a cheap one-liner; scratch that. It’s not as if I heard the words in English anyway; it was more of a general vibe, if that makes sense.

For the first time, Zombie Neo doubted.

Now why was that?

Was it me?

Hey, I realized. Why can I sense his thoughts? His feelings? At first brush it was enough like his generally oppressive aura that I assumed that’s all I was sensing, but after giving it a little thought, I realized the insight I was getting, the connection, was more intimate than that. It was a personal connection, like the two of us were having a conversation in my mind. Only I had the distinct impression he wasn’t aware of it. So maybe more like I was eavesdropping?

Fight-or-flight instinct and years of Isekai/Prog Fantasy context prompted me to grab that connection and use it. In my mind I reached out with spirit, surrounded the connection, and grasped as hard as I could.

Zombie Neo’s eyes widened and he stepped back, taking in the sand storm that now swirled around Sam.

“What—” he started.

I shoved.

Spirit flooded out of my disincorporated sandstorm body, shooting across the gap to the Shayathar vessel, not unlike intimate lubricant from a Super Soaker™.

He stepped back again, his eyes flashing with fear for just a moment. Then he snarled and, with the wave of a hand, broke our connection.

“What is this?” he growled. “How are you able to wield Qi magic, human?”

I didn’t have a mouth so I ignored him, latching onto Sam instead. She started to yell something but all in a moment her body, too, evaporated into a shower of swirling, cyclone-shaped sand.

What the fucking FUCK??? Her voice screamed in my mind.

Sam, hi! I thought. Sorry to startle you, didn’t have time to explain. We’re in a rush so I’m going to go ahead and NOT answer your questions right now, ok?

No you don’t fucking dare, you weird-ass nerd-face little—

She continued, but I ignored her as best I could in my struggle to bring as much cohesion to our shape as possible so I could move us in one direction again.

With a surge of spirit I forcibly pulled us over the Shayathar vessel, over the Sand Witches and Bryan, and through the broken window out onto the street. Then we flew.

We flew like the wind past buildings and the freeway, until I picked at random a low, flat rooftop to deposit us on. In order to give Sam her body back, I had to reincorporate both of us. I willed my spirit to pull back from the trait, and our bodies appeared, this time successfully standing on the roof.

But with Sam’s arm emerging my gut.

“OWWWWW!” I screamed like a dying cat.

She was firmly ensconced, her arm passing directly through my abdomen, a bit on the right, buried up past her elbow. Everything beneath my ribcage felt like a stone, like solid, dead weight, with pain radiating from the borders. Blood began to soak my equipped shirt around the place where her arm emerged.

“Jesus FUCK!” Sam screamed, tugging on her arm. As she did, the pain threatened to knock me right out, increased constitution or not, and white encroached on the edges of my vision. I attempted to gasp for breath but couldn’t quite make it happen. What I could do was raise both of my hands and grip her arm, holding her to prevent her from forcibly ripping herself free. Visions of watching my own guts spill out on the ground in front of me like a Mortal Kombat KO flashed through my mind. I very much hoped to avoid that outcome.

“What the fuck, motherfucker!” she continued. Her voice reached Kristin Chenowith registers.

Gritting my teeth, I torturously whipped enough willpower together to reactivate the trait. Sam and I both disincorporated again, our grotesquely entwined bodies blessedly dissipating. Difficult though it remained to gather my will cohesively in my sandstorm stage, I couldn’t help but feel that the relief of ending that shocking pain made it a little easier to focus when I shoved our two sandstorms apart as hard as I could. Sam’s sand moved out of mine, mine flew back toward the edge of the roof, and I quickly pulled my spirit back from the trait.

My body reformed just over the edge of the roof and I reached up to grab the gutter. It creaked and bent as if to snap, and I kicked and flailed until my other hand found the eave. I looked down over my shoulder, convinced I’d heard a snarling below, but nothing appeared in the backlot. With a pained grunt I pulled myself up onto the roof, then collapsed, rolling onto my back to catch my breath. I coughed up blood and rolled again so as not to choke.

“Let’s… never… do that… again,” Sam said, heaving great breaths between her words. She stood shakily a few feet away, bent with her hands resting on her knees. She’d been sick on the rooftop and she reached up with the back of one hand to wipe her cheek.

I winced in anticipation of pain as I pushed myself up to a sitting position, but none came.

The hole remained in my shirt, blood-ringed and ragged. But beneath, my flesh was unscathed.

Huh.

Magic was fucking weird.

I laughed at the thought, wiping blood away from my lips. Then I felt the muscles in my arms and legs begin to tense up, and my breathing grew tight and shallow.

Oh fuck, I thought. Here it comes.

So here’s a little more context about what was going on.

I’d been medicated since teenhood. My story wasn’t unique, but that didn’t make it suck any less. A bout of depression here. A soupçon of psychotic break there.

An attempt or two to make it all end.

One of the worst things about medicated treatments in adolescence is the constant cocktail adjustments. Say you’re dissociating and experiencing brief personality breaks. So your doctor sees you and basically (though they wouldn’t put it this way) takes a shot in the dark. Let’s put you on drug X. Sure doc, mom says, eager to grasp for the solution. And hey, to be clear, I’ve got nothing but respect for the doctors (even if big pharma can shove it right up their gold-lined asses); the drugs do help, and the docs do their best. But even a highly informed guess is still a guess, you know? So you go home with drug X and things go ok for a couple of months.

Until you develop side effects.

Now you’re not dissociating but you’re always itchy, twitchy, and dangerously constipated. So mom takes you back and the doc says oh, gosh, I’m so sorry. Let’s see if we can take care of that for you with drug Y.

Fast forward a couple of years and you’ve been on X and Y, Y and Z, X and Z, twice the X dosage, just Y and Z, and a few other unique permutations, each time initiating changes to your brain chemistry that may or may not have lifelong effects on your personality, thought processes, and overall well-being.

By the time the world ended I was a grown-ass man and had settled into a sort of uneasy truce with my meds, a tenuous stasis that included three pills every morning and another one each night. But—and I know this will come as a surprise—somehow in the process of losing my bed and house to a beam of super-charged space magic in what can only be described as “genre aware, overpowered fun,” I had neglected to grab those pills.

And now a day had passed without taking them.

I awoke from seizing on the roof to a blustery-looking Sam sitting atop me and repeatedly slapping me in the face. I stopped twitching, opened my eyes, and held up my hands to fend her off.

“You go back, you piece of shit!” she yelled. “Go back and get him! Now!”

I nodded and she crawled off of me. Then I reactivated my trait and took off like a dust-devil, back across the freeway, looking for El Zarape.

I only hoped I made it back in time.

It wasn’t all that hard to find the place a second time, it turned out, because even though from high enough up all the building tops looked more or less the same, it turned out quite a crowd had gathered in the street out in front of our little hideout.

The sun had fully submerged beyond the cityscape, but a bright harvest moon lit up the scene. It looked odd, somehow, marred with dark lines and patches, but I didn’t necessarily trust what I was seeing with my “one-thousand-mirrors” sand-eyes.

In the moonlight I saw a mass of bodies, some of them hooded figures (I assumed these were Sand Witches), others lurching human zombies. Here and there I thought I spotted a child running around at waist-height, but I soon realized these were goblettes.

“Where is he?” Zombie Neo was saying. His voice echoed out from the broken window. Through the sizeable hole I spotted him, holding a battered Bryan up by the collar, other hand raised in a high fist. He brought it down on Bryan’s face, then pulled it back up. “Where is the Qi Magician? Answer me and I will end you quickly.”

I didn’t have time to hesitate. I willed myself into the space and swirled around Bryan. But just as I did, my brain defied me, and even in my sandstorm state I felt myself battling to maintain control and stay conscious as my withdrawal symptoms took their toll. I mentally groaned, straining every bit of will I had to pour spirit into the trait and command it to pick up a passenger.

It’s really, really too bad my aim sucked so much.