Chapter Eighty-seven.

Tilry was clearly having second thoughts about this; she was staring at the gooey, almost free-flowing fish-soul I was holding up to her with two of my Mana-gloved danger-noodles. Despite her lack of facial features, I could tell she was half-disgusted, half-terrified and one hundred percent questioning her life choices that had led her to this moment.

‘Come on, Tilry, it’s not going to hurt. It tastes fine.’ I tried to encourage her, considering the half-digested soul would dissipate in about ten seconds.

‘Be brave, love, this is for your own good. And your levels,’ Hank said to her, his deep, ghostly voice softer than usual.

The familiar hung her head, looking down at her exhausted, sleeping host in the hammock stretching between two posts, and let out a sound I was sure was a sigh of resignation. She looked at my avatar body, then reached out with one of her four arms to touch the liquefied soul. The moment she did, her arm started absorbing the soul-soup, slowly at first, but after a few seconds it just flowed into her like water going down the drain of a bathtub. And that was it.

She flinched — a few seconds too late in my opinion — and then looked around as if to check if anyone had witnessed the atrocity she had just committed. Well, even if it wasn’t the middle of the night with everyone sleeping as uncomfortably as possible — with the exception of those on different watch duties up on the quarterdeck — the only ones who could see spiritual shenanigans were the three of us: Hank, Tilry and myself.

‘How do you feel?’ I asked the familiar.

‘I feel … fine,’ she replied after some hesitation.

‘Do you feel full?’ I inquired further.

‘Uh … no. I’d need ten times as much before I could … grow,’ she stated, clearly not comfortable.

I could tell this wasn’t an everyday experience for her, especially under the current circumstances.

‘Well, not to worry, love, where we’re going there’ll plenty of souls to go around, so be prepared to reach puberty,’ Hank commented cheerfully.

He was awfully happy about the success of our first attempt at feeding Tilry. Maybe he really did like the familiar for some reason. Well, she wasn’t my type, so I didn’t mind even if he did.

Oh! My! God! Not Wensah, the good old Earth-god. When had I started thinking about spirits in terms of being my type or not? This was worrying. Was I going full native? Again? I mean, sure, Tilry was easy on the eyes as far as spirits went — her appearance was feminine enough on account of subconsciously adapting to mimic her previous hosts, all of them women. But in reality, spirits were neither men nor women. They were spirits. They didn’t even reproduce like humans or elves did, they just popped into existence from the Essence permeating the Spirit World. I decided to bury these thoughts as deep in the dark recesses of my mind as I could, and focus on important matters.

‘Alright, this worked. What’s next? Can we move onto the Soul Shields now?’ I rapid-fired the words, and to show I meant business, I brought out the small and thin sheet of Essence-armour from my Spirit Room.

Tilry leaned closer to observe the object, and poked at it. Just as before, the material didn’t let her finger pass through it, then, as if it was a door, she started knocking on it.

‘Who’s there?’ I asked.

‘A stupid earthling who hasn’t yet realised his jokes make no sense in this world,’ Hank answered, while Tilry just looked around confused.

‘You’d be the worst of all brothers if you were actually my brother.’

‘A fact I’m proud of.’ Hank sent a mental grin my way.

‘Thank god I’m an only child.’ I sighed.

‘So … what about the armour?’ Tilry decided it was time someone put a stop to our quasi-brotherly quarrel and focus on things that mattered. ‘It’s solid, but will you be able to make more of it? Or shape it into something like that weird spirit-costume you had?’

‘Sure, I’ll just need to spit on it. Like a lot,’ I said cheerfully.

‘Spit?’ the familiar and my obnoxious roommate asked at the same time.

Happy that I managed to catch Hank off guard for once, I savoured his momentary confusion with glee, and before he could figure out the riddle — which he would in a matter of seconds — I decided to demonstrate.

I tapped into my brand-new storage organ and sent a considerable amount of Enzyme to the tip of the tentacle that held the armour-sheet. It took only a second for the digestive goo to cover it. It really was like spitting as far as I was concerned, and I smiled inside my soul. I let go of the lot — the sheet remained suspended in the air as gravity wasn’t something spiritual objects had to worry about.

‘Ta-dah! Let’s see if this works as intended,’ I said, and I slowly and carefully touched the sheet with a tentacle, coated with Mana to prevent it from trying to absorb it.

Stolen novel; please report.

The sheet had become softer, and if I wasn’t mistaken it had swollen a bit, like dry wood after soaking in water for a while. But unlike wood — wet or dry — the compressed Essence was bending and morphing under my touch a lot easier than before, and I knew that now I didn’t have to worry about shape and form when making the material. I could make small pieces or panels of this stuff, then use the Enzyme in conjunction with some good old-fashioned spirit-glue and build and shape shield and armour for us all.

The only problem was the amount of Essence I needed to make the spirit-kevlar, and that was the next challenge we needed to tackle. Hank was ready to tackle it, and by tackling it he meant refurbishing some of the rooms in the house.

***

I kind of lost count of the days and nights.

Hank was a typical manager, dishing out impossible and contradicting instructions and expecting the workforce to do everything. I was seriously considering taking this to HR, or to start a union or something. I wondered if employment laws and lawyers would be a hit in the Spirit World.

It was so busy I even forgot to talk to Krissy for the following days, but not to worry, Mr Manager was there to make sure our host was periodically reminded that we were still here.

Krissy and Kiwa were largely unaware of our undertakings and focused on their daily exercises, weapon maintenance and occasional interactions with rangers, sailors and marines. But it was all for the greater good, and despite my internal grumblings, I couldn’t complain about the progress we were making.

Thinning the unnecessarily thick walls of all my self-made pools, enlarging my secondary Essence pool under strict managerial supervision to avoid causing problems in our body, practicing making the new comm-thread during breaks, and of course catching some more fish for Tilry to enjoy — had I possessed a head, I would have felt like it was spinning.

My secondary Essence Pool doubled in size, going from 35 EP to a 70 EP capacity, which I was ecstatic about, right until Hank suggested that we somehow move that pool to the outside of our body, invoking things like “external hard-drives” to encourage me to agree to it. Maybe it was just my old, human sensibilities, but I kind of thought of this as akin to having my stomach or my guts on the outside, and I wasn’t sure I liked the idea. On the other hand, I felt and knew that we couldn’t significantly increase the size of it any further if it stayed inside our body. So, I considered this. And I still said no.

With the two Essence pools I thought we had enough to start working on actual armour — I mean, a total of about 140 EP was nothing to sneeze at, and with a collection rate of 15 EP per minute, I didn’t think we had to worry about refills.

Tilry seemed fascinated by the process of using Mana to compress Essence into denser and denser sheets and doing weird structural alterations even I didn’t fully understand — I supposed it was up to Mana how it interpreted and imposed my will on those sheets. When I realised that some of the Mana I used for the process actually stayed embedded in the sheets instead of evaporating, it shouldn’t have surprised me — based on everything I had learned, it was predictable. Regardless, things were going well. Slowly, but well. And since we weren’t preparing to outfit a whole army, that was just fine.

After five days of blood, sweat and fishing, our prototype shields were ready. But before testing them, we decided to take the time to witness Tilry’s levelling up, as she was finally ready to do so without having to eat the soul of a dead host. The thirty or so fishes that had given their lives for this noble purpose would not be forgotten.

Tilry’s level-up was … quick and underwhelming. At least for us, spectators. I was pretty sure her four arms grew a little, a couple of inches each maybe, but that was all I could see. It probably meant a slight increase in the speed of her Essence collection. After a few questions and tests, we determined that her Essence pool’s capacity went up from 38 EP to 41 EP, and her Mana pool from 25 MP to about 29 MP. That was good growth, and with all done and observed, it was time to see what our new shields could do.

***

‘Well, they’re not much to look at,’ Tilry commented.

I stifled the harsh, angry response that wanted to escape me, and pretended to take a deep breath. She wasn’t wrong, and she certainly didn’t deserve to hear the first thoughts coming into my mind.

The problem was that no matter how much I had tried to make the shields look like shields, they had ended up looking as if a toddler had decided to hammer crumpled tinfoil over the surface of a large ball with a toy hammer, then cut the thing in half, each half resulting in a shield-thing. As much as I wished to blame it on Hank and his sometimes incomprehensible suggestions, I could only blame myself, for I was the toddler, and my tenties were the toy hammers. Unfortunate, but it was the best I could do.

‘That’s my brother for you,’ Hank said, sounding almost happy and overly self-satisfied. ‘If there is something to be done incorrectly, he’ll do it.’

‘Fuk yu! Eat eat eat! I’m Hank.’ I shot my best retort at him.

‘Oi, that’s not fair,’ he complained immediately. ‘Don’t bring my embarrassing childhood mishaps into this!’

‘Oh, so you do remember, huh?’

‘Unfortunately.’ He was a lot quieter as he spoke now.

‘Hm. Then do me a favour and get off my back, will you? I did my best, and if you don’t like it, then go fu…’

‘Alright, alright.’ He gave up finally. ‘Looks aside, it will do the job. Right, Tilry?’

‘Right.’ Tilry agreed with as much conviction in her voice as befitting someone who was determined not to take sides and keep as quiet as possible. ‘So, you said we’ll need to test these … shield-things. How?’

How was a good question, and I was sure Tilry was not going to like the answer, for Hank’s genius idea was to get her to hold one of the half-spherical Essence-abominations, and I’d hit it as hard as I could with everything I had. Now, I was confident the feminine familiar would be safe — I had at least that much trust in my own handiwork — but I didn’t want to see her relapsing into her past state of being terrified of me. Being in the almost constant presence of a Tentacle Horror that could smash her up and eat her any moment, had taken some time for her to get used to, even more time to get comfy and open up a bit. I didn’t want to undo that.

Lucky for her, a sailor appeared on the part of the quarterdeck where our hosts were doing some sort of meditative exercise that was supposed to help with controlling Mana. The man requested their presence for a meeting in the captain’s cabin, and Krissy and Kiwa followed him to Captain Fenirig Arla’s quarters.

None of us spirits paid much attention to the meeting — it was mostly a recap of previous meetings, probably to make sure everyone knew the plan and their places in it. The only interesting thing was the father-daughter duo of Fenar and Fenar, and a brief contest to see who could come up with the best insults for orks. Throughout the meeting we were quietly trying to ease Tilry into the idea of being our product-tester, right until another sailor burst into the room, saying,

‘Captain! Barbarian ship spotted. About thirty miles starboard.’