Volume 1, Chapter 24: Team-Building Exercises Are Getting Weird (Patreon)

“That tickles!” Bri squirmed as, with my hand protected by Cinderhide, I pulled a line of fire from her and began using it to draw an arm attached to her. “Be, um… more careful.”

“Stop moving around so much,” I replied, this time using very simple, individual lines.

While painting the scene of the two of us fleeing from nature’s fury earlier, I had realized that I might have gone too far in trying to make her hand thick and detailed, complete with skin that only increased the surface area capable of burning someone on contact. Having it so close to her body also meant that anyone she approached was exposed to the full force of the heat radiating from her.

My new design was, first of all, more conceptual—just a few lines defining an arm and hand in space. Adding the arm itself was supposed to give her more reach.

“Wait. No. We were together fourteen months. My last test was eight months ago, so if I caught it from him, then—” Nicky sat on a mushroom log several feet away, spiraling in thoughts.

“Worry doesn’t suit you,” Sophie interrupted her, holding her arm and repeatedly straightening Nicky’s sleeve because—apparently—it was the only thing in the situation she knew how to fix.

“Nicky, dear Nicky,” Mara said, crouching in front of her. “Normally, in a situation like this, I’d recommend that you talk to a psychologist, but since we don’t exactly have one on hand, I can offer myself. If you want to talk abo—”

“No, thank you, Mara. You don’t have to treat me like another emergency.”

“She needs to let her emotions out,” Sophie finished for her.

Mara clearly failed to pick up on the hint that she should go away, because she kept trying to advise the crying woman, who responded by burying her tear-streaked face in her hands.

Sophie, meanwhile, stared at the black-haired woman with eyes cold as ice, trying to drive her away through sheer facial expression alone.

“I told you this was how checking everyone else’s health would end,” I whispered to Bri.

While I had been away, she had tested her abilities on the other Earthlings and discovered that Nicky had chlamydia. Nicky had immediately connected it to her boyfriend cheating on her and was now taking the revelation rather badly.

“I don’t understand, um… what the problem is. She didn’t feel like it was, well, threatening her life,” Bri whispered in a voice that sounded like wood creaking in a fire. The reason was the piece of mushroom she had just bitten through.

“Sometimes what hurts people has more to do with what’s in their head—or… rather, in their soul—than with their body, Bri. Nicky trusted another person not to do something, and he did it anyway. Now she’s suffering because of that,” I replied while drawing the line far enough away that I could no longer feel the heat radiating from her. Ending Cinderhide, I continued shaping the fire, this time creating only the outline of a four-fingered hand in the air.

Her flame stopped moving almost entirely. For once there was no flickering, no sparks, just a steady little light while she processed an injury her eyes couldn’t see. “So… people can be hurt even when, um, nothing in their body is damaged?”

“He speaks truth.” Lion’s face remained perfectly still, but his tail struck the earth once. Again, harder. On the third blow, dirt jumped from beneath it. “Bone breaks beneath a blow. The soul breaks differently. Betrayal leaves a fracture no shaman can set.”

“Does that, um… happen often? People betraying each other?”

“You’d be surprised,” Eli cut in, practicing with his abilities nearby.

He held one hand over a coil of rope lying on the ground. One end of it writhed and moved like a snake, following the direction of his gaze. Guided that way, it slithered toward one of the tall mushrooms nearby and began climbing upward, wrapping itself around the stalk as it went.

“In my experience, Bri, more often than not,” I replied as well, finishing the second finger while also watching the soldiers a few feet away. Six of them had gathered into a unit and were preparing for the journey, packing small shoulder bags, waterskins, and, naturally, weapons. Each wore a sword in a sheath fastened to his belt and carried a shield strapped to his forearm, while holding a spear in one hand. “That’s also why trust should rarely be given completely, and only to someone who has shown you several times that they deserve it. And even then, you should always keep some degree of caution.”

“That is an exceedingly bleak way to view reality, my friend,” the lion said from beside me. “To trust is to breathe the air exhaled by another, even when it is saturated with black gas, and even when you are already choking on it.”

“And how is that better, Khufu? You let yourself be poisoned by lies? Why?”

“It is better to live surrounded by falsehood if you know it has its back turned toward you and its weapon pointed outward at the world.”

“You’re assuming another person’s lies exist to protect you? That’s naive.”

“Naive, perhaps, but it allows cooperation. Life within the Pride is what binds us together. Only deeds and clear transgressions against your well-being and that of the whole deserve condemnation and the withdrawal of trust.”

“Testing trust is essential,” Eli muttered under his breath, but I didn’t dignify him with a response.

“We’ll see how well that works in practice,” I replied to Khufu instead, finishing the hand I had been drawing for Bri in the air.

While I ended Pyrography, it remained attached to my companion’s spherical body. At the same time, whenever I closed my eyes, I could still sense the presence of my creation as though it remained connected to me through Soma, even though I could no longer see that light when I opened them.

“Done, Brigid. If necessary, you should be able to heal people without causing too much additional damage,” I said, pressing my hand against the burning line of fire outlining the shape of a hand in the air.

The heat was intense up close, but not enough to immediately burn my skin. Bearable.

“Assuming, of course, that your Daimon actually recognizes this as a hand.”

“Let us put it to the test.” The lion to my right extended one hand palm-up and tilted it slightly toward the ground. Then, without any warning, bone shot forward from his wrist, tearing through fur and spraying blood.

For a moment, it protruded like a three-foot-long bony spike before shrinking and retreating back into Khufu’Ri’s body, leaving an open wound in his wrist.

“What the fuck, man? Your power tears your body apart from the inside? Can you still move your hand?”

“But of course. The bone being altered avoids the muscles and tendons. It tears only through the skin and some of the blood vessels.” He extended his arm toward Bri’s fiery hand.

She concentrated, furrowing her flaming brows and releasing a puff of black smoke.

“Fulfill your duty to the Universe, beautiful spirit.”

A moment later, sections of the lion’s skin began crawling across the wound like writhing worms. They caught hold of the opposite edge of the gash with invisible hooks, then pulled the two flaps of skin toward one another, sealing the opening and closing the wound.

“Had I not witnessed it with my own eyes, my heart would never have believed in the sanctity of the power you wield!”

“Whether it’s your duty or not, Bri, I’m glad that everything seems to be working the way it should,” I replied, watching Plasario approach with Rodrick and, surprisingly, Milo, who was walking ahead of them.

Both soldiers carried the same equipment as the knights waiting for them at the departure point where we had all gathered. Milo rested his baseball bat across one shoulder and walked with complete confidence, as though nothing damning had happened.

“Well, I’m fucking here, so we can get moving,” he said as soon as he came closer, looking over every Earthling he had met here.

He spent several extra moments staring at me in particular, refusing to look away when I returned the gesture and our eyes met. Once I realized he definitely wasn’t going to be the first one to break eye contact—and since I got no pleasure from staring at his ugly mug—I finally looked away and focused on what Plasario was doing.

Out of the corner of my eye, however, I caught Milo’s stupid little smirk, born from the victory he had apparently just achieved in his own head.

“Another weakling,” he muttered under his breath, tapping the bat against the ground several times before taking a swing like a golfer and sending one of the stones flying deep into the mushroom forest.

After checking over his soldiers, and without offering any explanation for why Milo was now part of the group, Plasario assigned us places in the middle of the column.

Then he took his position at the front and led us along the packed trail toward something that, from a distance in the darkness, looked like the shadow of a hill.

We walked like that for several minutes until the road changed from a path surrounded by mushroom trees into a stone trail running between rocky formations.

The sound of rushing water had followed us constantly from the moment we reached those enormous protrusions, but only after another few dozen steps did we climb high enough along the stone ledges to finally see it in its full glory—a raging river several dozen feet wide, broken up by numerous stalagmites jutting from the water. At this height, the vegetation returned, along with strange growths formed from an unusual kind of mycelium spreading across and over the rocks. It looked more like moss, with spherical growths protruding from it every so often, each one oozing a yellow bioluminescent slime that dripped onto the stone below.

As a result, everything around us—the walls and the numerous puddles collected across the stony ground below them—glowed with a light that looked like liquefied sunlight.

Countless local invertebrate insects scurried across the walls, along with lizards hunting them, but from somewhere farther away came much deeper sounds. Croaking calls overlapped one another, belonging to frogs that, judging by the force with which their voices carried, had to be far larger than any amphibians I knew from Earth.

“Fuck this shit,” Milo said, smashing his bat into a six-armed jellyfish crawling along the wall. It burst apart in a spray of something resembling lightly tinted water.

“Can you just fucking stop?” Eli snapped at him, one hand gripping the rope slung over his shoulder. His whole body was tense, ready to attack, defend, or run—whatever he had in mind.

“Fuck off,” Milo shot back, thrusting the extended baseball bat toward him, then drawing it back toward his shoulders as if preparing to strike. He feinted the attack, stopped short, and burst out laughing.

The movement caught the attention of the soldiers walking ahead of us, who turned around to make sure his aggression wasn’t about to develop into something more serious. Sophie, walking arm in arm with Nicky, flinched as well, but the lion beside me rested a hand on her shoulder in a reassuring gesture.

“And fuck this shit in particular too.” Milo swung again, this time at a lizard trying to escape between the rocks near his feet. The blow flattened it, scattering fragments of bone and flesh, some of which stuck to his bat from the force of the impact. He shook the weapon, flinging the pieces around him. Some of them hit Eli, who was visibly startled by all of that.

“That’s, um… not very nice, sir,” Bri said to Milo as she flew directly above the rocks being battered by the river current to our right.

“That’s not very, um, fucking nice, sir,” he mocked back, shaking his head with contempt and pushing his lips forward as though he were talking to a preschooler. “Don’t talk to me. I’m not interested in the opinion of something that doesn’t look human, and I don’t exactly give much of a fuck about other people either.”

He stopped as he said it, looking first at the three women and then at me. Since we stopped too, the soldiers walking behind us were forced to halt as well.

And amid the commotion, part of my attention was drawn to something up ahead. One patch of stone bothered me. The glowing growth covered almost everything around it, yet there was none on that particular section, and none of the little lizards scrambling across the walls seemed willing to cross it.

“Stop dragging your feet!” Plasario shouted from the front when he noticed what his people were doing.

“Or what? Fucking hell,” Milo grumbled, but he resumed walking, and the rest of us followed.

I knew people like him. I had worked with them, or for them, plenty of times during my career as a thief.

Violence was their language, and the only way they knew how to establish hierarchy. Anyone who bent beneath the force they projected, whether physically or verbally, became inferior to them, while those who resisted became targets to be removed, whether they were within reach or not.

It would have been a mistake to assume that, after being put in his place and humiliated by Plasario, Milo had gained some respect for him and would now obey everything he said. He was simply going to wait for the first opportunity to correct the imbalance in power and use it to get rid of the man once and for all.

A shout and sudden commotion tore me from my thoughts when the rocky wall directly ahead of us moved, opened a mouth, and with one lightning-fast flick of a red tongue snatched the soldier walking just in front of Nicky and dragged him into its throat.

A moment later, it shifted enough for me to realize that it was actually an enormous frog, at least nine feet tall. Its body had blended so perfectly with the surrounding stone that, standing motionless beside the rocks with its eyes half closed, it had looked like nothing more than part of the landscape.

Once it opened those black eyes covered by translucent membranes, however, it made it very clear that it was no stone statue.

Plasario and his men immediately began stabbing it with their spears.

“Priority—the frog!” Mara shouted.

Something boiled inside my soul at the sound of her words. I felt a growing conflict of Authorities, trying to dictate what I should focus on. The soldiers, Khufu, the screaming, the river—all of it seemed to retreat half a step while the creature itself became painfully obvious.

I didn’t need anyone else messing with my head.

[Authority Conflict detected. Competing Claims: The need to independently determine one’s own goals versus having what is important designated through a command reinforced by Authority. Sources of Strength: Experience advantage. Anchors: Identity, Emotional. Resistances: Soul Resistance, Identity Cohesion. Conflict State: Resisted.]

“Khufu, front! Sophie, back! Bri, swallowed man! Eli, with me! Soldiers, attack!”

The instructions came quickly, and they weren’t bad, but I had no intention of surrendering my will to someone just because her magic allowed her to push me toward it.

The frog responded by shoving and ramming its way through them, slowly sliding over the ground and swinging its limbs. Turning toward the soldiers attacking it from the front, it kicked backward with its hind legs and sent our section of the group stumbling away.

We crashed into the soldiers behind us, who caught us against their shields before moving forward to stab the creature from the rear.

Khufu’Ri did much the same. Bones slid out beneath the claws of his fingers, extending them and turning them into cutting weapons.

Then a thunderous crack exploded from the front.

The frog folded nearly in half from the impact and, as a result, spat out the soldier it had swallowed. Covered in saliva, he tumbled across the ground.

A moment later, while the frog was still bent awkwardly and struggling to open its eyes, we saw Milo launch himself into the air, reaching a height no human should have been able to jump. He swung his bat—now covered in spikes—over his head and brought it down onto the frog from above.

The instant the bat connected with the creature’s skin, another thunderous boom shook the surrounding cavern. The frog’s spine snapped completely, leaving it motionless and dead.

“Eli, now! The rope!” Mara shouted another order.

Eli already had a short length of rope in his hands. He wrapped it around one of the soldier’s arms the instant Milo’s strike made the frog spit him out, then leaned backward, hauling the slime-covered man farther from the creature before it recovered.

“More! Fucking give me more of them!” Milo shouted, spinning around with his arms spread wide. “I’ll kill every last one!”

“Milo, enough!” Mara continued issuing commands.

“I, um… really don’t like him.” Bri had dimmed so much while watching Milo that the shadows around us had crept several feet closer. “I know he saved that man, but there’s something… wrong with him.”

At the same moment, Milo stopped spinning around and brought the oversized frog down with all his strength again when its body twitched. Then came another blow. And another. Again and again, he slammed the bat down, crushing its flesh into pulp.

“Enough!” Plasario shouted.

Milo turned toward him, drenched in blood and splattered with chunks of frog skin and meat, baring his teeth while gripping the bat in both hands and pointing it in Plasario’s direction.

“We’re moving on. You’ve made enough noise already,” Plasario finished, glancing toward the soldier the frog had spat out.

“And you—” he said to Mara, pointing at her with his bloodied sword. “—disrupt the chain of command one more time, and we’ll be parting ways.”

“Understood,” the black-haired woman replied through a clenched jaw.

Khufu’Ri and Eli, together with another knight, were helping the man back to his feet and steadying him while he caught his breath. At the same time, they used broad sweeps of their hands to wipe the remaining strands of the creature’s saliva from his body.