Chapter Seventy-four

Mr Instinct was driving a hard bargain, surprisingly, all the while not letting up the mental-spiritual assaults on my soul, trying to wrest even the tiniest bit of control from me. It seemed negotiations and heroic last stands were kind of the same to Mr Instinct. It was weird.

Even more shocking was the degree of intelligence the little bastard was displaying once we’d got talking. Wasn’t it supposed to have an animal intelligence, much like Akela’s? Instead, I was slowly coming to the conclusion that the Tentacle Horror’s mental capacity surpassed Akela’s by a large margin. Considering Akela was the Einstein of wolves in my opinion, it was a worrying development.

When I’d discovered the probable reason why the critter was able to think and talk, I had regretted my life choices immediately.

The spirit-brain-node that housed the critter was made of the same, blue-ish spirit-stuff as the rest of the body. Except for the white spiderweb-like network of strings running across inside it. There was only one place in this godforsaken realm where it could have got white spirit-stuff to use for enhancing its processing power.

My friggin’ soul.

Sure enough, upon closer inspection, I discovered one of my soul-shoulders had what looked like little bite-marks. The twat had used one or more of those creepy roots to cannibalise me. And I hadn’t even noticed. Mr Instinct had been building itself up like some spirit-Skynet, preparing to take over, right under my nose. Suffering an injury to my avatar body over in the material world hurt like hell, but a cheeky Tentacle Horror Instinct biting into my soul didn’t? How on Earth did that make sense?

On one hand, I was furious, barely able to keep myself from pressing that red button and wiping Mr Instinct from existence.

On the other, I couldn’t really blame it. Him. Maybe him.

But negotiations were going somewhere, and I figured there was a very high chance I’d need the thieving monster’s expertise to fix things. At this point, I had to accept that my two choices were to either claim the Tentacle Horror’s body as solely my own, then burst open and die, or to strike a deal with the original occupant and coexist happily ever after in a body that wasn’t falling apart. Also, the fact that Wensah had left the critter alive in the first place made me suspect that his continued presence was necessary for the body to function. Or to exist at all.

‘I’m not giving you control of any tentacles. Not two, not one, not any. You’d just grab everything and eat.’ I rejected Mr Instinct’s latest offer.

‘Fuk yu!’ Mr Instinct said with the eloquence I’d come to expect from him over the past few hours of negotiating. And for good measure, he sent another wave of … something at me through those roots. It felt like a slap. ‘Eat. Grow. More space inside. Idiot.’

I wondered how much the guy had rummaged through my soul while taking bites of it for himself. I was certain he’d got glimpses into my mind, or consciousness, because his vocabulary was insanely large for something that was supposed to be basically an animal. He also seemed to understand concepts that only made sense if you were human or thereabouts.

‘Listen mate, I’m willing to let you decide how we grow when I level up,’ I presented my umpteenth counteroffer. ‘But I get to decide who and what we eat. I have friends, and I’m not going to just go around and eat everyone.’

‘Everything food. Eat,’ he argued. ‘Friend stupid. What friend?’

‘Okay, I’m going to explain this to you once more, so listen you little cunt!’ I growled at the critter. ‘Out there, in the material world, there are people who are a lot stronger than us. Than you. Not to mention the bloody gods. If we go around causing trouble, meaning we go around recklessly and eat everything we see, we’ll make enemies and we will be killed. Do you understand that? Do you want to be killed?’

‘Fuk yu! Want to live!’ the reply came, and with it another attempt to liquidise and siphon a small chunk of my human soul.

‘Well, so do I, and fuck you, too,’ I said, sighing and blocking the attempt with minimal mental-spiritual effort. ‘So, you understand friends and enemies?’

‘Friends, life. Enemies … death,’ he said after a short pause.

He was getting it, wasn’t he?

‘Exactly. For example: Krissy. She’s a friend. She is helping us. So we can live.’

‘Krissy. Friend. Not food,’ Mr Instinct mused.

I didn’t know if your run-off-the-mill evil spirit could remember names and the faces — or souls — that went with them, and I found it somewhat scary that Mr Instinct could. An intelligent monster like him was dangerous in the extreme. I was sure Wensah hadn’t accounted for this turn of events. In fact, I was sure she was fully expecting me to get rid of him, then die because of my inability to fix my body.

Well, “fuk yu” Wensah, that was not going to happen.

‘Alright, listen carefully, last offer,’ I said to Mr Instinct. ‘We need to fix our body before it falls apart, so let’s do that first. After that, I’m in charge of the tentacles, and I decide who or what we eat and when. And we will eat. Just … not constantly. You can decide how we grow when we level up. I won’t build anything or expand the rooms without your approval. And if something comes up you think is important, we’ll discuss it and make informed decisions. Do you understand?’

Mr Instinct was quiet for a few moments, then said,

‘Fuk yu. More white soul. Then deal.’

I felt him again trying to take a chunk out of me. I supposed I could afford to give him a small bite — the damage to my soul was less than minor, nowhere near the amount Fenar or Kiwa had. And for some reason it didn’t hurt. I let Mr Instinct take the bite and I watched it happen.

One of the weird, creepy root-things wiggled, stirring and mushing a penny-sized chunk of soul. Then the roots sucked it up and transported it to him. The white, webbing-like structure inside the brain-organ grew as soon as it received the materials.

‘Fuk yu, it’s good.’ Mr Instinct said, sounding happy.

‘Are you using my soul as a drug or something?’

‘Drug? What’s drug?’

‘Nevermind. So, we have a deal?’

‘We have deal.’

Finally, after hours of the weirdest back and forth I’d ever had, the deal was done. It wasn’t ideal — trusting an evil spirit to honour a deal was a dubious proposition, but we had some fixing and rebuilding to do, and we had maybe a day and a half before Wensah’s return. I would think of security measures against a Tentacle Horror takeover later.

‘Good.’ I said to the critter. ‘Let our life-saving self-surgery begin!’

***

The word surgery was a lot less fitting than I had initially thought. A more accurate way to describe what we were doing would have been a construction project. It was like gutting a building so we could redo it according to a safer and more comfortable design, while tiptoeing around landmines and hoping the building wouldn’t collapse on us without warning.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Wensah had severed the Tentacle Horror’s connections to his own nodes, made rather sturdy wires to connect my soul’s nodes to them, then sort of coated them with a dark-blue layer a spirit-stuff. That layer prevented Mr Instinct from even trying to reconnect, depriving him of any control whatsoever. Why she hadn’t placed similar protective measures around my soul, I had no idea.

Since I wasn’t willing to give any control to Mr Instinct, even if I could somehow bypass the node-shells, the critter appointed himself as the foreman of this construction site and began to yell orders at me, the lone labourer.

The first order of business — and of course our first disagreement — was Jack’s Room. Too big? Well. I had thought it was a good size, and I tried to argue that it was an exceptionally useful space. The damn critter was having none of it, and in the end I agreed to reclaim some of the building materials — a mixture of Essence, Mana and Spirit-Stuff — and use it to start filling in cracks and craters on the outer “skin” of our shared body.

Luckily, I could perform this task without damaging anything inside, and after about an hour’s work, Jack’s Room shrunk from 50 spaces to about 30.

My Spirit-Room received similar treatment. I did it without complaining. I didn’t have any usable units of measurements for its capacity, so the best I could say was that it went from small to smaller, giving me more stuff to use for repairs elsewhere.

It wasn’t hard work if I was honest. The Mana-content of the reclaimed materials made it responsive. All I had to do was to will it to move, and it did.

Mr Instinct decided the Secondary Essence Pool could stay as it was, but it had to be in a different location.

As it turned out, this pool was the main reason our body was pear-shaped as opposed to a sphere. Unfortunately, the pool as a whole refused to move just by willing it, so I had to pierce our skin and stick a tentacle inside to push it. I complained about the pain, Mr Instinct called me a “pussy” — probably just to flaunt the vocabulary he had stolen from me in the first place — and after five minutes of swearing at each other, the pool arrived to its new home, forming a triangle with the Primary Essence Pool and Mana Pool.

The critter then directed me to cut, shorten and re-attach the pathways between the Mana and the two Essence Pools. Those were near invisible, even to me, but I managed.

The bulge that had made us a pear didn’t deflate on its own, and it took a bit of tentacle-work to smooth things out and get us back to being nice and round like a soap-bubble.

And we worked and worked and worked some more. The insides of a Tentacle Horror had proved to be flexible — no living, physical being would have survived the kind of internal rearranging we were doing — and I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. I started to feel more comfortable, the weird sensation of wrongness gone and forgotten.

About a day and a half later it was all done. Or at least I thought it was all done, for Mr Instinct stopped telling me to do-this-do-that, and became quiet.

I took a nice, long look at myself.

Not exactly perfect — still had some rough patches on the outer layer of our skin — but we were structurally sound as far as either of us could tell. Aesthetics weren’t a major concern anyway.

I had to admit, I couldn’t have done this on my own. I hadn’t been born a Tentacle Horror, and I lacked the knowledge and of course the instinct and intuition of the creature native to this body.

‘So … job done, eh?’ I said, quite satisfied with the results.

No reply.

‘Are you there?’

Still no reply. He was there, I had no doubt, but it seemed his attention was on something other than me or the great job I had done. I focused as well, trying to get a feel for what he was so preoccupied with. It didn’t take long to realise that Mr Instinct was looking at the one thing we had not touched during our valiant and successful effort to restore order to our body.

The Black Essence portal.

Right. The portal was exactly where it had been before, exactly as small as it had been and probably doing exactly what it had been doing so far — being my internal bridge between the spirit world and the material world. I wished I knew how that thing actually worked, but I only had vague guesses. Seeing how intently the critter was focusing on it, however, was reason enough to start worrying.

‘What is it? Is something wrong with the portal?’ I asked, hoping he was simply fascinated and nothing else.

‘Small,’ he said after a while.

‘Yeah. It’s tiny. Is that a problem?’

‘Too small.’

‘Okay, again, is that a problem?’

‘Fuk yu.’

‘Riiiight,’ I groaned.

This guy was going to get on my nerves big time in the future, that much I could see already as clearly as the endless, alien Spirit-World around me.

‘Can’t work on body,’ he stated.

‘Body? You mean my other body? My avatar over there?

‘One body. Stupid.’

‘What do you mean? I have another one. With Krissy, right where I left it.’

‘One. Body. Stupid,’ Mr Instinct repeated himself, accentuating every word in a very human-like manner.

‘One … body …’ I mused. ‘Are you saying that my avatar isn’t a separate thing?’

‘One body. Same. Not separate,’ he explained.

I had been operating under the assumption that my avatar body in the material world was some sort of puppet. It had made sense. Sort of. But if I considered that I had eaten the avatars of a familiar and an evil spirit, and the act had not only killed them but allowed me to consume them in full, it made more sense that an avatar wasn’t a representation of the actual spiritual body, it was the actual, spiritual body. I wasn’t sure how that worked, but if the critter was right — and I had a feeling he was — it meant I couldn’t really treat my cute little avatar as a disposable, remote controlled puppet.

Also, was it just me, or Mr Instinct’s vocabulary had grown since I’d given up that coin-sized bit of my soul to him? What had I done?

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So we can’t work on my avatar because the portal is small. Big deal.’

I recalled Wensah injecting some Black Essence into the portal before using it to relocate my senses here — or my entire consciousness, I still wasn’t sure. Judging by Mr Instinct’s disapproval of the portal’s current size, I figured it was Wensah’s doing. Another precaution to prevent … something.

I was going to ask the critter if he knew how to make Black Essence. I was sure I would get there myself eventually, but if I could get some help, then why not?

I didn’t get to ask the question.

Mr Instinct went deathly quiet, erasing his presence almost completely. Just as he did, I sensed a disturbance in the force — more specifically, the stirring of Essence in what passed for air around here, then the smell of Black Essence appearing out of nowhere, bringing Wensah with it.

***

‘Hello there,’ Wensah greeted me.

Whether it was in front or behind me, the giant, eight-armed goddess filled the considerably large field of vision my tentacles gave me.

‘Has it been two days already?’ I asked.

‘Two and a half,’ she said. ‘And somehow you haven’t killed yourself.’

‘You sound disappointed.’

‘Well, I already found a spirit who wanted to be my darling Krissintha’s familiar,’ she said. ‘Wasted effort it seems.’

If I had any blood in my body, it would have reached boiling point in an instant.

‘You’re a horrible, callous bitch, Wensah. I despise you.’ The words came out before I could stop myself. Wasn’t exactly diplomatic of me, but she had a talent to piss me off within the first few seconds of a conversation. So, I braced myself for whatever was coming.

Wensah laughed, then carried on as if I had said nothing.

‘Seeing how you’re still in control of the Tentacle Horror, and not falling apart, I suppose I could give you another chance. Maybe there’s hope for you.’

I was baffled and relieved at the same time. She was usually in a mood to call me names and argue.

‘Gee, you’re in a good mood, aren’t you?’ I said to her, testing the waters.

‘Well, things are looking up. I have good news,’ she said, her voice more lively and excited than before.

‘Oh? Do tell!’

‘Komi’s people are going to send an army or whatyoucallit to the barbarians on the Mainlands. And you and my darling Krissintha are going to go with them.’

‘And … that’s good?’

‘More than good,’ she said. Even her voice was grinning. ‘You will take a look for me at what Sivera is doing with the damnable green idiots while you’re there. Even better, I have found the perfect place to set up this Bureau thing. It’s also on the Mainlands, so you can go there directly from the barbarians.’

‘What place?’

‘The Fentys Alliance,’ she announced it like this was some sort of award ceremony. Well, the name meant nothing to me. ‘Don’t you worry your little, stupid head, I’m sure my darling Krissintha knows all about it.’

And there it was, the customary name-calling, a staple of my conversations with the goddess. But this time I’d managed to lash out at her before she could call me all sorts of things. It felt good. Baby steps, Kevin, baby steps.

‘Alright, so we go there and set up. Then what? How are we even supposed to get people to take your familiars? Is there like a set procedure or something?’

‘How should I know?’ Wensah said. All eight of her giant arms moved. I was sure she was shrugging. ‘Take on whatever cause the two of you consider worthwhile and recruit. People willing to fight and die will want familiars. I shall give them familiars.’

‘Is that it?’ I asked, completely bewildered by how simple she had made this out to be.

‘Well, yes. What did you expect?’

I didn’t know what I had expected. Something more … solemn or religious maybe? I supposed it was a preconception I had brought from good old Earth, but associating gods and spirits with religion was the wrong conclusion in this world. Here, it was … business. Whether that was better or worse, I couldn’t tell.

‘Fine. It is what it is,’ I concluded.

What else was there to do? I still didn’t have the ability to go anywhere on my own, so I was going to stick with Krissy and see where we’d end up.

‘Good, good,’ the goddess chirped joyfully. ‘Are you ready then?’

I could sense Black Essence building up in one of her arms. It was damn time to leave this weird realm behind and I couldn’t wait to reunite with Krissy.

‘I’m ready, let’s go.’

End of Part Two