Chapter Forty-one

I would have wanted to stay a bit longer. The pups were the cutest things I’d seen in a long time, and of course a debate had started about what to name them. The three active participants of the debate — Kenta, Tommy and Deni — had some good ideas. Toven stayed out of it, muttering something about wolves’ natural habitat being a forest, not his garden. Krissy was too tired to even speak, and I wasn’t sure she’d make it back to the barrack without falling asleep on the roadside. The proud father of the litter, Akela, didn’t care for names: he just went with “pup one, two and three”.

Krissy used another 20 MP to give her muscles the extra umph they needed to get her back to the barrack. When she finally fell into her bed again, she fell asleep immediately without changing out of her training clothes or taking a bath. Sunrise was at least eight hours away, and I made up my mind to wake her and force her to take a bath before Toven’s endurance training in the morning. But for now, my nightly Essence-experiments could begin.

***

My Essence gathering was rather fast now — not counting the one I was using to cling onto Krissy I had seven tentacles, each of them five and a half meters long. They weren’t terribly thick, but they were more than adequate for most tasks. They collected Essence at a rate of 10 EP per minute each. That was 70 EP per minute total. Considering that the combined capacity of my two Essence pools was 103 EP, I could replenish my entire stock in under two minutes.

I hadn’t asked Tilry outright if this was good, average or bad, but after observing her and her host a little, I had concluded that the speed of my Essence collection was nothing short of prodigious. My best estimate was that the size of Tilry’s Essence pool was somewhere between 20 and 30 EP, and she could manage to collect 1 or 2 EP per minute per arm. She wasn’t made for this. I was.

I had known familiars were at a disadvantage against evil spirits, but this had really driven it home — no wonder four spiritualists hadn’t been enough to deal with the evil spirit. Small pools and a slow rate of collection meant limited Essence and Mana. I definitely had an advantage over familiars. But that evil spirit? The only advantages I’d had were my much longer reach and not being a mindless animal. In retrospect, I had been reckless.

But for now, I wanted to figure out what else I could turn Essence into. My ultimate goal of course was to make some Black Essence. I didn’t have much to go on though: Tilry wasn’t willing to show me the little black cube she had got from Wensah, and I doubted Wensah herself would just give some to me if I asked. So, experiments.

I went through the steps to make some of the same Spirit Stuff I had used for my new comm-node. I emptied my secondary Essence pool, gathering 35 EP at the tip of one of my tenties. Then I poured 35 MP over it. Mana transferred its own responsiveness to the Essence, becoming inert in the process. Then Essence began to do what I wanted it to do: it shrunk, condensing into a ball — some of it lost in the process — then I instructed it to change its spiritual structure, slowly becoming Spirit Stuff. I was doing this by feel rather than knowledge — it was like a blind man doing alchemy, not seeing the lead turning into gold, but feeling the change by touch. Nonetheless, by the end of the process, I had a small, dense and very expensive ball made of Spirit Stuff. Unfortunately, it was as low in nutrition as it was expensive to make, so it wasn’t a viable alternative to eating souls.

I wanted to see what else I could turn this little ball of spirit-flesh into, other than a new comm-node. The problem was that I didn’t have any specific ideas, so I just played around with it. I flattened the little ball into a pancake, using two Mana-gloved tenties as makeshift rolling pins. Then I willed it to become less dense, then more dense, to stretch, to contract. Then I mixed it with a little bit of unrefined Essence, making it heavier — spiritually speaking — and more visible, until I had a fairly flexible, blueish disk in my tenties. It looked similar to the Spirit-Stuff I was made of — translucent, but a little more opaque than my body.

I spent a few more hours looking at it, studying it, but I had no more ideas for tonight, so in the end I did what I usually did with the results of dead-end experiments: I consumed it. Or … I tried. I poked at the pancake shaped piece of Spirit-Stuff, and … it resisted. It felt like I was trying to stick a finger into a PET bottle: it wobbled, it dented, but it didn’t allow my tentacle to go through it.

Now this was interesting.

My tentacles could go through anything: walls, trees, a door, souls, the body of another spirit — it didn’t matter because I wasn’t made of … matter. I could usually feel some resistance from Spirit-Stuff, but never to this extent. I pressed harder and harder, until finally my tentacle went through the thin disk. Then I willed my tentie to start consuming it. It resisted even that. This was new.

In the end, I managed to eat it — my tentacle liquified it and slurped it up, but it took time, twenty seconds at least. It was as if a floodgate had been opened, and ideas poured into my mind one after another.

I could make my familiar-costume from this stuff — it was more opaque than a spirit’s body, so it could hide me. It could also serve as armour, protecting me against other evil spirits — if I had trouble penetrating and eating it, so would others. Hell, I could make a soul-shield out of this stuff and protect Krissy’s soul, at least for a while — twenty seconds was a long time in a fight, enough to retreat and get away.

The material was expensive to make. I wasn’t sure how many thousands of EP and MP I’d need to use to make a full suit for myself, so I would have to do it piece by piece. Which meant I had to be able to store completed parts somehow. Which meant I had to experiment and figure out how to build a version of Jack’s Room that could store spiritual materials as opposed to physical ones. Which meant …

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The door of the room flung open.

***

Fenirig Arte stood in the doorway, peering into the darkness of the room, his eyes on Krissy. What the hell was he doing here? There was no sword practice scheduled for today, was there? And what time was it anyway? I was sure Krissy had at least another two hours until she had to get out of bed and start getting ready for the day. Master of Rangers or not, the man wasn’t supposed to be here.

Fenirig Arte took the first step into the room. Even in the darkness, I could see the sinister smile on his scarred face as clearly as I could see his bronze coloured soul. He took another step, then another, walking towards the bed as silently as a cat stalking its prey, not even the sword at his hip making a sound. Did the elf finally snap and decide to get rid of the nuisance he considered spiritualists to be? No, it couldn’t be that. But as he approached, he placed his hand on the hilt of his sword. He stopped at the bed, glaring at Krissy who was sleeping like a log, and it looked he was about to draw his weapon.

No. Whatever he was trying to pull here, I wasn’t going to let him. I flung two of my tentacles forward, one for each of his arms, Mana shimmering in the darkness for a second.

Fenirig Arte stopped moving. He didn’t resist or struggle, he just stopped the moving his arms the moment my tentacles coiled around them.

He looked at me. I was sure he couldn’t see me, but his gaze was right on my spherical body, hovering above Krissy’s back. The elf grinned.

‘Isn’t that something?’ he whispered. ‘A spirit that wants to protect its host. And here I thought I’ve seen it all.’

I had no idea what he was on about, but this was the last straw. He’d been pushing and bullying Krissy for three months now under the guise of training. He’d given her more bruises than I could count, worked her to exhaustion all the time, and only hell knew what he was about to do to her now.

I pulled some EP and MP and I made a thread and attached one end of it to my secondary communication node.

‘Listen you invisible piece of shit …’ Fenirig Arte whispered.

I plunged a tentacle into his soul and I attached the thread to one of the nodes in it. The man gritted his teeth, snarling quietly, but he didn’t move.

‘No. You listen to me!’ I said to him, certain that he could hear me now.

Huh! Not very familiar-like, are we? His thoughts came to me.

I was taken aback, because … Fenirig Arte didn’t look surprised in the slightest. His smile returned, and he was as unfazed as if he was talking to one of his underlings, which was pretty much everyone around here. And the ease with which he sent his thoughts to me was disturbing — it had taken Krissy and the sailors days of practice before they could do it properly. I had almost forgotten that the man used to be a spiritualist.

‘What are you trying to pull here?’ I demanded. ‘Don’t think for a second I couldn’t or wouldn’t kill you! You know I could.’

Fenirig Arte’s grin widened, still looking at exactly where I was. It was unnerving.

Tell me, you bitchy little shit, what do you think I’m trying to pull here? He demanded instead of answering.

And suddenly I didn’t know what to say to him. What was it exactly I thought he was doing here?

‘Well, I …’ I began to say, but he cut me short.

Did you think I came here to kill her? After three months of training her, and so early in the fucking morning? Or did you think I suddenly fancied a human girl? Well, what is it? Or could it be you’re too stupid to use your invisible head, if you even have one?

I didn’t know what to say. All I knew was that I had just embarrassed myself as thoroughly as possible. Of course he wasn’t here to harm Krissy. We had a deal. He was here to train her. But …

‘She’s exhausted. Let her rest!’ I said to him.

No.

‘Why? Do you want her to die on her own? Is that what you’re aiming for?’

Fucking spirits! You really have a pile of shit-munching maggots for a brain.

‘Listen, Master Fenar, you will …’ I said, but I couldn’t finish.

The man yanked his arms away, and to my utter shock he tore free of my Mana-gloved tentacles. Under normal circumstances I would have wondered how the transfer of energy and movement between the physical and the spiritual worked, but the man narrowed his eyes and leaned closer to me without actually seeing me, and he said,

Call me Fenar one more time and you will learn that even your kind can swim in horse-shit.

I just kept quiet, utterly confused and a little scared of the man.

Good. Now listen here, brainless! We have a deal, and believe it or not, I like the kid, so I’m doing her a favour.

‘A favour?’ I scoffed, anger boiling in me again.

Life’s tough for spoiled brats like her. She’s human, so she’ll always be a brat, but I can at least take away the “spoiled”. And you, you shitheap, are more likely to get her killed than anything else. If you want her to live out the meager hundred or so years a human has, then don’t stand in my way of teaching her how.

‘But you’re just beating her up with a wooden sword!’ I argued, because that’s what he’d been doing.

Oh, don’t you worry, we’re just getting started. He sent his thoughts, laughing.

‘But …’

No buts! I will reiterate this for you, in case you haven’t been listening: for the duration of her training you will keep quiet, and you will do nothing to help her. Are we clear?

‘Y … yes, sir,’ I said.

A few thoughts went through my mind, but saying anything more would have been just a show of stubbornness, nothing else. I really had embarrassed myself here, hadn’t I? Was I acting overprotective? I needed to be less impulsive and a lot more pragmatic.

And now that we’re talking, we have only a few months before the first Joint Counter-Evil-Spirit Exercise. You’d better be ready to do your part.

I sighed inwardly, but he was right: a deal was a deal.

‘We’ll be ready,’ I said.

Good. Now get out of my head! I don’t want to hear your stupid fucking voice ever again!

I wanted to say “with pleasure”, but unfortunately the process of “getting out of his head” was going to be anything but pleasurable, and I was regretting my hasty reaction. At least I didn’t need to rip the entire node out of my body to sever the connection, only a chunk of it where the thread was attached. It was still akin to self-mutilation, but I did it quickly. I wished I could just cut the thread itself, but it never worked, no matter how much I tried.

I let Fenirig Arte’s arms go, retracting my tentacles. The man shook both his arms, as if trying shake some dirt off. Then he drew his wooden, training sword from the sheath, and started banging it against the headboard, right above Krissy’s head.

Krissy jerked awake in an instant, almost falling out of the bed, screaming, trying to scramble to her feet, her messy hair all in her face.

‘Wakey, wakey, you poorest excuse for a human!’ Fenirig Arte yelled into her ears with glee. ‘Get your misery-ass out of bed, for it is the most perfect morning for the honing of your defensive stances!’

‘Yes … sir!’ Krissy half screamed half cried, and she finally managed to stand up, groggy and not fully awake.

This was going to be a long day for her.