Vigor Mortis

A nightmarish beast towers before me, reeling up on its snake-like body. It must be over twenty feet long from tip to tip, with a tail ending in a wicked spike and a head fused seamlessly to its torso, jawless and horrifying. The monster’s mouth extends well down the length of its body, opening sideways like a valve to reveal rows and rows of vicious teeth. Surrounding the lips of the wretched maw are limbs halfway between giant centipede legs and human fingers, dexterous and multi-jointed enough to grab nearly anything and doom any attempt at escape. Most of the others stare in horror as it rises, inhaling and exhaling a putrid, wet stench.

“How are you feeling, Mateo?” I ask the monster.

A few more ragged breaths are the only answer I get for a while, though soon my confused and slightly overwhelmed Revenant starts to figure out the vocal cords of his new body. It was a pain in the ass finding a monster that might have vocal cords in the first place, but these things tend to mimic other creatures to lure them into its territory so I figured it would be a safe bet. They’re known as liar wyrms.

And Mateo is now a very cute one, if I do say so myself.

“Thhhingsss… weird…” Mateo hisses.

“Better or worse than your old body?” I ask.

He flexes his new form, slapping his massive tail across the ground and undulating his many rows of mandible-fingers. My team steps back, except for Penelope who looks… well, I don’t know how she looks but she is excited to the point of giddy.

“Bettterrrr…” Mateo ultimately concludes, and then he suddenly catches on fire.

This terrifies my team even more, although I can’t fathom why since they all know Mateo is a friggin’ natural thermomancer.

“Talent… weaker…” he reports once the flames die down. “Harder… to use…”

I raise my eyebrows, brushing hair out of my face with a tendril as I peer into his soul.

“Hmm… this body is much bigger than your last one,” I point out. “A lot more of your soul’s power is going into movement. Also… do the fire thing again?”

He does the fire thing again, blistering heat wafting over us. I nod, feeling out the workings of his soul as best I can, noticing extra power getting diverted into his new body’s skin.

“...I think you’re converting a lot more power into not burning yourself, too,” I say. “Your soul probably had a lot of time to improve your body’s natural heat resistance, or maybe you were just more used to it. Do you think you can cast learned spells like that?”

“Yessss,” Mateo intones, sinking his belly down to the ground so he’s more at eye-level with me. “Need… practice. But. Shhhould be… possible.”

I smile and nod, patting his brown, chitinous carapace.

“Great. Sorry things are weird now, and thanks for trying this out. Anything else you need?”

He thinks for a moment, twisting around this way and that to get a better look at himself.

“...Clothesssss?” he asks hopefully.

I regard his massive, serpentine form with a mouth larger than I am, scratching my cheek. Then I turn back to look at my team, shrugging helplessly at them. I can’t think of anything we could possibly dress this in, or how we’d even accomplish that… and it looks like they can’t either. Norah and Bently are both transfixed to the point of unresponsiveness, and Orville manages to only give me a shrug back.

“We might have to figure that one out later, Mateo,” I answer him. “Sorry. You’re kind of bigger than my house.”

“Not anymore, he isn’t,” Penelope comments, approaching Mateo and calmly hopping onto his back. “I got you and your family a new house, remember?”

“Oh yeah,” I say. “Thanks again for that, by the way. Are you, uh…”

She sits sidesaddle on my enormous sapient snake-Revenant, calmly holding onto one of the interlocking armored plates that form his body as he practices how to slither.

“...Are you comfy up there?”

“Walking has always been my least favorite part of being a hunter,” she admits, stretching and massaging her legs. “You don’t mind, do you Mateo?”

She’s about eighty percent lying about not wanting to walk; she needs contact to cast the spells she uses to preserve the corpses of my Revenants, and she starts subtly doing exactly that the moment she hops on. It’s an unspoken agreement between Penelope and I that we don’t let on how much she already knew about all of this. If this blows up in my face, there’s no sense dragging her down too.

Fortunately, Mateo doesn’t seem to mind being used as a mount… at least not by someone as beautiful as Penelope. He responds with a hissing laugh, clearly amused, though the reactions of the others indicate I’m maybe the only one who picks up on that.

“Healer… the only… non-coward,” he jeers, slithering around the others and putting his dead maw close enough to breathe on them. Norah squeaks when he gets close, actually squeaks like a bunny. It’s hilarious.

“You sure you don’t want a monster body, Alan?” I ask. “I’m sure we could find a good one.”

The headless Alan gives me two thumbs down, then indicates his sword. Well, Norah’s former sword, which he’s still holding since his old one broke. No way on a monster body, I need hands to be able to use my skills, is probably what he means. I nod back to him.

“Your call, no worries.”

I join Penelope on Mateo's back, and together we slither off towards our destination. I've spent the last couple of days on our forest journey acclimating to my new abilities and consuming every single creature I could get my hands on. Penelope even taught me the meat preparation spell, although I'm surprised how crazy complicated it actually is. Apparently, biomancy in general tends to have some of the longest and most precise spellcasting commands, making it a huge pain to learn. Also problematic is the fact that while I cannot be harmed by overfilling myself with mana, I absolutely can be harmed if I form a spell incorrectly.

Penelope likens casting a spell to constructing an essay. I pointed out that I've never written an essay, so she rolled her eyes and told me to just imagine a really long sentence. If you change even a single word in a sentence, it's possible to make the sentence mean something completely different, or more likely become absolute nonsense. But unlike humans, who can usually figure out what a sentence is supposed to mean if it only has one or two errors, magic is apparently much more… pedantic than that. How you shape the spell is what it will become, and if the shape is wrong, you could end up with a spell that does something unintentional, or worse, you could end up with chaos magic.

Chaos magic is what happens when you tell magic to do something that doesn't make any sense and it tries to do that anyway. The results are usually just an explosive release of energy as the magic gets converted into who knows what without any consistent guiding factors. Very rarely, however, chaos magic will randomly produce complicated spell effects that are a lot more dangerous than a simple explosion.

Apparently, one of the prevailing pieces of evidence that talents are granted by the Mistwatcher with purpose and intent is simply the fact that, if talents were random, nearly everyone with a spellcasting talent would end up with chaos magic and probably kill themselves. Instead, there are no chaos magic talents at all. Just like animancy talents.

"So, what's our actual plan in terms of killing this monster we've been sent to hunt?" Netta asks. "If it's attacking people in a city, we dead folk probably shouldn't be waltzing in to fight it. That's going to cause a bit of trouble."

"Maybe just a bit," Norah comments, looking in Mateo's direction.

He grins at her, or at least the closest equivalent he's capable of attempting with a sideways-opening mouth surrounded by bug fingers. I'm almost thankful I don't need to pay any attention to his expression.

"Obviously, we want to lure the target into the forest," I say. "We would want to do that regardless of how many undead make up our team. If we fight this thing in the city, what do you think it's going to do the moment it gets hurt?"

"Eat someone," Orville answers immediately, nodding. "Yeah, we definitely need to find it and catch it somewhere it can't hurt anyone. I'm going to guess it probably has a nest somewhere in the forest and it leaves to hunt the city at night?"

"Guess or hope?" Penelope scoffs. "If the information we've gathered is correct and these creatures never sleep, it could very easily be hiding itself in the city during the day and hunting at night without ever leaving itself in a position where we can isolate it. Since our foe is intelligent, this is likely exactly what it will do. The sheer concentration of edible meat in a human city is going to so vastly outstrip that of the forest that I would be surprised if a vrothizo would willingly retreat from it."

"You know a lot about these things, Penny?" Norah asks.

"If you call me Penny again you won't shit solid for a week," Penelope answers, delivering her threat with all the inflection of saying hello to an acquaintance. "And yes, I've consulted Claretta extensively on the matter. Although her time was spent with an abnormal variant, that abnormal variant is most likely our target, and even if it isn’t Claretta is still far and away the person with the most experience watching vrothizo in their natural habitat. We should expect to find our quarry in the city, not the forest surrounding it."

"How are we going to lure it away from people, then?" Netta asks.

"I guess I'll be bait," I sigh. "As the person with the biggest soul, I'm going to smell the tastiest."

"Biggest soul?" Norah asks. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"Oh, did I not mention?" I shrug. "Vrothizo eat souls. That's why they leave their victims alive and don't eat corpses. Try not to get bit."

Only silence and fear answer me, and I'm disinclined to explain any other details on the matter. Even if I'm just being informative, Norah and also Bently seem to get pretty freaked out when I talk about animancy. Bently I'll forgive, since he is a giant puppy dog and also has not suggested at any point that I should be handed over to murderous zealots. He's torn, though. I don't think he thinks Norah is wrong, exactly, just that he's loyal to the idea of our team staying together. It'll have to do. Orville seems to have minimal attachment to the church, and combined with Netta only being alive so long as I will it, I think if push comes to shove he will support me. Animancy still freaks him out, and I don't think he likes anything about the situation, but Orville is nothing if not a realist. When the alternative is the destruction of the only mother he has ever known, he knows where he stands.

Time seems to pass quickly, our many-day trip through the forest soon comes to a close. The forest starkly and suddenly ends, revealing the flat, dry land where not even the ravenous flora of Verdantop dares to grow. The earth is hard and thick with salt, the only life successfully managing to survive here being the stupid and ever-industrious humans in the city of New Talsi.

New Talsi is an interesting-looking place, lacking the massive defensive walls of Skyhope but instead being surrounded with enormous wooden guard towers that dwarf the many buildings behind them. Any monster that even tries to exit the forest could be pelted with hundreds of arrows from expert bowmen before even reaching the towers themselves, let alone the city proper. Many of them certainly look our way as we emerge from the forest, minus my Revenants of course, and we quickly locate and walk to the road to give the guards plenty of time to prepare for us. No one else is on the road today, which I suspect is fairly normal.

What I'm not sure is normal is how nervous all the guards suddenly become as we get closer to the city. A guard in one tower holds flags, signaling to the others and suddenly putting every other tower on edge. Armed and armored people emerge from the city, blocking off the road, a few people from the towers descending to join them.

"Is something the matter?" Penelope asks, once we get in polite shouting distance of the guards.

"State your business!" a guard orders.

"We're the hunters that have been sent to deal with your monster problem," I answer.

"Told you so," another guard mutters, nudging one of the men from the towers. "Of course hunters are going to feel weird."

"We've had strong hunters before, and one of them does not feel like a hunter," he protests.

"Just to be sure, we're going to ask to submit you to a biomancy test," the guard that first spoke grunts. "Sorry for the inconvenience."

"This is your fault, isn't it?" Orville whispers to me.

"Probably," I reluctantly admit. “I was already pinging as spooky after my solo trip, so I can’t imagine what I feel like now.”

"You should be doing biomancy tests on all travelers anyway," Penelope says, answering the guard. "The capital had trouble with some nasty parasites from the forest."

"We don't have the capital's luck when it comes to having a lot of biomancers available," the guard grumbles. "You'll have to wait for us to fetch one."

"Fucking hell," I grumble. "If there's another Nawra colony here, I'll scream."

"If there's another Nawra colony here, you are not to try to adopt one," Penelope says firmly.

"Fine," I groan, rolling my eye. Not that she can see it.

"Seriously, what happened to you two on that mission we didn't get to go on?" Orville mutters.

"Eh, we just had a nice, rousing round of genocide against a sapient species after nearly being killed by the Mistwatcher and subsequently a very grumpy Galdra the Annihilator. Also, Penelope enslaved me."

“I believe you mean ‘also, Penelope saved my life,’” Penelope chimes in haughtily. "Twice. One method of which just so happened to make ingenious use of property law."

"Woo, slave buddies," Orville intones blandly.

"Actually, are you still a slave now that your mom is dead?" I ask.

"Watcher's eyes, Vita..." Norah mutters, face in her hands.

“What? I just don't know how that works.”

Unfortunately, the biomancer arrives before I can learn more about slave law. We sit through their excruciatingly slow examinations before ultimately being allowed into the city. I am, after all, still physically human as Penelope refuses to stop reminding me. I'm starting to wonder if our team has been taking her for granted. Considering how much faster she is than the random person they got to scan us just now, I wouldn't be surprised if the average biomancer would have failed to save us from the kind of things Penelope routinely helps us shrug off.

Now in the city proper, however, it's time to stretch out my senses. We have a vrothizo to find, and if it's really holed up somewhere near people like Penelope suspects, I'm going to need to be the one to sniff it out. Not that I wouldn't have been the one to find it either way, I suppose, but it is what it is. To no one's surprise, however, I seem to mostly be sensing human souls in the human city. Hours of wandering later, I still haven't sensed anything abnormal.

Hmm... maybe I'm going about this wrong. That monster was collecting chunks of the souls it bit and slapping them haphazardly onto its own. Maybe it will feel mostly like a human now? I make sure to take more than a cursory glance at the souls in my range, and after another hour I finally find it.

No... I finally find her. The shell of human shards she has been collecting with her teeth have almost completed a full shell around the infinitely ravenous nothingness of her soul's core. Not only that, but they are much less the haphazard hodgepodge they were before, fusing and melting together slowly but surely into something more cohesive. Like one of my own shards melding seamlessly together with a Revenant until there is no conflict between their desire to follow my orders and their base nature, each separate segment of person that this small girl has victimized are slowly becoming one. Even more than that, they grow on their own, just like Fulvia's broken soul. When that shell becomes whole, what will that mean?

My team seems to notice that I found something, as in my ruminations I have completely stopped moving. I let them know that I’ve probably found the target, and we approach in silence. The vrothizo’s hearing is exceptionally good, and we don’t want to give ourselves away. As much as my former revulsion at having to worry about fellow soul-eaters has been replaced with curiosity, we still have a job to do and I still intend to take it very, very seriously.

How can I hold back when that sick monster has surrounded herself with children?